Coffee-Table Notes

13 -   Dawn Sievewright Dawn Sievewright took centre stage this year in a hit adaptation of Nicole Taylor’s successful film, Wild Rose. With an already impressive CV in shows such as Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour, Sievewright made the role of wannabe Country music star Rose-Lynn Harlan her own in a towering performance.     24 -  Milly Sweeney Milly Sweeney’s play, Water Colour, had already won the St. Andrews Playwriting Award before had even been produced. When it opened at Pitlochry Festival Theatre, Sweeney’s study of two young people on the brink went on to win the Stage Debut Award for Best Writer.     Alison Watt Alison Watt’s first London exhibition for seventeen years, From Light, saw the Greenock born painter create eighteen brand new works specifically for the  Pitzhanger Gallery in response to architect Sir John Soane’s use of light. The result illuminated Watt’s world as much as that of Soane.     Ramesh Meyyappan Ramesh Meyyap...

14. Carla J Easton & Blair Young First time feature filmmakers Easton and Young garnered huge acclaim for Since Yesterday, their film about Scotland’s lost girl bands, which premiered at Edinburgh International Film Festival. Eight Years in the making and inspired by Easton’s own experience in all woman band TeenCanteen, the duo have created a vital document of hidden history. 17. Sett Studios The artist run Leith Walk gallery and studio space has produced a huge turnover of exhibitions and events over the last year. Founded by a core group of Abi Lewis and Rehan Yousuf, with support from Steve Robb at Settlement Projects, there are currently seventeen artists on board in a vital non-hierarchical space.     31. Flannery O'kafka Flannery O’kafka’s exhibition, For Willy Love and Booker T: Blue babies do whatever they want, made full use of the Sierra Metro gallery’s space during its Edinburgh Art Festival run. The show’s mix of photography, film and a cosily carpeted en...

27 Hazel Johnson Hazel Johnson spent the first outing of her tenure as incoming director of Edinburgh’s Hidden Door festival, transforming the former Scottish Widows building into an expansive hive of artistic activity. Leading a tireless team of volunteers, Johnson aims to open up even more of the city’s hitherto unexplored spaces.   29 Fred Deakin Fred Deakin’s very personal rewind on his past in Club Life, a smash hit autobiographical excavation of the uniquely styled club nights the designer and one half of Lemon Jelly ran in Edinburgh in the late 1980s and early 1990s. More big nights out may follow.   32 Joseph Malik Joseph Malik’s heroic musical renaissance has been a thing of wonder. After several years out, the Edinburgh singer/composer/producer returned to become a favourite of Craig Charles’ Funk and Soul Show. With Proxima Ebony the latest of five albums in five years, Malik has truly found his time.   35 Neil Forsyth The final part of Neil Forsyth’s TV trilog...

When the first Scarred for Life book appeared in 2017, Stephen Brotherstone and Dave Lawrence’s bumper compendium of 1970s pop culture’s darker side tapped into a time when teatime kids’ TV seemed steeped in folk horror and dystopian sci-fi, and public information films gave you nightmares. A second volume did something similar for the 1980s.   A new Scarred for Life podcast takes this further, with Brotherstone and Lawrence joined by presenter Andy Bush as they ask suitably culty guests to confess three things from their childhood that genuinely terrified them.   “ Scarred for Life has always been a conversation,’ says Lawrence. “The original idea for the books came from conversations that Ste and I had over many years, the conversation continued in the live show Q&As with audiences, and it just seems a natural progression to take that conversation forwards in a podcast.’   Now five episodes in, Scarred for Life has seen the likes of producer/director/writer Jamie An...

2023: WTF is going on? As The KLF come into view once more by way of the BFI’s forthcoming DVD collection of assorted videos and films from the self styled ‘Stadium House’ duo of Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond, you might well ask. Cauty and Drummond, after all, aka Rockman Rock and King Boy D, gatecrashed the pop charts in the 1980s with their epic brand of conceptual rabble rousing before self-destructing at the 1992 BRIT Awards. As The K Foundation, they rebooted late twentieth century pop culture as we knew it, burning a million quid as they went.    23 Seconds to Eternity – The Collected films of The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, The KLF and The Timelords (1988-1992) brings together video clips for assorted smash hits including 3 A.M. Eternal, What Time is Love? and Justified and Ancient. The collection also features rarely seen ‘ambient road movie’ The White Room (1989), plus restored or previously unreleased shorts, all directed by Bill Butt.   For long-term K watcher...

The noise of art looks set to be heard all around Dundee this summer, when, for one night only, Art Night comes to town. With ten commissioned artists showing off their wares in some of the city’s most iconic civic venues from early evening until late, this Dundee edition of the mini festival co-founded in 2015 by Philippine Nguyen and Ksenia Zemtsova will mark the first time the event has happened outside London.   Judging by the results of some of the commissions under Art Night’s current artistic director, Shetland born Helen Nisbet, who took up the reins in 2018, this is certainly worth making a song and dance about. Sound and music based commissions include works by Emma Hart, Danielle Braithwaite-Shirley and Richey Carey.   While Hart’s   BIG UP  aims to explore local rave culture, Braithwaite-Shirley’s   The Lack: I knew your voice before you spoke  will present a new generative game inviting users to share sounds and music with the virtual world. Ri...

Space is very much the place at Hidden Door this year, as Edinburgh’s grassroots festival moves into the John Hardie Glover designed former Scottish Widows building on Dalkeith Road now rechristened as The Complex. Music acts may remain the festival’s high profile public face, but dig deeper, and there is a whole lot more going on with other art forms at ground level and beyond. The hive-like hexagonal shape of Glover’s construction, which opened in 1976, lends itself to all manner of underground interventions.   This should be clear from The Environments, a series of immersive voyages that invites audiences to move through hill, post-nuclear wasteland, garden and forest. This leads to the less familiar sounding terrain of aphotic archaeology – the aphotic zone being the portion of a lake with little or no sunlight - and Holocene, or current geological epoch.   Dance is to the fore in The Environments, with new works by choreographer Roisin O’Brien and composer Rowan McIlvride...

When Fred Deakin started putting on a series of clubs in the 1980s and 1990s, he never expected several decades later to be auditioning actors to help tell his story. Yet this is exactly what the promoter of such iconic nights as Going Places, Misery, Devil Mountain, Thunderball and Impotent Fury has been doing in the run up to Club Life, a quasi autobiographical show-and-tell celebration of an era of Edinburgh clubbing when imagination mattered. Introducing elements that went beyond the music to become total environments, Deakin’s nights were social sculptures in a democratic creative playground where fun and games could be had by all.   From early days promoting nu-jazz night, Blue, at the original Gilded Balloon bar, Deakin and his assorted collaborators moved operations into venues such as Wilkie House (now Stramash), and the site of what is now La Belle Angele at the Designer Frames Gallery. From here, Deakin’s canvas expanded to take in the Fruitmarket Gallery, Murrayfield Ic...

When a woman wearing a going-out dress knelt on an Edinburgh pavement on King Stables Road outside a former municipal lighting depot and put a large chunk of chalk in her mouth, it was the prelude to a five-hour trip that saw the woman crawl in a circle onto the neighbouring streets, before arriving back on King Stables Road. As the woman marked out her path with the chalk still in her mouth, the white line on the pavement resembled a snail trail.   This was  Magdalene, Are You Satisfied with the Experiment?  a durational ‘installaction’ by Polish performance artist Karolina Kubik. Presented in honour of seminal theatre director Tadeusz Kantor, the event opened the 2015 edition of Hidden Door, the multiple arts festival that burst onto the scene the year before when it transformed a row of abandoned vaults on Market Street into ad hoc art spaces.    As an opening statement of a festival resembling an arts village in some radical republic, Kubik’s appearance was ...

Flashback Some time in the mid to late 1980s, I attended a short season of films by  Shūji Terayama , a Japanese radical best known for his features, Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets (1968), and Emperor Tomato Ketchup (1971). The screenings took place at Filmhouse in Edinburgh, which I visited on a semi regular basis to see the sort of subtitled arthouse films I’d previously only been able to watch on small screen BBC2 or Channel 4. Tickets were cheap, especially if you were on the dole, as I was, and spending afternoons watching Godard and Fassbinder, or more current works by Derek Jarman or Peter Greenaway, was a steal for 50p. The  Shūji Terayama season, however, was something else again, and seemed to relate more to performance or visual art as much as film. One short film, Laura (1974), had a group of women address the camera directly, with Terayama’s assistant, Henrikku Morisaki, walking from the audience and through the slatted screen to become part of t...

A funny thing happened on the way to Edinburgh this year. No, really. After a pandemic induced absence, and with all those small-is-beautiful type promises of a more bijou August festival season seemingly forgotten, the class-based inequalities of festival city are more gapingly obvious than ever.   The exposure of dodgy working practices by some Fringe venues, and the fact that it is increasingly difficult to work at the festivals at all unless you are from a wealthy background mirror the chaos of late capitalist society beyond. As too do extortionate accommodation costs, while ticket prices in some places look increasingly out of reach for the average punter in search of a good night out.   The result, in the Fringe, at least, saw the Fringe Society initially announce a Working Class Producers Mentorship. This was subsequently ‘paused’ due to a poor response, with successful applicants absorbed into the already existing Emerging Producers Development Programme.    ...

The cultural landscape looked a lot different to how it does now when Barry Esson first started putting on events at the start of the twenty-first century. This is evident from the three initiatives he and Arika, the socially minded production company he heads up with long-term collaborator, Briony McIntyre, currently have on the go.   Already up and running at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London is Decriminalised Futures, an exhibition of thirteen international artists exploring experiences of sex workers. This is co-produced by Arika with the ICA and the Sex Workers Advocacy and Resistance Movement (SWARM).   Later in March, in association with CCA Annex, the digital wing of Glasgow’s Centre of Contemporary Arts (CCA), Arika will present A Breath to Follow. This two-day series of online discussions and presentations investigates different aspects of Black and indigenous grassroots art, dance and music collectives in Brazil.   This week sees the launch of ...