Middlesbrough Art Week, now presenting its 7th festival edition, takes place across the town from Thursday 26th September to Saturday 4th October, 2024.

The title for this year’s festival, IN THE NOW AND THE FAR, seeks to negotiate the overlap and differences between cultural production and political action. Who has the right to take action? What does art & social practice look like? When is the moment and who is in the room? We are thinking about the attitudes, frameworks and timescales that inform the way that we make and share work, and in turn, how this helps us reimagine the communities we live in. We are also considering how uneven distribution (of power, time, resource, capacity) has shaped social movement of the past, and how this in turn might act as the imaginative scaffold for the future.

We have chosen the title ‘IN THE NOW AND THE FAR’ to explore what unfolds as we gather energy to take action, a tension that exists between the hope required to imagine different futures, and the urgent demands of social justice to address past and present inequity. At its heart will be programmes to support artistic practice in the North East and to join up conversations and actions towards sustaining these voices long-term. In a year of political elections near and far, we will also seek to amplify voices that have been underrepresented historically, to expand our work with and by communities across the wider North East region, to reflect on and promote the creative spirit needed to reconfigure our relationships in the now and for the future in so we can better stay (and play) with the trouble.

Middlesbrough Art Week was born in 2017 as an artist-led festival powered by The Auxiliary Project Space, a small growing team of artists, curators and coordinators, and fuelled by wide reaching partnerships. MAW supports artist ecologies in the North East, connecting artistic practice and ideas with like-minded peers nationally and internationally, and is committed to practice and not just preach principles of fair work and social justice.

Over the years we’ve invited artists to make the Transporter Bridge sing, installed a giant drawing ball at Middlesbrough Town Hall, and brought a dystopian model village to Centre Square, turned Church House into a beating heart, an old bank into an art gallery and flew a giant inflatable pig in from Japan.