Edinburgh’s cherished Summerhall Arts continues its year-round visual arts schedule with a variety of current and forthcoming exhibitions:
Currently open until 6th October, Forming Space showcases work by artists and makers at Garvald Edinburgh, whose practices span contemporary craft and visual art, exploring the theme of the vessel through the act of making, revealing the relationship between form, the space within and the layered meanings a vessel can hold.
Garvald Edinburgh supports adults with learning disabilities and autistic adults through a model of creative workshops and studios. Across its visual arts and craft studios, makers are supported to develop individual creative practices within a collaborative environment that values skill, experimentation and artistic expression.
Conversation With Our Ocean, opening 9th Oct, is a collaborative exhibition by Elizabeth Ogilvie + Robert Page: Elizabeth is an environmental artist working where art and science meet, producing experiential installations with water and video, while Robert is an artist-filmmaker combining documentary filmmaking and fine art, often exploring human activity, positive and negative, on the ocean environment.
Marine life helps determine the nature of our planet, with ocean environments representing significant opportunities by offering natural solutions to mitigate and adapt to climate change, while providing invaluable havens for marine life. The exhibition is a meditation on these ecosystems, recorded in Atlantic and north-sea waters, celebrating what could be our greatest weapons in combatting the climate crisis, and proposing a collaboration with the ocean through films and immersive installations that explore deep time, invisible systems. The centre’s Dissection Room is set to be transformed by an ambitious immersive installation comprising semi-abstract video projections, digital prints and text works (see top), with contributions from leading marine scientists and colleagues.
Also opening 9th Oct, Dîdâr: I am the feather and the bird is the precipice is a collaboration of Franco-Iranian photographer XEDER and artist Alex Rigg, and asks ‘What happens at the edge of things?’ in an exhibition ‘preoccupied with life-forms of the precipice – grief, separation, cries and silence, destruction, death and birth – and its inhabitants: ghosts, prophets and crises.’ The exhibition brings together photography, performance, spoken word and critical discussion, and includes collaborations with Dana Simm, Topaz Pauls and Suzi Cunningham, creating a space where images become starting points for other forms of encounter, interpretation and experience.
The live events include performances by Oceanallover and Helmut Lemke, life drawing and spoken-word interventions responding to the photographs, and a critical reflection hosted by Bram Gieben involving guest critics, artists and audiences, exploring ideas and questions raised by the work.
Admission is free, and open Weds – Sun 11am – 5pm.
The arts centre re-opened in the spring of 2025 and has again taken its place as a vibrant centre of visual arts, theatre and education, with a lively mix of on-site cafes and bars, day and evening.
