Summerhall

January 2020: four very different artists uncover forgotten histories and semi-imagined pasts in Summerhall’s first exhibition of the new year, Mount Strange and the Temple of Fame. Deep diving into investigative research, these artists interrogate the minutiae of tangled human and ecological life.

Curated by Wendy Law, Edinburgh-based contemporary visual arts specialist, Mount Strange is a reimagining of Summerhall’s Festival 2012 exhibition Only Women Women Only, presenting a diverse range of work dealing with the erasure of women in written history, wealth and power, folklore and ritual. These four women artists across six galleries, invite us to contemplate what is fake, what is artifice, what is real and what is truth.

Wendy Law commented; ‘These women are today’s explorers – as artists they research, scrutinise and collect. They delve into strange histories, question reputations and our spiritual and physical relationships with our environment.’

Victoria Clare Bernie, Maria Gimeno, Mina Heydari-Waite and Alix Villanueva use film, video, drawing, photography, found objects, ritual and performance.

Victoria Clare Bernie is a visual artist concerned with the tension between natural entropy and human design, exploring wildness through human minutiae. Her film Mount Strange and the Temple of Fame gives the exhibition its title. She is presenting two other films, including Daedalus – exploring the mysterious true story of Hitler’s Deputy’s fateful flight to Scotland in search, perhaps, of a peace treaty – and Office of Woods.

In Queridas Viejas (Old Mistresses), Maria Gimeno stages a gendered intervention on the ‘bible’ of art history; E.H. Gombrich’s The Story of Art. Using a sharp tipped kitchen knife and an academically rigorous approach, Gimeno carefully inserts the artists Gombrich ‘forgot’ – the women – and invites us to examine our own relationship with art history, and the primarily white, male collections of our major art institutions. On the 8th March, Marie Gimeno will perform Queridas Viejas for the first time in the UK to celebrate International Women’s Day in the Anatomy Lecture Theatre.

Glasgow-based, Iranian-British artist and facilitator Mina Heydari-Waite’s work is concerned with hierarchical dynamics in cultural history and cultural participation. Her work همسفر  (Hamsafar / Companion Traveller) investigates the role diasporic identity plays by weaving together semi-imagined histories of the Iranian diaspora created after the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

Alix Villanueva is a multi-media Edinburgh-based artist and cosmoecologist, interested in the use of the strange and the folkloric within ecological thought and in investigating where domesticity and the wild entangle. She is presenting items worn during her happenings, including ‘Landscape Skirt’ – a healing ritual.

Find out more about Summerhall’s Visual Arts programme.

Quirky felt tapestries by Marlon Wobst and charming architectural drawings by Glasgow’s Will Knight plus Out of Sight Out of Mind presents work by hundreds of artists as part of the Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival

October 2019: the nights are closing in and the days are getting nippy, so we’re cosying up with an outstanding programme of visual art throughout Autumn and Winter here at Summerhall.

On 15 November we open a UK first exhibition of Berlin-based artist Marlon Wobst’s (b.1980) mischievous, colourful felt tapestries. In FRIENDS, Marlon walks the fine line between fine art and craft with wool-felt tapestries that recall Joseph Beuys’ subversive felt sculptures of the 1960s and 70s. Known as a colourist working predominantly in oils and on paper, these new felt tapestries will bring the Meadows and Corner Galleries to life with cheeky bathing scenes, football games and wild, naked horse rides direct from Marlon’s gallery in Berlin, SCHWARZ CONTEMPORARY. With humour and intelligence, Marlon presents us with human figures locked into complex and often sensual shapes, drawing us into a colour drenched, almost hyper-real world.

On 30 November, Glasgow artist Will Knight (b.1988) will invite us to look at Summerhall in a new way with his quirky, beautifully wrought architectural drawings. Will studied at the Glasgow School of Art, where he began investigating domestic, commercial and civic buildings through recording, measurement and drawing by hand. But Will’s drawings resist the sterile, static nature of architectural drawings. Instead they record the building just as it is, with all the furniture, objects and ephemera that we live and work with every day. With this exhibition, Summerhall will join the Assembly Hall in Edinburgh, Dumfries House in Ayrshire and Renfield St. Stephens Church in having our ‘portrait’ drawn by Will.

On World Mental Health Day (Thursday 10 October) we welcomed Out of Sight Out of Mind to Summerhall as part of the Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival (SMHAF). Now in its seventh year, Out of Sight Out of Mind presents a feast of film, sculpture, installation, photography, painting and drawing, it continues to be supported by SMHAF and the Mental Health Foundation as part of their year-round arts programme. This year the exhibition will consist of almost 400 works by artists from across Scotland and the UK and will fill more than an entire floor of the extensive gallery spaces at Summerhall in Edinburgh.

Closing on 27 October, there isn’t much time left to catch Alan Smith’s (1941-2019) The New World: Retrospective exhibition. After a life threatening illness, Smith completed this new body of work prompted by Tiepolo’s Il Mondo Nuovo – a fresco depicting everyday life in Venice in the 1790s – when The Venetian Republic of a thousand years found itself in its death throes. In The New World, Alan used digital images to draw parallels between this fading Venice and our own Brexit Britain. A selection of the earlier works is presented along The New World.

All exhibitions are free, and we can’t wait to welcome you to Summerhall this winter.

Find out more about the Summerhall visual arts programme.