Introducing Edinburgh Art Festival 2026

The UK’s largest annual festival of visual art is set to return to Edinburgh from 14—30 August 2026, presenting alternative perspectives across the breadth of the city — centring on our new home in Leith.

Our 2026 edition invites you to gather around alternative queer images in Edinburgh graveyards, Japanese fetish paintings, community-held stories, living, breathing sound collections, string performances from the Golan Heights, reimagined relics overlooking the city, and a late-night party in a sculpture park.

Bringing together galleries and community spaces from across Edinburgh with a programme of interdisciplinary commissions, the festival creates a unique moment in time for artist-driven work.

Exhibitions and Installations

EAF’s 2026 edition invites audiences to gather around an ambitious programme of visual art and performance shapes by movement, memory, and collective imagination, unfolding in venues across the city.

At our new home in Leith, a trio of alternative archives and queer histories: never before seen Edinburgh works from iconic leatherdyke photographer Del LaGrace Volcano; the first Scottish showing of Japanese fetish paintings by Sadao Hasegawa; an ode to documenting and continuing trans history through collecting from Trans Masc Studies. The programme spreads across creative spaces at Custom Lane, gathering spot Brown’s of Leith, and, most excitingly: EAF’s new permanent space at 92 Constitution Street.

Spreading out across the city, installations create a moment in time for alternative histories and presents. Looking over the city, a reimagined relic by sculptor Emii Alrai reflects on Edinburgh’s colonial history. At the Palestine Museum, the Palestinian Sound Archive brings a living, breathing archive of cassettes, reel and vinyl records from Palestine and beyond from Majazz Project.

Performances and Live Events

EAF’s varied programme of performance and live events each create a unique moment in time: transforming unexpected venues across the city with the best of interdisciplinary performance, thought-provoking conversation, and a chance to gather and reflect on our present moment.

Throughout the festival, Leith becomes the centre of a network of experimentation. In the heart of the post-industrial Biscuit Factory, the festival opens with a rhythmic rise and fall of dance and violin, with Magnus Westwell’s developing work Caught Hold of Nothing— before kicking off into a buzzing launch party, soundtracked by queer rapper and poet Mykki Blanco. Lawrence Abu Hamdan is set to close out the festival with performance Zifzafa: transforming the imposed noise of Syrian occupation into an act of resistance.

Jupiter Rising returns to Jupiter Artland’s magical landscape for another year, with another night of art-drenched chaos and late night dancing — this year programmed by vibrant artist and Rising fan favourite Sgàire Wood. Deep in the development process, PLATFORM artists Moira Salt and Olivia Priya Foster will share the inner workings of their creative practices — a preview of what is to come in 2027.

Deepening our ongoing collaboration, EAF has partnered with Falastin Film Festival to fill our closing weekend with a dedicated focus on Palestinian and Lebanese artists and filmmakers. With a programme of sound, film, and conversation, the co-programmed final weekend presents creation as a vital act of witness and solidarity.

Partner Gallery Programme

As the UK’s largest annual festival of visual arts, EAF’s Partner Gallery programme showcases the best Edinburgh has to offer:  the diverse, exciting summer programmes of more than 25 galleries, community spaces, and museums across the city. Highlights include:

• A focus on archives and photography runs through this year’s festival which includes the largest ever presentation of photography by Sandra George at City Art Centre, while Wendy McMurdo: The Digital Mirror at National Galleries Scotland: Portrait charts 20 years of McMurdo’s photographic reflections on childhood, the digital world, learning and make-believe.
• Exploring environmental matters is a major group show, Earth Matters at The Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. 30 artists delve into soil to reveal its brilliance, beauty, and fragility, celebrating the 300th birthday of ‘the father of modern geology’, James Hutton.
• An ambitious new commission by Katie Paterson, co-commissioned with Folkestone Triennial, arrives at Collective, comprising nearly 200 amulets, each created with materials sourced from endangered landscapes and fragile ecosystems, exploring themes of deep time, geology, and the environment.
• Craft, design, and textiles weave through the programme such as at Dovecot, where Elizabeth Blackadder: A Life in Colour showcases over 30 tapestries and hand-tufted rugs, translating her distinctive visual language into richly textured forms.
• Sculptures made by leading artists such as Anne Hardy and Eva Rothschild will be on display at the Talbot Rice Gallery and Fruitmarket
• Drawing on technology is Morphological Murmurations at InSpace at Edinburgh College of Art; a multisensory installation from Theodore Koterwas engaging audiences kinaesthetically with language, embodied communication, neurodivergence, artificial intelligence (AI) and models of animal behaviour. 

The first release of our live events programme is now available to book. Tickets for the Opening Night, Closing Performance, and Jupiter Rising are all on sale via EAF’s website now. Stay tuned for the full events launch on 28 May.

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Image credits [from top]: Magnus Westwell, Edinburgh Art Festival; Sgàire Wood, JUPITER RISING, EAF25 - Photo: Charlotte Cullen; Sandra George, Self-Portrait – Bread Street, 1994. Courtesy Craigmillar Now © Sandra George Estate.