Coffee-Table Notes

Faith and the lack of it is everywhere in Nathan Coley's work. For his contribution to Generation, GoMA have chosen to restage 'The Lamp of Sacrifice, 286 Places of Worship, Edinburgh', in which Coley built miniature cardboard models of every church, synagogue, mosque and temple in Scotland's capital, then placed side by side in what became a kind of deconsecrated village. “It's always nice meeting an old friend you haven't spoken to for many years,” Coley says of revisiting 'The Lamp of Sacrifice', which has lain in storage for the last decade after being first seen in 2004 at Edinburgh's Fruitmarket Gallery. “I'm feeling excited about it being in Glasgow, and I'm interested in how it transfers to the west coast, even though the metaphor will remain the same.” 'The Lamp of Sacrifice' takes its title from Victorian artist John Ruskin's 'The Seven Lamps of Architecture', in which he stated that 'It is not the church we

When Robert Louis Stevenson declared in his poem, 'Travel' exactly how much he would 'like to rise and go/Where the golden apples grow,-' his artistic antenna was most definitely heightened in a work first published in 1865, and without access to either cheap flights or Google Earth. It is the fourth line of the poem, however, that has lent itself in part to an international residency programme initiated by the five Scotland-wide bases that make up the Scottish Print Network. By enabling ten artists from Scotland and ten from Commonwealth countries to undergo research residencies, 'Below another sky' arguably gave them a taste of the imagined idylls captured by Stevenson. This is expressed most eloquently by two complimentary shows by Louise Hopkins and Carol Rhodes which run in tandem at Edinburgh Printmakers over the next month, and which capture two very different sets of experiences. Where Rhodes revisited India, a place which has heavily influenced her work

It's initially an odd sensation seeing Dominic Hill in Edinburgh. So immersed has the artistic director of the Citizen's Theatre been in his own ambitious programme since he took over the Gorbals-based institution that it's rare to even see him out of the building. Yet here he is, in a windowless meeting room in the Royal Lyceum Theatre on Grindlay Street to give the Herald an exclusive look at the Citz's forthcoming autumn season, tickets for which go on sale today. Perhaps Hill's appearance shouldn't be regarded as too off-piste. Prior to his appointment at the Citizens in 2011, he spent three years as artistic director of the Traverse Theatre, a stone's throw away from the Royal Lyceum. More recently, Hill scored one of his biggest hits of the last year with his production of Crime and Punishment, with Chris Hannan's stage version of Dostoyevsky's novel being co-produced by the Citizens and Royal Lyceum Theatres in association with Liverpool's

Oran Mor, Glasgow Four stars As soon as Zimbabwean refugee Ishmael screws in an over-head bulb in the inner-city high-rise he must now call home at the start of Zodwa Nyoni's painfully pertinent monologue, it casts the harshest of lights on one of the most criminally marginalised sectors of society, both at home and abroad. As a young gay man forced to flee his home-land, Ishmael faces a frying pan/fire situation as he's thrown onto the mean streets of Leeds. When not holed-up in his room or trying to get his former lover to pick up the phone, Ishmael must run the gauntlet of a concrete jungle where pit bulls and young single mums run wild. Ishmael strikes up a friendship with Bex and her toddler son, Bailey, only to run scared from their brief encounter lest he continue living a lie. Even as he finds some kind of salvation via the bright lights down-town, however, Ishmael's future looks far from certain. Arriving in a climate in which some far right political parties woul

Things got strange for Emma Callander after she first directed Tom Wainwright's play, Banksy: The Room in the Elephant. Originally seen at Oran Mor in Glasgow in a co-production with Bristol's Tobacco Factory, Wainwright's play looks at what happened when iconic street artist Banksy sprayed the words 'This looks like an elephant' on the side of a water tank in Los Angeles. For the previous seven years, the tank had been the makeshift home of Tachowa Covington, who had furnished it to become something of bespoke miniature des-res. Now Banksy had given it the tag of celebrity, however, the tank was designated as a work of art, removed, and sold off to the highest bidder. 'Banksy Brings Misery To Homeless Man' one newspaper headline announced when Wainwright's look at art, commerce and real life first appeared. Things got even stranger during the production's Edinburgh Festival Fringe run, when film-maker Hal Samples, who was making a film about Covingt

CCA, Glasgow Four stars A multi-dimensional playground of TV monitors, projector screens and lap-tops is the back-drop for this dramatic rendering of Katherine Angel's remarkable book, Unmastered. First published in 2012, Angel's first-person narrative is part love story, part confessional, part feminist theory made flesh and part getting of wisdom that takes in sex, desire, pornography, loss, grief and the life-giving thrills of all in a series of poetic fragments. In Nick Blackburn's wildly impressionistic work-in-progress staging for his Wooster Group inspired Blackburn Company, which features Angel herself performing the entire book, Unmastered also makes for a beguiling dramatic monologue. A stiletto-heeled Blackburn is one of two men onstage who make up the troupe of six that accompanies Angel, who sits to one side of the playing area, speaking her own words heard through headphones on her mobile phone. While films flicker on the TV monitors, the four women dance or

Bongo Club, Edinburgh Saturday May 3 rd Four stars It may not have been Live Aid, but by gathering (some of) the clans from Edinburgh's off-piste but ever-fecund experimental/noise diaspora to play for Edinburgh Central Food Bank, promoters Braw Gigs and the Bongo Club have taken a principled stance against one of the most sadly necessary by-products of the Con-Dem alliance and their criminal banker friends' ongoing advocacy of austerity culture. The shadowy presence of Warsaw emigre, WIDT (Antonina Nowacka), opens proceedings with a low-key display of synthesised looped chorales put through a spectral dub blender and set to a projected backdrop of impressionistic images. The quartet of FUA follow this with a sax and drum propelled assault that drives the guitar, electronic and vocal extrapolations beneath, while the increasing volume of Fordell Research Unit's solo samples of criss-crossing slabs of sound is pure Techno for airports. Headliners Muscle