Edinburgh Art Festival reviews: Karol Radziszewski | Renèe Helèna Browne & more

Karol Radziszewski: Filo | Sally Jubb Photography

The Edinburgh Art Festival turns 20 this year, with what feels like a strong physical presence in the August landscape thanks to two floors of exhibitions and a festival hub at the City Art Centre. The performance programme established last year by director Kim McAleese continues with events every weekend, as does the festival’s prioritising of those who might be seen as marginalised, such as queer voices and people of colour.

The commissioned programme at City Art Centre begins with Karol Radziszewski: Filo (★★★). Radziszewski is a Polish artist whose practice focuses on archiving the queer history of Eastern Europe, pushed even further underground than in the West because of persecution of gay people under Communism.

A series of vitrines chronicle Polish gay magazine Filo, which operated in the 1980s and 1990s, founded by activist Ryszard Kisiel who travelled the Eastern Bloc identifying safe places for queer people and sharing the details with the community. From DIY beginnings with a typewriter, camera and photocopier, it is object lesson in how much has changed since, not just in queer culture but in how culture is communicated.

Accompanying the archival show is a group of Radziszewski’s portraits - part of a much larger project to celebrate historical figures central to East European queer history. He works in bold colours, referencing both pop art and propaganda posters, with subjects including a transgender lawyer from Croatia, a poet from Ukraine, and a chess player from Belarus. Having some background about their stories would further add to the experience.

On the same floor, Renèe Helèna Browne’s Sanctus! (★★★★) is another kind of portrait. The artist worked for a year on this 28-minute film about their mother, Helen, looking through the lens of rally racing in rural Donegal which is an important part of their family culture. In the juxtaposition of images and words, Browne builds up a nuanced picture of Helen and her voice, only revealing her face in the final minutes. 

The thoughtful voiceover brings together references from Catholicism (Helen was raised a devout Catholic but later came to reject the faith), rally driving and Irish folk tales to weave a subtle portrait, capturing something of the complex relationship of mother and child where some distance is necessary if the offspring is to become themselves. It signals Browne, a graduate of Talbot Rice Residents programme for emerging artists, as a talent to watch out for.

Renèe Helèna Browne: 'Sanctus!' | Sally Jubb Photography

On the next floor up is Platform, EAF’s showcase for emerging artists (★★★), now in its tenth year. Alaya Ang is making a kind of family portrait, too, in lengths of cloth stitched together, mud-dyed in the traditional Singaporean way and laid on the floor like the contours of a landscape. The soundscape is the ambient sound from Ang’s family’s tailoring business.

Tamara MacArthur explores the presence and absence of intimacy in contemporary life with an immersive installation of gauzy fabrics hanging floor to ceiling. Pushing through them one reaches a quiet inner space where MacArthur’s voice can be heard singing along to pop songs.

Kialy Tihngang critiques social media as a vehicle for information, by juxtaposing the traditional practice of breast ironing in Cameroon, used to mutilate the bodies of girls as young as 10, and an Instagrammer’s feed about the (alleged) wonders of breast reduction. Edward Gwyn Jones makes use of a simple visual motif he found in the Alan Clarke film Penda’s Fen - an actor being pelted with mud and foodstuffs which smash across an invisible glass screen - which is visually arresting, but I’m not sure to what end. 

The festival opening performance on 9 August was Through Warm Temperatures (★★★), created by artist and choreographer Mele Broomes, using words, a live musical soundscape and five dancers, including Broomes herself. One of her inspirations was castor oil, derived from a plant which is common in much of the southern hemisphere and has a range of medicinal uses.

The idea of a healing salve permeated the performance which embodied elements of struggle as well as freedom, connection and quietness. It might also “oil” the wheels of difficult conversations, like those undertaken by the Living Archive of black women artists, of which Broomes is a part. While the Custom Lane venue is not ideal due to poor sightlines for many in the audience, this is an accomplished piece of choreography, realised with elegance.

Meanwhile, EAF’s partner programme continues at galleries all over the city, such as Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, which hosts Sequoia Danielle Barnes: Everything is Satisfactual (★★★). Edinburgh-based Barnes, who is completing an 18-month fellowship at ESW, has created an immersive pastoral moment: a carpet of plastic grass, recorded birdsong, two children having a picnic, characters from the classic Br’er Rabbit stories and visuals from Disney’s 1946 film Song of the South.

But something’s not right: the birdsong is on a loop, slugs are creeping towards the picnic food, Song of the South is mired in controversy due to it being set on a plantation in Georgia, and the eyes of the children? Well, they’re just scary. The Br’er Rabbit stories, known to many as the work of Joel Chandler Harris, were African-American tales dressed up by Harris to be more palatable to a white audience.

Sequoia Danielle Barnes: Everything is Satisfactual | Oana Stanciu

Barnes is exposing how “cuteness” is used to mask racist and patriarchal attitudes, not just in these examples, but more widely in popular culture. The unsettling qualities of the work draw attention to this. There are important lessons to note here, but this is art as cultural critique, which might explain why it feels heavy, static, rather than being animated with a creative force of its own.

Meanwhile, in the smaller upstairs gallery at ESW, another Edinburgh-based artist, Jan Pimblett, a recent graduate of Middlesex University’s MFA course, does uncanny with bells on. Hybrids (★★★★) is full of made and found objects which, together, compound the unsettling effect: a bejewelled baby doll which seems to be stumbling out of its box, a curled up fur, a mechanical wooden arm, ceramic monsters, a coil of admission tickets from a fairground sideshow. It’s teeming with energy and imagination, perhaps almost too much. The fact that we’re looking in at it through glass does nothing to diminish the strangeness.

The Edinburgh Art Festival exhibitions at the City Art Centre run until 25 August; Sequoia Danielle Barnes: Everything is Satisfactual until 1 September; Jan Pimblett: Hybrid until 6 October.