The UK’s largest annual festival of visual art returns to Edinburgh this August with a packed programme of exhibitions, events, and collaborations. This August, Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF) invites audiences to a programme of genre-pushing commissions – from alternative queer images and reimagined relics overlooking the city, to late-night parties in a sculpture park. The 2026 programme brings together galleries and community spaces from across Edinburgh, creating a unique moment in time for artist-driven work. From EAF’s new home in Leith, see Love Bites Back, an exhibition of work by Del LaGrace Volcano, drawn from the Queer Archive of Resistance. While at Custom Lane, Carnal Desires is a rare exhibition of work by Sadao Hasegawa, revealing the under-recognised and largely unseen work of one of post-war Japan’s most influential gay fetish artists. The EAF Welcome Space at Brown’s of Leith will offer a place to arrive, pause. Also on The Shore, Bard will present The Archive, an immersive installation with Simon Foxton exploring the boundaries of AI as a tool in the context of craft and storytelling. A focus on archives and photography runs through this year’s festival with the largest ever presentation of photography by Sandra George at City Art Centre. Among People at Stills is a major survey of internationally renowned documentary and portrait photographer Jillian Edelstein, and Wendy McMurdo: The Digital Mirror at National Galleries Scotland: Portrait charts 20 years of McMurdo’s photographic reflections on childhood, the digital world, learning and make-believe. Offering a festival within a festival, Jupiter Rising at Jupiter Artland presents In Pride, In Piety, In Vigilance, a solo exhibition of new work by Glasgow-based Irish artist and performer Sgàire Wood.

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