ScotlandArea: 77,910 km²Time zone: GMT

Scotland accounts for one-third of the UK’s total area, and consists of the northernmost part of the island and  790 surrounding islands.

Scotland’s art scene has, until recently, been buoyant. The country boasts two of the best art schools in the country; this year, it hosted Glasgow International, Dundee Art Night and Edinburgh Art Festival, alongside the Edinburgh Festival and Fringe. In the middle of the latter Creative Scotland, the state body responsible for funding these activities, announced that nearly £10m had been cut from their budget and so they would be reducing their support of the arts, including £3m set to be allocated to hundreds of individual freelance artists. These are the artists whom 111 organisations and artists called, in an open letter, “the heartbeat” of the cultural sector, at risk from the loss of this fund. “Without it, many artists are left without the means to continue their work,” they wrote. “This risks sending a stark message out to the world: Scottish arts is closed for business.”

The roots of the shortfall go further back and originate further south. Shortly before the UK left the European Single Market, the Johnson regime sought through the UK Internal Market Act 2020 to restrict the legislative competence of the Scottish Parliament. Designed to constrain the capacity of the devolved institutions to use their regulatory autonomy, this act undermined Scotland’s ability to make its own economic or social decisions, keeping them strictly in line with those made in Westminster. This move was deemed by the Financial Times to be an “example of what not to do [as] London retook control of structural funds previously disbursed by the EU.” Overstep like this is fuel for the independence movement, Scotland’s grassroots movements to decentralise and empower itself – and indeed, this year, independence is again a key doorstep issue. This year, three Scottish arts festivals display just how rich the country’s artistic output is – thanks to years of robust funding mechanisms that are now imperilled – and make a powerful case for art’s ability to speak to urgent political reality.

These are not simple demonstrations of art’s goodness, however, but often the sites of grappling with Scotland’s history and identity. Glasgow, Scotland’s largest city, is defined by its rapid mercantile growth as an important hub in the British Empire’s tobacco trade and shipbuilding industry. Yet more recently Scotland’s long struggle for independence and its national movement has somewhat obscured the country’s complicated role in the history of British colonialism. As Scotland’s politics – for a generation defined by the Scottish National Party – dissolves into complexity, and new narratives struggle to be born, these art festivals pose new answers to old questions.

At this year’s exceptional Glasgow International (GI), curated with an intelligent and engaged touch by Richard Birkett, memories, forgetting and the archive emerged time and again as a way to think about the city. Artist Cameron Rowland foregrounded these concerns in his work “Obstruction” by shackling the gates to Ramshorn Cemetery with padlock and chains. He both reminded citizens of the persistence in their midst of the slave-owning merchant class, buried with impunity and separation in this churchyard, as well as the obstructive rhetoric that repeatedly denies Glasgow a full and frank conversation about the city’s colonial history.

Elsewhere, the GI digs into other territories. Alexis Kyle Mitchell’s hour-long film The Treasury of Human Inheritance (2024) is constructed around the experience of living both with and alongside disease and disability (in the central family’s case, the effects of a genetic condition called Myotonic Dystrophy, which accelerates with each generation that inherits it). The film sets landscapes of Glasgow’s abandoned architecture in dialogue with rituals, home movie footage and celluloid film, all overlaid with a soundtrack made by Luke Fowler and Richy Carey that mimics the disease, using an analogue synthesiser. Presented by the film’s producer Mason Leaver-Yap in a two-person exhibition in a disused Catholic church hall, Kyle Mitchell is paired with Ima Abasi Okon, who has affixed 3kg of vacuum-packed dehydrated oxtail stew with scotch bonnet, ashwagandha, lion’s mane and tulsi to the wall, alongside certificates that verify the organic material is fit for human consumption. Darkened and projected next door, Kyle Mitchell’s film displays her own techniques of making hand-processed film with and about genetic material of Myotonic Dystrophy. Together, the pieces consider the act of preservation and the necessity of self-led ritual in preparing for an uncertain future.

These works shade into a broader question: who gets to be included in the mythologies of the places we live? Teneu, an audio work and printed book by Lisette May Monroe and ​​Adrien Howard of Rosie’s Disobedient Press, was presented at GI alongside the press’s contribution to Edinburgh Art Festival 2024, “I am writing in search of”, which reflects on a city’s often overlooked enclaves during times of cultural spectacle. Alongside the two-city participation of Rosie’s Disobedient Press was an insight into the heart of the project, a small office/display/work room that hosts regular professional sessions for artists in Govanhill (of which the neighbourhood has a large proportion). With lanyards and cards urging us to “Disobey your master’s voice”, we were welcomed into a Govanhill oasis of positive productivity, supporting very local voices, through print, lecture, exhibition, and most impressively, workshops offering legal and practical help. Their focus for Glasgow International was on the myth around Teneu, Glasgow’s medieval, forgotten first mother and parent to St Mungo, who is rumoured to be buried beneath the city’s largest shopping centre. May Monroe found out about Teneu when she worked on a project recreating a work by artist Jacki Parry on the wall of the St Enoch’s shopping centre food court, in which there are more languages and dialects spoken in one place than anywhere in the city. As she explains, “I had been talking to Adrien a lot during the making of this, and pretty soon we were talking about her all the time, the idea of [Teneu] being an overseer or a narrator of the city. When the story of a city is told by the government or the tourist board, who is missed out?”

Poster for Teneu (2024), Lisette May Monrie, Adrien Howard, Helen Charman, Sasha Staicu, Joey Simons, Mason Leaver-Yap, Martha Adonai Williams, Francis Jones, Joanna Stawnicka. Presented by Rosie’s Disobedient Press as part of Glasgow International 2024. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by JACK ARTS Scotland

The result was an audio work and a book of commissioned texts featuring the work of nine artists and writers, which deal with Teneu as both historical myth and as a story that has become physically and mentally embedded in a city’s culture – obscuring perhaps some more uncomfortable truths. Leaver-Yap contributed an essay that was striking for its illumination of how a soon-to-be-destroyed shopping centre – my ears are still ringing with the loss of the Elephant and Castle community shopping centre in South London – brings home an archaeology of belief, use, possibility, and decision-making so out of the user’s hands.

Elsewhere, the disjunction between individual lives and the machinations of the city were on tragic display. Cathy Wilkes’ childhood in Northern Ireland is a rarely touched-upon subject for the artist, who prefers to deal with more opaque referential material. However, for this commission, beautifully displayed at the University of Glasgow’s Hunterian Art Gallery as part of a commission from the Imperial War Museum, Wilkes’ gloves are off – and she is in dialogue with those histories and experiences of violence not usually given expression within official representations of war. At the centre is the story of Emma Groves, a Belfast mother of 11, who was shot in the face with a rubber bullet through her own living room window. Groves had been playing a nationalist folk song, “Four Green Fields”, in defiance of a British Army neighbourhood search. She put on the record, turned to the window and was blinded for life. Booklets, pamphlets, placards and other archival ephemera root the display still more clearly in the Belfast of the Troubles. There is a hastily drawn-up poster reading “Stop RUC Brutality”, magazine photos of living rooms damaged by military assaults, and an article from Socialist Woman showing Groves’ horribly bruised face below the headline “How British troops ‘keep the peace’”.

Mina Heydari-Waite at the venue Offline traces a semi-fictional narrated filmic journey across Iran in Farang /‭ ‬فرنگ‭ ‬(a word used in Persian to denote white people). The work combines a personal archive of family footage of Iran in the early 1990s with archival material showing the 19th and early 20th-century British engagement in the region; uncovering the interplay between the two. Heydari-Waite shows how her family’s trip to Iran maps onto the route once taken by the British Indo-European telegraph line, and considers different forms of overlapping and the history of telecommunications. Farang meanders through the synchronicities of coincidence, a physical journey that is laminated against the machinations of 19th-century capital.

Still from Farang (2024), Mina Heydari-Waite, presented at Offline for Glasgow International. Image courtesy of the artist

In the months preceding Glasgow International, The Common Guild, an unusual and likeable arts organisation in the city, stepped outside of their usual grand townhouse into the bare bones paucity of a black office space – a location ripe for a sculptural intervention. Against a sweeping curtain wall view onto the city, London-based, German-born artist Nicole Wermers presented “Day Care”, which focused on the often-overlooked optics of the cleaning culture of hotels, office spaces and occupied buildings. Large wheeled carts display crudely rendered reclining nudes in grey, rough finishes, a juxtaposition of women’s bodies and “the invisibility of care and maintenance work”. In the form of readymade commercial products and other apparatuses of the service industry, Wermers engages with the social, psychological and economic conditions of corporate structures and overlooked labour hierarchies.

While Glasgow is often seen as Scotland’s arts powerhouse, further north Dundee has emerged as a hub for creativity and innovation. The city is recognised by UNESCO as the UK’s first City of Design, a distinction granted for its varied history in the control of Indian jute fabric export in the 1800s and Grand Theft Auto, one of the world’s biggest gaming successes. In 2023 Shetland-born Helen Nisbet enlivened the scene by bringing her Art Night concept to the city, creating links between spaces as diverse as The Keiller Centre, the Rep Theatre, and Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Oak Room in the extraordinary Dundee V&A Design Museum. Tai Shani’s film, My Bodily Remains, Your Bodily Remains, And All The Bodily Remains That Ever Were, And Ever Will Be, showing at The Little Theatre, is a poetic meditation on various historical resistance movements and groups, the spiritual dimensions of anti-supremacism, intersectional queer feminism, communism and revolutionary thinking. Recognising the emancipatory power of love and pleasure as a catalyst for radical change, the film is a paean, perhaps, to hope.

Showing in the design section of the V&A Dundee is Náhrdelník (Necklace), a new film by artist Lucy McKenzie, a graduate of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design. Consisting of footage from the eponymous 1992 Czech television series which depicted the interlocking lives and dramas of characters in 19th and 20th-century Prague, McKenzie’s edit focuses on the modernist architecture and interior details of the famous Villa Müller, designed by Adolf Loos and where parts of the show were set. “Much like McKenzie’s output as a whole,  [Náhrdelník] is not about loving or even liking culture; it is about articulating the manners of cultural power,” states Mason Leaver-Yap. McKenzie “uniquely betrays Loos’s interest in domestic control: the interiors of Villa Müller frame other interiors, and the visitor is subject to this framing too. Such contrivances are a consequence of the house’s striking rejection of a traditional floor plan; the interior is a complicated sequence of contiguous spaces on multiple levels, involving recesses, raised platforms and anterooms.” The chosen footage is woven together to potentially ascribe the domestic spaces in this nostalgic period television drama, with sinister undertones.

Still from Náhrdelník (Necklace) (2023), Lucy McKenzie

Edinburgh remains Scotland’s cultural heart, as well as the capital and seat of its parliament. Taking place during the busy month of August, a time where comedy, arts, literature, poetry and more collide, this year’s Edinburgh Art Festival, curated by Kim McAleese, set out to celebrate “persistence”. One of the key presentations was by London-based artist Prem Sahib, who took a particularly nasty speech from former Conservative MP and former Home Secretary Suella Braverman as a literal starting point for his work “Alleus” (her name backwards), presented in the Castle Terrace Car Park. A re-ordering and remixing of an anti-immigration speech in which she stoked fears around grooming gangs and the notion of “swarms”, Sahib lays bare the hideousness of her language, highlighting how political discourse is legitimised in parliament and eventually echoed in hate speech. Elsewhere, in “The Ground is Not Unchanging”, Heydari-Waite devised an exploratory programme of screenings, responding to Stuart Hall’s alternative notion of the “living archive” as an ever-evolving relational entity holding multiple and contested narratives simultaneously.

The living archive might more widely describe Scotland’s art scene at present: polyphonic and contradictory, with its diffuse, branching lines of enquiry unafraid to reckon with how the past continually tugs at the present. “Living”, wrote Hall, “means present, on-going, continuous, open-ended”, and art, like archiving, represents “an interruption in a settled field”. As such, it constitutes a critical part of these cities’ capacity for self-knowledge – and for self-determination in the context of a still-dim political future. .