Spring 2025 exhibitions

On the occasion of Talbot Rice Gallery’s 50th anniversary, we are delighted to announce our 2025 spring exhibitions.

Walker & Bromwich: Searching for a Change of Consciousness
Glasgow-based duo Zoe Walker and Neil Bromwich create projects that bring together utopian, socialist and animist ideals to create spaces for communities to come together around issues of climate change and social justice.

Searching for a Change of Consciousness draws together a number of artworks made with different communities including working-class communities in Wales, anarchists in Denmark, environmental scholars and Indigenous representatives from the Colombian Amazon, for the first time. Sometimes funny, sometimes sombre, and always hopeful, their projects are often built around unique giant inflatable works that fall between sculpture and processional objects.

Visitors will be immediately confronted with the colossal Serpent of Capitalism enveloping the gallery, setting the stage for a story that runs from foundation myths—where serpents represent an umbilical connection to the earth—to the monstrous, destructive force of capitalism as it consumes itself and damages everything in its wake. Through the forest-like space of the Encampment of Eternal Hope, we hear recordings of The Minga Indigina and the Organisation of Indigenous People of the Colombian Amazon—who gathered at the encampment when it was in Glasgow for COP26—speak about the pressures modern developments have placed upon their communities and the urgent need to draw together all beings to make positive change.

Searching for a Change of Consciousness asks how nature can be represented in human affairs and joins calls for animals, rivers, mountains and trees to become agents for political gatherings. The ominous, black and jagged inflatable sculpture Llechi A Llafur / Slate or State symbolises the struggles around one of the largest slate quarries in the world, in Penrhyn, North Wales. The accompanying video shows the Penrhyn Choir carry the sculpture from the town of Bethesda, where a deep rift still runs through a community once divided by the quarryman’s strike over their rights and earnings in a three-year industrial action (1900 to 1903), to Penrhyn Castle, former home of the quarry’s owner.

With videos documenting the happenings around the works, new drawings and their latest collaborative project in Bandung, Indonesia, Searching for a Change of Consciousness also brings together the broader practice of a collaborative artist duo who have for decades have been trailblazers of socially engaged practice.

Supported by Creative Scotland and curated by James Clegg.

Trading Zone 2025
Emily Beaney, Ross Dickson, Victoria Evans, Emilie Fielding, Keziah Greenwood, Inayah, Hanayo Kubota, Rita Mahfouz, Eilidh McKeown, Maria Schiza, Wenqi Zou

Trading Zone – a metaphor coined by historian of science Peter Galison—is TRG’s interdisciplinary student exhibition selected from across Edinburgh College of Art and the wider University of Edinburgh. Featuring students of Fine Art, Design, Illustration, Painting, Sculpture, Contemporary Art Practice and Creative Writing, Trading Zone 2025 includes complex negotiations with identity, artists channeling haunting archetypes or icons, works that seek to tap into Pagan ideas, create spaces for the stories of persecuted peoples, explore the enigma of archeological sites, sonically attempt to capture the complexity of our relationship to outer space, or explore mysticism - one artist referencing a Celtic tradition of “telling the bees”, where people, believing that bees could take messages to the otherworld of the dead, would send messages with the bees to bring about good luck.

Selected by James Clegg (Curator) and Tessa Giblin (Director)

Forthcoming at Talbot Rice Gallery

Wael Shawky
June 28–September 28, 2025

Wael Shawky’s solo exhibition in 2025 will expand across all of Talbot Rice Gallery’s galleries. Shawky’s penetrating historical analysis will be explored through dramatic retellings of the past, including Drama 1882, which was created for the Egyptian Pavilion at the 60th La Biennale di Venezia in 2024, and tells the story of the 1882 nationalist Urabi revolution and the resulting conflict that led to Britain’s occupation of Egypt until 1956. Together with film, Murano glass sculptures, drawings and paintings from Shawky’s Cabaret Crusades trilogy, the exhibition  will celebrate an extraordinary artist, and will reflect on the founding of Talbot Rice Gallery 50 years ago by an Islamic art scholar, and welcome the dawn of the next 50 years of the gallery’s future—part of a global discourse on art and cultural politics within a top research university.

Supported by Creative Scotland, Edinburgh International Festival, Henry Moore Foundation and The Al Waleed Centre, University of Edinburgh. Curated by Tessa Giblin.

Stay in touch with us as we explore what the 16th century University of Edinburgh, together with Edinburgh College of Art can contribute to contemporary art research and production today and in the future.

Press contact: Josh Young, josh.young@ed.ac.uk