Fruitmarket’s Deep Time
A festival of new music

Each year we invite an artist to curate Deep Time around a generative theme and to present a new commission of their own work alongside commissions, premieres, collaborations, performances, talks, exhibitions and film screenings by invited artists.

With a programme that has included sonic representations of geological time; noise made in protest at conflict and violence around the world; an installation that drew attention to the everyday objects around us; and the voices of two artists who showed at Fruitmarket many decades ago mixed live; Deep Time brings radical, experimental, genre-defying artists together in Edinburgh each November to respond to ideas about the world we are living in.

Previous editions of Deep Time are:
I See Red, curated by Raven Chacon
Basquiat & Cage 8424, curated by Elaine Mitchener
Deep Time, curated by Katherine Tinker

Deep Time: I See Red

Fruitmarket’s annual festival of new music, Deep Time, returned for its third edition, curated by Diné (Navajo) composer, performer and artist Raven Chacon. I See Red is an acknowledgement of current urgencies of ecological, civil and political unrest through the liberation of loud noises. The title comes from a series of paintings by artist, curator and activist Jaune Quick-to-See-Smith that was on display in Fruitmarket’s galleries at the  time. These paintings were made as expressions of anger; fires to be either lit or extinguished. Over three days, Raven Chacon and artists from the US, Canada, Brazil, Australia, Taiwan and Lebanon – Charmaine Lee, Li-Chin Li, John McCowen, Mazen Kerbaj, and Laima Leyton & Iggor Cavalera – prompted by these emergencies and by each other, responded with voice, sound and noise. Together they expressed present anger for unfolding horrors and reflect on ancestral traumas, while also seeking hope and connection through the experience of collective listening.  

The curator and artists of Deep Time were in conversation with Carcross/Tagish First Nation curator, writer, and researcher Candice Hopkins over the festival. 

The exhibition of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s work, Wilding, was open late until the start of the performances.  Also, on display on the ramp into the Warehouse, was an exhibition of drawings by Deep Time artist Mazen Kerbaj made as an urgent call to protest and closely related to his performance, From One War to Another.

Download the full programme 

Deep Time: Basquiat & Cage 8424. A festival of new music, curated in 2024 by Elaine Mitchener.

27.11.24–30.11.24

Apartment House · Jean-Michel Basquiat · John Cage · Brìghde Chaimbeul · Esi Eshun · Mark Francis · Anton Lukoszevieze · Allan Macdonald · Eddie McGuire · Elaine Mitchener · Kate Molleson · Rie Nakajima · NikNak · Pauline Oliveros · Aidan O’Rourke · Ben Patterson · Bashir Saade · Simone Seales · Sean Shibe · Sodhi · Theoretical Girls · The Rolling Calf (Elaine Mitchener & Neil Charles + petals) · Dam Van Huynh · David Wojnarowicz

‘Art is how we decorate space, music is how we decorate time.’ 

Jean-Michel Basquiat

‘The right to be myself, as long as I live! As if I were a sound.’

John Cage

Deep Time is Fruitmarket’s annual festival for new music which takes place in Fruitmarket Warehouse. Programmed with a different curatorial voice every year, each edition of Deep Time takes a generative theme as its starting point.

In 2024 the festival was curated by vocalist, movement artist and composer, Elaine Mitchener. 2024 was Fruitmarket’s 50^th anniversary year and Mitchener focused on 1984 when two artists from New York whose work blended visual art with sound and music were both shown at Fruitmarket during the Edinburgh Festival. John Cage (1912–92), a senior, hugely influential figure in avant-garde music exhibited works on paper in Fruitmarket’s upstairs gallery. Downstairs, a young painter Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–88) showed visionary paintings influenced by a context of jazz, hip-hop, no wave music, poetry, and art history, in his first institutional exhibition.

Deep Time 2024 used this creatively significant moment as a prompt to bring a series of new commissions, performances, talks and curated playlists by some of the UK’s most radical and progressive experimental artists to Fruitmarket. Mitchener invited them to respond to the idea of an imagined conversation between Basquiat and Cage, envisaging the meeting in Fruitmarket of these two artists as a cultural intervention that reshaped and reimagined future possibilities. The work of Basquiat and Cage continues to challenge and inspire, and Deep Time invites us to not only look back in reflection but to look forward with renewed energies in unsettling times.

‘I don’t think about art when I’m working. I try to think about life.’

Jean-Michel Basquiat

‘Our business in living is to become fluent with the life we are living, and art can help this.’

John Cage

Download the full programme 

Images: Chris Scott and Tiu Makkonen

Deep Time: A festival of new music

For too long, the climate fight has been limited to scientists and policy experts. While we need their skills, we also need so much more. When I survey the field, it’s clear that what we desperately need is more artists. – Mary Heglar

Deep Time was Fruitmarket’s first festival of new music featuring commissions and performances from leading radical and experimental composers, musicians and improvisors. They were brought together in the context of deep time to explore ideas of time and temporality, stasis and movement, provocation and play, ritual and activism in art and music, drawing their inspiration from geology, philosophy, popular culture, the natural world, and the need for art to engage with the reality of the climate crisis.

The festival premiered two inventive new commissions by Germany-based Croatian composer Sara Glojnarić – winner of the Ernst von Siemens Förderpreis 2023, Erste Bank Composition Award and Darmstadt’s Kranichstein Music Prize – and Dundee-based Japanese composer and improvisor Shiori Usui– a BBC Proms commissioned composer and recipient of a 2018 Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Artists – as part of four days of performance, improvisation, talks, late night DJ sets and curated playlists that opened up Fruitmarket to some of the most innovative and boundary-challenging new music.   

Performers:
Angela Wai Nok Hui | Yshani Perinpanayagam | p.e.r.s.o.n.a.l.c.l.u.t.t.e.r (Jenni Hogan, Rosie Middleton, Katherine Tinker, Helen Whitaker) | Plus Minus Ensemble (Mark Knoop, Alice Purton, Vicky Wright) | Simone Seales | Pat Thomas | Katherine Tinker

Composers:
Uri Agnon | Laurence Crane | George Crumb | Davíð Brynjar Franzson | Sara Glojnarić | Esin Gunduz | Jenni Hogan | Bernhard Lang | Liza Lim | Jessie Marino | Claudia Molitor | Njabulo Phungula | Max Syedtollan | Berglind María Tómasdóttir | Shiori Usui | Gillian Walker | Jennifer Walshe

In partnership with the Sir Charles Lyell Collection, Centre for Research Collections, University of Edinburgh and Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh