August 7–24, 2025
EAF announces the 2025 programme. With 82 events and exhibitions across 45 partner galleries and venues, the festival showcases artists: local and global; historic and contemporary; emerging and established; and always strives to amplify intersectional voices. At the heart of EAF25 lies an inquiry into global social movements, political shifts, and environmental change.
Opening EAF25 is Linder’s A kind of glamour about me at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, a large-scale performance coinciding with her retrospective Danger Came Smiling at the same venue. Further new commissions include film work by CJ Mahony and Lewis Hetherington, and long-term research project with Trans Masc Studies. Closing EAF25 is Bornsick, a new performance co-commissioned with Serpentine by Lewis Walker, a London-born queer non-binary artist working with the extremes of movement.
EAF25 will be based in a new central Pavilion, supported by Outer Spaces, bringing together new works and residencies. Here, Lewis Hetherington and CJ Mahony’s film who will be remembered here draws connections between Scottish queer people across the span of history. Memory Is A Museum, an EAF-commissioned ongoing research project by Trans Masc Studies, traces the histories of masculine-leaning gender diversity in Scotland. EAF’s support of emerging artists continues with Hamish Halley, the first recipient of the new Early Career Artist-in-Residence Award, with an installation at The People’s Story Museum. The Pavilion will also host screenings of My Blood Runs Purple, an experimental short film by Civic Artists-in-Residence Ria Andrews and Jj Fadaka. Artist residencies include Halley, Fadaka, and Andrews, and Outer Spaces network artists Miriam Foy, Frances Burnett-Stuart, and Olivia Priya Foster.
Alice Rekab’s Let Me Show You Who I Am unfolds across billboards, examining legacies of migration and strategies of survival within the family unit, with a focus on intergenerational experiences of Irish, Black and Mixed-Race life, co-commissioned with Liverpool Biennial. Brandon Logan presents Little Low Heavens, an intimate collection of paintings, curated for the domestic spaces of Bard. Más Arte Más Acción’s Around a Tree from EAF24 will return for EAF25, activated by performance from trans-Indigenous artist and biologist UÝRA, and workshops by Decolonising the Outdoors.
The UK premiere of Voiceless Mass by Diné/Navajo artist and composer Raven Chacon will take place at St Giles Cathedral, co-presented with Fruitmarket, performed by Scottish Ensemble. Blackie House Library and Museum’s RING OF TRUTH brings together visual artists, musicians, and writers in response to the enigmatic 'Music of the Spheres' manuscript. JUPITER RISING X EAF will return for a one-night-only music and art festival, with a line-up including TAAHLIAH, Florence Peake, Roxanne Tataei, and Ponyboy.
Fruitmarket exhibit a new body of work by Mike Nelson, known for his immersive, absorbing installations that entirely transform spaces, and which has been made and developed on site this year. Talbot Rice Gallery will present a solo exhibition by Wael Shawky, following his representation in the Egyptian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2024. At Stills Centre for Photography is an extensive collection of photos from Siân Davey’s series, The Garden. Jonathan Baldock is set to bring queer folklore to Jupiter Artland with new sculptural work that combines earthly delights with surreal mythologies to bring together new stories. Alongside this, a new film by Guy Oliver traces social, cultural and personal histories, interrogating notions of masculinity.
Ingleby Gallery show Mirror Matter, the first major UK show of work from Aubrey Levinthal. The Scottish Gallery will present Victoria Crowe at 80: Decades, a powerful collection of new paintings, reflecting six decades of Crowe's career, alongisde silversmith craft in Yusuke Yamamoto: The Dappled Garden.
Sett Studios present FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS, inviting the local artist community to participate in a 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 will be presenting SEEDLINGS: DIASPORIC IMAGINARIES, a group exhibition exploring new ways to connect with our worlds through other-than-human perspectives.
Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop presents Beachheads by Louise Gibson, an exhibition of monumental sculpture crafted from the detritus of late capitalism, and work by Megan Rudden exploring the idea of the ecotone, a transitional space between two states. Edinburgh Printmakers will display work by Robert Powell, a multidisciplinary Medieval-inspired printmaker, and the work of Aqsa Arif, whose printmaking, textile, sculpture and film explores elements of Pakistani folklore.
Collective will exhibit Fire on the Mountain, Light on the Hill, the first solo presentation in Scotland by visual and performance artist Mercedes Azpilicueta. At Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, Fungi Sessions marks the première of Hannah Read’s albums The Fungi Sessions, and at Dovecot Studios, IKEA: Magical Patterns explores six decades of groundbreaking textile design.
At City Art Centre is John Bellany: A Life in Self-Portraiture, capturing an extraordinary life and career through the lens of the artist’s own eyes, and Out of Chaos: Post-War Scottish Art 1945—2000, a range of artworks from the permanent collection. The National Galleries of Scotland hosts a major retrospective by sculptor Andy Goldsworthy and an exhibition conceived by acclaimed artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen, Resistance, which explores how acts of resistance have shaped life in the UK, and the role of photography in documenting and driving change. Cold War Scotland, exploring Scots' stories at the centre of this global conflict, continues at National Museum of Scotland.
At Edinburgh College of Art, Tipping Point and Authenticity Unmasked explore how artists can help us more wisely respond to AI. 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.
EAF25 is curated by Kim McAleese (EAF Director) and Eleanor Edmonson (EAF Curator).
Press information
Nicola Jeffs, +44 7794 694 754 / nj@nicolajeffs.com
