Edinburgh Art Festival has just announced its programme for 2015. This year sees international artists introduced to Scottish audiences for the first time including Americans Tara Donovan and John Chamberlain, Korean artist Kwang Young Chun and the late German artist Hanne Darboven. There will also be the chance to see new works by artists Toby Paterson, Sara Barker, Charles Avery and Marvin Gaye Chetwynd as well as early career artists from the open call still to be determined. We got in touch with EAF’s Director, Sorcha Carey to find out more.

Portrait of Sorcha Carey

If you only had one day in Edinburgh on a limited budget, what five exhibitions would you recommend not to miss?
Most of our programme is free, and Edinburgh is supremely walkable, so there would be a whole host of options. If the weather’s nice, I’d recommend a morning walk down to Inverleith House to see the John Chamberlain, and then continuing on along the Waters of Leith to Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop to see Toby Paterson, with Rhubaba just around the corner. After lunch in town, you could take in Hanne Darboven at the Talbot Rice Gallery, and Kwan Young Chun at Dovecot. Then if you’re super keen, you could pop into Phyllida Barlow, at the Fruitmarket, conveniently located just next to the train station (and the café does great cakes, if you’re in need of a pick me up).

Inverleith House: John Chamberlain, ‘Miss Lucy Pink’, 1962. Painted and chromium-plated steel. 47 × 42 × 39 inches (119.4 × 106.7 × 99 cm) Private collection. © 2015 Fairweather & Fairweather LTD/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photography by David Heald. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery.

Dovecot Studios: Kwang Young Chun, ‘Aggregation 06 – JN028’, 2006. 250cm diameter. Mixed media with Korean mulberry paper.

This is your fifth year as Festival Director. What’s the most important thing you’ve learned since your first EAF festival and how has your approach now changed?
I remember coming across that wonderful Beckett quote after my first festival – Try Again, Fail Again, Fail Better – and it has kept me company since then. It speaks to me of that tightrope you walk, wanting to do better each year, but also needing to be ready to fail. I have a much greater understanding of our context now – both the city itself, and what it becomes in August. And one certainty about festivals is that they will always surprise you – each year has its own energy, and at a certain point you have to let go and allow the festival be what it wants to be that year!

The festival seems to encourage works which sits outside of the traditional gallery space. Can you give us a preview of what visitors might expect on Edinburgh’s streets?
Programming work for public spaces is at the heart of what we do – it’s one of the ways in which we try and make contemporary practice more accessible, as well as to engage in a lively conversation with our context. Last year, we were fortunate enough to work with the Indian curator Vidya Shivadas, and something she said to me on one of her visits really stuck with me, and has provided the inspiration for this year’s programme. ‘Sorcha, you live in a picture postcard‘, she said. There are definitely moments when Edinburgh feels like more an illustration in a book than a real place, and this year’s programme explores that tension. There’s a strong strand in contemporary practice, of artists who create quite self-contained worlds – they are entirely invented, but they provide really important ways to think about and reflect on real lived experiences. So visitors to Edinburgh in August will have a unique opportunity to encounter a series of fictional worlds in a city which itself keeps one foot in the world of the real, one in the world of the imagination (the mad god’s dream, as Hugh MacDiarmaid described Edinburgh).

Fruitmarket: Phyllida Barlow. Installation view: dock. Tate Britain, London, 31 March – 19 October 2014.

Ingleby Gallery: Charles Avery, ‘Detail of Untitled (Dancers outside the MoA, Onomatopoeia)’, 2012. Pencil, ink, acrylic and gouache on paper. 83.5 x 114 cm (image size). Private collection. Image courtesy of the artist and Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh.

Christine Borland, Craig Coulthard and yourself will select a minimum of three early career artists from the open call. What are you looking for from the applicants?
We really want the festival to provide more opportunities for artists trying to develop a full-time practice in Scotland, and our new platform for early career artists is one way in which we are trying to support this,
I can’t speak for my fellow selectors, but I’m looking forward to being surprised, to encountering new work and approaches that I’ve not seen before, and having the opportunity to share that with our audiences.

As the only annual Scottish international contemporary art festival, how does this year’s festival address Scotland’s cultural heritage?
One of the things which makes our festival programme so unique, is that we are not exclusively focussed on contemporary art. While this is definitely one of the core strengths of our programme, we also always have a really strong range of historic shows also. So this year, as well as new work by contemporary practitioners, both the Queen’s Gallery and City Art Centre are showing survey shows of historic Scottish work stretching right back to Ramsay and Wilkes. I think this provides a really interesting context, to see the latest generation of Scottish artists against a backdrop of over 200 years of extraordinary art making.

A festival on this scale with anticipated audience figures of over 300,000 must take its toll. What are your plans for 31 August and when do start planning the 2016 festival?
Yes – September is definitely a time for catching up on sleep (and re-reading Beckett!). We’ve already started planning for 2016, though as ever, there’s still a lot to do…

The festival runs for one month this summer from 30 July – 30 August. See the full programme online here.

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This is my favourite time in the festival planning cycle – when we not only know what’s going to be in the festival programme, but we can talk about it. This year is a particularly significant one for us as we celebrate our tenth edition – a kind of coming of age (although we are still the youngest of Edinburgh’s August festivals). Our programme reflects our growing ambition. We’ll have 45 exhibitions in over 30 venues across the city, as well as our largest programme of publicly sited commissions to date.

I’m really looking forward to having the time to reflect on what happens when artists collaborate with one another. This is something we have been considering in our Parley commissions programme, and there are some great exhibitions dedicated to this too. Inverleith House’s Mostly West explores the collaborations of the recently deceased Franz West with such major and diverse figures from the contemporary art world as Douglas Gordon, Mike Kelly, Sarah Lucas and Michelangelo Pistoletto.

Jupiter Artland is looking at the longstanding collaboration between Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane, in an exhibition which includes the amazing Steam Powered Internet Machine (and for people who didn’t make it to Documenta last year (or did and loved it), there’s a one in a lifetime opportunity to see Sam Durant’s Scaffold).

Paul Rooney with Leeds United at Edinburgh College of Art is another interesting collaboration. Paul Rooney originally studied at ECA, and has been attracting increasing attention since winning the Northern Art Prize in 2008. If Mostly West shows us jointly authored works, Rooney and the artist collective Leeds United are making an exhibition which deliberately blurs the edges between each other’s practice – less a collaboration than a deliberate obliteration or confusion of the boundaries of individual authorship.

There’s some great new work by younger artists featured in this year’s programme. Rhubaba’s project with Polish artist, Lucy Pawlak, is a definite must see – the artist will set herself up for duration of the festival in the role of a Producer of a narrative feature film, and visitors, as well as invited experts will be invited to become involved in the creation of the final piece.

National Museum of Scotland have the second in a series of commissions which invite contemporary artists to work with their collections – Ilana Halperin has been exploring the museum’s geological and mineralogical collections. The other must-see at the museum is the Mary Queen of Scots exhibition which explores the elaborately crafted myth around the Queen which still retains its power today. It’s just one in a series of exhibitions in the programme which offer a timely reflection (in view of a certain impending date) on Scottish identity and its constructions. Bourne Fine Art’s exhibition considers how for over two centuries, artists have been crucial in the building a visual picture of Scottishness. While Rachel Maclean’s solo exhibition at Edinburgh Printmakers offers a very contemporary response to some of those same questions.

And lest we think it’s all easily expressed with thistle and tartan, Talbot Rice’s Nam June Paik exhibition (which is also part of the Edinburgh International Festival) reminds us of the profoundly international outlook of Scotland as a nation. Pat Fisher, Senior Curator at the Talbot Rice recently gave a lecture at a Nam June Paik conference in Seoul, entitled ‘Nam June Paik; Honorary Scot’ – and faced with the enticing prospect of the first exhibition in Scotland (birthplace of electromagnetic theory and John Logie Baird) of the artist who incorporated the television into the world of art, it is hard not to see this as a homecoming of sorts.