Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF25) opens today and to mark the beginning of the festival which is the UK’s largest annual festival of visual art, Festival Director, Kim McAleese, and Curator, Eleanor Edmonson, are photographed standing alongside a new billboard work created by Alice Rekab.
This work delves into themes of diaspora, migration, and Irish and Black identity. 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.
Pic Neil Hanna
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, voice 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.
The work is co-created with the SCORE Scotland young people in Wester Hailes, the work reflects on the artist’s Irish, Sierra Leonean, and Syrian family histories, creating powerful visual narratives of belonging and identity between Ireland and Scotland.
The artworks will be shown publicly in August on billboards at Wishaw Terrace (the location in the photos) during EAF25 and around the city from 7-24 August.
The 21st edition of the festival includes 82 exhibitions and 45 partner galleries and venues included in the biggest EAF programme to date with all tickets for all events now on sale.
Pic Neil Hanna
Pic Neil Hanna
Pic Neil Hanna
Pic Neil Hanna
