New commissions, queer histories and a public pavilion reshape Scotland’s largest visual arts festival
This August, Edinburgh Art Festival returns with its largest and most ambitious programme to date. Running from 7 to 24 August, the 2025 edition brings together 82 exhibitions and over 45 galleries, museums and artist-led spaces across the city. But this year’s biggest development may not be the numbers. It could be the introduction of a new civic centrepiece: the EAF Pavilion.
“This year marks an important shift for EAF,” says curator Eleanor Edmondson. “We’re launching a new Festival Pavilion, an open, civic space at the heart of the city that invites audiences to gather, listen and take part. Using empty space and reimagining it as a place to bring people together, we hope that people can stop by, take some time in a busy city, and feel inspired by what’s inside.”
Made possible through a new partnership with Outer Spaces, the Pavilion will host exhibitions, events, screenings and conversations. It will also house HOST, a six-month residency for early-career artists, providing dedicated studios, public visibility and access to the festival’s citywide programme.
Ancestral knowledge and the art of lived experience
Across this sprawling programme, EAF25 maintains a clear thematic focus. “Across the programme, there’s a deep commitment to ways of thinking that centre lived experience, ancestral memory and Indigenous knowledge,” Edmondson says. “This is reflected in major new commissions, including a powerful live genre-defying work by Lewis Walker, and the outdoor premiere of Linder’s performance A Kind of Glamour About Me. We also can’t wait for the sounds of Raven Chacon at St Giles and to celebrate such a broad range of artists at Jupiter Rising. It’s a festival shaped by artists who are reimagining how we relate to place, community and time itself.”
The themes are visible throughout the programme. Queer history is foregrounded in who will be remembered here, a film and text-based performance project by Lewis Hetherington and CJ Mahony. Drawing on fieldwork across historic sites in Scotland, it includes writing in English, Scots, Gaelic and BSL. Also in the Pavilion, Memory is a Museum, an ongoing research project by Trans Masc Studies and artist Ellis Jackson Kroese, investigates masculine-presenting gender diversity in Scotland’s past.
“Using empty space and reimagining it as a place to bring people together, we hope that people can stop by, take some time in a busy city, and feel inspired by what’s inside.”
EAF Curator Eleanor Edmondson on the new Festival Pavilion
From billboards to cathedrals: a citywide festival
The festival extends from gallery walls to the streets of Edinburgh. Artist Alice Rekab’s Let Me Show You Who I Am appears on billboards across the city. Created through collaborative workshops with young people in Ireland and Scotland, the work examines legacies of migration and mixed-race identity in Liverpool and Edinburgh.
At St Giles’ Cathedral, Pulitzer Prize-winning Diné/Navajo composer Raven Chacon brings Voiceless Mass to the UK for the first time. The work, performed by Scottish Ensemble, is written for organ, winds, strings, percussion and electronics. It confronts the silencing of Indigenous voices within religious and institutional settings, specifically referencing the role of the Catholic Church in the abuse of Indigenous children in North American residential schools. A live conversation between Chacon and composer Elaine Mitchener will precede the performance.
JUPITER RISING x EAF, a one-night-only festival within the festival at Jupiter Artland, returns with performances from TAAHLIAH, Florence Peake, Roxanne Tataei, and a major new commission from artist Jonathan Baldock. Blending surrealism, folklore and queer aesthetics, Baldock’s work uses sculptural forms to imagine new myths for the present.
A new creative space takes root on Leith Street
The EAF Pavilion, located at 45 Leith Street, is also home to the HOST residency. Created in partnership with Outer Spaces, it provides a free, central working space for emerging artists. For Outer Spaces Director Shân Edwards, it represents a new model for artist support.
“Outer Spaces continues to hand over spaces for artists to work in and collaborate in and make communities with other artists,” Edwards explains. “Occupying these vacant commercial buildings temporarily is creating new opportunities for programming and providing support for artists across Scotland through commissioning and exhibition opportunities. We are thrilled that this August, our building on Leith Street will be transformed by our new partnership with EAF25, and that the special dynamics of ‘meanwhile’ space and sites where art is made as well as presented will come together. In this building, less than 100 metres from the official centre of Edinburgh, HOST, a new residency programme will provide a much-needed opportunity without financial barriers for early career artists, alongside EAF25’s ambitious and engaging programme.”
“Occupying these vacant commercial buildings temporarily is creating new opportunities for programming and providing support for artists across Scotland through commissioning and exhibition opportunities.”
Outer Spaces Director Shân Edwards
HOST includes six artists, including Jj Fadaka and Ria Andrews (whose experimental film My Blood Runs Purple is screened at the Pavilion), and Hamish Halley, EAF’s first Early Career Artist-in-Residence. Halley’s textile and video work, on show at The People’s Story Museum, explores grief and legacy through the act of cleaning his grandparents’ home after their passing, interwoven with the transition of Perth Museum’s collection to a new space.
Partnerships, retrospectives and radical reimaginings
Beyond its commissions and residencies, EAF25 features a dense calendar of exhibitions. Highlights include Wael Shawky’s Drama 1882 at Talbot Rice Gallery, Andy Goldsworthy’s 50-year retrospective at the Royal Scottish Academy, and Siân Davey’s immersive photographic project The Garden at Stills.
Mercedes Azpilicueta’s tapestries at Collective respond to global food economies and feminist activism. At Dovecot Studios, Magical Patterns celebrates six decades of IKEA textile design. Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop presents new work by Louise Gibson and Megan Rudden, and Edinburgh Printmakers showcases projects by Robert Powell and Aqsa Arif.
Meanwhile, Fungi Sessions, an installation by Hannah Read at the Royal Botanic Garden, combines music and mycology. King James VI/I is remembered through a major exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, while Edinburgh College of Art hosts two new AI-focused shows: Tipping Point and Authenticity Unmasked.
Looking back to imagine what comes next
“We’re so excited to be announcing our EAF25 programme,” says Kim McAleese, the festival’s director. “At the heart of this year’s programming is the call to reflect on how ancestral knowledge can guide us in addressing contemporary challenges. We are inviting audiences to reflect on our collective relationship with the natural world, drawing inspiration from the wisdom of those who came before us — those who foster cycles of care, sustenance and resilience.”
This interest in lineage, memory and imaginative resistance is what gives EAF25 its shape. It isn’t only a festival of contemporary visual art. It is a proposition: that art can help us remember more fully, gather more generously, and prepare for what is to come.
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