Edinburgh art festival 2024 review – from pure joy to war-torn desolation

The great, dark quadrangle of the University of Edinburgh glows with light. It comes from a colossal sheet of what appears to be fabric hung between classical columns. Fields of cream, gold and rust, with sporadic blue waves and scarlet spots, suggest topographies with coastlines and cities. Then an August breeze riffles the surface and you realise that everything you see is made of fragments of metal: tiny tessellations somehow woven into this glittering swathe. It is one of the most dramatic curtain-raisers in contemporary art.

The veteran Ghanaian artist El Anatsui (b 1944) made this masterpiece with the flattened caps of liquor bottles, their tags and labels, all stitched together with copper wire. It speaks of long and infinitesimal labour in a land of historic enslavement. There is a direct yet poetic connection between the exquisite sight and the recycled detritus of colonial trade. And there is much more of Anatsui’s stupendous art through a quadrangle door and into the Talbot Rice Gallery upstairs.

The show opens with the earliest of these shimmering chainmail weavings, smaller scale and more loosely constructed from thousands of brilliant aluminium fragments, titled Woman’s Cloth (2001). The method is plainly visible, the hands of the artist and his assistants pressing on the metal, cutting, piercing and linking the elements together: discs, pennants and rectangles, mainly in red and black, or their undersides in silver and gold. It is swagged at a jaunty angle (Anatsui leaves galleries free to display his work as they please).

And suspended opposite is his latest creation, Scottish Mission Book Depot Keta , conjuring memories of the library that gave him books and crayons as a child in Ghana. Thirteen metres of glorious gold-yellow discs, rising up in geological folds like the volcanic surroundings of Edinburgh itself, and made specially for this show, it is a wall of pure joy holding tiny intermittent scribbles and dots – half a letter, a printed curlicue or apostrophe – that resemble the first scribbles of a child.

Freedom , from 2021, brings you closer into the geopolitical detail of these works. The brand names are telling – Lords, Castles, Chelsea – ribboning across the glinting fragments, literally woven into the piece, metaphorically into the history of Ghana. Alcohol was one of the earliest imports from the west, first traded for gold and then for people. Three forms seem to fly free as birds, here, leaving all this behind; and the work is mounted so that it turns a corner.

Lavery may be the only impressionist ever to paint Edinburgh’s Princes Street; if only he was Monet

Upstairs are sonorous prints, early woodworks and glittering mother of pearl oceans. In the Georgian Gallery, Anatsui works his recycled metal into forms akin to lace, macramé, willow weaving, the finest filigree and the heaviest tapestry. Anyone who saw his marvellous Turbine Hall installation at Tate Modern earlier this year will know how huge and diaphanous his works can be, as well as how devastating. This show gives you El Anatsui in full, from the most condensed and lyrical to the grandest of three-dimensional spectacles, singing of tragedy, humanity and hope through the purest visual delight. A coup for the Talbot Rice Gallery, this is the largest retrospective of his work ever held in the UK.

It is also the centrepiece of a particularly strong edition of the Edinburgh art festival , that loose confederation of museum surveys, contemporary art shows and pop-up events in unusual places. What is it, where and when: for once, the routine questions have an answer. Kim McAleese, who took over as director in 2022, has somehow managed to persuade the council to allow her to infiltrate the City Art Centre, with its wood panels and parquet floors, hitherto an austere monument to civic pride.

Now you can step straight out of Waverley station and into this new EAF hub directly opposite, with its bright banners, giving the festival vital focus and direction. Two floors above are given over to festival shows. Young artists are given a proper stage – I specially liked Tamara MacArthur ’s warm-hearted alteration of the space, with rose-tinted windows that turn Edinburgh red, and a hanging garden of matching drapes, surrounding a kind of tabernacle where the artist will perform acts of kindness.

And on the floor below, Polish artist Kar ol Radziszewski is showing an archive of F ilo magazine , one of the first queer underground magazines in central-eastern Europe, founded in 1986 in response to communist suppression, alongside his own post-pop portraits of LGBTQ+ icons. Irish artist Renèe Helèna Browne has a slow-building film portrait of their mother, intercut with meditations on faith and death, startlingly choreographed against the movements of rally cars.

Step back out across the street and the Fruitmarket has Anatsui’s fellow Ghanaian star Ibrahim Mahama (b 1987), with a multipart show about the construction (and eventual abandonment) of the railway the British commissioned to ferry minerals and cocoa around what was known, in colonial times, as the Gold Coast.

Like Anatsui, Mahama recycles the past – in his case, hundreds of documents from the paint division of the Ghana Industrial Holding Corporation, concerning gallons of white paint, board meetings and low annual production. Collaged together, they make a substrate for lifesize charcoal drawings of Ghanaian workers burdened with railway tracks, and sketches of people hauling the abandoned carriages and engines back to Mahama’s art and education complex.

Gradually, through old photographs, you see that these 21st-century Africans – employed by the artist – are re-enacting the labours of shirtless workers sweating it out for the British long ago. Works inspired by the tattoos used to identify such men in case of accidents are created out of the old carriage leather. Powerful films show the many hands involved in the making of this show, which is at heart a political reversal: instead of labouring to make the parts of railways they never saw, these Ghanaians now turn the remnants into art.

A few minutes away, at Collective on Calton Hill, are Scottish artist Moyna Flannigan ’s delicate collages, prints and installations in which paper women encounter history, specifically the space age (this is the old observatory). There are nods at Picasso, Hockney, Sinéad O’Connor. The word “fragile” is – unnecessarily – lettered across several wan works.

Down the hill in the former Glasite Meeting House, the Ingleby Gallery is showing California gardens by the LA painter Hayley Barker : so profuse they almost baffle the eye. Violet twilight over winding paths, nasturtiums and cyclamen glimmering at dusk, a pale moon rising over fronds: they represent the four seasons, and yet there are no true seasons in LA.

The paint appears so thin and dry, sinking exiguously into the canvas, yet the images are gloriously dense. Barker aspires to be an American Vuillard. And for a further paradox, look at the mauve tennis courts of Florida in the survey of Sir John Lavery ’s crowd-pleasers at the Royal Scottish Academy. Born in Belfast in 1856, Lavery roamed through France, Morocco, Monte Carlo, Venice and Spain: just about anywhere the sun could be found and described in buttery slathers on canvas.

Lavery is eventless froth: he can’t make a snake look scary or a woman look like more than a doll. He can’t paint faces and has a weak sense of psychology. But as an official great war artist he takes great care with soldiers’ wounds and numbers the dead in shadowy fields of graves. He may be the only impressionist ever to paint Edinburgh’s Princes Street; if only he was Monet.

But this year’s most urgent show is Home: Ukrainian Photography, UK Words at Stills. A field pharmacy, a flock of books drying after an explosion, the same apartment block bombed over and again in sequence, until all that remains is the single word of graffiti: people.

An old man rearranges his shattered possessions in a house with the facade blown off. Displaced Ukrainians sardine themselves into fractional spaces. The art ranges from semi-abstract images of charred landscapes and deserted chairs at the Polish border, to gravely beautiful portraits of citizens in bunkers. Every work is a revelation of life right now, an art made with extraordinary urgency, as nowhere else in the festival. Photography is knowledge.

• The Edinburgh art festival continues until 25 August