Art of class comes to the capital

This year's Edinburgh Art Festival will include some of the finest work from home and abroad – with much of it promoted in a space that will put the festival at the very heart of the city

• A powerful festival line-up includes the work of David Mach, pictured here with one of his works. Picture: PA

THE Edinburgh Art Festival will stake its claim to a place in the capital's heart this summer from a gleaming glass-chambered pavilion in St Andrew's Square that will be used to promote the event's top exhibitions in a prime city centre space.

This move was part of a powerful line-up announced yesterday, which included a blood-red wax bell, standing five metres tall, by the stellar contemporary British sculptor Anish Kapoor and 400 portraits protesting against the rape and murder of women in a notorious Mexican border city.

The festival director, Sorcha Carey, said the event "marries world-class exhibitions with the best creative talent Scotland has to offer". With an emphasis on sculpture this year, the festival ranges from the first major show in the UK for 30 years by the American abstract artist Robert Rauschenberg, to artists who have been Scottish favourites for decades.

Exhibitions will take place this year in 42 museums, commercial galleries, and artist-run spaces. For the first time, galleries have been asked to pay submission fees of 250, with bigger galleries invited to become "partners" paying scaled subscriptions of 1,000-5,000.

The fees have met mixed reactions but some 30,000 has been raised so far, festival staff say, alongside financing from Creative Scotland, Edinburgh City Council, and the Scottish Government's Expo Fund.

"The festival is still funded publicly but we need to develop a model in which people participating value and invest in it, and we want to create an art festival that's sustainable for the future," said Carey, who ran the external exhibitions programme for the Liverpool Biennale during that city's year as European Capital of Culture in 2008.

In a promotional perk, partner galleries will be involved in a series of events at the St Andrew's Square pavilion. It will occupy the opposite end of George Street from the Edinburgh International Book Festival, with which the art festival will be staging linked events in a bid to "cross-fertilise".

The pavilion is designed by artist Karen Forbes, a professor at Edinburgh College of Art, whose work includes designing Moscow City Palace, a Russian skyscraper, with Scottish architects RMJM. The curved forms and scalloped edges are intended to create a "play of light and shadow" around the base of the 42-metre monument to Henry Dundas, Viscount Melville.

Backed by the festival's 160,000 Expo Fund grant, it will be constructed in July from nine linked segments of curved glass, made by the Glasgow glass manufacturer Gray and Dick, arcing round a radial floor of veneered wood. RMJM and the structural engineers Buro Happold are working on the space, designed to accommodate about 40 people.

"It is inspired by segments of time," Forbes said. In a futuristic reflection of how the Melville monument acts as a giant sundial, in the pavilion participants, he added, "can imagine arcs of light continually moving across the floor, you get dramatic changes. We have modelled it with almost painterly changes of light across the space. If you like, it's glowing with light."

Each day at 1pm, timed with Edinburgh's one o'clock gun, partner galleries will get the chance to talk up their shows to people lying on their backs on cushions. "We are stressing St Andrew's Square as a visual hub, a point of reflection in the city, with all the galleries going out from there," said Forbes.

In 2009, Anish Kapoor, the Turner Prize-winning artist, created a minor sensation in London with a show at the Royal Academy that included Svayambh, a huge block of red wax moving slowly on rails, and Shooting into the Corner, an air-powered cannon firing pellets of wax across a room to build up a wax sculpture. His simpler Untitled (2010), a bell form of red wax, will go on show for the first time in the UK in the Sculpture Court at ECA, along with White Sand, Red Millet, Many Flowers, a 1982 piece of shaped piles coloured in deep blue, red, and yellow.

As usual, the festival acts in large part as an umbrella combining and promoting planned exhibitions in the city. The Rauschenberg show, at Inverleith House in the Royal Botanic Gardens, will feature 43 works by the American artist, including paintings and sculpture in metal and glass. It is organised in collaboration with the Rauschenberg Studio in New York and the Gagosian Gallery.

At the other end of the spectrum, also on offer this summer are shows such as The Northern Renaissance: Durer to Holbein, a showcase of the two 16th century masters at the Queen's Gallery of the Palace of Holyrood House. Planned by the festival for a dilapidated building in the city centre, 400 Women is a conceptual work by the artist Tamsyn Challenger, featuring portraits, all a uniform 14x10 inches in size, by contemporary artists in response to the rape and murder of women in Cuidad Juarez, the notoriously violent border battleground of Mexican drug cartels. The work premiered in London in 2010.

Major public galleries have already signed on to the festival's partnership scheme, some paying the 5,000 maximum. But other galleries have criticised the first-time fees, and one leading private gallery in the city, The Scottish Gallery, has opted to go for the cheaper 250 submission route. Director Guy Peploe said his summer exhibition of Dame Elizabeth Blackadder will already get "cross-publicity" as the Scottish National Gallery is staging a major retrospective.

In the current economic climate, building non-government funding is vital, "particularly for a festival that's ambitious and wants to develop," Carey said. The festival's chairman, Jupiter Artland founder Robert Wilson, has outlined ambitions of recasting Edinburgh's art festival as a major date on the European cultural calendar.