Edinburgh Art Festival 2025 – EAF Pavilion now open

Edinburgh Art Festival begins today, with a packed programme of commissioned works, special events and partner exhibitions.

Themes of this year’s festival include political shifts, environmental change and global social movements, all filtered through the painting, sculpture, performance, moving image and photography of local, national and international artists.

This year the festival is based in the new EAF Pavilion hosted by Outer Spaces at 45 Leith Street. The Pavilion will be open 10am-5pm every day until 24 August, and will include a Welcome Space where you can find information about the festival, artists’ research and the Festival shop.

Several commissioned works will be shown in the Pavilion; Lewis Hetherington and CJ Mahony’s who will be remembered here is a moving film in which four queer writers respond to Historic Scotland sites. Each writer employs a different language.  Bea Webster’s BSL contribution is especially touching, as they contemplate what might have been the experience of deaf, queer people inhabiting the land around the Machrie Moor Standing Stones long ago, and question what happened to those people’s stories.

Meanwhile, Trans Masc Studies: Memory is a Museum traces the history of masculine-leaning gender diversity in Scotland, Jj Fadaka and Ria Andrews’ My Blood Runs Purple interrogates the subject of historically marginalised bodies and healthcare, and Alice Rekab’s Let Me Show You Who I Am addresses themes of diaspora, migration and Irish and Black identity.

Outer Spaces is a charity giving artists access to free studio space in empty office buildings across Scotland. 45 Leith Street is just one of their projects, with about 100 artists working in the building. This year the charity and EAF are together presenting HOST, a new artist residency giving early-career artists studio space in Edinburgh for six months.  Visitors are invited to explore the HOST artists’ practices every Saturday during the festival.

Jillian Lee Adamson is a HOST resident; often sewing for ten hours a day, she employs slow stitching to make intricate, beautiful embroidery cells. The delicate appearance of her work ‘belies its true strength, symbolising the incredible resilience and inner strength within us all.’

Jillian’s studio has a spectacular view over the city and the Forth, with doors opening onto an airy terrace. The one downside of Outer Spaces studios is that tenants may be asked to leave at any time if the landlord requires the building for its own purposes, but the charity is doing everything it can to offer tenants an alternative space. The average stay in one studio is 9 months to 3 years.

Another major EAF commission takes place at the Royal Botanic Garden. Inverleith House will host Linder’s Danger Came Smiling, her first retrospective in Scotland, while on the evening of 7 August this pioneering feminist artist will perform A kind of glamour about me, reflecting on the transformative power of creativity to shape identity and social mobility.

Partner galleries, venues and public buildings offer a wide spectrum of exhibitions, installations and performances, from The Scottish Gallery’s Decades, a celebration of Victoria Crowe’s 80^th year, to the Scottish National Gallery’s acclaimed Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years, Fruitmarket’s Mike Nelson installation, and the UK premiere of Raven Chacon: Voiceless Masses, performed by Scottish Ensemble at St Giles’ Cathedral on 9 August.  Chacon’s composition explores the deliberate silencing of voices within colonial and institutional frameworks, in particular 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.

At Stills Centre for Photography, Sian Davey’s The Garden documents the artist’s and her son’s transformation of their Devon garden into a wildflower haven and a community space. From 8 August Blackie House Library and Museum will host Ring of Truth, in which contemporary artists and musicians respond to the enigmatic Music of the Spheres manuscripts, believed to be Coptic compositions from 5^th-6^th century Egypt.

At Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop you can see Megan Rudden’s Love in the Ecotone, exploring the relationship between sculpture and language, and Louise Gibson’s Beachheads, a series of monumental sculptures crafted from discarded industrial and household materials, highlighting the excesses and wastefulness of consumer culture. Still in Leith, Customs Wharf presents Orcadian artist Brandon Logan’s paintings; drawing from Orkney’s environment and culture, Little Low Heavens  channels a new queer take on minimal abstraction.

Edinburgh Printmakers are presenting two exhibitions. Aqsa Arif’s Raindrops of Raini, a multimedia installation encompassing film, textile screenprints and sculpture to probe themes of fractured identity, displacement and cultural synthesis. Hall of Hours, Robert Powell’s multimedia exhibition, is inspired by mediaeval Books of Hours, inviting audiences to consider the passage of time and how humans relate to it.

The Art Festival’s Civic programme involves year-round collaborations with artists, individuals and communities who find alternative ways to organise through art, providing the space for longer-term creative collaborations and aiming to make public spaces and the art world more accessible, engaging for those who have previously been excluded from them. The Community Wellbeing Collective in Wester Hailes is a socially engaged, community-led, art collective of 30+ people living in or connected to the area.

On 16 August, CWC will host What We Make With What We Have, a shared meal and a discussion about ways in which communities and individuals can create possibilities in times of crisis.

The Travelling Gallery will be out and about with its new group exhibition. SEEDLINGS: DIASPORIC IMAGINARIES, curated by Jelena Sofronijevic, explores ways to connect with our worlds through other-than-human perspectives, and seeks to destabilise systems that favour scientific theory and marginalise ancestral knowledge and indigenous cosmologies. Catch the gallery at Coburg Studios on 9 August, CWC in Wester Hailes on 11 August and The Ripple, Restalrig Road, on 14 August.

At The People’s Story Museum on the Canongate, EAF’s first early career artist-in-residence Hamish Halley’s installation narrates two stories; the cleaning of his grandparents’ home after their deaths and the transition of Perth Museum’s collection to a new space. As well as developing his practice, Hamish is working with local communities through discussions, events and workshops, inviting people to reflect on their own relationships with memory, place and transformation. Hamish will offer a tour of his work on 14 August.

Sett Studios on Leith Walk will offer two unusual exhibitions. On 8-10 August FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS invites all supporters of the studio to run the space, bringing in their own work for a packed salon-style show.  And from 22 to 24 August Get in Loser, We’re Going to Sett Studios will feature an array of artmaking mediums, approaches and concepts from SETT studio residents.

Climb up to Calton Hill to visit Collective, which will host Fire on the Mountain, Light on the Hill, Mercedes Azpilicueta’s first solo exhibition in Scotland, a monumental tapestry exploring care and resistance, revealing overlooked female histories. There will be a special live performance on 22 August.

Climb down again to visit Edinburgh College of Art at Inspace on Crichton Street for two exhibitions focusing on artists’ responses to AI. Tipping Point features seven new works by artists including Rachel Maclean and Julie Freeman, while in Authenticity Unmasked: Unveiling AI-Driven Realities Through Art (note: this one ends on 17 August), three artists present works to prompt reflection on when authenticity matters and what shapes perceptions of human versus AI-mediated content.

And if you need to get out of festival city, take a trip to Jupiter Artland in West Lothian to see their three current exhibitions, Jonathan Baldok’s WYRD, Guy Oliver’s Millennial Prayer and WORK BEGAT WORK, pairing the work of Ian Hamiton Finlay and Andy Goldsworthy, two artists central to Jupiter Artland’s history.

On the evening of 23 August, EAF’s closing event will take place at Firststage Studios in Leith. Bornsick, co-commissioned with Serpentine, is a new performance by queer movement artist Lewis Walker. It will reflect the idea that we inherit illness, born into a system that shapes us before we can define ourselves. Finally, on 24 August at the EAF pavilion, the Festival’s closing conversation Where Do We Stand? will include open conversation, film screenings, performance and shared food, all centered on the world we live in, how we shape it and how it shapes us in return.

Some of these exhibitions and events are ticketed; many are free. For details, visit the Festival’s website or pick up a programme from EAF Pavilion.