Time is a round-trip ticket to Ibrahim Mahama’s ‘Songs About Roses’ exhibition at the Fruit Market Gallery – the best show of the year. Edinburgh Arts FestivalMahama’s detailed yet poetic charcoal drawings of rail-hauling youths leave one wondering: are they laying or removing track for the British Empire’s Gold Coast Railway?
My attention was immediately captured as I poked my head through the gallery door. This Ghanaian artist is a man who deals with themes that seem to fit the magical realist novel: Railways built by the British government between 1898 and 1923 The Gold Coast colony gained independence in 1957 and became Ghana.
Defenders of the British Empire’s legacy often point to the railway as a positive achievement, but it was built to transport minerals and tropical timber for British profit, not for Africa. Mahama’s archaeology of this industrial behemoth details how British companies profited. As well as his powerful paintings of African people suffering the physical demands of the railway, there are also painted replicas of Manchester engineering firm trademarks, films of decaying industrial spaces, graffiti on tree bark, and photographic re-enactments of performance art carrying the rails. The atmosphere he creates of decadence and futility, a rusted-out, doomed colonial fantasy, culminates in the warehouse space of Fruit Market, where the smell of engine oil still permeates the air in a repurposed loft in the ruins of the city’s Waverley station.
Here, Mahama has built structures out of sleepers and displayed life-sized portraits cut out from group photographs of former Gold Coast Railway employees. He has resurrected the small, monochrome faces captured in the awkward poses of the photographs as individuals. This act of coming to terms with the ghosts of history has made Mahama one of the most important artists working today, alongside William Kentridge and Anselm Kiefer.
He also almost gets the mission of the festival, which, on its 20th anniversary, says it will “look to artists, organisations and figures who resist and refuse”. I find it hard to find this mission elsewhere. A portrait of Winston Churchill at his easel in the south of France, or one of the serene paintings by Belfast-born Sir John Lavery, is on show at the festival in an upbeat retrospective, but Royal Scottish AcademyChurchill, who was Secretary of State for the Colonies at the time Lavery painted and was actually responsible for the construction of the Gold Coast Railway, would have resisted the end of the empire. Lavery’s moist brushwork of river and seaside scenes is enjoyable by the standards of Victorian and Edwardian art, but I found the exhibition a little sleepy, like a day at the beach with my grandparents. He is certainly not the “Irish Impressionist” that the exhibition pretentiously claims.
Lavallee transports you to a world of lost history, and as I wandered between the old and new towns exploring the festival exhibits, I repeatedly felt lost in time. National Museum of Cold War Scotland It features artefacts from the 1950s to 1980s, including steel blast doors from an air raid shelter in East Kilbride, which, stained by time and vandalism, look like Kiefer-esque works of art.
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Seeing old “Protect and Survive” pamphlets and protective clothing that was supposed to protect soldiers from radiation gives you a sense of irony – imagine that – they actually thought the Soviets were going to start a war! Then a visit to the stills gallery confronts you with the reality of the present – no irony, no distance, just rawness. Photos from Ukraine It shows what a Russian invasion would look like and how much life can and has been destroyed by conventional weapons.
Nazar Furik’s photos of the partially liberated city of Kherson show a landscape of ruins: destroyed bridges, burnt fields and forgotten footballs in the mist. The most harrowing photo is not for the faint of heart: Mykhailo Palinchak photographed a dead civilian lying on the road in Bucha, Kyiv region. 2022They lie on their backs, arms outstretched, thick black blood all around them. Were they executed?
When this is the reality, it’s no wonder we want to escape. So much art is not “resistance” but rather offers a whole range of pastoral pleasures. Los Angeles painter Haley Barker writes, Ingleby Gallery Located in New Town, the building’s light-filled central space is the perfect setting for her delicate garden paintings of purple cacti, paths and a yellow moon peeking through the bushes. These paintings may seem too pretty at first, but as you look at them, the colours become more and more bizarre, subtly stimulating the pleasure principle in your optic nerve and releasing uncharted endorphins.
At Dovecot Studios in the Old Town, you’ll discover the mysterious neuroscience of colour applied not just to paint but to wool. This is a special place in Scotland: a living craft workshop founded by followers of William Morris, where weavers work with leading artists to create tapestries. During my tour of the workshop, the weavers never took their eyes off their looms.
Dovecot’s festival show may seem like a self-congratulatory venture – a “making of” exhibition that tells the story of how they went about creating the pieces. Chris Ofili’s Tapestry “The Song of the Caged Bird”The meticulously lit exhibit shows weavers experimenting with multi-coloured threads to capture Ofili’s delicate palette in textiles, before finally revealing the tapestry itself, transporting us to a dream world of comical and erotic Trinidadian folklore and landscapes. It was hard to leave – Ofili is beautifully celebrated here as the Matisse of Trinidad.
Resistance? More like bliss.
