Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF) opens tomorrow (Friday) for the 2023 festival, the first under the direction of Kim McAleese. The 2023 festival is set to be one of the largest yet, with 55 ambitious projects and exhibitions across more than 35 venues, with the most innovative and renowned partners, museums and galleries working in visual art in this city all set to take part, including many who will work with EAF for the first time. The new format festival is a call to action to explore the Scottish capital, looking at the city a-new through the lens of visual art and across a diverse range of the EAF partner galleries, museum presentations, and newly commissioned works. The programme connects the people and city of Edinburgh with a global dialogue through a range of exhibitions, commissions, performances and events. The festival dates are 11-27 Aug
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CreativityTranscript
00:00 I'm Gemma Kearney, I do lots of things, but in this context I'm the Chair of the Board
00:04 at the Edinburgh Art Festival.
00:06 My name's Kim McAleese and I'm the Director of the Edinburgh Art Festival.
00:09 So the Edinburgh Art Festival is the visual art arm of the umbrella of fun that happens
00:16 in this city every August.
00:18 It's a massive celebration of visual art all across the city of Edinburgh, from the 11th
00:23 until the 27th of August, so in all of the museums, in all of our partner galleries,
00:27 in lots of different spaces, right across the city from Jupiter Artland, which is right
00:32 on the outskirts of Edinburgh, right through to Westerheels, where we have a community
00:36 wellbeing space.
00:37 There are lots of commissions, artistic projects, talks, events and performances that we're
00:41 programming.
00:42 It's sort of become something that is multi-form, hugely celebrated, and one of the smaller
00:49 festivals in the offering that there is, which there is so much, there honestly really is,
00:54 there's so much going on, and the art festival remains quite kind of agile, potentially subversive,
01:03 and really, really multicultural, I think.
01:08 The EAF is a really, really interesting festival.
01:11 I mean for me, I believe very strongly that as a kind of holder of culture, a director
01:18 of a festival or arts organisation, that we have a very important civic role, and that
01:24 we are all operating with public money, and so that we do have that civic duty and responsibility
01:29 to really think about who we're platforming and why.
01:32 So I was first involved in the Edinburgh Art Festival in 2021, and I'd only just moved
01:38 to Edinburgh, having been a wide-eyed theatre, either student or lover, since the age of
01:47 18, and coming to Edinburgh every August for The Fringe.
01:50 In 2021, as a broadcaster by trade and a published author, I decided that Edinburgh was a good
01:58 place to position myself, to continue to kind of challenge myself, I think, in new locations,
02:05 and I was asked to host an online version of what the EAF were offering that year because
02:11 of the pandemic.
02:12 I find it more interesting and I feel very strongly about platforming people who have
02:17 been historically minoritised or underrepresented, so I don't want to shy away from difficult
02:24 political questions because I think it's really important that in the realm of art, that's
02:28 where we can talk about them and how we can shift things and change things in the world
02:32 going forward.
02:33 At the end of introducing so many different amazing artists, I felt so impassioned that
02:42 more people have access to EAF because I think that it really does offer something very different
02:50 when it comes to what Edinburgh is known for in August.
02:53 Art is a really interesting space, everything feels really flexible.
02:57 We're outside of the kind of, we still have to operate under certain structures, but we're
03:02 outside of lots of the confines of lots of very powerful and difficult structures in
03:08 the world, and I actually think that art has the power to bring people together to discuss
03:14 very difficult and quite traumatic things in ways that are not necessarily verbal as
03:19 well.
03:20 I mean, there'll be experiences you have in a performance, experiences you have with
03:24 music, with an installation, a film that you might see that is able to convey very complex
03:30 ideas and issues, but in a way that words kind of fall short, and that's what I'm really
03:35 interested in, the power that art and artists have to kind of help us think together.
03:42 The fact that it is an art festival really gives it an opportunity to not be quite so
03:52 commercial perhaps, and platform a new wave of thinkers that don't necessarily want to
04:00 be put into a box or category.
04:02 What's really interesting for me about the City of Edinburgh is, you know, the art festival
04:07 has done an incredible job, like working with many partners all across the city, working
04:11 in public spaces, and working with really difficult topics, questions, ideas.
04:18 EAS has the potential to be the most accessible festival, because it's multi-form, so much
04:26 of it is free, and it's everywhere, it's all over Edinburgh, and it's not in the obvious
04:33 places, which just makes me so excited because the democratisation of art in all forms is
04:40 fundamental to an ethos that's very important to me.
04:45 The city is completely captivating and magical and beautiful, but actually whenever you scratch
04:50 under the surface a bit, we're living in a city where lots of the wealth is based on
04:55 kind of colonial power, and that's something that I wanted to think about with this festival.
05:00 You know, it's really easy to be completely swept away by the beauty of the city, but
05:04 actually there are difficult histories that I think that we should and need to address.
05:08 Feel like my mind and heart in unison are always expanding, and it comes out in so many
05:21 ways, and one of those ways is to support and hold space for the arts without thinking
05:29 about them in the ways that we do when we over-intellectualise them.
05:35 Come together and organise, find people who are like-minded, or maybe not even like-minded,
05:40 but people who will teach you something, and use that and channel that into something that
05:47 is going to help other people.
05:49 Digital art, the arts, multi-form, breaking down the barriers and not having the categories
05:56 and boxes to tick is part of a future that I want to be part of.