Middlesbrough Art Week, the North East of England’s largest contemporary art festival returns and once again unfolds in public spaces across the town of Middlesbrough. This year’s programme runs for eight action-packed days from 26 September to 5 October, with exhibitions, events and new commissions filling the streets and taking over Middlesbrough town centre.  

Artist taking part include Grace Mae Bradley, Jace Clayton, Karrabing Film Collective, Amy Dover, Theresa Easton, Alia Gargum, Kyriaki Goni, Olana Light, Natasha Thembiso Ruwona, Adam Shaw, Strange Telemetry, Chris Thompson, Henna Asikainen, Eileen White, Webb-Ellis, Joshua Le Gallienne, Matthew Young, Christine Walker, Mark Bletcher, Lisa Sopekan, Amy D’Cruze, Beth Hinde, Charlotte Thompson Bec Nicholson, Katie Young, Diane Cobb, Ali Cook, Nesh Dadgostar, Cameron Lings, Sophie Sieta, Elaine Robertson, Liberty Hodes amongst others. 

The festival showcases work by both established and upcoming artists, both near and far. This year’s Middlesbrough Art Week includes works by international artists Francis Alÿs, Kyriaki Goni and Karrabing Film Collective; new commissions by Natasha Thembiso Ruwona and Alia Gargum; performances by Amy Dover, Olana Light and a mass participation project called Uproot Collective.

Middlesbrough Art Week also sees the return of the North East Open Call and the New Graduate Award, both of which celebrate artistic practice across Tees Valley and beyond. Keep an eye out for new public artworks and participatory initiatives at this year’s festival, including Most Creative Station delivered by Navigator North, Comedown Comedy, SPARK and Words Per Minute. Across Middlesbroguh, visitors can expect an inventive and richly diverse programme of free exhibition and events by partner venues & cultural organisations  including MIMA, Navigator North, Platform A, Hypha, Industrial Coast, Python Gallery, Eden Arts, The Word, 2b Creative, and Freestyle amongst many more. 

This year’s festival – IN THE NOW AND THE FAR – seeks to negotiate the overlap and differences between cultural production and political action with themes of voice, silence and agency resonating across artworks. Belgian-born, Mexico-based artist Francis Alÿs is sharing the filmwork The Silence of Ani, which follows teenagers as they wander the ancient Armenian city of Ani near the Turkish border. As they explore the city’s ruins, Alÿs invites the young people to play whistles and flutes that give an impression of birdsong echoing across the landscape. 

Middlesbrough, a northern, post-industrial town, with its often unseen or overlooked unbridled creative energy proves again and again to be the perfect backdrop for a contemporary art festival. 

Each year, Middlesbrough Art Week continues to carve out space on its own terms and as we move forward & bring the audiences of Middlesbrough with us on this journey, I am delighted to have Claire Feeley join the team as guest curator and leading on the UPROOT Collective. It’s going to be spectacular.

Liam Slevin, Artistic Director 

Continuing on the theme of sonorous landscapes, Zimbabwean-Scottish artist Natasha Thembiso Ruwona is presenting the research strand of a new commission called A Troubling, or, A Sonic Refusal exploring Black sound as it relates to geography. Considering voice in the age of AI, Greek artist Kyriaki Goni is showing Not Intended for Algorithmic Audiences, a fictional virtual assistant that begins to exhibit odd behaviour, sharing playful tips with humans about how to not be heard by algorithms online. Strange Telemetry’s Future Poker, is a speculative fiction card game where audiences are invited to collectively  play out how different ideas of the future combine and interact in often surprising ways.

Responding to the connections between Middlesbrough, James Cook and Indigenous communities in Australia, Karrabing Film Collective are presenting Night Fishing with Ancestors, a filmic account of collaborative trading in food and culture between Asia and Indigenous people from Australia that predates European settlement. Reflecting on ecosystem fragility, artist Amy Dover creates meticulously detailed drawings of animals and non-human life under threat, and will invite Middlesbrough audiences to then erase a large scale drawing. Olana Light’s work envisions intimacy between the natural and human world, and for the festival, she is expanding her ongoing project The Birch Tree Family. 

Recipient of the inaugural MOTHEROTHER x MAW residency award, Alia Gargum is creating work on an architectural scale, tracing her relationship to cultural memory and migration. Cameron Lings will reflect on the impact of his rural Red Barn Residency on his practice which consists primarily of sculptural forms that explore statistics, information, and data sets. 

Part of Navigator North’s Most Creative Station project, Adam Shaw’s ‘Kiosk’ is a structure inspired by an archival photo of the former ‘Ed Walker and Wilsons’ news kiosk on platform one which will house a printing press that the artist will use to create and exhibit new work that responds to people’s memories of the station.

Now in its seventh year, Middlesbrough Art Week is committed to supporting artists at all career stages of their career and is an avid champion of North East based talent. Each year, 20 regional artists are supported to present work spanning installation, painting, performance, and multimedia.

The North East Open Call is the festival’s flagship regional exhibition of artists. 8 artists are selected to present work from across the region that responds to the festival themes. Work is selected by a panel of industry professionals as well as invited curator Pennelop Payne. We are delighted to be partnering with Dodds Brown on delivering this exciting exhibition in the centre of Middlesbrough. Participating artists include: Chris Thompson, Henna Asikainen, Eileen White, Webb-Ellis, Joshua Le Gallienne, Matthew Young, Christine Walker, Mark Bletcher. Together with the exhibition at MAW, The North East Open Call gives financial and curatorial support and networking opportunities to the participating artists.

The New Graduate Award is a 3-month long studio based professional development programme that aims to show young artists ‘the ropes’ and how to survive as an artist. The programme is supported by Northern School of Art, Newcastle University, Northumbria University, University of Sunderland and School of Art & Industries – Teesside University. The programme also includes a two day intensive workshop with industry professionals, this year included previous Turner Prize judge George Vasey and New Contemporaries, the leading organisation in the UK that supports recent art graduates and their development. Participating artists include Lisa Sopekan, Amy D’Cruze, Beth Hinde, Charlotte Thompson, Bec Nicholson, Katie Young, Diane Cobb, Ali Cook, Nesh Dadgostar

Highlights of the public programme includes talks by acclaimed artist and writer Jace Clayton, civil rights activist and author Gracie Mae Bradley and conversations with Seed Sovereignty and members of Uproot Collective. Together, these events will explore multiple resonances of ‘uprootedness’ in contemporary Britain. UPROOT Collective is collaborating with artist Theresa Easton on a new zine connecting themes of the UK’s hostile environment to social movements for climate justice. Throughout the duration of the festival, there is  a full programme of free, drop-in creative activities for all ages, including workshops on gathering and saving seeds, and opportunities to learn more about the artists and community leaders that have contributed to the programme. 

In The Now and the Far September 26th – October 5th