Symbol of Times curated tour at 20th Edinburgh Art Festival by X MUSE

Vadim Grigoryan, co-founder and artistic director of X MUSE Vodka (the official drink partner of EAF's 20th Birthday), shares his highlights below through the lens of 'Symbols of Time'.

Article Source: Edinburgh Art Festival
Last Updated: 24 July 2024 11:12

The 20th Birthday of EAF (Edinburgh Art Festival), the UK’s largest annual festival of visual arts, spans the work of more than 200 artists, across multiple art disciplines across the city. X MUSE Scottish Barley Vodka is proud to be the official drinks partner of the EAF24 – art is its brand DNA and our spiritual home is Jupiter Artland.

In addition to supporting the festival’s programming, the X MUSE ‘Arma’ Martini is the official birthday serve and this can be enjoyed at the City Art Centre, Balmoral Hotel and leading galleries and performances around the city of Edinburgh during EAF.

X MUSE Co-founder Vadim Grigoryan has selected 10 highlights which are boundary pushing and which also resonate with the layered and storied value system of the X MUSE brand. The thread which connects the following shows is the curatorial lens “Symbols of Time”.

1.Mele Broomes: Through Warm Temperatures
Custom Lane, 92 Constitution Street, EH6 6RP

Award-winning choreographer and performance artist Mele Broomes and their Scotland-based dance collective Project X often celebrates the juxtaposition of ancestral knowledge and contemporaneity, time inflicted change, reconnection with natural sources, beliefs in natural remedies and elixirs.

Broomes’ themes are dear to the ethos of X MUSE and its team has even created an EAF24 cocktail in their honour. Called ‘Save’, the serve celebrates ancient druidic herbal traditions prevalent in Scotland and other parts of the UK, and is also inspired by the druidic drink mentioned by Geoffrey Chaucer in ‘A Knight's Tale’, with ingredients including meadowsweet syrup, verbena and water mint tea.

2.El Anatsui: Scottish Mission Book Depot
Talbot Rice Gallery, University of Edinburgh, South Bridge, EH8 9YL

The exhibition of this giant of contemporary sculpture from Ghana is a must-see. El Anatsui is one of the most important living artists - he was even included in the 2023 Time 100 list of the world's most influential people – and this exhibition will be the most significant exploration of his practice ever staged in the UK, spanning more than five decades.

As a brand creative from the drinks sector, I am automatically drawn to Anatsui’s favourite medium - bottle caps, of course – and his exploration of food and drink-adjacent themes in his art. What I like particularly is that his sculptural wall hangings are not only visually stunning, but also full of meaning. The drinks brands and colourways integrated into his “bottle-top installations" lead us to a space of sociological, political and anthropological reflection. Removed from their accustomed, functional context these elements of our drinking culture “could generate some reflection, some thinking, or just some wonder”, according to the artist.

What makes the artist particularly close to X MUSE is his love for hidden symbols, such as Adinkra, a Ghanian system of conceptual signs and aphoristic symbols. Our brand credo ‘more is hid than uttered’ is embossed in its Latin version ‘Plura Latent, Quam Patent’ on every X MUSE bottle cap in wax.

3.⁠Hayley Barker: The Ringing Stone
Ingleby Gallery, 33 Barony Street, EH3 6NX

This is the first exhibition in Europe from Los Angeles-based artist Hayley Barker from Oregon, whose paintings with seemingly prosaic subjects become for a viewer complex, energetic membranes. A daughter of an amateur poet, Baker is a fascinated believer in the power of plants. As a collector of minerals she also believes that any object has a memory and energy that affect us. (I wonder if she has amethysts, beloved by X MUSE - our liquid from the distillation process rests on amethyst crystals, linking to natural energetic healing and in reference to British artist Anya Gallaccio’s amethyst grotto, on view at our spiritual home, Jupiter Artland).

But, mostly interestingly, Baker’s paintings are “a means of both measuring time and freezing the moment”, according to her gallery. And this capability to foster “ambromoments” - the moments when time stops to exist - is particularly close to the DNA of our brand. The Ringing Stone rings with intimate poetry and melancholic introspection that have universal resonance and cannot leave one indifferent.

4. Andrew Sim: Two rainbows and a forest of plants and trees
Jupiter Artland

Another intriguing American painter of energy and time, is being shown at Jupiter Artland, our spiritual home. Just like his West coast colleague, Glasgow-born but New York based, Sim draws his inspiration from plants in woodlands, parks or ornamental gardens. His exploration of trees is full of symbolism. Apart from using a more obvious rainbow as a symbol of Queer experience, the plants symbolically become “portraits through which to express vulnerability, community connection and growth”.

5.Fungi Forms
Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh

Fungi were some of the first complex life forms on land and, according to a new study, the first mushrooms were already present around 800 million years ago - way earlier than even the shadows of Adam and Eve.

These life-enhancers and underground connectors of trees and plants are perpetual inspiration for artists and are in focus at an exhibition that explores them from cultural, design and artistic perspectives. Yeast is also a fungus and without it there would not be spirits.

Nearby there is also and event-based installation in the form of a large table around a tree aimed to discuss the interconnections between humans, plants and fungi in times of rapid biodiversity loss.

6.Chris Ofili: The Caged Bird’s Song
Dovecot Studios, 10 Infirmary Street, EH1 1LT

The majestic oeuvre of Chris Ofili attracted my attention through its medium - a large format tapestry - and associated craft in handweaving, which could be viewed as a symbol of time. Ofili’s original mythological watercolour design has been transformed over three years into a tapestry by Dovecot’s master weavers.

The Caged Bird’s Song (2014-2017) speaks to X MUSE also because of its subject matter – magical and alchemic properties.

7.Koji Hatakeyama: Scenes in Bronze
The Scottish Gallery, 16 Dundas St, EH3 6HZ

The show of Japanese artist Koji Hatakeyama (1956-) continues the time-related meaning of ancient craft and noble artistic materials. Hatakeyama’s approach to metalwork is rooted in 17th century Japanese traditions. His signature patinated, cast bronze boxes are full of enigmatic surfaces which represent the landscape, evoking a sense of time.

8.Do Ho Suh: Tracing Time
National Galleries Scotland, Modern One, 75 Belford Road, EH4 3DR
The title of Do Ho Suh’s first solo exhibition in Scotland - Tracing Time - clearly indicates it belongs to this particular curation of highlights.

This Korean artist is one of the world’s leading contemporary artists. In contrast to the two previous artists he often sculpts time from much more fragile media such as paper and fabric.

9.Edward Gwyn Jones as part of PLATFORM24 group exhibition
City Art Centre, Floor 4 | 2 Market St, EH1 1DE)

It is always rewarding to discover young emerging talent and this is exactly what this annual group exhibition is designed to do for artists based in Scotland. One of them - Edward Gwyn Jones - is particularly close to the red thread of X MUSE parcours. The artist’s moving images bring together seemingly disparate ‘artefacts’ to present “inside-out histories and examine time as malleable, and history as subjective”.

10.Martin Creed, Work No. 1059
The building housing The Scotsman Hotel

This permanent public art installation by British artist Martin Creed is not part of this EAF festival, but could be easily enjoyed during it. What is a better symbol of time than marble? This metamorphic rock born in the older layers of Earth’s crust breathes Precambrian Time.

The original Scotsman Steps were built at the turn of the 20th century to connect the Edinburgh New and Old Towns. In 2010 Creed was commissioned by the Fruitmarket Gallery to reimagine the dilapidated steps. Creed clad each of the 104 steps in a different type of marble, coming from marble quarries all over the world. Thanks to the artist, a simple architectural passage has become a time and space teleporter and "microcosm of the whole world”.

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