Andrew McNiven is a Scots/Irish artist and academic. Born in Edinburgh in 1963, he studied fine art at Goldsmiths' College in London, graduating in 1987, a contemporary of many of the artists who rose to international prominence during the 1990s. He received his MA from Goldsmiths in 1995 and completed an AHRC-funded, practice-led PhD at Northumbria University in 2010. Since 1990 his work has been shown internationally by amongst others: the Lisson Gallery; the Whitechapel Gallery; the Akademie der Kunst, Berlin; Pictura, Dordrecht; and the Royal Scottish Academy. Formerly a lecturer at Edinburgh College of Art, he has been Senior Lecturer/Senior Fellow in Visual Culture at Zeppelin University in Friedrichshafen, Germany since 2010. He is a trustee of Stills in Edinburgh.
The moving image work ‘P.Y.M.’ (2024) shows twenty-nine specific sites in Belgium and northern France where his grandfather, Percy Young McNiven, can be placed accurately during his service with the Royal Scots during the First World War. These include the sites of the battles of Loos, the Somme and Passchendaele. The work aims to recover something of both his grandfather’s personal history and the histories of his comrades; to respond to and offer alternatives to forms and practices of memorialisation and remembrance which have emerged in the years since the last participants of this war died and the more recent advent of the ‘culture wars'; and to represent as they are now a sequence of particularly charged sites from which all material traces of the war have disappeared, and where, in most cases, only the topography of the landscape familiar to its participants remains - the places where many of those died or were marked for life in their tens of thousands.
‘P.Y.M.’ was made with the support of Creative Scotland.