British Art Show 8: Our Top Seven
British Art Show 8 is a consistently high quality artists' survey; here are seven artists from this year's exhibition to get you started.
Rachel Maclean
For her ambitious new BAS work, Maclean meets the intensive and disquieting aesthetic of her previous videos with disturbing allusions to paedophelia and increased gore. There’s the same magpie attentiveness to the absurdities of televised talent shows and the like, with a strong referencing of child’s television music and dialogue. Big eyes and jaggy teeth abound, with voices and roles shifting as a shrunken Maclean portrays the girl protagonist, while at other times appearing as a large and leering adult man.
Melanie Gilligan
To Talbot Rice, where Melanie Gilligan sets up a multi-screen video installation. Its form is recognisable from Netflix drama series; its dialogues, direction and soundtracking. Each screen is an episode and with wireless headphones that tune in to each screen, strolling between them and engaging in non-episodic viewing is encouraged. Between them the screens tell the story of an imagined new technology allowing for abilities beyond telepathy. It’s an interesting visual art take on sci-fi, especially within the festival which thematically sets itself questions of new technology and its futures.
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Lawrence Abu Hamdan
Downstairs from Gilligan, there’s more of an emphasis on the reality of current surveillance technology. According to Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s presentation, it’s possible to video household items and, from their vibrations, extract audio without a microphone. A blown-up photograph documents the items that have so far been successfully used for this purpose. Showing a supermarket aisle, it highlights juice bottles, packets of crisps and tissue boxes, one of which is displayed and demonstrates the technology in action.
Benedict Drew
Drew’s work is one of the largest of the festival. It’s an exercise in overawe – a microphone records the room’s disjointed soundtrack, which is then emitted through a pair of wireless headphones set on a sliced column, which sits in the light of monitors displaying brightly coloured images. The images is recognisable as landscapes, but there’s also what looks like a slow popping bubble in thick mud. While at first sight there’s a presumption of loud overcrowding, by the second pass it’s obvious there’s a refined repetition of elements and images on display.
Ryan Gander
Rivalling Gander in scale, but much more subtly, there’s Gander’s little window with a chair and book in front of it. A conveyor belt rotates 32 objects around, and seasoned Talbot Ricers will notice the deceptively huge amount of space it actually takes up. Dead birds alternate with a disemboweled teddy bear and rejigged children’s toys, and are accompanied by a sizeable book of dialogues and variously true and untrue information in sections that match with each item. With the text amounting to a few hours’ reading and not in sequence with the objects, there’s a quiet information overload.
Andrea Büttner
There’s the same kind of understated massiveness in Andrea Büttner’s project in the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Buttner presents over a hundred images taken from the references and language used by famous 18th century philosopher Immanuel Kant. Modern surgical images, pictures from what looks like Crufts and a whole lot more come from Wikimedia and Flickr. All drawn from close readings of Kant’s most famous text, these seeming anachronisms are a reminder that even a faithful edition of the most sacred writings are subject to change by the time in which they’re read, whenever that may be.
Charlotte Prodger
In Inverleith House, high-mounted monitors share a sightline with the lush grounds around. Showing racing dog’s names, four fat-backed screens flash in block capitals phrases like “ROYAL PROGENY” and “SUDDEN IMPULSE”. Audio comes from a cycling eight-minute voiceover about the difficulty of reading the manuscripts of Gertrude Stein. One revision in particular is considered, the replacement of “may” with “can” apparently coming from a difficult relationship with a love interest, nicknamed “May”.
British Art Show 8 continues until May 8 at Talbot Rice Gallery, Inverleith House, and Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh