Early Career Artist Award
Platform: Early Career Artist Award is the festival’s annual group exhibition and is designed to provide a dedicated platform for early career artists based in Scotland and working in the field of contemporary art within Edinburgh Art Festival’s programme.
In 2023, Platform took place at Trinity Apse, a Gothic kirk hidden off of Edinburgh’s Royal Mile. The 2023 Platform artists were Aqsa Arif, Crystal Bennes, Richard Maguire, and Rudy Kanhye.
About the Artists
Aqsa Arif
For Platform 2023, Aqsa Arif presented Sohni — Heera, a new multi-media installation delving into two South Asian female archetypes: the courageous heroine Sohni from the Seven Queens of Sindh folk stories, and the elegant entertainer and Mughal Empire era courtesan, the Tawaif.
Through sculpture, screen print, painting, and textiles, Arif represented the dual female representation of heroine vs. courtesan within South Asian popular culture, mirroring her own experience of dual identity. In this way, the artist explores the perception of women as vessels for cultural morality, and the way these archetypes are impacted by British colonialism.
Crystal Bennes
Crystal Bennes presented a collection of works connected to 1670s colonial projects following Oliver Cromwell’s “reconquest” of Ireland. The installation centres on a list of propositions by English colonial administrators to transmute the “uncivilised” Irish into the “cultivated” English: that the Bible should be translated into Irish; that wooden houses be made of stone to create better conditions to make marketable products such as butter, cheese and linen; and that English women brought to marry Irish men should act as agents of colonial transmutation via “their dowry of houses, gardens, markets and laws”.
Bennes’s artistic practice is grounded in long-term projects using archival research, fieldwork and material experimentation. The project is part of broader research into the imperial, colonial origins of Western natural sciences connected to the English colonisation of Ireland.
Richard Maguire
Richard Maguire’s Platform 2023 installation hinges on Peggy Hall, the illegitimate daughter an East India Tradesman and a woman of “Indian” descent. Maguire’s research uncovers Betty, an enslaved woman tasked with Peggy Hall’s care, potentially the girl’s mother, who was forcibly repatriated away from her after the abolition of slavery.
Maguire uses this story as an anchor to explore the way enslavement impacts kinship and family structures, using crafted jewellery and textiles that mirror gifts passed from parent to child. The artist uses layered archival images, showing people connecting through garland making, music, and dancing, to show the fragility of kinship ties under colonial conditions, and ways they might be preserved.
Rudy Kanhye
Rudy Kanhye’s work explores the social, political, and historical conditions integral to Mauritian identity and beyond. Working with local histories, texts, and archives, he explores the language of race and decolonisation, reappropriating spaces that have been confiscated by European colonialism.
Kanhye’s Platform 2023 installation used printmaking to showcase imagery connected to Mauritian identity and imperialism: the Dodo, extinct due to colonisation and the Queen, a symbol of empire. Kanhye also spotlights labourer women who emigrated from India to Mauritius after the abolition of slavery, exploited by colonisers, but nevertheless shaping Mauritius’ development. The event was accompanied by a participatory performance, sharing a Mauritian coconut curry and performance with the audience.
Platform: 2023 is supported by the PLACE Programme, a partnership between Edinburgh Festivals, Scottish Government, City of Edinburgh Council and Creative Scotland.
Header Image: Crystal Bennes, About Exchanging of Women, The Surveyor General, A Woman’s Place, All of England was Once a Lawn, and The Natural Order, EAF 2023. Photo: Sally Jubb.