Early Career Artist Award

About Platform

Platform: 2023, Edinburgh Art Festival’s 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.  

More information about selected 2023 artists and their work is coming soon – please find out more about this year’s festival format here.

This year, Platform will be take place at Trinity Apse. Please note that there are steps to access Trinity Apse. Find out more about access at Edinburgh Art Festival 2023.

Aqsa Arif

Aqsa Arif is a Scottish-Pakistani artist who uses the interdisciplinary mediums of film, printmaking, photography and poetry to construct complex installations in which the themes of dual heritage, migration and cultural dissonance are explored. Using archetypal and folk narratives as a force of understanding and renewing the Self, Arif examines the effects on the psychological world.

Crystal Bennes

Crystal Bennes’s artistic practice is grounded in long-term projects which foreground archival research, durational fieldwork and material experimentation. Recent bodies of work include a photography project on an artificial island in Sweden made of radioactive waste from industrially-produced fertiliser and a series of hand-woven Jacquard wall hangings created by translating a CERN computer punchcard programme into weaving instructions for a Jacquard loom. Work also includes a feminist statement on the gender politics of science and computing histories past and present and a five-year project to reconstruct a 19th-century hay meadow based on a nineteenth-century myth of unintentional plant migration from Italy to Denmark.

Rudy Kanhye

Rudy Kanhye is an interdisciplinary artist, curator and culinary designer of Mauritian heritage, interested in exploring untold histories and promoting art that is created for communities. Focusing on art as a powerful force to retune perceptions, his research takes the form of exhibitions, publications, and public lectures. Committed to communicating and testing ideas, he has exhibited and curated exhibitions internationally.

Rudy Kanhye and Lauren La Rose have created a new collective that investigates the ways in which artists and activists have historically worked together. The emerging collective aims to promote the voices of Disabled, Chronically Ill and BIPOC artists organising for social change, with a particular interest in exploring the intersections between racial, climate and food justice.

Richard Maguire

Richard Maguire Is an artist working in the mediums of drawing, printmaking, sculpture, and film. He is interested in archives and where hermeneutics of race and sexuality converge. With a mimetic approach to reproducing select images and objects, Maguire poses seemingly disparate articles as their juxtaposition forces one to reconcile with what labours or history remain unspoken whilst intimating dialogues amongst what kin and their labours what have we been continued to be estranged from.

Platform: 2023 is supported by the PLACE Programme, a partnership between Edinburgh Festivals, Scottish Government, City of Edinburgh Council and Creative Scotland.