PAST EXHIBITION: This was part of the 2024 programme
2024 Marked the 10th Year of PLATFORM, this annual group exhibition is designed to provide a dedicated platform for early-career artists based in Scotland and working in the field of contemporary art within EAF’s programme. 2024’s Platform artists responded to the themes of the EAF24 programme, centering intimacy, material memory, protest, and persecution.

Alaya Ang: For their Platform presentation The Fingers Pulling The Thread, Singaporean artist Alaya Ang created a floor-based multimedia piece displaying hand-dyed textiles produced in Indonesia and Scotland. A meditation on textile craft, lineage, and creative labour, the installation explores how personal and collective memories are woven into what we wear.

Edward Gwyn Jones engages with moving image, text, and printmaking to explore persisting social, technological, and personal histories. His work reframed seductive and latent artefacts, examining their role in shaping collective and individual perceptions.

Tamara MacArthur: Forged a site dedicated to centring care and emotional vulnerability, in response to the artist’s environment. MacArthur’s practice often balances along the edge of a façade, relying on an audience not only to engage but to suspend disbelief in the artist and their construction of intimacy.

Kialy Tihngang explored the fetishisation of Black women and their breasts. Tihngang anchors this to her own Cameroonian heritage and understanding of regional tradition. The work was partly influenced by Instagram infographics and self-proclaimed TikTok experts, a phenomenon of aestheticising traumatic information pervading each new ‘social media activism’ movement.
Selectors for the exhibition were Amal Khalaf, Director of Programmes at Cubitt and Civic Curator at the Serpentine Galleries, London and Eliel Jones, Curator of Performance and Time-based Media at KANAL; alongside EAF Curator Eleanor Edmondson.
Care considerations: The works will speak openly about racism, colonialism, and sex work, and include imagery of implied violence, and optional audience participation with physical contact.
A PLATFORM24 Closing Event accompanied this exhibition.
Platform: Early Career Artist Award 2024 is supported by the PLACE Programme, a partnership between Edinburgh Festivals, Scottish Government, City of Edinburgh Council and Creative Scotland, Cruden Foundation and The Fenton Arts Trust.