The writing on your wall

‘The Writing on Your Wall’ is an exhibition that looks at printmaking as a socially concerned, democratic media designed to disseminate radical ideas. The exhibition, featuring contemporary commissions and historical examples and artifacts, looks back to a history of polemical, iconoclastic and satirical printmaking. Taking its name both from the biblically inspired idiom (Daniel 5:25–28) and a British Situationist poster from 1968 the exhibition not only proposes political change but can perhaps also be seen to acknowledge the increasing marginalisation of print in a digital age. Edinburgh Printmakers has commissioned and published new prints by Art & Language, Jeremy Deller, Ruth Ewan, Alistair Gray and Tom O’Sullivan and Joanne Tatham. Their works will be presented alongside prints produced by Christopher Logue and by King Mob in the late 1960s, James Gillray in the late seventeenth century; pamphlets produced by political presses in Britain in the first half of the twentieth century and other political ephemera and banners. The exhibition will be accompanied by a free catalogue produced on obsolete, historical equipment, within and during the exhibition.