British Art Show 8 in Edinburgh

Colin and Yee tried to “touch those places that were not necessarily fully on the map, such as Cornwall or Kent.” “We cast the net wide, asking curator and gallery directors for recommendations, and artists aswell, because they are the best source of information. Bit by bit we started to see ideas emerging and so we took our research down specific routes rather than continually meeting a lot of different people.”

What they discovered was an artistic community – which here for the first time includes not just British or international artists resident in Britain, but international artists abroad who have had significant impact on British art practice – in some ways rebelling against the ubiquity of technology and the speed with which it has tightened its grip on our culture. They found a preponderance of interest in materiality and physicality, and in handcrafting objects rather than simply “finding” them.

But if there are scattered ceramics, textiles, paintings and sculptures, there is also a heavy preponderance of film. I look around the three galleries early on in the installation process. At Inverleith House, a room shrouded in black in the basement will show Patrick Staff’s film which has its roots in the archive of Tom of Finland, the LA-based Finnish artist who accumulated a huge collection of erotic art. Upstairs, we wander into a room in which giant strips of quasi-architectural wallpaper by Pablo Bronstein are laid out on the floor, ready to paper the walls, beneath Bedwyr Williams’ giant cracked egg, the large black screen it encloses still and silent, like nearly all the films I (don’t) see that day. On the other side of the room, Bronstein’s large scale image of an imagined tower, a curious juxtaposition of glasshouse and towerblock, draws the eye. It promises to be an arresting installation.

In another room an artist’s assistant is working herself up to putting a colony of ants into Anthea Hamilton’s Perspex sculpture of a naked woman. “It’s never straightforward,” she says, showing us two little test tubes of jittery ants. “They never seem to want to leave the tube.”

Working our way up through the building, Simon Fujiwara’s textile hangings, a tapestry of fur and shaved fur that reminds one of Korean Pojagi textiles, are the somewhat striking result of what happens when you shave an old fur coat, the underlying pelts stitched together like patchwork fields.

Upstairs in the office we find Jesse Wine, who is waiting to install four ceramic ‘figures’ in the nearby Glasshouse. “They’re like teenagers hanging around in a shady environment,” says Wine of this new work, telling me he’s waiting to see what they look like in situ before forming his final view of the piece. The works have “Barbara Hepworth-type holes” in them, a reference to the fact that in this environment, you are more likely to encounter – or feel comfortable with – a Hepworth or a Henry Moore than his deliberately mischievous torsos.

Across town, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art is in a similar state of concentrated preparation, the white gallery spaces littered with ladders and lights, cables and toolkits. More blank screens attest to that unknown quantity of sound and vision that comes with an exhibition that is heavily weighted towards video. There are objects and installations to attract in every room, but it is a vast airplane propeller that dominates, mounted in the central gallery space with every intimation that it will one day soon be revolving.

This is the first time that Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin’s installation Dodo (2014) has been seen in the UK, a semi-archaeological survey of the once undisturbed natural landscape of the desert spot where joseph Heller’s Catch 22 was filmed in Mexico. “30 years after filming, Broomberg and Chenarin came back and found all these fragments of buried plane,” the result being a kind of play on the archeagology of cinematography. At certain points, the propellers will turn, as if powering the film behind, which is actually an extreme edit of Catch 22 to include only those scenes of the stunning wildlife of the area before filming.

In the main gallery space Ryan Gander’s Fieldwork is an impressive installation of objects revolving round inside an enclosed space – with only one viewing window – in which each object tells a story. Benedict Drew’s Sequencer (2015), an audio-visual ‘false promise of desire and seduction’ has expanded purposefully into the Georgian Gallery Space whilst upstairs Melanie Gilligan’s dystopian vision of the near future, “The Common Sense” plays out its drama on five screens.

The overall effect will all become much clearer at the weekend, when the exhibition opens, but one thing is certain; a visit to this exhibition will require thinking hats on, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

British Art Show 8 is free at Inverleith House – Royal Botanic Gardens, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, and Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, until May 8

www.britishartshow8.com