Future Flares Festival returns once again, with a curated programme of innovative politically engaged performances, plus related talks and workshops. This year's line-up will feature work from radical performance makers including 'Get Off', an ‘in yer face’ look at desire by Katy Baird, the ecologically devastating 'Vigil' by Mechanimal/Tom Bailey, and what promises to be a thrilling new ‘30 […]

Dan Dubowitz is Reader in Architecture and the International Lead for Manchester School of Architecture. He heads up he FLUX Atelier and is co-chair of the schools expert panel which delivers the ‘Provocations’ series, inspirations talks, Atelier nights, and the salons programme. Trained as an architect, Dan worked for architectural and design practices in London […]

Stephen Scott-Bottoms Stephen Scott-Bottoms is a writer, researcher and theatre-maker. He is currently Professor of Contemporary Theatre and Performance at the University of Manchester, having previously taught in Leeds and Glasgow. Steve is the author of several books, most recently Incarceration Games: A History of Role-Play in Psychology, Prisons and Performance (University of Michigan Press […]

ynn Setterington is an internationally recognised artist working in the textiles arena. Her work explores contemporary issues in society and how stitch can be used to commemorate people and communities. Her quilts and cloths are held in many major public museums including the V&A, Crafts Council, IQSC and Whitworth Art Gallery. In the 1990s she […]

Jurriaan Benschop in conversation with Jenny Eden Jurriaan Benschop is a Dutch writer and curator who is based in Athens and Berlin. He is the author of Why Paintings Work (2023) and Salt in the Wound. Encountering Contemporary Artists across Europe (2019). His reviews and essays are published in Artforum International, The Brooklyn Rail, on […]

Amanda Beech x Adam Walker Amanda Beech is an artist and writer. In video, painting and other forms, her work apprehends structures that subtend and are coextensive with our lived reality. She invests in the capacity for a new form of realism that demands the invention of new explicatory forms of reason and contingency. Her […]

Ray Grewal is an award-winning writer who has worked across film, theatre, TV and radio. He has also worked as a Production and Development Executive at Creative England on a slate of short films and features, a script editor at the BBC in various departments and he mentors film makers for the BFI and Ffilm […]

MAFA presents a discussion on “Looking Back, Moving Forward - Creating, Collecting and Conserving Art in Manchester”. Contributors include Hannah Williamson, Curator of Fine Art at Manchester Art Gallery, Peter Davis, MAFA Archivist and Wendy Levy, Gallerist in Manchester for 40 years. Chairing the discussion will be Dr Fionna Barber, Reader in Art History in […]

Dr Lena Šimić is Liverpool-based transnational performance maker, local politician, activist, pedagogue and scholar researching contemporary performance and the maternal as well as arts responses to the climate crisis. Reader in Drama at Edge Hill University. Lena was a co-organiser of the Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home between 2008 and […]