5 unmissable visual arts highlights at Manchester International Festival 2025

Featuring breathtaking digital art, live cultural ceremony and a programme of talks grounded in Pacific identity, heritage and culture, the acclaimed Queer Indigenous collective FAFSWAG take over HOME with a specially created showcase exploring transformation and ritual, fantasy and futurism, the environment, cultural languages and spirituality.

Billed as a joyous and thought-provoking celebration of cultural exchange and storytelling, FALE SĀ / SACRED HOUSE offers an immersive response to the inherently precarious concept of ‘home’ for peoples in a perpetual state of displacement. Over two years, FAFSWAG artists were invited to create a ceremonial house in which ancestral stories from the Pacific Diaspora of Aotearoa New Zealand and the wider Moana can flourish.

Find out more below.

Throughout the festival, Manchester’s Venture Arts host a relaxed pop-up studio filled with art, movement, music, live performances and interactive workshops with local artist Michael Beard.

Between Fri 4 and Sun 20 Jul, the Aviva Studios Lab opens as a unique window into the creative process, where visitors can discover how working environments impact creativity as Michael produces large-scale artworks in real time.

On select days, Michael, star dancers from Company Chameleon and a chamber musician from Manchester Camerata transform the Lab into a performance space in which the trio respond to each other’s work and embrace the evolutionary nature of collaboration.

When Michael is not at work, the Lab welcomes a range of Venture Arts creators who exhibit a diverse array of art and creative projects.

Staged in partnership with Rochdale Development Agency, Mumbai-based artist Shilpa Gupta presents a captivating sound installation at RISE Inavate Centre, gathering stories from different communities to offer a stirring exploration of persistence, hope, longing and belonging using a series of singing microphones.

Over at Manchester Art Gallery, An Inheritance invites visitors to join young people from across the region in creating an inventive, historic and radically ambitious gift from one generation to another.

Working with artists Andy Field, Beckie Darlington and Rosabel Tan, over 500 primary school children from Greater Manchester have shared their knowledge, advice, jokes and memories, alongside an assortment of modern objects, to form a time capsule that will be left locked away for the children of 2125.

Billed as an invitation to think about the world we live in now, the legacy we leave behind and what it means to be a good ancestor, An Inheritance allows guests to explore the collection and contribute advice of their own, before key representatives from the city sign an oath to guarantee its preservation for the next century.

Presented by the Whitworth as part of this year’s festival, the first international solo exhibition of works by artist, Indigenous activist and leader of the Aimeni (White Heron) clan of the Uitoto people, Santiago Yahuarcani, offers a spellbinding and intensely urgent exploration of nature, myth, memory and colonialism beyond the confines of Western art history.

Building on his presentation at the 60th Venice Biennale, The Beginning of Knowledge features more than 25 large-scale paintings from the last fifteen years, including new work and international loans, each made using natural pigments and materials. Alongside the shared history, collective memory and wisdom of his ancestors, Yahuarcani’s work harnesses the sacred knowledge of medicinal plants, the sounds of the Amazonian jungle of his native Peru, and Uitoto myths that explain the various configurations of the universe.

Yahuarcani’s narratively rich oeuvre also acts as a statement of protest, his vivid depictions of a lost natural world offering profound meditations on the climate catastrophe, his people, their enslavement during the Peruvian rubber boom and the colonial extraction of natural resources.