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PRINT TRANSPARENCY: ALBERTA WHITTLE & HARDEEP PANDHAL Edinburgh Printmakers, until Sun 5 Jan ●●●●●

Hangovers of empire hang heavy over Alberta Whittle and Hardeep Pandhal’s work, seen here in tandem responding in part to the new home of Edinburgh Printmakers in its former life as the base of the North British Rubber Company. They’re there in Alberta Whittle’s two short films, ‘What Sound Does The Black Atlantic Make?’ and ‘Sorry Not Sorry’, that form the centrepiece of her contribution to this exhibition, and in Pandhal’s short animation, ‘BAME of Thrones (trailer)’ and his 'Happy Punjabi Gothic' series of eight etchings. Both of Whittle’s films are collages that join the dots of the

black experience, from colonial cannon fodder serving queen and country, to the Windrush generation patronisingly welcomed off the ships with requests to sing calypso. Fast forward a few years, and marches by the National Front and inner city riots look like troubling precursors to where we are now. Today’s institutionalised racism is exposed by impassioned MPs Diane Abbott and David Lammy, and is as easy to see through as the three wall pieces of totems produced in Whittle’s home country of Barbados. Three sculptural installations, ‘Exodus Behind’s God’s Back’, ‘Grave Liners for the Dispossessed’ and ‘Hindsight is a Luxury I Can’t Afford’, are similarly personal evocations of a largely hidden history.

Pandhal’s ‘BAME of Thrones (trailer)’ is a tellingly silent comic- book style, rap-based depiction of a migrant culture under watch. His 'Happy Punjab Gothic' series takes inspiration from a drawing by 19th and early-20th century Indian satirical cartoonist Gaganendranath Tagore. It looks at the commodification of education in colonial-era India, with Pandhal’s updates showing how education has been monetised in an explicitly political fashion. Such oppressive ideological constructs are laid bare throughout an exhibition that reclaims assorted hidden histories as a glaring reminder of the roots of the state we’re in right now. (Neil Cooper)

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PHOTOGRAPHY HAL FISCHER: GAY SEMIOTICS AND OTHER WORKS Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow, Fri 15 Nov–Sat 30 May PAINTING LEONARDO DA VINCI: A LIFE IN DRAWING Queen’s Gallery, Edinburgh, Fri 22 Nov–Sun 15 Mar

PHOTOGRAPHY SCOTLAND’S PHOTOGRAPH ALBUM: THE MACKINNON COLLECTION Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Sat 16 Nov– Sun 16 Feb

Hal Fischer didn’t realise he was making history when he took the pictures that appear in this show. He was too busy living through it. As a gay man in his twenties, who breezed into a post-hippy but still sexually liberated San Francisco in 1975 to study photography, he embraced the scene he landed in with relish. He might have been one of the greatest minds ever to have lived, but many of Leonardo da Vinci’s greatest projects went unfinished. The great equestrian statue of Francesco Sforza, Duke of Milan? The ambitious engineering scheme to divert the river Arno? The treatises on botany, anatomy, painting? Due to factors political and personal, none was realised.

‘I came out in a place and a time where it all felt What we have are drawings, hundreds of them, in

very natural, and that comes out in the work,’ says Fischer today of the 24 photographs that make up Gay Semiotics. As the title of the series hints, each image is accompanied by a text that explains its iconography with deadpan pseudo-seriousness. The effect is of an in-crowd pastiche of some socio- anthropological textbook that might just allow straight society to get a handle on the signs and signifiers of wild life elsewhere. which Leonardo worked out his thinking and planned his greatest schemes. This year, to mark the 500th anniversary of the artist’s death, 144 drawings from the Royal Collection which holds one of the finest groups of Leonardo drawings in the world were displayed simultaneously in 12 locations around the UK (including Kelvingrove Museum in Glasgow). Now, as a grand finale, more than 80 drawings are being shown together, the largest group ever in Scotland.

‘The pictures aren’t exploitation,’ says Fischer. They trace his life and many interests, from

‘This was my world at the time, which I’m sharing, and that’s a kind of liberation in itself, and it was without consequences. There may have been a naiveté there, but the work reflects the world I was part of at that time, and I’m celebrating that.’ (Neil Cooper) anatomical dissections to engineering plans, from preparatory drawings for his lost painting ‘Leda and the Swan’ and the Duke of Milan’s never-built statue, to the visions of cataclysmic storms which obsessed his closing years. A rare chance to witness a beautiful mind and a supremely gifted hand. (Susan Mansfield)

One of the last great collections of photography still in private hands was saved for the nation in a £1million acquisition last May and goes on show for the first time here at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.

The MacKinnon Collection, assembled by

Aberdeen-based pharmacist and photography enthusiast Murray MacKinnon, contains more than 14,000 images which span a century of history. Scotland played a key role in the early development of photography and the collection includes more than 600 images from this time including the work of Edinburgh-based pioneers Hill and Adamson, and an exquisite view of Loch Katrine by William Henry Fox Talbot from 1844 (pictured). With images dating from the 1840s until the 1940s by Thomas Annan, Julia Margaret Cameron, George Washington Wilson, Roger Fenton and many more, it captures a century of change, from small-scale farming and fishing to the development of large-scale industry. National Librarian Dr John Scally describes the project to save the collection from being broken up or sold overseas as ‘akin to buying Scotland’s photographic album of 14,000 pictures and bringing it home’. (Susan Mansfield)

1 Nov 2019–31 Jan 2020 THE LIST 133