Art Festival launches its 2025 Programme

The UK’s largest annual festival of visual art returns for its 21^st edition this August (7th to 24th).

The Edinburgh Art Festival [EAF] promises yet again to create a feast of visual arts in spaces across the city - 82 exhibitions and 45 partner galleries, the biggest programme to date. From modern myths to queer history, the political body to environmental collectivity, the three-week Festival invites you to witness, reflect, and participate in narratives that have fought to be remembered. Encounter a voiceless sound shaking a cathedral; knowledge shared around a tree-shaded table; a familiar object under museum glass; a story of belonging ringing out amidst standing stones.

EAF Commissions

In a first for the festival, this year there will be an EAF Pavilion, a shared hub made possible by a new partnership with Outer Spaces which will be a hive of activity and will host many of the new commissions and projects, resident artists, and discussion, as well as exhibited artworks. Below are seven of this year’s highlights:

1. Lewis Hetherington and CJ Mahony’s who will be remembered here is a tender film which draws intimate connections between Scottish queer people across the span of Scottish history [see image above].
2. Memory is a Museum, an EAF-commissioned ongoing research project by Trans Masc Studies, in which artist Ellis Jackson Kroese traces the histories of masculine-leaning gender diversity in Scotland. 
3. My Blood Runs Purple, an experimental short film by Ria Andrews and Jj Fadaka, questioning the inequalities and barriers in healthcare offered to them as artists in so-called black, gendered bodies
4. 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
5. Orcadian artist Brandon Logan presents an intimate collection of his paintings in Leith where the works, curated for the domestic spaces at Bard, appear to float inconceivably away from the wall.
6. Exploring the concept of interplanetary harmony, Ring of Truth at Blackie House Library and Museum brings together visual artists, musicians, and writers in response to the enigmatic Music of the Spheres manuscripts, a set of six illustrated leaves believed to be Coptic compositions from 5th—6th century Egypt.
7. HOST is a new artist residency programme co-presented by Outer Spaces and EAF25, designed to platform and connect artists with Edinburgh’s creative communities beyond the festival moment – and visitors are invited to explore the HOST artists’ practices through open studios every Saturday during the Festival.

EAF Events

The 2025 festival is focused around three weekends of memorable, challenging live events. From talks to performances and parties, these events provide space to engage deeply with new ideas as well as bask in the excitement of new experiences. Below are seven of this year’s highlights.

1. Thursday 7 August [Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh]: opening the Festival will be Linder’s A kind of glamour about me, a world premiere performance outdoors in collaboration with choreographer Holly Blakey, composer Maxwell Sterling and fashion designer Ashish Gupta.
2. Friday 8 August [St Giles’ Cathedral]: the UK premiere of Voiceless Mass, a Pulitzer Prize-winning composition by Diné/Navajo artist and composer Raven Chacon, performed by Scottish Ensemble in the historic setting of St Giles’ Cathedral in Edinburgh
3. Saturday 9 August [Edinburgh International Book Festival]: featured artist Linder, one of Britain’s great pop-culture provocateurs, collides in discussion with the great, Booker Prize-shortlisted feminist writer Marina Warner
4. Saturday 16 August [Jupiter Artland]: back in its third year and taking place in Jupiter Artland’s stunning and magical landscape, JUPITER RISING X EAF will return for one-night-only festival within a festival, with line-up including TAAHLIAH and Ponyboy
5. Sunday 17 August [Edinburgh International Book Festival]: 2025 marks 30 years since the first major Pride event in Scotland, and artists Lewis Hetherington and CJ Mahony join contributors Mae Diansangu and Harry Josephine Giles for a discussion of how we reconsider the stories of the past and what it means to ‘remember into the future’
6. Saturday 23 August [First Stage Studios]: a new performance from London-born queer movement artist Lewis Walker, reflects the idea that we inherit illness, born into a system that shapes us before we can define ourselves [see image above]
7. Sunday 24 August [EAF Pavilion]: join us to close EAF25 with an afternoon that will bring together artists from the programme, alongside thinkers and local groups, to reflect on the world we live in — how we shape it, and how it shapes us in return.

EAF Partner Gallery Exhibitions

EAF was founded in 2004 through an ambitious partnership of galleries presenting visual art, at the core of Edinburgh’s summer festivals. This partnership remains at the core of EAF and is reflected in the programme of exhibitions developed for the festival each year by those Partner Galleries. Below are seven of this year’s highlights.

1. Royal Scottish Academy: will celebrate five decades of Andy Goldsworthy, with over 200 works including photographs, sculptures, and expansive new installations built in-situ specially for the exhibition [see image above]
2. Fruitmarket: will play host to artist Mike Nelson, known for his immersive, absorbing installations that entirely transform spaces, making meta references to art and counterculture
3. Talbot Rice Gallery: will mark their 50th anniversary with a solo exhibition from Wael Shawky, weaving together large-scale film productions, sculptures and drawings, as created for the Egyptian Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale (2024).
4. Jupiter Artland: Jonathan Baldock’s sculptural work combines earthly delights with surreal mythologies to bring together new stories – laced with hope, humour and vulnerability – as possible myths for our past and present.
5. Collective: presents Fire on the Mountain, Light on the Hill, the first solo presentation in Scotland by visual and performance artist Mercedes Azpilicueta, comprising a human-scale tapestry with sculpture and sound installations
6. Edinburgh College of Art: Tipping Point explores how artists can help us more wisely respond to present realities and near-future horizons of artificial intelligence (AI), presenting new ways of thinking about today’s AI, the futures we want, and the communities needed to build it.
7. Ingleby Gallery will present Mirror Matter, a first major UK show of work from Aubrey Levinthal which offers a glimpse of an unspecified, usually urban, story, echoing the oddness of everyday life and the communality of experience. 

The Edinburgh Art Festival runs from 7th to 24th August and you can find full programme details online HERE or download the festival brochure HERE.