Film scene: a wood-panelled library of some elegance on the Canadian-American border. So precisely on the border, in fact, that a line of black duct tape running across the polished marble floor divides the building between Quebec and Vermont.
It was here, explains our soft-spoken narrator, that three men brought a backpack through the US entrance in 2011, depositing it in a lavatory to be collected by a criminal who then left through the Canadian exit. The bag was full of smuggled guns.
In 45th Parallel, a film by the Turner prize-winning artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan screening at Edinburgh’s Talbot Rice Gallery, the camera now homes in on the narrator, Mahdi Fleifel. A Danish-Palestinian director, Fleifel knows something about borders himself, having been raised in a refugee camp in Lebanon. In the film, he is sitting in the adjoining opera house of the Haskell Free Library. On stage (technically Quebec; the opera house’s seating is in Vermont) is footage of the fatal spot on the Mexican-American border that featured in the notorious supreme court case of Hernández v Mesa.
Jesus Mesa was a US border patrol agent who came across some Mexican children playing on the border one June evening in 2010. He killed unarmed Mexican teenager Sergio Hernández with a single gunshot to the head. All that separated them was 18 metres (60ft) and the invisible border – literally an unmarked line in the sand.
Mexico indicted Mesa for murder, but the US refused to extradite him. The US supreme court voted 5-4 that the American constitution terminates at the border and does not extend – as Mesa’s bullet did –into Mexico. The implications of this verdict (to paraphrase the film’s superb script) are very far-reaching – like the fatal bullet itself.
Drone strikes launched in the US end the lives of Syrian civilians, infants in Afghanistan, a wedding procession in Yemen. Devastating reconnaissance footage is woven into the film’s immensely subtle narrative. Borders prove intangible and absurd, porous in life, and susceptible to the loopholes embodied in the Haskell Library itself, yet also a matter of life and death, according to the law.
Abu Hamdan’s work is always a brilliant fusion of moving image, researched fact and theatrical performance (in this case by the captivating Fleifel). Completed last year, 45th Parallel is his best film yet and not to be missed at this somewhat uneven edition of the annual Edinburgh art festival. All its moral and philosophical dilemmas, its visions, tales and sounds (including an eerie music specially scored for the opera house scenes) are as condensed as a sonnet. The whole vast experience is contained in 15 minutes.
Also at the Talbot Rice Gallery, Irish artist Jesse Jones has turned the next-door gallery, ordinarily full of light, into a pitch-black multimedia installation, The Tower. Out of the darkness looms a sequence of spotlit vignettes: a circular stone portal in the wall, pierced with holes through which you peer into an anchorite’s cell; a girl crouched at the bottom of a towering ladder; a stone statue of a long-haired woman dressed in nothing but animal skins, rising out of a heap of shattered rocks.
On a giant screen, young women sing in ecstatic medieval polyphony. There is a prevailing sense of female community, of the bonds between women, the heights they have to scale, the darkness into which they are pushed, punished, shut away. Bewildering when you first enter, the elements gradually begin to merge into a kind of ancient-modern promenade performance that clearly touches on Hildegard of Bingen and Julian of Norwich. But only the accompanying text, with its references to Ireland’s patriarchal history, and its abortion laws, brings the work into the present or indeed into any kind of meaningful coherence.
More concise, and far less elaborate, is a work by Crystal Bennes in Platform: Early Career Artist award at Trinity Apse, a former gothic kirk off the Royal Mile. Bennes’s subject is the 17th-century economist and politician William Petty and his early version of racial eugenics, a proposal to “improve” Ireland by sending 7,000 English women into forced marriage with Irish men. Their children would all be raised as English Protestants, the girls with a work ethic invoked here in sculptures related to the hard labour of laundry, land and dairy farms. Best of all is a lifesize cameo of the vile Petty, bewigged, impressed into the surface of a basin of what appears to be curdled and solidifying milk.
A few steps further down the steep stone alleys off the Mile is the strangest contrast imaginable, between two well-established artists in prominent public galleries.
Peter Howson has been awarded a three-floor retrospective at the City Art Centre at the age of 65. Nobody even slightly familiar with the strenuous and tormented expressionism of this Ayrshire-raised, Glasgow-trained painter will be surprised to hear that very little has changed down the years. Where Howson once painted the hell of Glasgow life among drunks, vagrants, the poor and unemployed, so he came to record the hell of the Bosnian war with the same brutal machismo, conflating hints of Michelangelo with a raw and sometimes caricatural muscularity.
And so he now paints scenes from the Bible, having a new sense of God’s presence in the world. There are small portrait heads of gnarled saints and apostles and vast martyrdoms and crucifixions. Wall texts declare these works to be “countercultural to the expectations of a 21st-century artist” but they are entirely expected in other ways. Everything, from the delicate to the numinous, compassionate or redemptive, is sacrificed to the force of Howson’s dark brushwork. We are all still in hell.
Directly across the road at the Fruitmarket gallery, Portuguese artist Leonor Antunes has a hanging garden – or perhaps it is more like a sequence of rooms – of knotted and woven works suspended from the ceiling. Each is diaphanous and elegant, crafted in all kinds of materials from silk, twine and hemp to copper wire and pineapple leather. Some feel like screened enclosures, others are more vine-like, reminiscent of bridles or rope ladders.
The works apparently refer to other artists, including Lena Bergner and Trude Guermonprez, Bauhaus designers forced to flee Germany in the 1940s, and Sadie Speight who worked on the Royal Festival Hall. Their names occasionally appear in Antunes’s titles, as if she were talking to them somewhere offstage. And though there is an almost ethereal serenity to this refined and meticulous art, it is also discreet to the point of reticence, if not withdrawal.
The Stills gallery has a magnificent show of monochrome photographs by the veteran Prague-born photographer Markéta Luskačová, focused upon her images of children’s lives. Gawping, gazing, curious, rapt, comforting each other in fights, innocently aping the adults, trying to learn how to be grown up, in hardship or poverty, when still young enough to invent hilarious games involving nothing but their own school jumpers.
At first, it seems they are all from Soviet bloc countries – four to a bed, out on their mother’s back during the potato harvest, watching itinerant jugglers in some far-distant market. But then you notice the familiar stripes of a primary school dress in some English playground in summer and the dreich flat sands of Whitley Bay in Tyne and Wear. The street musician performing with a couple of small puppets, poignant counterparts of the human infants in the buggy beside her, was photographed in London in 1990.
Luskačová’s compositions are as superb as her power of noticing. Girls skip across a playground, linked cardigan to cardigan in a chain of black diamonds. A boy holds his upright dog by the paw, a little friend exactly half his height. A child stands vertical before his grandmother, flat upon the floor, in a configuration like a sign of the cross. It takes a moment before you realise she is dead.
Luskačová wheeled her own small son around the London to which she fled, from communist Prague, in 1975. It is almost as if she takes in the world from his height. A photograph shot in Brick Lane in 1977 shows an encounter between a lion cub and a greyhound, barely restrained on its leash. Behind them stand a pair of small children, equally alive to the staggering moment.
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The Tower is at the Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, until 30 September