Art

Every year I look forward to the RSA New Contemporaries. It always fizzes with energy. Here are the young showing us how, while the so-called grown-ups drag us through the grisly farce of Brexit. Nor does this year disappoint. There are 63 new graduates including a small group of architects. The show is on both floors of the RSA and so there is room for them each to have their own bit of wall or floor. Thus their work is not scattered and they can spread themselves out a little. One or two individual works have been in the recent group shows, but here the artists, among their peers, have a better chance to make a statement.

We think of an archive and we think of a room somewhere, closed off from the light of day and stacked top to bottom with papers and files and computers. Politics, History, Economics… these are the kinds of subject areas that fill most archives in most places, representing a past that, on the whole, was dominated by men, in a world that went about its business as though women had little to do with it.

Revolutionary politics fired a new wave of art in Germany, as this wonderful show at the Hunterian illustrates

The V&A Dundee is among Scottish beneficiaries facing calls to return donations from a billionaire family accused of fuelling an epidemic of painkiller addiction.

As Brexit looms, a group show at Talbot Rice brings together work by 13 international artists exploring the subject of borders

The National Museum of Scotland began life in 1866. Opened by Prince Albert, it was called the Industrial Museum of Scotland and was a product of the same drive, led by the Prince, that gave us the V&A and the other South Kensington museums, all conceived as engines of economically useful, popular education. Enlarging on the same Victorian purpose, the Museum then changed its name to the Edinburgh Museum of Science and Art. In 1904 it changed its name again, but not really its purpose or character, to become the Royal Scottish Museum. In 1985 however, a development began that has, since then, changed it profoundly. The Royal Scottish Museum, as it then still was, absorbed the National Museum of Antiquities, the collection of the Society of Scottish Antiquities that had been started two centuries earlier. This accession in turn eventually prompted the wholly new building of the Museum of Scotland, joined onto the western end of the old building and opened in 1998. Then finally in 2004, a project was launched to reorganise the original Victorian building and completely transform all the displays. The first step was to create a new entrance at street-level and indeed the new ground floor onto which it opens. Much else has happened since as this radical process of renewal was taken up through the building’s many layers and spaces.

A quartet of women are hidden in plain sight at Ingleby Gallery, while Victoria Morton shows her mastery of movement and colour

A striking piece of Edinburgh street art reputed to have been created by the world-renowned graffiti artist Banksy has been defaced in the ultimate act of criticism.

Visual Arts Scotland’s show at the RSA mixes work in diverse media to impressive effect

With a new exhibition celebrating her work opening in Edinburgh, the Irish designer talks about her love of print, the inspiration of the colours of her childhood and her hopes for the future as her website relaunches

In a film in which a statue of Engels journeys across post-industrial Europe in a flat-bed truck, Phil Collins asks profound questions about inequality and wealth. By Susan Mansfield

Does a lifelike painting make a perfect portrait? The BP Portrait Award show invites us to ponder the question

Margaret Salmon’s films of intimate sexual encounters between three committed couples offer a thought-provoking alternative to the male gaze, while Lorna Macintyre’s photographs are object lessons in subjectivity writes Susan Mansfield

The SSA Annual Exhibition is still offering the art scene something different in its 121st year, writes Duncan Macmillan

Katie Paterson grapples with some of the biggest ideas in cosmology and deep time and offers up work which helps make them more understandable, whether that’s on a beach or in a gallery. Interview by Susan Mansfield

Optical illusions? Surrealist collages? Donegal carpets? You’ll find all these things and more in Scotland’s galleries in the year ahead, write Susan Mansfield and Duncan Macmillan

As First World War centenary commemorations draw to a close, the Outer Hebrides marks a special anniversary, for the aftermath of the war brought a particularly savage tragedy to these islands. On Hogmanay 1918, a yacht packed with returning servicemen sank after hitting rocks less than a mile from the harbour at Stornoway with the loss of 201 lives. For many years, the sinking of the Iolaire seemed a disaster too terrible to comprehend: men who had survived the war, drowned just yards from shore, even as their families joyfully awaited their return. On top of already heavy wartime losses the event would leave no community untouched, yet it was shored up behind a wall of silence. It was 1960 before a memorial was erected near the site of the sinking at the Beasts of Holm.