Visual art and Isla Leaver-Yap

Venice Biennale 2007

18 Jun 2007

(Image: Gun Fight of the Mind by Tony Swain) The Venice Biennale is sinking. The 110-year-old international exhibition is fighting to keep its place as the world’s creative laboratory of artistic endeavour, consequently finding itself swamped with…

Aernout Mik

22 May 2007

(Picture: Scapegoat) At first, it might seem surprising that Dutch artist Aernout Mik claims to care little about art. He argues that you might as well get rid of the words ‘experiencing art’. Yet, in going against his orders and experiencing the…

Wael Shawky: Al Aqsa Park

Collective Offsite, Sat 31 Mar

9 Apr 2007

FILM INSTALLATION ‘I do not intend to control the viewer,’ says Egyptian artist Wael Shawky, ‘but rather to construct the work in a precise fashion where every element is controlled.’ But when Collective herded its audience onto two buses destined…

Body Parts 3

RSA, Edinburgh, run ended

13 Mar 2007

PERFORMANCE The essence of performance art is its unpredictability. From the medium’s rise in the 1960s and 70s with early shock tactics, such as artist Chris Burden’s infamous ‘Shoot’ where the artist was shot in the arm at close range, to work like…

Alison Watt - The dark fold

The dark fold

27 Feb 2007

If the substance of all painting is light, then artist Alison Watt has got a dark sense of humour. Perhaps best known for her luminous oil paintings of shapely white calico fabrics and creamy brocade drapes, Watt has quietly spent two years creating her…

Ahlam Shibli

Everyday war

12 Feb 2007

Shibli’s lens attends to the bleak realities of Palestinian identities lived within Israel and the Occupied Territories. Born in Galilee, which became part of Israel in 1948, Shibli explores the topographical and emotional contradictions of people…

Trenton Doyle Hancock: The Wayward Thinker

Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, Sat 10 Feb-Sun 8 A

29 Jan 2007

DRAWING AND INSTALLATION Fifty thousand years ago an ape man ejaculated into a field of flowers. His act culminated in the creation of the Mounds: part-human, part-plant mutants that have taken over one of the many parallel universes in artist…

Venice Biennale

The big four

29 Jan 2007

As one of the most varied line-ups that Scotland has presented at this year’s biennale, Doggerfisher’s Lucy Skaer, Rosalind Nashashibi, Louise Hopkins and Charles Avery will head out to the Scottish Palazzo Zenobio to make new work for their…

Christine Borland: Preserves

Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, until Sun 28 Jan 2

6 Dec 2006

INSTALLATION In Kos, Greece, there is a tree that stands in front of the Castle of Knights. Apparently planted by eminent physician Hippocrates, the town’s locals optimistically put it at about 2400 years old, and its frailty has generated a reliance…

Scottish Collectives and Young Athenians

Establishing emerging art

10 Oct 2006

Visiting a gallery in Berlin recently, I arrived at an artist-led space, which, despite supposedly being open for an hour, was still closed. After strolling around and returning two hours later they were just opening shop, only to discover that their…

Jeremy Deller - Edited Rushes

The Modern Institute, Glasgow, until Sat 28 Oct

28 Sep 2006

FILM INSTALLATION What has Jeremy Deller been up to? It’s two years since he won the Turner Prize, so what exactly has the artist-curator-director got to show for himself since this aforementioned institutional stamp of success? With four new…

Gregor Laird: Lost in the Forest

Brunswick Hotel, Glasgow, Sun 1-Sun 29 Oct

28 Sep 2006

NEW ART TALENT Maybe not a sheep, but definitely dressed in wolf’s clothing, young Edinburgh artist Gregor Laird is taking a trip to where the wild things are for his Glasgay! premiere. Piecing together large collage work for his first show since…

Callum Innes - From Memory

Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, 30 Sep-19 Nov

18 Sep 2006

PAINTING Abstract painting initially appears to have had a tempestuous and polarised history of either obsessively concealing or proudly parading its own creative process. From Mondrian’s sleek matrix paintings, to Pollock’s grandious splatterings…