The Annuale is a festival of independent practice that for a month freely associates a group of artist-led projects in Edinburgh. A temporarily collective promotional tool for the usually disparate activities within the city, the Annuale provides an irresistible corral in which to present a diverse schedule of events that celebrate the latest display strategies and modes of proliferation. From the safe ground of ‘traditional’ exhibition structure to the seemingly wild terrain of pub quiz and geographical study, the annuale encapsulates and gives voice to the energy of grassroots operations that can otherwise remain hidden in the shadow of the international festival.

This year the Annuale welcomes a series of projects from groups outside the city to exhibit amongst the locals, creating new dialogues with and augmenting the vibrancy of existing practice.

Built Overnight

Brut Brut

Aspects of a CIty

Joyriding

The Institute of Social Hypocrisy, presents the exhibition I Pretend to Like Harold Pinter, with artists Victor Boullet and Edie McKay.

The Institute has moved its headquarters from Paris to Edinburgh for the duration of the Annuale, and with plaques and flags, it has installed its authority into its new building.

The title is taken from a text work by Victor Boullet, which is part of a series of pieces discussing insecurity, alienation and acceptance.

There is also a visual account of the hypocrisy in the relationship between the explorer Roald Amundsen and his dogs during his South Pole expedition in 1911.

Edie McKay’s site-specific installation consists of three elements constructed floor to ceiling from plasterboard and paint. These columns serve as a fake support for the room, they are present, yet redundant, symbolic of our relationship to our own social environment.

For the duration of the Exhibition The Institute took over the EMBASSY website

The Institute
of Social Hypocrisy
-Edinburgh

The Institute of Social Hypocrisy is the Paris based artificial organization that fronts an ongoing collaborative work by the artist Victor Boullet. The Institute of Social Hypocrisy is conducted in the form of a protracted performance piece and its very existence is brought about by inviting participation with others.

The ISH provides a perception of authority and thus acts as a Trojan horse; it permits the contributors to covertly infiltrate organizations and to gain access people that they might not normally be able to approach.

The accepted paraphernalia that symbolize an official structure also represent The Institute. Door plaques, headed paper, business cards and a flag combine to present an authoritative façade that conceals the true internal activity.

The fundamental theme recurring in Victor Boullet’s work is that of alienation and acceptance. He highlights the aspects of intrinsically hypocritical social behaviour used to ingratiate oneself with others. This sense of exclusion, and the subsequent desire to put up an illusion of conformity, functions as the point of departure for the activities taking place within the The Institute of Social Hypocrisy.

The Institute combines these two connected aspects, of simulated bureaucracy and hypocrisy to form a conceptual umbrella under which a programme of related events can take place. It provides a structure for artists to take control of the programming and direction of their work and to be responsible for the events, installations and publications that occur.

Part of ANNUALE 2010

The relentless association, from the Renaissance onwards, of the Middle Ages with the ‘hypereconomy’ of the gift, with whatever exceeds calculation or rationality, for good or for ill, has made the Middle Ages a marker of fantasy and excess (…), a figure of the unnecessary and the extraordinary.

Louise Fradenburg, 1997

‘Avalon’ is the first curatorial investigation into premodern futurity by The Confraternity of Neoflagellants – lay peoples dedicated to the ascetic application, dissemination and treatment of neomedievalism in contemporary culture. Borne of the ‘new irrationalism’ of ‘zombie capitalism’, they are attuned to the scent of medieval in the commons, in the folkmote, the plateau of middle, in post-post-industrialism.

The exhibition will specifically augment The Embassy’s residency within the crypt and bell tower of the Baronial Revival Roxburgh Church. The Confraternity will draw from the scholastic symbolism of Dante Alighieri’s Commedia – the principle ‘map’ of dualistic medieval cosmology and a mythology important to the hacker intelligentsia of early Internet development communities – to codify the ecclesiastical space according to neomedieval gaming principles of ‘grinding’ and ‘levelling-up’.

In conjunction with The Embassy, Edinburgh Annuale, Edinburgh College of Art and Central Station, a collaborative codex of rhizomic illuminations will be made available. Additionally, on the 28^th June, the Confraternity will mount the lectern to expound further irrationaliisms.

The Confraternity of Neoflagellants was founded in 2009 by Serjeant-At-Law Norman Hogg and joined by Keeper of the Wardrobe Neil Mulholland. It is a secular and equal opportunities confraternity bound by chirograph.