Karla Black sculptures (2001–2021) details for a retrospective
Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller: 12 Days of Giving
Emma Hart: 12 Days of Giving
12 Days of Christmas: Anthony Schrag
12 Days of Giving: Sarah Yearsley
12 Days of Giving: Janette Ayachi
12 Day of Giving: Tania Kovats
12 Days of Giving: Barry Bryson
12 Days of Giving: Sabine Passareli
12 Days of Giving: Jacqueline Donachie
Pip Thornton, Arcadia
Thanks to Waverley Mall, Edinburgh and Five Percent for making a film about Pip Thornton’s Arcadia. Thornton’s digital installations drill into the ironies and paradoxes of how online advertising puts a price on language. To gather her evidence, Thornton follows the trail to where transactions take place behind the smooth surface of a search results webpage, her intelligence formed partly by a fascinating previous career as a police detective specialising in financial crime. The title of one of her recent articles, ‘Words as data: The vulnerability of language in an age of digital capitalism’ gives an indication of the concerns driving her work – the manipulation possible through processes that are opaque to us as consumers of online content – and the title of her talk, ‘Linguistic Capitalism: Resistance and Intervention’ highlights her hope to give us tools to interpret the intentions of the operatives shaping the systems that deliver our online content.
Arcadia (2020) has been made specially for The Fruitmarket Gallery’s pop up space in Waverley Mall and uses LED screens hung in the bookshop’s windows
to display text to be seen in the communal mall space below. Thornton’s
chosen text is selected from Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project (1927–1940). Each word appears along with a price which is allocated from Google’s advertising platform, Google Ads.
Thornton explains Google Ads as effectively functioning as a ‘linguistic stockmarket’, and she offers a telling example which shows the pernicious effects that politics can have on what we may incorrectly imagine to be a ‘level playing field’ of access. When in 2017 the political parties in Westminster were battling over whether Theresa May’s adult social care plans were effectively a ‘dementia tax’, it became increasingly hard for dementia charities to afford to appear at the top of online search rankings. This happened as a bidding war raged between those who wanted to win the click-throughs that might translate int
Pip Thornton, Arcadia
On Wednesday evening from 6-8pm, join us to celebrate the installation of Pip Thornton’s Arcadia at Bookmarket, top level of Waverley Mall.
Artist Pip Thornton’s Arcadia (2020), made specially for The Fruitmarket Gallery’s pop-up space in Waverley Mall, uses LED screens hung in the bookshop’s windows to display text that will be seen in the communal mall space below. The text is from Walter Benjamin’s Arcades project. Each word appears along with a price which is allocated from Google’s advertising platform. Arcadia invites us to consider the processes that generate monetary value around us, in both physical and virtual marketplaces.
Supported by
Edinburgh Futures Institute
https://facebook.com/events/s/preview-pip-thornton-arcadia/580986175787979/
Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller's Night Walk for Edinburgh
Night Walk for Edinburgh returns as part of Edinburgh’s Christmas and Hogmanay celebrations
Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller
Night Walk for Edinburgh
16 Nov 2019 – 31 Jan 2020 (except 17 Nov, 24–27 and 31 Dec)
Free. Book here: https://www.fruitmarket.co.uk/night-walk-for-edinburgh/
Following Janet Cardiff’s voice and walking in her footsteps, you will be led through the backstreets of the Edinburgh’s Old Town, unravelling a disjointed tale – part game-playing, part surrealistic poetry, perhaps even a murder mystery – layered with history, invention and memories.
The image of the street comes up on the screen you are holding. It appears that it has been shot in the exact location that you are standing in, almost as if it is in real time. A figure walks past on the video as another passes by in the real world, the two realities aligning. The sounds from the headphones are startlingly three-dimensional, further merging the two worlds in front of you. A female voice close behind you says: so here I am in Edinburgh…
As you listen, she begins to tell you where you are – you should be at the bottom of Advocates’ Close, looking out at Cockburn Street with your back to the steps… – and what you should do – now let’s turn around… and go up the stairs.
One of the biggest hits of this year’s Edinburgh international Festival, Cardiff and Miller’s Night Walk for Edinburgh is now a permanent part of The Fruitmarket Gallery’s collection. We plan to run the work every winter, during Edinburgh’s Christmas and Hogmanay celebrations.
Collect your screen and headphones from Bookmarket in Waverley Mall. 3/1 Waverley Bridge, Edinburgh, EH1 1BQ. Please bring a form of ID or a credit card with you to leave in exchange for the screen.
Access information
Night Walk for Edinburgh involves c.120 steps up and 30 down, uneven ground and some steep slopes. Please dress for the terrain and the weather.
For those who need it, we are pleased to offer a seated version, inside at Bookmarke
Our current exhibition is the first solo institutional exhibition of the work of Senga Nengudi outside the United States. It includes work from 1969 to the present, with recreations of work not seen since the 1970s and a major new installation.
Born in Chicago in 1943, Senga Nengudi has been a trailblazer in sculpture for fifty years. A vital figure in the avant-garde scenes of Los Angeles and New York in the 1960s and 1970s, her work is characterised by a persistently radical experimentation with material and form.
The exhibition offers the chance to see significant examples from Nengudi’s best known body of work, the R.S.V.P. series, in which nylon tights are stretched, knotted, filled with sand and mounted between the walls and the floor in powerful, yet humble, figurations of the triumphs and traumas of the human body. It also includes several Untitled (Water Composition) sculptures from the late 1960s/1970s. Undermining the static and industrial tendencies of Minimalist sculpture, these abstract water sculptures hang and flop with the weight of a body, mimicking flesh while responding to the viewer’s touch.
Much of Nengudi’s work has been informed by her long standing interest in spiritual rituals and performance across cultures. The exhibition includes documentary photographs and film of performances from the 1970s, and a new Sandmining installation which was made specially for the exhibition, which is shown alongside elements from the Wet Night – Early Dawn – S**t Chant – Pilgrim’s Song series from the 1990s, the works together exploring the artist’s ongoing investigations into the commonalities of different belief systems and pilgrimage.
Offering an expansive overview of Nengudi’s practice and shedding light on the work of a figure fundamental to Postminimalism, this exhibition asserts Nengudi’s vital position within a generation of artists who redefined the possibilities of sculpture and representations of race and gender while drawing upon a tradition
Linda Goode Bryant in conversation with Fiona Bradley, Director of the Fruitmarket.
Ambient Audiences: Jamie Flett and Safetynett
Tonight from 6.30–8.30pm come along for an alternative St Andrew's Day celebration with Jamie Flett Music and Safetynett Flett who will be creating live ambient sounds using electronics and instruments to trace elements of intuitive and mantric music. Come along, it is free and the bar is open. https://www.facebook.com/events/692189837814940/
#winterwarmer #alternativeStAndrewsDay
Emma Hart BANGER at The Fruitmarket Gallery, 27 October 2018–3 February 2019
Emma Hart (b.1974, London) makes sculpture that is generous, generative and immediate in its appeal. This exhibition brings together two bodies of work that represent the most recent developments in her artistic practice: Mamma Mia! (2017), a major installation made following a residency in Italy awarded as part of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women that Hart won in 2016; and a group of new sculptures collectively titled BANGER (2018) made since Mamma Mia! and in response both to it and to the space of The Fruitmarket Gallery.
Mamma Mia! (2017), consists of ten large ceramic objects which hang from the ceiling, while an eleventh lies sidelong on the floor. The objects simultaneously resemble heads, upturned measuring jugs and lamps. They are glossy and monochrome, and project large speech bubbles onto the floor, some of them periodically sliced through by the shadows of ceiling fans made of oversized cutlery. As you move around and under the forms you become aware that the interior of each is a riot of intensely coloured, highly inventive pattern.
Red electrical cables run between the forms, powering the lights and binding the objects together in a way reminiscent of a genogram, a particular kind of family tree which indicates both family relationships (mother, father, daughter, son) and the quality of each relationship (loving, indulgent, claustrophobic). In a genogram, red and zigzagging lines both represent hostility.
As a viewer, you might find yourself drawn into the family group or groups represented in Mamma Mia! and the uneasy domestic space in which it resides. As Hart says, ‘the domestic is where we can feel every emotion possible, sometimes over a short period of time, for example over a meal.’ Emotions are played out over the exterior of the forms – tears, worry lines and faces buried in hands all suggest fraught and heightened feelings. These are intensified by the interior patterns of the heads, each of which conjures a different state of mind. The
Tacita Dean: Woman with a Red Hat at. The Fruitmarket Gallery until 30 September 2018
British-European artist Tacita Dean (b.1965) has a wide-ranging practice that includes drawings, photographs, installations and collections of found objects and images, but she is best known for her use of film, and her advocacy for its preservation as an artistic medium.
This year, Dean has presented three major exhibitions in London around the themes of landscape, portraiture and still life. This present exhibition complements these, but is distinct from them, exploring the artist’s approaches to theatre, performance and narrative. In the context of Edinburgh’s festivals, the work in this exhibition speaks to the vitality of the performing arts in the city over the summer months.
The title – Woman with a Red Hat – is taken from the film Event for a Stage, around which the exhibition pivots. Originally commissioned for the 2014 Sydney Biennale as a live theatre piece, the work was Dean’s first foray into the theatre and her first experience of working with an actor. The film is an intricate interweaving of the four consecutive performances of the piece. The fierce interplay between the artist and the actor, Stephen Dillane, as they struggle to understand and accommodate each other’s artforms makes for a compelling, complex investigation into the balance of reality and illusion in both.
Other works in the exhibition expand upon the themes explored in Event for a Stage, looking at the figure of the actor, the role and workings of the script, and the construction of sound and narrative in film.The works range from the early installation Foley Artist,that dramatises the fiction of cinematic sound, to the recent film miniature His Picture in Little, featuring three actors who have all played Hamlet on the London stage. Together, the works in the exhibition ask us to consider the ways in which theatrical artifice can transport us, and ultimately deliver truth through fiction.
