As Edinburgh Art Festival

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For Edinburgh Art Festival 2021, Associate Artist Tako Taal has brought together six of the most interesting artists working currently to respond to a work by Isaac Julien, which pivots on the history of American abolitionist Frederick Douglass

Interviews: Adam Benmakhlouf

For this Edinburgh Art Festival, Tako Taal has assembled six artists with diverse practices to respond to a film by the artist Isaac Julien, Lessons of the Hour (2019). In this work, Julien’s subject is the American abolitionist Frederick Douglass. What caught the attention of scholar and creative Sequoia Barnes was Douglass’ trip to Naples with the sculptor Edmonia Lewis. “I don’t know why [they went], all I know is they went to Naples. Two Black people, not necessarily postslavery are just travelling around Europe... it’s this weird parallel universe to the transatlantic slave trade.” In response, Barnes draws on the artistic lineages of where she grew up in Alabama, particularly the quiltmaking practices of Gee’s Bend. For Barnes, this medium allows a mixing of the radical historical-critical approach of hauntology and Black historical studies. “The quilt is like a portal, set amongst a shrine.” Artists Francis Dosoo and Matthew Arthur Williams’ respective responses take the form of self-portraiture. This jumps off from Douglass’ push to photograph himself as much as possible, ensuring his own agency in his representation as a Black man. “The work albeit about how we are seen and what narrative that is, is really about two things,” explains Williams. “One, erasure. Physical erasure from records and accounts, and erasure

Image: Courtesy of artist from each other. Two, it is holding a moment for generational exchange and knowledge. A crossgenerational relationship, and knowledge exchange makes for a kind of anchoring force through times of very active and aggressive systemic oppression. The work with all these subtexts is still saying tenderness.” In contrast, Francis Dosoo’s works are installed as billboards on Calton Road. In collaboration with the artist and fashion photographer Kamilya Kuspanova, Dosoo has created a triptych of photographic works accompanied by text. “I’m interested in people’s relationships with themselves through religion,” as Dosoo carefully phrases it. The poses and composition of these works draw from images of saints in classical paintings. Dosoo is committed to the transformative potential of images as a way of deepening how people see and understand the world around them, which Dosoo tracks a common line of interest with Frederick Douglass’ use of photography. The Associate Artist programme also includes a new film work by Camara Taylor, holusbolus. This work furthers Taylor’s research into the life and death of William Davidson (1781-1820), the son of a Scotsman, the Attorney General of Jamaica and a Black woman. “He has mobility, even if he is poor throughout his life. He comes from what could be retrospectively understood as – not necessarily a Black elite – but a Black mobile class.” The film work centres on the speech Davidson gave in which he pleads his innocence, claiming to have been mistaken for another man of colour when he is tried for his alleged involvement in a radical plot to assassinate cabinet ministers and the Prime Minister. The work that has emerged Taylor describes as “very complicated” and “very strange”, coming from a collaboration with artists Nima Séne, Sulaïman Majali, 皚桐 and writer Shola von Reinhold. For artist Thulani Rachia, their work arose from an anecdote about Frederick Douglass buying a violin in Edinburgh, and which he played as part of a self-healing practice. This sparked some recognition, as Rachia records melodies while travelling and adjusting to new cities and locations. “[In doing so], I’m creating a safe space for myself in not-so-welcoming built up environments.” These have been transcribed into scores for cellists Simone Seales, Justyna Jablonska, Iain McHugh, Joanna Stark and Dr Claire Garabedian. The scores incorporate long moments of rest for the musicians as a subversion of the usual extractive relationship of audience and performer, as

Pastoral Scene 001 from the series What is behind the Saint's eyes, when they look through tears to the altar?, FrancisDosoo

well as including parts written in Rachia’s mother tongue isiZulu alongside conventional Western Italian music notations. Music and sound come to the fore again in Chizu Anucha’s work, in which he sonically imagines the future that would have been imagined by the abolitionists that visitied Edinbugh in the 19th century. He specifically takes a cue from Ellen and William Craft, who disguised themselves, she as a white male slaveholder and William as an enslaved servant. He let those stories sit while recording in the old Georgian building, “to occupy the space and be present with all that in mind.... [in] an old Georgian building made using funds that were acquired by the oppression of people.” The question that Anucha came back to: “If people were doing a gig or show two hundred years ago, if they were imagining utopian futures, what would they be? I’m thinking about now and gigs and how Black people occupy white institutions now, versus hundreds of years from now. In a utopian sense, what would be imagined and how could we try to embody that?”

For sites and information on the work above, see the Edinburgh Art Festival website. All free and open throughout August

Young Team

Platform is always one of the most exciting parts of Edinburgh Art Festival, offering up four emerging artists’ practices with lightly curated themes between them, with this year’s looking at care and support structures

Interview: Adam Benmakhlouf

Each year, Edinburgh Art Festival saves a spot for some of the most exciting emerging practices in Scotland right now, in the Platform exhibition. This year’s no exception and the 2021 edition brings together four artists working with ideas of history, literature, trauma, identity, debt and using the tools of sculpture, artist film, drawing and installation to do so. For artist Isabella Widger, the Platform exhibition meant being able to delve deeper into a novella by the ‘Dickens of France’ Gustave Flaubert, called A Simple Heart. “It was written in 1877 and spans a chunk of the middle of the 19th century. It follows the housemaid Felicité and is almost divided in three between her young years, middle age, then later her death. Throughout, she suffers losses and betrayals and slowly becomes more and more isolated, losing her eyesight. She’s given a parrot at some point and her attachment to it is really strong, it replaces all the lost relationships she had, with a romantic and maternal element... It’s an idealisation of simplicity and purity… critiquing it as well as simulating it.” This forms the context and basis for Widger’s installations of drawings and sculptures. One of these includes an imagined portrait of Felicité with her bird, and is loosely a self-portrait by the artist, too. A large photograph is also pasted across a freestanding wall, and shows an image of a small set of Felicité’s room blown-up to full scale. Speaking of the imagination involved in creating these versions of what is described in the book, Widger says they aren’t scenes that are necessarily described: “At some point you have to realise, you can say something [back to these reference materials]. The not-saying is too reifying.” Continuing ideas of care and maintenance work, Kirsty Russell’s new textile artworks extend in part from time spent in the archive of Glasgow Women’s Library, specifically looking at “the sewing papers… The shapes of the work are informed by the parts of garments like the gussets and yokes, bits of the shoulder that hold the other parts of the pattern.” These elements struck Russell as relevant to the broader themes in her practice. “All the women in my family are in care settings, so I’m always thinking of that and the weight of that work you often don’t really see, the repetitive nature of maintenance work.” Translating to the works Russell is showing, she says, “I like that they could be used, I want to make a rug that people will sit on. I like the idea of people having that relationship with them.” Artist Jessica Higgins continues the theme of support work, setting an imaginative story in the ear infection of a debt advisor. This affliction causes the protagonist Denise’s hearing to become distorted by an echo. For Higgins, the echo comes with broad associations, ranging from Greek mythology to the listening and mirroring of active listening that forms part of advisory work. So it is that in the video a series of performers act as the Ear, “who repeats a lot of phrases and lines throughout,” explains Higgins. “Then there’s the compère, the narrator, host and colleague, who

Image: courtesy of the artist

“All the women in my family are in care settings, so I’m always thinking of that and the weight of that work”

Kirsty Russell

co-composes Denise as the character, and Meanwhile who is a time-based figure, played by a dancer who made choreographic scores based on the original version of the script. The Ear then mirrors these through the film. Then there’s the chorus who are meant to be the voices on the film, sometimes as part of the dialogue of the film, then other times in the theatrical tradition of summarising and reflecting.” Summing up the film-performance, Higgins describes all the research, forms and ideas as “pickling around this weird thing.” Also working with experimental forms of filmmaking, Danny Pagarani’s Platform work takes a philosophical angle towards identity formation. In the process of forming the work, Pagarani says, “I was engaged in a certain kind of self-fetishisation. Instead of fleeing that or pretending it’s not happening I went more for it.” Images of the artist’s own arms pressing into one another are included alongside the grinding together of two ceramic phallus forms the length of Pagarani’s forearm, as they loudly make a metallic ceramic sound. These form the setting too for footage of Pagarani’s father reading the Krio words for “hurt, heart and place”, homophones of one another. Thinking of the ways these words differ but reach out to one another in a way, Pagarani suggests a notion of a less rigid or prescribed identity formation that can include difference, where identities seemingly distinct from one another can find aspects of themselves in one another. As an example, Pagarani mentions “English is a creole language, with Italian, French, Greek, African and Hindi words… To be blunt about it, it’s our only political hope if we can hold that contradiction within us, what I am is also what I’m not.”

Platform: 2021, Institut français d’Ecosse, until 29 Aug, open daily 10am-5pm, free