Aug 18th: Year Of The Horse (with Tam Dean Burn)

There's so much on in Edinburgh in August that's its hard to choose what to go see. This show should be top of anyone's list. And a wee birdy tells me that if you buy The Scotsman tomorrow (Wed 19th) there is a voucher for half prce tickets to the show...

(From The List)

The cartoonist, Harry Horse presented a haunting, gothic vision of contemporary Britain in the Sunday Herald in the year before his tragic and early death in January 2007. These bare facts and a few more are communicated by Tam Dean Burn before he launches into a slide show of the artist’s work, reading Horse’s own text as each piece appears before us.

What emerges is a frightening vision, accompanied by Keith McIvor’s disturbing electronic score of a vacuous consumer society, fuelled by war and brutality and reified by the bromide of affluence.

Horse’s work is stunningly effective, both beautiful and ghastly in its exploration of the blood money appropriated in the Iraq war, and the grim moral vacuum of the spectacle that masked it. For him, our culture sleeps, glutted with the smug righteousness of its media, as an environmental and moral apocalypse approaches. It’s all strikingly presented by Burn, who in a white ‘hoodie’ voices the primal rage of the artist with a theatricality that contrives to arrest you long after the show, but never overwhelms the breathtaking visuals.

Assembly Rooms, 623 3030, until 31 Aug (not 24), 6.05pm, £10–£12 (£8– £10).