Coinciding with an international book festival and the frenetic Fringe, the Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF) 2025 eschews explicit, politically urgent responses in favour of a slower activism, returning to nature – both human and non-human – as worth interrogating first. In its 21st year, the festival comprises 82 exhibitions across 45 partner venues across a wide range of practices and materials. There is a demonstrated investment in bringing to the fore local, young and emerging artists and venues, as well as those from marginalised communities, especially queer artists, in Scotland and beyond. The festival is without a theme this year, which enables a more amorphous experience of it. But as one darts between galleries, amid hordes of street performances and teeming cobbled streets, patterns begin to emerge, just as one might contemplate a leaf or flower over a period of time.

At Stills Centre for Photography, British photographer Siân Davey is presenting in Scotland for the first time with The Garden. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Davey and her son, Luke, researched which plants and seeds would flourish in their back garden’s native soil in Devon and began cultivating an “immersive wildflower haven” over three years. Then they invited people over the garden wall to be photographed –– neighbours, friends and family, extending this invitation to other community members, especially young queer people coming to the camera to confront their traumas and shame within the cocoon of Davey’s sanctuary. The resulting images are tender and stirring, even if not formally new; they are straightforward portraits of individuals against the serene yet vibrant garden background, evidently in celebration of their bodies and identities. The nude pictures of female-presenting people, in particular, emit a palpable sense of self-acceptance, stillness and peace, in contrast to the usual defiance of some contemporary female nudes that ‘gaze back’.

The world today heaves with multiple ongoing crises and political movements – including the ongoing genocide in Gaza – but the Edinburgh Art Festival has not taken a politically charged curatorial direction this year.

The garden is an apt framework for approaching the festival as a whole – its spreading roots, growing seeds, patience, unpredictability and diversity. Fittingly, the Royal Botanic Garden of Edinburgh (RBGE) is a venue for Hayward Gallery’s travelling exhibition Linder: Danger Came Smiling, the titular British artist’s first Scottish retrospective. Linder is renowned for her biting feminist critiques through photography, punk-inflected collages and performances. Like vines, the comprehensive and lush works here – female porn stars overlain or morphing into giant flowers, for instance – spill out the RBGE indoor gallery’s confines into the gardens, with installations as well as a newly commissioned outdoor performance that is at once off-putting, erotic, fluid, bizarre, yet meditative. Succinct swatches of text throughout maintain a strongly held curatorial throughline that engages Linder’s images with ideas on domestic space, female duty, sexism within horticulture and a predatory consumer culture that preys on women as products.

Alongside more established artists like Linder, Egyptian artist Wael Shawky at Talbot Rice Gallery and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Diné-Navajo artist Raven Chacon, the festival makes admirable space for the work of emerging and early-career artists in Scotland. Work in progress, albeit still rough, by the recipient of EAF’s inaugural Early Career Artist-in-Residence Award, Hamish Halley, is at the People’s Story Museum off the Royal Mile. Elsewhere at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop are two small shows by Scottish artists Louise Gibson and Megan Rudden. Rudden’s Love in the Ecotone is particularly notable for her use of breast milk as a sculptural material, its colours and texture changing with what it mixes with in its environment (water, resin, glass and acrylic here). Rudden is a new mother, interested in how the female body’s experiences of pregnancy, birth and child-rearing can act as a formal lens and conceptual instigator. A few of Rudden’s poems are in the exhibition booklet, thinking through concepts of the “ecotone” – “a transitional space between environments” – “slow violence”, as theorised by Rob Nixon, which describes violence that is gradual, environmentally rooted and often invisible and Astrida Neimanis’ “hydrofeminism”, which explores fluid interrelations between women’s bodies and water bodies as a source of knowledge.

Climbing up Calton Hill to City Dome, Collective is showing Fire on the Mountain, Light on the Hill by Argentinian artist Mercedes Azpilicueta, her first solo in Scotland. The centrepiece tapestry Potatoes, Riots and Other Imaginaries (2021) is named after the 1917 potato riots in Amsterdam’s Jordaan neighbourhood, close to where the artist is based. These riots were organised by the area’s working-class women during postwar food shortages, while ships full of potatoes were being exported out of the Netherlands. Azpilicueta’s tapestry stitches together archival images of women who may have participated in the riots, along with other contemporary images of women in protest, especially from the grassroots Argentinian Ni Una Menos movement against gender-based violence, which the artist is an active part of. Though there are other accompanying works – a sound piece and sculptures made from items like dish cloths and makeup sponges – the tapestry is the true pull. It’s an accomplished piece of craft as well as a statement on mounting feminist solidarities across borders and generations –– resonating harmonically with Linder, Davey and Rudden’s works too.

The potato quite literally enters the exhibition space in SEEDLINGS: Diasporic Imaginaries, a group show organised by the Travelling Gallery, a contemporary art gallery housed in a bus that moves across Scotland. The seed – its rooted existence, dispersals, self-containment, growth potential – is the show’s focus, with work by seven diasporic artists, many of whom have researched specific seeds native to their native lands. For instance, Mombasa-born Iman Datoo’s 2022 film Kinnomic Botany looks at the UK’s largest collection of potato seeds to critique how humans have long categorised items and people into hierarchical taxonomies.

Curator Jelena Sofronijevic’s newly commissioned essay, How does a tree fit inside a seed?, alongside ample accompanying text, helps to contextualise the many works crammed into the small space, while resonating with the fact that, like the show’s subject, the exhibition space is a migrating body itself.

Visiting Jupiter Artland at EAF is a must. The outdoor sculpture park and gallery, located just outside of the city, is a soothing sojourn into Scotland’s pastoral nature. Two works here stick to the mind: British artist Guy Oliver’s hour-long film Millennial Prayer is a riveting, warm satirical video essay of sorts on the state of humanity at the turn of the millennium, exploring masculinity, cinema, politics and the evolution of pop culture, with Oliver narrating and performing intermittent skits throughout. In the ballroom gallery, London-based Jonathan Baldock’s installation WYRD (a play on the Old Norse term meaning ‘strange’, tied to the modern word ‘weird’) displays pairs of textile-clay sculptures of animals that have been known to engage in same-sex relationships. Challenging queerness as unnatural or as a monstrosity, Baldock questions what we define as ‘normal’ and why. Much like SEEDLINGS, WYRD undercuts human systems of classification.

One of EAF’s quiet standouts is undoubtedly Philadelphia painter Aubrey Levinthal’s show Mirror, Matter at Ingleby Gallery, a softly-lit, charming space in Edinburgh’s New Town. Figurative painting is a major trend right now, but Levinthal has an edge; her paintings carry the strange, melancholic patina of everyday life, yet they are also sublime and introspective, pulling you into their shifted gravity. Translucent blocks or ribbons of colour reveal themselves to be laptops or charging cords, amid the traditional markers of still lives like water glasses and flowers.

The snaking chargers echo the exposed piping, wiring, dugouts and “earthworks” in British artist Mike Nelson’s Humpty Dumpty at Fruitmarket Gallery. Nelson is presenting photographs of Mardin, a predominantly Kurdish city in southeastern Turkey that experienced a period of intense redevelopment, resulting in massive excavations and reconstruction projects during the 2012 Mardin Biennial. The images document the soft glows of shop signs against the exposed nerves of its underground infrastructure. Nelson pairs these with a large-scale photographic and sculptural installation called Low Rise, depicting a south London housing estate set for demolition.

The world today heaves with multiple ongoing crises and political movements – including the ongoing genocide in Gaza – but the Edinburgh Art Festival has not taken a politically charged curatorial direction this year. This initially felt slightly surprising, leading to maybe a more gently neutered experience than expected. To what extent is the slower, deeper approach effective or satisfactory enough, is a question for the viewer. What is more than salient, however, is the fizzing, contagious energy of a city approaching its cultural investments – into its youth, its marginalised and locals, as much as its wider soft power – with abundant care and seriousness.

The Edinburgh Art Festival 2025 runs from August 7 - 24, 2025, across locations in Edinburgh, Scotland.

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.