Julie Favreau. She century / Edinburgh Art Festival

venue: Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh

Julie Favreau’s film installations transport us to intensely private worlds, peopled by enigmatic figures often engaged in highly charged encounters with peculiar objects Anomalies, for example, is a portrait of four individuals each engaged in strange, almost ritualistic, actions with a range of obscure objects – a woman with a pair of compasses on her head, a man levitating. Presented in a larger sculptural environment recalling the objects in the film, and accompanied by a specially composed sound track, the work has a deliberately immersive quality, plunging the viewer into an intimate otherworldly space.

All of Favreau’s work grows from this intimate relationship between object and gesture – with a single object often providing the starting point for an entire choreography and vice versa. Her new work for the festival, She century, has at its core an elastic rope, from which Favreau builds a richly ambiguous narrative centred on an isolated female figure. Part hunter, part magician, Favreau’s female protagonist conjures an invisible parallel world with her rope.

Favreau often speaks of her works ‘opening a door’. She century explicitly plays with the tropes of architecture – walls move mysteriously in the garden, while the lone female figure traces an invisible architecture with her hands.

She century is developed with Caroline Dubois, Pierre-Yves Martel (music), Simon Plouffe (sound), Shu Lorimer (camera) and Daniel Warren (production).

With additional support from Royal Over-Seas League, Hospitalfield, Government of Quebec, Canada Council for the Arts, Sodec and Battat Contemporary.

Commissioned with the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

Sun—Wed, 10am—6pm Thu—Sat, 10am—7pm Outside August: Mon—Sun, 10am—5pm

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern Two)

75 Belford Road, EH4 3DR

0131 624 6200

www.nationalgalleries.org