Art as activism to be explored in Summerhall Arts’ new batch of solo exhibitions
Catalyst, which opens at the end of January, will discuss the place of contemporary art in tackling injustice
Summerhall Arts is bringing activism to the fore of its programme this year with Catalyst: Art As Activism, a series of four exhibition with a focus on practice which challenges social, political and environmental injustice.
While tackling a broad array of contemporary social injustices, the exhibitions will be brought together by ideas of control and exploitation, whether that means bodily autonomy, ecological catastrophe, histories of labour, disability or capitalist extraction and contemporary colonialism.
Eilidh Appletree’s Net Worthy (pictured above) will examine the fraught relationship between capitalism and biodiversity, emulating a submerged landscape to illustrate how ‘capitalism endangers all life on Earth’. Taraneh Dana’s A Heart In Exile, meanwhile, will collect three bodies of work to reflect on the artist’s move from Iran to the UK, using clay, sound and intimate sculptural forms. ‘Exile is not a single event but an ongoing condition,’ Dana said. ‘Through these works, I try to face myself honestly—acknowledging grief, gratitude, and the strange beauty of rebuilding identity in a new place.’
Molly Wickett’s All Day, Waiting For Another Sun To Rise will imagine a post-apocalyptic landscape from the perspectives of queerness and disability, while also discussing ‘crip time’, an experience of time shaped by disability and difference rather than linear progress. Finally, Kasia Oleskiewicz’s Any Body Home will converge the artist’s research into feminism and nonhuman animals, imagining a ‘species-inclusive reality’, where every animal can live and thrive unhampered by danger.
Samantha Chapman, head of visual arts at Summerhall Arts, said: ‘Catalyst brings together artists whose practices insist on art’s capacity to intervene in the world. These exhibitions do not offer easy resolutions; instead, they ask audiences to sit with complexity, to recognise their own entanglement within systems of power, and to imagine alternative ways of being that are grounded in care, accountability, and collective responsibility.’
In related news, the Glasgow Film Festival (GFF) has also focused on activism for its opening film this year, Everybody To Kenmure Street, announced this week. The documentary will discuss a UK Home Office dawn raid in the Glasgow district of Pollokshields, one of Scotland’s most diverse neighbourhoods, which prompted local residents to rush to the streets to stop the deportation of their neighbours. It will be screened at GFF on Wednesday 25 February, with a general release planned for Friday 13 March.
Catalyst: Art As Activism, Summerhall, Edinburgh, Saturday 31 January–Sunday 29 March.