EAF (Edinburgh Art Festival) is the UK’s largest annual festival of visual art. The festival was founded in 2004 to provide a dedicated platform for the visual arts at the heart of Edinburgh’s summer festivals.

EAF cultivates connections between communities, artists and collaborators to develop contemporary visual art projects. Every August, we present the UK’s largest visual art festival that is rooted in Edinburgh and Scotland, with global dialogue. Our year-round Civic programme allows us to work year-round, building ongoing relationships with local artists, initiatives, and communities.

EAF amplifies intersectional voices and perspectives. Our work is rooted in social justice, championing the voices and work of intersectional, emerging, and early career artists to develop art projects that address colonial histories, queerness, feminism and the climate crisis. 

What is EAF?

EAF is made up of three core strands: Festival-led commissions, year-round Civic programme, and Partner Gallery offerings. These strands overlap and blend together to create a strong network of multi-dimensional, interconnected programming.

The Festival-led strand makes up the series of EAF-commissioned exhibitions, installations, and live events, creating space for challenging artist-driven work during the August festival. Drawing together collaborations with local and global art platforms, the Festival-led programme stages world class artists for a moment in time during Edinburgh’s August festival season.

The Civic strand is EAF’s work with year-round collaborations with local artists and communities who find alternative ways to organise through art. These projects aim to innovate safer, braver, and more accessible ways to engage with creativity, centring those who have historically been excluded from the art world. This includes long-term artist development, open and closed group workshops, and collaborative access events, as well as exhibitions and events during the August festival.
Explore the Civic programme.

The Partner Gallery strand brings together the diverse, exciting programmes of our 25 Partner Galleries and Museums across Edinburgh. From the historic to the contemporary, the emerging to the established, the local to the global, the vast breadth of offerings from our Partner Galleries mean there is something for everyone.
Find out more about the Partner Galleries here.

Our vision is to:

• Develop a multidisciplinary Festival that is innovative, intersectional and led by our Values, nurturing vision from artists and partners.
• Increase and provide a platform for equity in our projects, the way we work, and the people we engage, with commitment and empathy.
• Convene and connect partners locally and globally.
• Produce work informed by research, advocacy, and our partnerships.
• Be agile, responsive and adaptive to our environment, with care and support.
• Ensure organisational resilience through strategic planning, self-reflection, good governance, staff welfare and risk mitigation. 

Read more about our Civic Engagement programme.

Partner Exhibitions, Museums + Galleries

EAF was founded in 2004 through an ambitious partnership of galleries presenting visual art, at the core of Edinburgh’s summer festivals. This partnership remains at the core of EAF, and is reflected in the programme of exhibitions developed for the festival each year by our Partner Galleries.

Presented across leading national institutions, internationally recognised contemporary art galleries and artist-run spaces, it offers a chance to experience visual art by historic and contemporary artists from Scotland, the UK and internationally.

Permanent Work

Our previous Commissions Programme has resulted in a number of permanent works for the city. A map of works can be found here.

These include:

• Rabiya Choudhry: Give light and people will find the way (Ella Baker), 2023
• Bobby Niven: Palm House, 2017 (Open to members of the general public on request)
• Graham Fagen: A Drama in Time, 2016
• Martin Creed: Work No.1059, 2011 
• Richard Wright: The Stairwell Project, 2010 
• Alison Watt: Still, 2004 (No longer on display)