Rabindranath X Bhose

Part of the Edinburgh Art Festival, Rabindranath X Bhose’s first solo exhibition conjures the bog, a northern-hemisphere wetland ecosystem once considered a spiritual portal. The show consists of one work, DANCE IN THE SACRED DOMAIN, 2023, for which Bhose has stuck iridescent vinyl puddles intermittently across the gallery’s floor and walls; these amoebic shapes are bordered by peat that the artist collected from Shetland, an archipelago north of mainland Scotland where he spent time meditating. Inspired by that soujourn, the exhibition embraces the bog as fluid and fertile ground for queer and trans spirituality.

Presiding over Bhose’s bog is the tarot figure of the Hanged Man, whose serene expression belies his suspension from the gallows. Recalling the bodies once bound with branches and ritually sacrificed in the bog, the Hanged Man appears in four guises on the gallery windows, incised into a layer of clay, peat, cacao powder, and testosterone gel. Suspended from the gallery’s ceiling is a cluster of branches Bhose gathered from his hometown of Glasgow, affixed with moss collected from the surrounding Calton Hill, a storied Scottish cruising ground. These tree limbs are fettered together by color-coded hankies, leather collars, cock rings, and shibari rope: queer emblems that recall ancient artifacts sometimes discovered in the Scottish peat bogs. Nested among the trussed leather and wood, a single video offers glimpses of blue sky, a stalk of grass, and Bhose’s blurred, semiclothed form, moving through ecstatic poses. “Move with the most tender gesture you can muster,” he intones in an audio work that accompanies the installation. Arms extended, navigating the bog, he dances in the pattern of the Hanged Man, gifting a trans pastoral.