WOSP

Edyta Majewska came with her daughter to live in Scotland in 2006. Ten years later while she was working as a cleaner in a school in Glasgow, the sports hall was set up with polling booths for the referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU. As a Polish national, Majewska had become worried for her own future. Although highly educated, language barriers and economic necessity sometimes led her to take on jobs where she felt socially invisible. Now the voices of bigoted politicians were making her feel she could very shortly be made to disappear altogether. Majewska turned her anger and frustration in a positive direction. On the day before the referendum she filmed herself sweeping up around the polling booths. Later she coupled this footage with Nigel Farage’s grating voice to make a short but powerful video,  The Other White . Farage was gloating over the Brexiteers’ historic victory that came, he claimed, because of the EU’s open door policy on immigration. Seventeen milli...

When Frances Scott was a child her pilot father would take her up in an aeroplane on Sundays to look down upon the islands of Orkney. He taught her to recognise each one by its shape alone. “To give you a feel of the place, to make you aware of your heritage and understand where you fit in.” Over a three-year period following art school, Scott flew over Orkney more than a thousand times. She worked as a steward for an airline that served the Northern Isles. In the ten minutes of take off and just before landing Scott would see through her window slithers and fragmented shapes of those familiar islands and she longed to make them her own. Slack water is a point of stillness in a tidal flow. It is a point in time when, for a moment, opposing forces are in balance and the water appears not to move. It is a phenomenon that is strangely pleasing to see.   Slack Water  was once the working title of Scott’s project to map the islands of Orkney through walking their coast...

Torture  has arrived at Stills Gallery in Edinburgh. Supported by arts organisation a/political Andres Serrano has produced an extensive body of work picturing borrowed torture devices and staged acts of torture. As part of his creative process he visited concentration camps and interrogation centres. He also took advice from torturers and victims of torture alike. Many of the photographs were made at The Foundry, a disused factory in the industrial town of Maubourguet. Since 2015 the work has toured galleries in France, Italy, the USA and Northern Ireland and now reaches Scotland in the form of eight very-large-scale photographs.  What we see in the exhibition are four, obviously simulated, photographs of people being tortured, three still lives of historic instruments of torture and a portrait of CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou. The photographs reach almost from floor to ceiling, mounted behind plexiglass, supported by thick black wooden frames. The vast size and sca...