Bard Edinburgh presents UPENDED Exhibtion

UPENDED is a selling exhibition of photography by Matthew Hyndman at Bard, celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Edinburgh Art Festival, opening on 10th August.

Article Source: Bard Edinburgh
Last Updated: 6 August 2024 17:01

Image Credit: The Cuillin Ridge From Elgol by Matthew Hyndman

The Edinburgh gallery Bard is hosting an exhibition of 10 monumental photographic prints by artist and activist Matthew Hyndman in a show called UPENDED, opening on Saturday 10th August as part of the Edinburgh Art Festival’s 20th anniversary. Following Bard’s charismatic approach to showing and selling Scottish craft and design, UPENDED has an irreverent charm, subverting cliched tropes of Scottish landscape photography with the presence of Hyndman, naked and standing on his head in each image. The ten photographs show Hyndman in ten spectacular settings all over Scotland.

“We are numb to these epic vistas from their over-use in tourism campaigns and across social media,” says James Stevens, co-founder of Bard. “Put a bottom in the frame and we see the view anew all over again. Beyond Matthew and because of him, the landscape feels arresting in its majesty. We marvel at the technical feat. We wonder about midges and passers-by.”

For Hyndman, his headstands are more than a dare or an attempt to garner influencer status – on the contrary, his nudity means he is all but black-listed from social media. Hyndman formerly belonged to a devout religious community. In his early twenties he was on board a mission ship in South East Asia when he accidentally sent his WhatsApp conversation history with a man he had met online to his entire congregation back home. He left the boat and his church. His life as he had known it was upended.

Today, Hyndman lives in Edinburgh with the man who met him off the boat. He co-founded the Ban Conversion Therapy group, raising awareness and lobbying the government against insidious practices that still exist to bully people into believing that homosexuality is a convertible lifestyle choice.

“Scotland has become a sanctuary for me,” Hyndman explains. “My headstands are acts of defiance and liberation. I’m shedding more than my clothes and inhibitions; I like to think I’m also shedding an institutionalised version of myself at the same time. I’m baring everything.” He describes standing naked, facing landscapes of such monumentality as an enlivening experience: “It’s humbling and exposing but also empowering”.

“Being on my head feels like an important form of abstraction, else the decision to be naked feels too loaded,” says Hyndman. He finds it amusing that the most common responses to the images are questions about his neck and the cold.

“My neck is fine,” he confirms, “and being cold is not something that worries me at all. Against the great tradition of Scottish landscape photography, there’s a certain cheekiness at play here,” he laughs. “For all that I have overcome personally, ultimately what makes me happiest is when people laugh at the sheer gumption!”

UPENDED will be on show at Bard from Saturday 10th August and will run until Sunday 27th October.

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