GALLERY: Thousands attended The 42nd Orkney Folk Festival
Visitors from all over the world attended the Orkney Folk Festival, which ran from May 22nd to May 25th.
This spectacular festival took over the island in various locations and venues in Orkney, such as Stromness Community Centre, The Pier Arts Centre, and Stromness Town Hall.
The event featured 60 acts from Orkney, Denmark, America, England, mainland Scotland, and Sami artists. Acts included Kim Carnie, Dreamers' Circus, Fara, Project Smok, and many more.
Local food and drink pop-up vendors included The Orkney Distillery and Beiting & Brew.
Orkney Folk Festival had many sponsors such as Orkney Islands Council, Creative Scotland, and NorthLink Ferries.
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Press and Journal
26-05-2025
- Press and Journal
GALLERY: Thousands attended The 42nd Orkney Folk Festival
Visitors from all over the world attended the Orkney Folk Festival, which ran from May 22nd to May 25th. This spectacular festival took over the island in various locations and venues in Orkney, such as Stromness Community Centre, The Pier Arts Centre, and Stromness Town Hall. The event featured 60 acts from Orkney, Denmark, America, England, mainland Scotland, and Sami artists. Acts included Kim Carnie, Dreamers' Circus, Fara, Project Smok, and many more. Local food and drink pop-up vendors included The Orkney Distillery and Beiting & Brew. Orkney Folk Festival had many sponsors such as Orkney Islands Council, Creative Scotland, and NorthLink Ferries.
The Guardian
23-04-2025
- The Guardian
An irrelevant bourgeois ritual: this year's Turner prize shortlist is the soppiest ever
Remember when controversy was fun? If not, that's because you're too young. But back in the 1990s, my child, Britain got itself in hilarious knots about conceptual art, the readymade and whether a pickled shark or elephant dung can be art, with the Turner prize as battleground. It was a culture war but with laughs, because no one's identity was at stake and it wasn't like Brian Sewell was going to become prime minister and have Rachel Whiteread jailed. It is by embracing the earnestness of today's high-stakes culture wars that the Turner prize has lost its edge, the art getting more careful as the ideologies loom larger. This year's shortlist is the soppiest yet. Two of the artists nominated are painters. Painters, I ask you! This makes some sense of the shortlist announcement taking place on JMW Turner's 250th birthday. But as painters go, do Mohammed Sami and Zadie Xa (who also creates bland installations) compare with the boldness of Mr Turner? Neither is pushing back the boundaries of what a painting might be, or redefining this art for the 21st century in scale, freedom, audacity. I honestly don't know why Xa has been shortlisted. She's one of those artists whose mildly impressive but pointless work you see at every art fair and Biennial. Her figurative fantasy paintings framed by rambling, decorative installations mix up the myths of Vancouver and Korea, but the lack of rawness or shock or surprise is stultifying. Sami is in another league, and the quality artist on the shortlist. His large landscape paintings meditate on the horrors of war and agonies of enforced migration with a disconcerting poetry rooted in an impressionistic mistiness. You look at a blue sky over water, or trees above a rocky cliff, tenderly painted with whiffs of Monet and Cézanne, but then notice a refugee camp through the woods, or starbursts of ordnance in the Iraq sky. Surely he's a shoo-in to get the Turner prize. He is not only the best artist on this list but a real international talent whose seriousness and subtlety are obvious. So why am I not more thrilled? I suppose because this is good for you. Sami is important but he's not shocking. His art embraces skill instead of setting out to scandalise or create a new language. I would like it more if it had no moral value at all. So what about the non-painters? Will they provoke us with … balls of coloured paper and wool? That's what Nnena Kalu makes, hanging her multicoloured tangles of streamers and strands in poetical arrangements. These craftily wrought sculptures won't scare, or amaze, anyone. Kalu's work has a familiar appearance, and that's not just because she's been doing this stuff for two decades before recently getting recognition. It's because this kind of post-minimalist, found yet handworked sculpture has dried-out, attenuated roots in art movements that started way back in the 1960s. Nice, academic, dull. The artist who makes most sense as a Turner candidate, even firing the old flames of raw controversial reality, is Rene Matić, whose photographs portray intimate moments with family and friends – and report on skinhead subculture. Sadly these close, fragmentary images don't have great emotional pull on a stranger – it's a bit like looking at someone else's family snapshots. To make that work takes more flamboyance and poignancy than Matić shows. Rene's not a laugh. Yet there's something in their work that you don't get from the others: a glimpse of life in Britain right now. I think this goes to the heart of this Turner shortlist's fragility. It is determinedly globalist, reflecting a jury made up exclusively of curators who have shortlisted the kind of stuff they see all the time on the international circuit – Xa, for instance, has been shortlisted for work at the Sharjah Biennial, in the United Arab Emirates. Sign up to Art Weekly Your weekly art world round-up, sketching out all the biggest stories, scandals and exhibitions after newsletter promotion Clearly the jury are striking a blow against Brexity Little Englanders by shortlisting an artist from Vancouver whose art reclaims her Korean heritage – but who meets the rules by being resident in the UK. If Xa was a better artist this would be a more powerful gesture. But this shortlist's lack of connection with the realities of contemporary Britain is just another way to dig the ailing Turner prize deeper into irrelevance and empty bourgeois ritual. This year's exhibition will be in Bradford, far from the liberal elite metropolis this shortlist reeks of. So we'll go to Bradford, applaud these right-minded artists, approve of art without borders and ignore the rising vote for Reform outside this introspective event. Obviously there's good in all these artists but not enough to make the Turner matter again. Only one gives you a glimpse of what's going on in the streets, as opposed to the Biennials. I hope they win. Speak for England, Rene!
Belfast Telegraph
23-04-2025
- Belfast Telegraph
Turner Prize shortlist includes Iraqi exile who studied in Belfast and artist who uses ‘salvaged' antique dolls in work
The shortlist also includes an artist who uses dolls 'salvaged' from thrift shops and online in their work and another who uses VHS tape. Painter Sami, 40, born in Baghdad, has studied at the Belfast School of Art and Goldsmiths College, London. He says: 'My paintings seek to capture the state of confusion that occurs because of the cut thread between reality and the imagination; between war narrated and war witnessed.' Sami was given the nod for After the Storm: Mohammed Sami at Blenheim Palace in Woodstock, Oxfordshire, which has 14 paintings that respond to the history of Sir Winston Churchill's birthplace, and contain 'hints and references to conflict in Iraq'. The paintings do not have human figures, while one shows the 'shadow of a helicopter blade over a table and empty chairs', and another appears to suggest body bags. Peterborough artist Rene Matic was among the four shortlisted artists announced at the Tate Britain on Wednesday for their first institutional solo exhibition, called As Opposed To The Truth, which touches on ideas of the rise of right-wing populism and identities. Alongside Matic were three fellow London-based artists, Glasgow-born Nnena Kalu, Mohammed Sami, who first moved to Sweden after leaving Iraq, and Canada-born Zadie Xa. Matic, 27, was praised by the jury for expressing 'concerns around belonging and identity, conveying broader experiences of a young generation and their community through an intimate and compelling body of work'. Their work looks at themes including 'the constructed self through the lens of rudeness', which they have taken from rudeboy culture, a Jamaican subculture in the UK. It includes personal photographs of family and friends in stacked frames, paired with sound, banners, and an installation at the Centre for Contemporary Arts Berlin, Germany. They also have an ongoing collection called Restoration, which focuses on 'antique black dolls salvaged by the artist' and a flag quoting political leaders who called for 'no place for violence' in the wake of the attempted assassination of US President Donald Trump. Kalu, born in Glasgow in 1966, is a resident artist at ActionSpace's studio, which supports learning disabled artists across London, at Studio Voltaire. She creates large-scale abstract sculptures and drawings that hang down from the wall or ceiling. The items are made from colourful streams of repurposed fabric, rope, parcel tape, cling film, paper and reels of VHS tape. Kalu is nominated for her installation Hanging Sculpture 1-10, which Manifesta 15 Barcelona commissioned her to create at a disused power station, and her presentation in Conversations, a group exhibition at Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. The works contain 10 large brightly coloured sculptures that hung among the grey concrete pillars of the industrial site, and a work in pen, graphite and chalk pen on two pieces of paper. She was commended for 'her unique command of material, colour and gesture and her highly attuned responses to architectural space'. Xa, 41, who studied at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver and the Royal College of Art in London, is influenced by her Korean background and its 'spiritual rituals, shamanism, folk traditions and textile practices'. She is nominated for Moonlit Confessions Across Deep Sea Echoes: Your Ancestors Are Whales, and Earth Remembers Everything (2025), which was created with Spanish artist Benito Mayor Vallejo and shown at the United Arab Emirates' Sharjah Biennial. It has a sound element inspired by Salpuri, a Korean exorcism dance, and a mobile sculpture inspired by seashell wind chimes and Korean shamanic rattles, which has 650 brass bells that make harmonised sounds. An exhibition of works will be held at Cartwright Hall Art Gallery from September 27 2025 to February 22 2026 during the Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture celebrations. The winner will be announced on December 9 2025 at an award ceremony in Bradford. Last year, Scottish artist Jasleen Kaur, who put a doily on a car, won the prestigious art prize, which awards £25,000 to its winner and £10,000 to the other shortlisted artists. Previous recipients include sculptor Sir Anish Kapoor (1991), artist Damien Hirst (1995), and filmmaker Sir Steve McQueen (1999).
