Tracey Emin has dramatised her own life, emotions and fame at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Photograph: David Levene
Let's face it, Edinburgh festival is about live performance. It's about theatre, it's about comedy, and although the Edinburgh Art Festival, now into its fifth year, keeps getting stronger, it would be ludicrous to think it's visual art that brings summer crowds to the city. So perhaps it's worth asking what art exhibition is most worth a visit in Edinburgh if you're not there primarily as an art fan, but a theatre buff. What in short is the most theatrical visual art at this year's festival?
There's quite a choice, from Tracey Emin's dramatisation of her own life, emotions and fame at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art to the actor Kevin Eldon telling aliens what earth music sounds like on video at the Collective Gallery. But for stage designers, directors, and anyone interested in state-of-the-art scenography, the show that's really worth catching is by Canadian artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller and is at the Fruitmarket Gallery.
I enjoyed their exhibition as pure theatre. Cardiff and Miller create vivid, intense, poetic spaces you can enter - when you crawl inside their 2008 piece The House of Books Has No Windows, the aroma of antiquated paper is deliciously strange. All their installations have a meticulous stagecraft that wouldn't be out of place in a first-rate production at the Traverse. Most marvellous of all is their 2005 work Opera For A Small Room. You peer through the windows of a little wooden hut into a room stuffed with vintage records and old record players: the room itself "performs" an opera, with sinister voice over commentary, scratchy records, spectacular lighting changes and a stentorian Leonard Cohen-like vocal. It's a beautiful, engrossing, eerie piece of theatrical magic.
