There was a moment during the 2014 Edinburgh Art Festival when festival director Sorcha Carey found herself sitting above the city's old Royal High School, where work by Amar Kanwar and Shilpa Gupta was being shown inside and outside architect Thomas Hamilton's neo-classical Greek Doric creation built between 1826 and 1929. Indian curator Vidya Shivadas, who was standing beside Carey, looked out at the city's panoramic view. “Sorcha,” Carey remembers Shivadas saying. “You live in a picture postcard.” This confirmed something Carey had always thought. “Edinburgh as a city has a vocabulary of the imagination,” she says. “There's something profoundly fairytaleish about it. There's a magic castle and at times it looks like a dark kingdom.” Out of this has come The Improbable City, a series of seven public art commissions for this year's Edinburgh Art Festival featuring brand new interventions by artists including Charles Avery and Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, and set to be
An archive of arts writing by Neil Cooper. Effete No Obstacle.