IN the heart of Edinburgh’s Botanic Gardens, three young children stand at a rope cordon — as three young adults entwine themselves in one another on the other side. One gapes in horror, one stands in transfixed fascination and the third looks like she couldn’t care less.

A Kind Of Glamour About Me (★★★★) is a performance conceived by the post-punk artist Linder — best known for producing the cover of the Buzzcocks’ single Orgasm Addict — and a flagship event of the Edinburgh Art Festival. Now in its 22nd edition, the festival brings together the summer shows of galleries across the Scottish capital with original commissions and one-off performances. Weaving between street performers and leafleters in the classic spirit of the fringe, the relative serenity of the art gallery is an attractive prospect — and yet there’s enough for all the senses at EAF to leave you positively tired.

Image

This year’s festival has no overarching theme (unlike 2024, which invited viewers to “reflect upon the conditions under which we live, work, gather and resist”), but one notable aspect is the ability to see featured artists in different contexts and mediums across the city. Linder’s performance piece is reflected in a full retrospective at Inverleith House, while Andy Goldsworthy’s work can be seen at both the Royal Scottish Academy and Jupiter Artland — the bucolic exhibition space art garden in the grounds of the stately home Bonnington House, to Edinburgh’s west.

It’s here too that film-maker Guy Oliver offers up the ambitious Millennial Prayer (★★★), a rumination on the significance of the year 2000 in the human context of what came before and after. It’s to be applauded for taking in the 1999 solar eclipse as much as the Millennium Dome and Woodstock 99.

The film draws on Adam Curtis’s use of spliced archive footage, but more still it’s a pastiche of the 1990s BBC documentaries of Jonathan Meades. And yet its intellectual hesitancy — grounded in a fear of being another white man pronouncing the truth — means it doesn’t quite work in an artistic format that demands a kind of moral leadership. Still, Montagne conceived the essay as an “attempt” — and it’s certainly that.

At the University of Edinburgh’s Talbot Rice Gallery, Wael Shawky brings together two searing film installations with a display of his signature marionettes. Drama 1882 (★★★★★), made for the Egyptian pavilion at the Venice Biennale last year, is one of the most accomplished art films of recent years — an operatic retelling of the British occupation of Egypt. “We were full of hope,” the subtitles translate amid a sombre, firm strings arrangement — a hope dashed by the twisted deceptions of imperialism, and yet fulfilled by the artistry of this performance.

Image

At Edinburgh Printmakers, which is the largest artistic printing workshop in Europe, Aqsa Arif has produced another stunning multimedia show, Raindrops Of Rani (★★★★) taking in climate change, dispossession and consumer culture. Louise Gibson’s Beachheads (★★★), at Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, is a series of monuments “produced from the detritus of late capitalism” which remind us of the fragility of the material world. And the City Art Centre’s John Bellamy retrospective, with its haunting rules of three, is not to be missed.

There are blockbuster shows too, like Steve McQueen’s Resistance: How Protest Shaped Britain And Photography Shaped Protest, which takes over Modern Two at the National Galleries of Scotland. Here, photographers such as Vanley Burke, John Deakin, Tish Murtha and the communist emigre and intelligence agent Edith Tudor-Hart are brought together to give “a voice to the stories and images from history which have been buried in UK archives until now.” But while these snaps might well have been kept at a distance from major state museums, many similar images have long graced the walls of trades halls and — when they still existed — unemployed workers’ centres. History is rarely forgotten or “untold” in full.

Edinburgh Art Festival runs until August 24, with many shows running into the autumn. For more information see: edinburghartfestival.com.