Tag Archives: folklore

Paula Rego: Obedience and Defiance

27 February 2020

For our February session, we will be discussing the major retrospective exhibition, Paula Rego: Obedience and Defiance, where we will be joined by the curator of the exhibition, Alice Strang.

Paula Rego: Obedience and Defiance is a survey of the Portuguese artist’s work that brings politics to the fore. This major exhibition is the first ever retrospective of Paula Rego’s work to be held in Scotland. Rego is one of the most important artists living in Britain today. Born in Lisbon in 1935, she is celebrated for her intense and courageous paintings, drawings and prints. The exhibition spans over 50 years of her international career, from the 1960s to the 2010s. It features more than 80 works, lent from public and private collections. Rego is admired for her courageous exploration of moral challenges to humanity, such as political tyranny, gender discrimination, abortion, female genital mutilation and the death of civilians in war. Other works in the exhibition begin with her Portuguese roots and lived experiences, or respond to current affairs and stories from literature, cinema, folklore, mythology and art history.

Mount Strange and the Temple of Fame

30 January 2020

The first Spin event of the year will see us heading to Summerhall for their group show Mount Strange and the Temple of Fame. In the exhibition, four major female artists investigate and uncover strange landscapes and the power of myth-making and folklore. The artists research, reclaim, reveal and represent semi-imagined old pasts, new futures, and truth.

In her film Daedalus, Victoria Clare Bernie explores conspiracy and myth surrounding Rudolf Hess’ failed flight, on 10 May 1941, to Dungavel House, the summer residence of the Duke of Hamilton in South Lanarkshire (now an immigration detention facility).

Madrid-based artist Maria Gimeno’s Queridas Viejas (Dear Old Mistresses), restores women artists to their rightful place in art history. Queridas Viejas is currently showing at the Prado Museum in Madrid.

In Hamsafar (Fellow Traveller), Mina Heydari-Waite investigates how Iranian cultural histories, traditions and experiences are relayed and how diaspora artists collect, reassemble and refabricate cultural cues and narratives to create new settings for themselves.

Alix Villanueva, a multi-media, Edinburgh-based artist and cosmoecologist, displays in her work a range of modern mythmaking, merging sculptural elements, image-making and rituals to explore and unpack relationships with other beings.

The exhibition includes drawings, film, sound, objects, installation and performance, across six gallery rooms. We’ll be joined by the exhibition’s curator Wendy Law and the artist Alix Villanueva.

 

Natasha Russell: Night Smell

26 February 2015

Our February event will be Spin’s first visit to a new visual art space in the city, The Number Shop Gallery and Studios.

Gallery Director, Alistair Grant will take us on a tour of the studios and preview emerging artist Natasha Russell’s exhibition of new work which will open the following night. Russell is an Edinburgh-based painter and illustrator. She is a recent graduate of Edinburgh College of Art and will join us on the night for the discussion.

Natasha is interested in the strange and imbalanced relationships between humans and the rest of nature. Night Smell is a body of recent work in printmaking and drawing exploring night time. Here she has woven together folklore and science, exploring the tug of war between our desire to become more removed from the natural world while peering ever closer. 

The Number Shop studios provide artists with a defined personal space, as well as shared floor space in which to work, echoing the art school studio model. Since its opening, the TNS has hosted a program of exhibitions in the Project Space as well as throughout the shared studio spaces.