CRITIC’S CHOICE

Summerhall’s ever-changing roster of exhibitions includes this month a reworking of their 2012 Festival exhibition, Only Women Women Only. Titled Mount

Strange and the Temple of Fame, it includes work by four diverse artists whose work is concerned with the rubbing out of women from the written historic record, with wealth and power, with folklore and mythmaking and its relationship to the ecological movement.

“These women are today’s explorers,” says Curator Wendy Law, of artists Victoria Clare Bernie, Maria Gimeno, Mina HeydariWaite and Alix Villanueva. “As artists, they research, scrutinise and collect. They delve into strange histories, question reputations and our spiritual and physical relationships with our environment.” The large scale exhibition will fill six rooms in the labyrinthine Summerhall space, ranging in media from film to photography, sculpture to installation.

Bernie explores “wilderness through human minutiae”. Her films, of which three are shown in this exhibition, range from natural entropy to a failed visit by Rudolph Hess to Scotland in 1941. The work which gives its name to the exhibition is based – via Alexander Pope – on a Chaucer poem which discusses the myth of fame and the reliability of historical record.

Sharing similar themes, Gimeno, currently based in Madrid, shows Queridas Viejas (also showing at the Prado, Madrid) which restores female artists to their rightful place in history. She will also perform the work on March 8. Mina Heydari-White explores the narrative of the Iranian cultural diaspora since the 1979 revolution in “Hamsafar”. And Alix Villanueva, artist and cosmoecologist, using ritual and myth-making to explore human relationships with others. In celebration of International Women’s Day, there will be an artist panel discussion on March 7. Mount Strange and the Temple of Fame, Summerhall, 1 Summerhall, Edinburgh, 0131 560 1580, www.summerhall.co.uk Jan 24- Mar 15, Wed-Sun, 11am-6pm