Edinburgh Art Festival director
Category
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CreativityTranscript
00:00My name is Kim McAleese. I'm the director of Edinburgh Art Festival and we are here in the City Arts Centre, which is a beautiful civic space which is just opposite Edinburgh Waverley Station and opposite the Fruit Market Gallery.
00:15I'm here to welcome you for our 20th birthday and we are inhabiting three different spaces within the City Arts Centre and we're open from the 9th until the 25th of August so people can come and visit us here.
00:29On our ground floor we have a welcome hub and a welcome space that any audience member can come into and we can tell you all about our massive programme across that period of time.
00:40We have a beautiful shop and merchandise and artist projects and we can give you lots of information about what you can visit when you're on your trip to Edinburgh.
00:52So the Edinburgh Festival has been running for 77 years this year and there wasn't really a collective celebration of visual art until 20 years ago. Why was that?
01:02There's lots of different reasons for that. The Edinburgh Festival, the international festival, used to historically have a visual art offering and that waned at various times depending on the director who was the person leading up that festival.
01:20And because there's such a strong visual art offering and community here in Edinburgh with amazing national galleries and museums, artists led spaces, commercial spaces, lots of those spaces came together in 2004 and decided to make a very specific and bespoke Edinburgh Art Festival to showcase the visual art that was happening during the international festival on the fringe in August.
01:45Obviously a lot of the museums and galleries in Edinburgh actually predate the Edinburgh Festival. You've been here a long time before then. They're very much part of the visual art offering in August.
01:56They are. They're very much part of it. You can visit the National Museum, you can visit the National Galleries, of which there are five different locations. They've had a wonderful refurbishment and there's plenty on offer there.
02:07But like I was saying, there's also amazing more contemporary art spaces like Fruit Market, like Talbot Rice Gallery with the connection with the university as well. We have amazing commercial spaces.
02:21So there's Ingleby Gallery, there's the Scottish Gallery and they're showing some really beautiful painting work. We also have some artists led spaces that are kind of sprawling all across the city as well. So there's kind of something for everyone that you'll be able to access.
02:38There's obviously quite a lot of debate about how accessible arts and culture is these days, but visual art in Edinburgh in August seems to me to be quite accessible to people regardless of their budgets. Can you tell us a bit about that?
02:51Yeah, of course, Brian, for sure. The majority of our programme is free to visit. We have commissions and visual art spaces across the length and breadth of Edinburgh. If you pick up one of our handy guides or if you look on our website, we've got a really extensive and beautiful map that if you go to Leith, there's a million things that you can do.
03:13If you go further out west in the city, right as far as the gorgeous Jupiter Artland, that's like a huge kind of sculpture park, there are things to do there. There's lots that's located centrally as well. So if you wanted to spend some time in between a fringe show or an international show, we've got tons of spaces that are very centrally located.
03:35But it's really important to me that people who are visiting the art festival feel like in any kind of area of Edinburgh, you will be able to find something. Plus, I think it's a really good way to navigate all of the city. Maybe people wouldn't necessarily have gotten on the tram and gone down to the shore right beside Leith.
03:55So people are here for a few weeks, maybe here for a fringe or international festival to encourage them to maybe see a bit more of the city by taking in the art festival?
04:03100% there's a million things that you can do. And like I said, we have a beautiful map and digital guide. And we also have if you log on to the Bloomberg Connect app, we have a special partnership with them this year. And so you can there's extra bits of information in there if you want to do it with an app as well. But we have like on Google Maps, you can find everything too.
04:25Can you give us a couple of places where really interesting places in Edinburgh that are part of the festival this year that people might not necessarily have been to before, particularly for a cultural event?
04:35Yes, of course. And we have lots of spaces all over the city. But what I'm really, really excited about is next Friday, which is the 16th of August, you'll be able to visit the Castle Terrace car park and we'll be presenting a kind of choral and live music performance with three different singers by an artist called Prem Sahib, who is going to be occupying the three floors of the spiral staircase in the Castle Terrace car park just underneath Edinburgh Castle to kind of remix and spit back out some
05:04quite vitriolic Zoella Braverman speeches to try and like morph and distort their kind of racist and xenophobic rhetoric and put it back into the world kind of cleansed. So if you want to go to a performance in a car park, we've definitely got that. And another thing that I would recommend is Jupiter Rising on Saturday, the 17th of August, which is in Jupiter Artland, that beautiful sculpture park, which is in the west of the city.
05:33And we have like a mini festival within a festival with Femurgy DJs, lots of different performers, we're going to have an in conversation and a book discussion. But really, it's an opportunity to spend some time with all of your pals to enjoy some performance work and to maybe have a little dance at a kind of music and art festival in a really spectacular location right in the middle of the festival. So yeah, really excited about that.
05:59In terms of what's on offer at the art festival, do you think the boundaries are blurred like never before between different art forms?
06:05For sure, what I'm finding and which is really exciting for me is the artists are using lots of different mediums to express their creativity. So a lot of the artists that we work with, it's really about the message they're trying to put out into the world. And that could be with performance, it could be with painting, it could be with a small publication or on a flag that you'll find on the front of City Arts Centre.
06:28And it could be in a newspaper, like we're going to distribute across the city. And there's lots of different ways that the artists are experimenting. And I frankly, I'm very excited about that. So yeah, you'll see different ways that EAF is going to infiltrate the city this year in loads of different art forms.