Save the date as the UK’s largest annual festival of visual art returns to Edinburgh this August (7 to 24) with a packed programme of exhibitions, events, and collaborations taking place across the city for the three week festival — the biggest of its kind in the UK.
Bea Webster for who will be remembered here, CJ Mahony and Lewis Hetherington. Photo by Tiu Makkonen.
The 21st edition of EAF (Edinburgh Art Festival) promises a packed programme this year across 82 exhibitions and 45 partner galleries and venues, the biggest programme to date.
The three week festival will showcase works of performance, moving image, photography, sculpture, and painting, as well as artist-led discussions and live events across a range of venues, including some which are brand new for 2025. Highlights include a range of newly commissioned, EAF-initiated works, including a performance by Linder, film work by CJ Mahony and Lewis Hetherington, and performance by Lewis Walker. Back in its third year and taking place in Jupiter Artland’s stunning and magical landscape, JUPITER RISING X EAF will return for one-night-only festival within a festival, with line-up including TAAHLIAH and Ponyboy. Institutional presentations of new work created in the city by Mike Nelson sit alongside the UK premiere of Wael Shawky’s Drama 1882, and a major retrospective by land artist Andy Goldsworthy and the queer ceramic and textile animals of Jonathan Baldock.
Tickets are now on sale for all events.
The festival spans from Leith to West Lothian, and from Haymarket to the Old and New Town, with works both indoors and outdoors. New commissions for EAF25 center collaboration with partners in the city and beyond, including Historic Environment Scotland, Fruitmarket, Bard, Liverpool Biennial, Serpentine, and Mount Stuart Trust.
This year for the first time, there will be an EAF Pavilion, a shared hub made possible by a new partnership with Outer Spaces. Located at Outer Spaces, 45 Leith St, EH1 3AT, The EAF Pavillion will be a hive of activity and will host many of the new commissions and projects, resident artists, and discussion, as well as exhibited artworks.
In the exhibition space, Lewis Hetherington and CJ Mahony's who will be remembered here is a tender film which draws intimate connections between Scottish queer people across the span of Scottish history. A fieldwork performance project with Historic Environment Scotland and their team of historians and researchers, four writers have been commissioned to each create a piece of text for performance, each responding to one of four sites which spans the whole of human history in Scotland. Each writer responds in a different language: Robert Softley Gale in English, Harry Josephine Giles in Scots, Robbie MacLeòid in Gaelic, and Bea Webster in BSL. The film brings to life experiences that have been rendered invisible by the erasure of marginalised people from history.
On show in the Pavilion’s Welcome Space will be Memory is a Museum, an EAF-commissioned ongoing research project by Trans Masc Studies, in which artist Ellis Jackson Kroese traces the histories of masculine-leaning gender diversity in Scotland. The Pavilion will also host screenings of My Blood Runs Purple, an experimental short film by Ria Andrews and Jj Fadaka, questioning the inequalities and barriers in healthcare offered to them as artists in so-called black, gendered bodies. The space will also hold the festival’s Closing Conversation: Where Do We Stand? that will bring together artists from the programme, alongside thinkers and local groups, to imagine a world where art bridges the knowledge of the past with a sustainable, interconnected future.
For 2025, EAF will collaborate with Fruitmarket to present a special performance piece: the UK premiere of Voiceless Mass, a Pulitzer Prize-winning composition by Diné/Navajo artist and composer Raven Chacon, in the historic setting of St Giles’ Cathedral in Edinburgh. A work for organ and a large ensemble of flute, clarinet, bass clarinet, percussion, strings and electronics, the piece explores the deliberate silencing of voices within colonial and institutional frameworks. The performance highlights the complicity of the Catholic Church in the suppression of Indigenous voices, and the abduction and abuse of Indigenous children in residential schools in the Americas. A conversation between Raven Chacon and vocalist and composer, Elaine Mitchener, will precede the performance. The piece will be performed and supported by the Scottish Ensemble.
Back in its third year and taking place in Jupiter Artland’s stunning landscape, JUPITER RISING x EAF will return for one-night-only on Saturday 16 August. Pre-sale tickets are now available with a full line-up announcement and ticket release, closer to the Summer. This year, EAF are delighted to confirm that artist Jonathan Baldock, Queer as Folklore writer Sacha Coward are on board with a headlining act from TAAHLIAH as well as a performance by both Florence Peake and Roxanne Tataei.
EAF’s support of emerging artists in Scotland once again takes centre stage in 2025. Hamish Halley is the first recipient of EAF’s new Early Career Artist-in-Residence Award, an overlapping 18-month artist residency that gives early career artists the opportunity to develop their work closely alongside the EAF team, participate in the Festival’s year round Civic programme, and foster collaboration and mentorship between incumbent and upcoming resident artists. Halley works primarily with textiles, video, and printmaking, often incorporating foraged materials into his practice. His work investigates these materials, histories, and personal narratives to raise questions about custodianship, inter-species relations, labour, and tradition. Invited to present at EAF25, Glasgow-based Halley brings a poignant video piece that intertwines two deeply resonant narratives: the intimate act of cleaning his grandparents' home after their passing and the monumental transition of the Perth Museum's collection into a new space. His work reflects a profound sensitivity to the landscapes—both physical and emotional. Halley’s work will be exhibited at The People’s Story Museum off the Royal Mile.
HOST is a new artist residency programme co-presented by Outer Spaces and EAF25, designed to platform and connect artists with Edinburgh’s creative communities beyond the Festival moment. HOST gives selected early-career artists a space in the heart of Edinburgh for six months, offering an opportunity to engage with the city’s cultural landscape and develop new work. Artists will have a dedicated space within the EAF Pavilion, taken over as part of Outer Spaces' work to fill vacant office spaces with artists, positioning them close to the EAF programme and the centre of the Festival. This residency unites members of the Outer Spaces artist cohort with artists from the Festival programme: Hamish Halley, EAF’s first Early Career Artist-In-Residence, and long-time EAF collaborators Jj Fadaka and Ria Andrews, with Outer Spaces studio holders Miriam Foy, Frances Burnett-Stuart, and Olivia Priya Foster. Visitors will be able to explore HOST artists’ work through open studios every Saturday during the Festival.
Once again, the EAF programme will include a showcase of one-off moments across three special weekends, with a wide-ranging partner programme across multiple venues. Opening the Festival on 7 August will be Linder’s A kind of glamour about me at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, a large performance outdoors. Linder, known for her photography, radical feminist photomontage and confrontational performance art, brings this new performance in collaboration with choreographer Holly Blakey, composer Maxwell Sterling and fashion designer Ashish Gupta. This is the third chapter in a series of performances by the artist and is being specially created to coincide with her first London retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre for 2025, where performance becomes, in Linder’s own words, ‘an extension of collage’.
The performance is a co-commission with Mount Stuart Trust, and will be acquired into their collection thanks to Art Fund, and will be free for audiences to attend thanks to Ampersand Foundation. The EAF performance coincides with Danger Came Smiling, a Hayward Touring exhibition at Inverleith House this summer. Following the performance audiences can expect a lasting trace left by Linder in the West End of the city, in partnership with JACK ARTS Scotland, EAF has commissioned Linder’s first ever live photomontage billboard which will be pasted by Linder and a team of technicians ahead of the festival.
Lewis Walker, meanwhile, is a London-born queer, non-binary artist working with the extremes of movement. An ex GB gymnast and recent graduate of London Contemporary Dance School, their new work, Bornsick, reflects the idea that we inherit illness—born into a system that shapes us before we can define ourselves. Co-commissioned with Serpentine, this autobiographical narrative will be performed on 23 August and will portray the queered body — one that moves out of society and towards the animal — delving into the questionably forced fluidity of identity.
From galleries to the streets, EAF works will also be presented across the city. Shown on billboards across the city, Alice Rekab’s Let Me Show You Who I Am examines legacies of migration and strategies of survival within the family unit, with a focus on intergenerational experiences of Irish, Black and Mixed-Race life in Liverpool and Edinburgh for a major new public art work to be shown on poster sites across Edinburgh. Co-commissioned with Liverpool Biennial 2025 and supported by JACK ARTS Scotland, the artworks will be the result of a focussed creative workshop made physical. The workshops will bring together four creative collaborators from across Ireland and Scotland to work with young people through music, dance, voihce and ceramics to create a platform for young people’s self-expression. The project is generously supported by Culture Ireland and marks the start of a long term working relationship with Alice Rekab as part of the festival's focus on long term collaboration.
In Leith, meanwhile, Orcadian artist Brandon Logan presents an intimate collection of his paintings. The works, curated for the domestic spaces of Bard in Leith, appear to float away from the wall. Each work, created by weaving layered warps of string with paint, are imbued with Logan’s process involving the gradual flooding, sealing, and fusing of materials — transforming liquid colour into solid form.
Exploring the concept of interplanetary harmony, RING OF TRUTH brings together visual artists, musicians, and writers in response to the enigmatic Music of the Spheres manuscripts, a set of six illustrated leaves believed to be Coptic compositions from 5th to 6th century Egypt. The exhibition will be hosted at Blackie House Library and Museum as part of EAF25, with a co-presented series of events at Blackie House’s Garagespace with EAF.
Following the successful third iteration of Más Arte Más Acción’s Around a Tree in Edinburgh at EAF24, the roundtable installation will continue at Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. Thanks to British Council funding for 2025, the table will be activated by trans-indigenous Brazillian biologist, ecologist, visual artist and art educator, Uýra Sodoma. Their work takes the form of dance, poetry, and stunning characterization, to confront historical racism, transphobia, and environmental destruction, while emphasizing the interdependence of humans and the environment. Alongside this activation the table will continue to be activated by artists and community groups as a site for gathering and connecting with nature and one another year round.
2025 also sees cross-city partner collaborations with galleries such as Fruitmarket who will play host to artist Mike Nelson, known for his immersive, absorbing installations that entirely transform spaces, making meta references to art and counterculture and are often made with ‘found objects’ from the surrounding environments. Fruitmarket will also collaborate with EAF to present a special performance piece for the festival: the UK premiere of Voiceless Mass, a Pulitzer Prize-winning composition by Diné/Navajo artist and composer Raven Chacon, performed by Scottish Ensemble in the historic setting of St Giles’ Cathedral in Edinburgh. A work for organ and a large ensemble of flute, clarinet, bass clarinet, percussion, strings and electronics, the piece explores the deliberate silencing of voices within colonial and institutional frameworks. The performance highlights the complicity of the Catholic Church in the suppression of Indigenous voices, and the abduction and abuse of Indigenous children in residential schools in the Americas. A conversation between Chacon and vocalist and composer Elaine Mitchener will precede the performance
At Dovecot Studios, IKEA: Magical Patterns explores six decades of groundbreaking textile design by IKEA and features 180 iconic fabrics that showcase the rich history of the Swedish furniture retailer's commitment to innovation, collaboration, and experimental design.
Talbot Rice Gallery will mark their 50th anniversary with a solo exhibition from Wael Shawky. Weaving together large-scale film productions, sculptures and drawings, Shawky will bring together artworks from his Cabaret Crusades series with Drama 1882, offering a piercing historical analysis of the British occupation of Egypt through a dramatic retelling of the past, created for the Egyptian Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale (2024).
At Stills Centre for Photography, presented in Scotland for the first time is an extensive collection from Siân Davey’s series, The Garden will be on display across the month of August. Siân and her son, Luke spent three years transforming their garden into an immersive wildflower haven, creating a space for shared stories. Siân invited communities in and captured moments of reflection, love, connection - a place for heartbreak, joy and everything in between.
Jonathan Baldock is set to bring queer folklore to Jupiter Artland. Baldock’s sculptural work combines earthly delights with surreal mythologies to bring together new stories – laced with hope, humour and vulnerability – as possible myths for our past and present. Alongside this, a newly commissioned film by Guy Oliver will also open for EAF – the film takes the turn of the millennium as its starting point, tracing social, cultural and personal histories and interrogating notions of masculinity.
Collective presents Fire on the Mountain, Light on the Hill, the first solo presentation in Scotland by visual and performance artist Mercedes Azpilicueta. Comprising a human-scale tapestry with sculpture and sound installations, the exhibition references themes including collective action, food economies, war and women-led global rights movements. At Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, meanwhile, immerse yourself in a mesmerizing fusion of art and science. Fungi Sessions marks the première of Hannah Read’s albums The Fungi Sessions Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 as an audiovisual installation.
At City Art Centre audiences can enjoy John Bellany: A Life in Self-Portraiture which will capture the span of an extraordinary life and career through the lens of the artist’s own eyes and the words of the people who knew him best. Scheduled to complement this is Out of Chaos: Post-War Scottish Art 1945-2000 - a range of artworks from the City Art Centre’s permanent collection, featuring key pieces by William Johnstone, Joan Eardley, Eduardo Paolozzi, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Elizabeth Blackadder and Maud Sulter.
Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop will present Beachheads by Louise Gibson, an exhibition of monumental sculpture crafted from the detritus of late capitalism, which speak eloquently to the excesses of contemporary consumer culture. In their Hawthornvale Space, Megan Rudden will exhibit an installation which explores the idea of the ecotone, a transitional space between two states. Edinburgh Printmakers will display the work of Robert Powell, a multidisciplinary printmaker whose work comprises elements of animation and printmaking. Also on display will be the work of Aqsa Arif, whose printmaking, textile, sculpture and film explores elements of Pakistani folklore.
The National Galleries of Scotland will mark the 400-year anniversary of King James’s (VI / I) death with an exhibition at the Portrait gallery that charts his remarkable reign through stories of power, plot, and mystery. While their summer exhibition in the Royal Scottish Academy building will celebrate five decades of Andy Goldsworthy, with over 200 works including photographs, sculptures, and expansive new installations built in-situ specially for the exhibition.
At Edinburgh College of Art Tipping Point explores how artists can help us more wisely respond to present realities and near-future horizons of artificial intelligence (AI). Commissioned by Bridging Responsible AI Divides (BRAID), the exhibition features seven new artworks by Louise Ashcroft, Julie Freeman, Wesley Goatley, Identity 2.0, Rachel Maclean, Kiki Shervington-White, and Studio Above&Below, presenting new ways of thinking about today’s AI, the futures we want, and the communities needed to build it. Authenticity Unmasked, meanwhile, features three new artworks by Georgia Gardner, Kinnari Saraiya, and dmstfctn, prompting reflection on when authenticity matters and what shapes perceptions of human versus AI-mediated content.
The King’s Gallery will showcase Royal Portraits: A Century of Photography, an exhibition that charts the evolution of royal portrait photography from the 1920s to the present day, bringing together photographic prints, proofs and documents from the Royal Collection and the Royal Archives. Ingleby Gallery will present Mirror Matter, a first major UK show of work from Aubrey Levinthal. Levinthal’s work offers a glimpse of an unspecified, usually urban, story, echoing the oddness of everyday life and the communality of experience. The Scottish Gallery will present Victoria Crowe at 80 | Decades, an exhibition showcasing a powerful collection of new paintings, which reflect six decades of Crowe's working career. Also on show will be The Dappled Garden, an exhibition of work by internationally recognised silversmith Yusuke Yamamoto known for the technique of chasing; a highly skilful process which uses numerous steel punches to produce distinctive surface texture.
Sett Studios will present two shows: FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS, inviting the local artist community to participate in a packed salon-style exhibition, and Get in Loser, We're Going to Sett Studios, showcasing the work of studio-holders as collaborators in a non-hierarchical art space. The Travelling Gallery (Scotland's unique contemporary art gallery in a bus) will be presenting SEEDLINGS: DIASPORIC IMAGINARIES a group exhibition exploring new ways to connect with our worlds through other-than-human perspectives. The exhibition will be in Edinburgh from 9 to 14 August visiting Wester Hailes, Restalrig and Leith as part of EAF.
Kim McAleese, Director, EAF, said: ‘We’re so excited to be announcing ourEAF25 programme. At the heart of this year’s programming is the call to reflect on how ancestral knowledge can guide us in addressing contemporary challenges. We are inviting audiences to reflect on our collective relationship with the natural world, drawing inspiration from the wisdom of those who came before us—those who foster cycles of care, sustenance, and resilience. There are also recurring motifs of classical myths, folklore, modern feminist empowerment, queerness through the lens of Scottish history as well as thoughts on what it is to be human - exploring concepts of the body as a temporary vessel that is often shaped by societal expectations.’
EAF Curator, Eleanor Edmondson, said: “As ever, EAF is rooted in collaboration—through partnerships, co-commissions, and community connections across the city, the UK, and internationally. During August, the festival uses its platform to amplify the work of artists and partners engaging with intersecting political, queer, and feminist practices. The work is both sublime and internationally acclaimed, yet presented in inclusive and accessible ways through our long-term relationships across Edinburgh. This festival is for local people and visitors alike, inviting everyone to explore culture, politics, self-expression, and community.”
Emma Nicolson, Head of Visual Arts at Creative Scotland said: "EAF returns with a bold and expansive programme for 2025, continuing to lead the way in championing contemporary art across Scotland and offering vital platforms for both emerging and established voices. This year’s edition resonates with urgency and imagination, inviting us to reflect on the stories that shape us- our roots, identities, ecologies, and futures. From groundbreaking new commissions that explore queer history, displacement, and post-colonial memory, to ambitious installations that speak to climate crisis and collective care, the festival draws powerful connections between the personal and the political, offering a unique opportunity to experience ambitious visual art in conversation with local and global audiences alike”
EAF x Art Monthly
For a second year, EAF will partner with Art Monthly to commission an early career writer to write about the EAF25 Programme. The aim is to host a writer based outside London but not necessarily from Scotland to attend the festival and to create a piece to be published in the magazine in Autumn 2025.
The Skinny x EAF25
EAF are teaming up with the Skinny for a fourth year running to commission four emerging art writers to write about the EAF25 Programme. The project aims to platform Scotland-based, early career writers from backgrounds underrepresented in journalism, through a mentored, paid opportunity to be published, in print and online, by The Skinny. Three of the four writers will write two articles, each on a different element of the EAF25 Festival: one EAF commission, and one Partner Gallery commission. In a new development for this year, a fourth writer will be commissioned as the first Longform Emerging Writer, spanning two years (April 2025—August 2026), to write an extended piece on EAF’s first Early Career Artist in Residence, Hamish Halley. All writers will be supported by a group workshop with The Skinny’s Art Editor, Rachel Ashenden.
EAF x Edinburgh International Book Festival
For 2025, EAF co-hosts two artist-driven in-conversation events with Edinburgh International Book Festival, delving further into the inspiration behind the projects and the minds behind them. Following her performance at the festival, Linder Sterling will be joined by Booker Prize-shortlisted feminist writer Marina Warner and EAF Director Kim McAleese on Saturday 9th August, to discuss feminism, fashion, fairytales, and her artistic obsession with the human body. To mark the closing of the festival’s middle weekend, on Sunday 17th August, and to mark 30 years since the first major Pride event in Scotland, EAF25 Artists Lewis Hetherington and CJ Mahony join contributors Mae Diansangu and Harry Josephine Giles for a discussion of how we reconsider the stories of the past, and what it means to ‘remember into the future’.
For more information and to discover more about EAF’s year-round civic programme, visit: www.edinburghartfestival.com.
Background
EAF (Edinburgh Art Festival) is the UK’s largest annual festival of visual art, and will return 7 to 24 August 2025. Founded in 2004, we work with local and international partners to present an ambitious and meaningful programme of exhibitions, events and projects across the city.
Since its beginnings, EAF has featured exhibitions including international and UK artists at a pivotal point in their career alongside the best emerging talent, major survey exhibitions of historic figures, and a programme of newly commissioned artworks that respond to historic sites in the city.
We support Scottish and international artists to make new and ambitious projects which engage with the extraordinary context of Edinburgh in August. Presented principally in public spaces, our projects allow access to overlooked or neglected stories or spaces in our city’s heritage.
EAF’s year-round community engagement programme has long-term relationships and partnerships across the city, creating relevant and memorable experiences with artists. We invite local people to explore culture, community, the city and self-expression, and value, with many festival projects reflecting this unique creative relationship.
Partners for EAF: the Community Wellbeing Collective; National Galleries Scotland; Jupiter Artland; Edinburgh Printmakers; Sett Studios; Collective; Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop; The Scottish Gallery; Travelling Gallery; Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh; Ingleby; Dovecot Studios; The King’s Gallery; National Museum of Scotland; Talbot Rice Gallery; Edinburgh College of Art; Edinburgh Futures Institute; Stills Centre for Photography; Fruitmarket; City Art Centre.
Our public funders are: Creative Scotland, the public body that supports the arts, screen and creative industries across all parts of Scotland distributing funding provided by the Scottish Government and The National Lottery. Further information at creativescotland.com. We are also supported by City of Edinburgh Council.
Our major programme supporters are: the PLACE Programme, a partnership between Edinburgh Festivals, Scottish Government, City of Edinburgh Council and Creative Scotland; The British Council and Event Scotland.
Outer Spaces supports artist professional development, artist-led activities and studio provision in empty commercial property. Outer Spaces is committed to building a new infrastructure for arts in Scotland, and has supported over 900 artists in 120 properties across 13 local authorities. Since 2021, they have harnessed unused commercial spaces for public good by removing financial barriers to visual artists looking for access to space for research and experimentation, encouraging collaboration and cultural renewal in our arts sector.
They match artists working across all disciplines with free space alongside programming to support visual artists, working in the context of vacant or disused spaces as sites of research and experimentation.
The charity was set up in 2021, in response to the economic and social impact of the pandemic on artists’ practice and livelihoods. The unprecedented number of empty commercial properties becoming available at the time inspired founder Shân Edwards who saw an opportunity for collaboration and cultural renewal. Since then, Outer Spaces has supported over 900 artists with free studio space in over 120 properties across 13 local authorities. With a radically inclusive approach that removes financial barriers the organisation is committed to building a new infrastructure for the arts in Scotland.
Creative Scotland is the public body that supports culture and creativity across all parts of Scotland, distributing funding provided by the Scottish Government and The National Lottery, which, now in its 30th year, has supported over 14,600 projects with more than £501.9 million in funding through Creative Scotland and its predecessor, the Scottish Arts Council. Further information at creativescotland.com. Follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram. Learn more about the value of art and creativity in Scotland and join in at www.ourcreativevoice.scot.
EventScotland is working to make Scotland the perfect stage for events by securing and supporting an exciting portfolio of sporting and cultural events. It provides funding opportunities and access to resources and information to develop the industry.
EventScotland is a team within VisitScotland’s Events Directorate, the national tourism organisation, alongside Business Events and Development teams. For further information about EventScotland, its funding programmes and latest event news visit eventscotland.org.
JACK ARTS Scotland specialise in creating inspiring street campaigns and experiences for the culture space. Working with galleries, exhibitions, publishers, institutions, and local clients their team understands the arts, the audience and the need to be truly creative, not just claim to be. They believe city streets offer a unique canvas and context to showcase campaigns that connect with an informed and creative audience. That is why they curate, fund and promote their own series of Your Space Or Mine projects giving artists and creatives a platform on the streets to connect with neighbourhoods and communities. With a portfolio of carefully curated poster sites in 11 cities across the UK via their parent company, BUILDHOLLYWOOD, and a creative team that can produce bespoke creative billboards, hand painted murals, interactive installations, ambient and unique experiential marketing campaigns, JACK ARTS Scotland is perfectly placed to promote the arts on the streets. www.buildhollywood.co.uk.
Media contacts
Press contact and more information:
Studio Nicola Jeffs
Nicola Jeffs, [email protected]
Miriam Morris, [email protected]
Siobhan Scott, [email protected]