This year Edinburgh Art Festival celebrated its 20^th birthday with a programme aptly burgeoning with all the rebellion and yearning of someone casting off their teenage years. Spanning the work of more than 200 artists and sprawling across the city, the festival tackled the question of how to make art in a global crisis, profiling artists who push back against structures of corruption and oppression.

This resistance was seen most blatantly at Stills Gallery where the touring exhibition Home presented work from contemporary Ukrainian photographers exploring the meaning of the titular word in such tumultuous and uncertain times. Incorporating still life, portraiture and landscape photography, the works captured a distinct feeling of hope amongst the destruction and displacement on display, best exemplified by a poignant black and white shot by documentary photographer Mykhaylo Palinchak. Capturing a monument to Dante Alighieri cushioned by sandbags, the image metamorphosed this defiant yet tender act of protection as a stand-in for a community resisting the present whilst simultaneously planning for a future.

Similarly navigating the rhetoric of protest and protection, Edward Gwyn Jones’ three-screen installation Pillory, Pillocks! at City Art Centre featured footage of sludge and slime being thrown at a glass screen. Jones’ work functions as a piercing commentary on the bleak socio-economic reality that plagues us today with his careless and degrading use of food waste raising issues of food insecurity through the lens of medieval humiliation. With gut-wrenching atrocities becoming a regular feature of our daily scroll, each thud of amorphous goo results in a jump scare as Jones asks us - what does the screen protect us from?

At Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, Sequoia Barnes’ installation Everything Is Satisfactual peeled back the layers of our known world, revealing the proximity of the adorable and the grotesque. Functioning as an Afro-surreal retelling of Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby—a folk tale in the oral tradition—the space was transformed into a garish, uncanny meadow as Barnes deconstructed our relationship with cuteness, picking apart insidious folklore or the cannibalistic notion of something being so cute we could eat it. Through off-kilter ceramics and an unnerving video work of repurposed Disney footage, Everything Is Satisfactual functions as the knife's edge on which we perceive cuteness and violence, revealing how institutions of power can be rotten at the core beneath a layer of saccharine sweetness.

Painstakingly crafted from thousands of discarded bottle caps, El Anatsui’s signature wall hangings did not disappoint in his long-anticipated exhibition Scottish Mission Book Depot Keta at Talbot Rice Gallery. Woven together with copper wire, the flattened aluminium caps form a glittering, butter-yellow expanse mimicking the contours of a landscape, puckering and cracking underneath the arid heat of the sun. By using reclaimed caps from the bottling industries of Ghana and Nigeria, the very material is imbued with the history of colonialism as Anatsui prompts us to consider the remnants of industry and the labour that actualised it. Traces of touch are stitched into the very fabric of the works as global histories and personal narratives collide.

Although many exhibitions featured works which sought to break down systems of oppression, the other half of the programme looked to build up alternative structures premised upon care, compassion and community.

At Fruitmarket Gallery, Ibrahim Mahama’s Songs About Roses similarly contemplated the memory of materials and their ability to hold vestiges of labour. Through moving image, sculpture and large-scale charcoal and ink drawings, Mahama explored the colonial era Gold Coast trade and the human stories behind it. Gestural drawings of Ghanaian workers graced canvases made from reclaimed production reports as Mahama masterfully entangled everyday intimacies with the mundanity of industry.

If this segment of the programme was the thorns of the revolution, the next was the rose. Although many exhibitions featured works which sought to break down systems of oppression, the other half of the programme at EAF looked to build up alternative structures premised upon care, compassion and community.

Stepping back into the local archives to march onwards into an idealised future was the latest offering from Rosie’s Disobedient Press. Delving deep into Edinburgh’s history of politics and protest, Rosie activated the archive, examining language as a historical act of resistance. Selecting instances that showcase the vibrancy and strength of community, their research resulted in works of textual intervention which have taken the form of printed matter and merchandise such as caps and clothing. With this, the archive is taken out into Edinburgh, the city’s inhabitants becoming walking sculptures, emblazoned with local histories and tender memories.

Sanctus! explored intimacy and belonging through the lens of an outsider. Slick and immersive, the viewing room is swaddled in floor-length leather curtains which ooze the fast-paced sex appeal of a race car. Using the shiny object of the rally car as an emotional access point, Renèe Helèna Browne attempts to connect with their mother and family of petrolheads, capturing moments of intimacy amongst the grit of life and the race track.

Equally alluring was Only the Lonely, an installation at City Art Centre where Tamara MacArthur transports you to a space reminiscent of a decaying strip club. MacArthur’s work sings of nostalgia as their House of Cards style of making teeters on the edge of collapse. Eerie and enticing, the space was drenched in carmine from tinted windows whilst a labyrinth of red curtains led to a glittering papier-mâché cavity which holds you suspended in a dream-like world where their durational performance explores the presence and absence of touch. The work ruminates on notions of yearning and longing providing a shimmering hollow where you can feel like you belong even just for a moment.

Sited in Edinburgh’s lush Royal Botanic Garden, Around a Tree from Colombian collective Más Arte Más Acción (MAMA) functioned as an invitation to discuss or ruminate on the crippling loss of biodiversity brought on by the climate emergency. This participatory work invites you to sit at a round table encircling a young Portuguese oak and—weaving together sculpture, performance and intervention—highlights the power of art to catalyse change, providing a space to foster conversation and create community. The EAF2024 programme offered a light at the end of the tunnel, dissecting the socio-political landscape only to stitch it together again. From profiling local, emerging artists to importing prolific names from across the globe, the festival in Scotland reflected a growing togetherness in the face of adversity, fanning the flames of resistance and potential revolt.

(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position of STIR or its editors.)