In Cornmarket, where they hanged Henry Joy McCracken, romantic Presbyterian hero of 1798, Hilary Gilligan bemuses lunchtime shoppers. Instead of the place's customary Baptist preachers, she brandishes unfired mudclay heads on poles which might have been pikes, intoning backwards the numerals of the 200 years between.
Anne Seagrave dances hypnotically beside a video projection of her phosphorescent self-dancing in the gloom of the Crescent Arts Centre, once Victoria College, where young ladies learn their chemistry. On the floor, words commemorate women scientists who published in other names, when scientific success wasn't appropriate for women. Overlaid with a torch song to himself, Robert Mitchum's Night of the Hunter plays on video.
Robin Deacon, wearing nought but a silvered phallic ferry-boat, takes us on a satirical odyssey through the streets of London, appropriating as much from Tommy Cooper, Michael Bentine, Dali and Duchamps as from Sooty.
All part of Fix '98, the third of Catalyst Arts' biennial festivals of provoking, amusing, bemusing time-based delights, brightening public and private spaces across the city.
Until July 3rd
