ARTIST #1: DANNY PAGARANI

After an exceptionally challenging period for the creative sector, Edinburgh Art Festival makes a welcome return in 2021, with over 35 exhibitions and new commissions in visual art spaces across the city complemented by an online programme of events and digital presentations.

Edinburgh Art Festival continues to champion the city’s vibrant visual arts community and we are delighted to support them in doing so by presenting this weekly showcase, produced alongside the festival and featuring work by early career artists taking part in this year's edition.

Dear, it backwards (2021) is a failed attempt to “tell it all,” says the artist Danny Pagarani. The film began with a “fixation on three homophones “at”, “at”, and “at”. He explains that in Sierra Leonean Krio “at” simultaneously means “heart” and “hurt.” In English “at” is place, location, space. It’s “here” but it’s also “there” and “anywhere.”

“Having my dad read these words seemed like an economical way of playing with two philosophical ideas whilst also talking about the father-son relationship,” says Pagarani. “Firstly, to paraphrase Hegel, we may mean the particular but we speak the universal. The second idea is that identity includes its other. The “heart” both is and is not “hurt.”

Sound and music are important in Pagarani’s work. He says the discovery of the sonic properties of black clay sculptures became central. “The sound they make is glacial and metallic,” he says. “I realised I’d found an instrument which could make the sound of the death drive.”

Danny Pagarani is a graduate of the Glasgow School of Art and holds a BA in Philosophy and English from the University of Sussex.