Art Producer and Creative Director Michael Whitham previews Edinburgh Art Festival 2025
This August, Edinburgh will once again become a city of stories — not just the literary kind that echo through its cobbled streets each festival season, but stories rendered in clay and textiles, film and performance, billboards and botanical gardens. From August 7 to 24, the Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF) returns.
The 2025 edition—its 21st—offers a dense and sprawling lineup that stretches across the city, from the monumental to the intimate, from ancient folklore to AI futures. Anchored in the idea that ancestral knowledge can guide contemporary transformation, this year’s theme feels unusually cohesive for a festival of such scale.
At the center of the festival’s beating heart is a question, as posed by EAF Director Kim McAleese: how might art help us reimagine our place in the world, by looking backward as much as forward?
This question unfolds through dozens of commissions and collaborations, many of them site-specific and artist-led. Linder, the radical feminist artist known for her confrontational photomontage and performance art, will open the festival with A Kind of Glamour About Me, a new performance at the Royal Botanic Garden created with choreographer Holly Blakey, composer Maxwell Sterling, and fashion designer Ashish Gupta. Set amid the natural splendour of the gardens, the work becomes an extension of Linder’s lifelong collage practice — here translated into moving bodies, sound, and live spectacle.
A more somber reckoning will unfold inside St Giles’ Cathedral, where the Pulitzer Prize-winning Diné composer Raven Chacon presents the UK premiere of Voiceless Mass. The work, co-commissioned with Fruitmarket and performed by Scottish Ensemble, marks one of the festival’s most powerful confrontations with institutional histories.
Meanwhile, in a newly introduced festival hub — the EAF Pavilion — several artists will examine gender, history, and erasure. Among them is Ellis Jackson Kroese, whose ongoing research project Memory is a Museum traces transmasculine identities through Scottish history, and CJ Mahony and Lewis Hetherington’s collaborative film exploring Scottish queer lives across generations.
The festival’s reach is not limited to traditional venues. In Leith, Brandon Logan’s intimate, woven paintings will float within the domestic rooms of Bard. Billboard works by Alice Rekab, co-commissioned with Liverpool Biennial, will interrupt the cityscape with reflections on identity in Scotland and Ireland. And at Blackie House Library, the exhibition Ring of Truth interprets Coptic manuscripts through visual art and music, suggesting that even the stars can carry human longing.
Supporting emerging voices remains a pillar of EAF’s mission. Glasgow-based artist Hamish Halley, the first recipient of EAF’s Early Career Artist-in-Residence award, will present a film linking the personal grief of clearing his grandparents’ home with the institutional shift of Perth Museum’s relocation. Meanwhile, the new HOST residency, in partnership with Outer Spaces, provides dedicated studio time and public visibility to six early-career artists in a vacant city-center space transformed for creative use.
In a year where many festivals are retrenching, EAF25 is taking the opposite approach: expanding, collaborating, and inviting difficult conversations. As McAleese puts it, the aim is not just to reflect the times, but to ask what we carry with us — through story, through body, through image — and how we might tell it differently.
For more details and the full lineup, visit www.edinburghartfestival.com.
Header image credit: Alice Rekab: Adamstown Energy. Courtesy of the Artist and Superprojects