list.co.uk/festival Reviews | FESTIVAL VISUAL ART
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BILL VIOLA: THREE WOMEN Spiritual beauty from seminal American video artist ●●●●● THE COMMON SENSE Eerie representation of the future ●●●●●
ADAM LEWIS JACOB: NO EASY ANSWERS Dystopian show from emerging artist ●●●●●
On a rectangular screen that might be mistaken for a mirror, a woman and her two daughters walk slowly towards the camera in silence. As they walk, these three graces occupy a fuzzy greyness that makes them appear like classicist statues come to life as sylph-like sirens. Once they step through some kind of waterfall, the rush of water gives them life, and they stand in vivid colour, their dresses blue and white. They peer out a moment, only to turn back into the greyness, the youngest daughter lingering like Orpheus for one last look until she too steps back in line towards the underworld.
Part of seminal American video artist Viola’s Transfigurations series, ‘Three Women’ (2008) is a nine-minute video looped so the trio appear to be destined to repeat their walk for Sisyphean eternity. The fleeting moment of transcendence recalls Breath, Samuel Beckett’s even briefer matter of life and death. The sheer spiritual beauty of the piece sees it perfectly placed in the chapel of St Cuthbert’s in keeping with the appearance of many of Viola’s works in churches. Seen in this way for Edinburgh Art Festival, it suggests not so much an abyss, but a shadow line crossed. (Neil Cooper) ■ The Parish Church of St Cuthbert, until 1 Sep, free.
Hidden deep in the bowels of Edinburgh College of Art, Melanie Gilligan’s The Common Sense is an installation you’ll want to spend time with. Arranged over an angular, snake-like frame, which winds its way around the gallery room, 15 television screens each show a small clip of filmed narrative drama, a medium which Gilligan continues to return to in her work. The theme of the show is social media, specifically a focus upon a futuristic form of human integration known as The Patch; a kind of implant worn on the roof of the mouth which allows users to access the feelings and thoughts of others.
Across various scenes, the film – which totals around 90 minutes when its component parts are added up – looks at The Patch’s effect upon education, commerce, population control and social order, and the extrapolated parallels with social media as we use them now are apparent. Yet more than this, the film is a sculpture too, and seemingly alive to our presence; as we walk near to each screen wearing our personal headphones, the installation switches films on and off to react to our presence, a wholistic and eerie representation of a world designed to observe and respond to us individually. (David Pollock) ■ Edinburgh College of Art, until 26 Aug, free.
Shopping malls occupy a particular place in dystopian thinking; their soullessness seems to capture the emptiness of consumer culture. JG Ballard was drawn to them, as is Glasgow-based artist Adam Lewis Jacob, who references Ballard in this installation. Jacob, a graduate of GSA’s MFA course in 2015,
throws a lot at this multi-layered work, the title of which comes from a 1992 essay criticising Britain’s membership of the EU.Three screens show a film collage mashing together phone footage of shopping malls with family snaps, cartoon characters, advertising billboards and found footage from the Queen’s Golden Jubilee in 1977. The boundaries between the personal, entertainment, corporate marketing and political identity become increasingly blurred. Elsewhere, desk lamps pulse out messages in Morse code. It adds up to sensory overload, the same kind of
over-stimulated alienation that is induced by too many malls. However, it feels like a body of work coalescing around a theme, rather than a directed response. Is Jacob gunning for capitalism or is this a personal response to his own memories? As with the Morse code, we’re left wondering what it means. (Susan Mansfield) ■ Institut Français d’Écosse, until 26 Aug, free.
RAVI AGARWAL: NADAR/PRAKRITI Exhibition exploring the Scottish environment ●●●●●
Last summer, Indian artist Ravi Agarwal undertook a residency at Edinburgh Printmakers and, during his time in Scotland, travelled and researched in the Highlands. An environmental activist in India, Agarwal wanted to find out more about people’s relationship to nature in Scotland, and how land is managed and conserved. Used to working with lens-based media, Agarwal was new to
printmaking and worked with expert printmakers in Edinburgh to turn his photographs into lithographs and copper etchings. He describes the process as one of ‘slippage’: made into a print, the image becomes less documentary, more an aesthetic object in its own right.
His lithographs are beautiful, intensifying the textures in a
photograph: patterns made by moss on fine twigs, or by wind on the surface of water, or by the forms of trees in a forest. He has an eye for a good composition: a forest pool seen from above, an angular rock at the edge of water. A series of copper etchings layer landscape photographs with
images of people: crofters working on the land or hunters shooting a wolf (Agarwal is particularly interested in the large animals now extinct in Scotland as the tiger might one day be in India). A further room includes work made in India: several photographs and a rather beautiful film, ‘The Sewage Pond’s Memoir’. Agarwal is interested in the similarities and differences between
his home country and this one, and includes film interviews with people from both countries talking about nature, forestry and land ownership. While this is not a large body of work, it is an interesting one, not least because it gives us a chance to see our own country through the lens (literally) of an artist from the other side of the world. (Susan Mansfield) ■ Edinburgh Printmakers, until 20 Oct, free.
15–27 Aug 2018 THE LIST FESTIVAL 95