International Markets

As 2019 comes to a close and we look ahead to 2020, the team at Manchester International Festival are reflecting on a successful year and excited by what’s to come in the new decade.

This year’s festival - the second led by our Artistic Director John McGrath - was the biggest yet, with more than 1,000 ticketed events, ranging from dance, theatre, music and visual arts, to site-specific performance and immersive installations.

The Arab British Centre is seeking a film curator for the fifth edition of the SAFAR Film Festival, taking place across London venues from 17 – 21 September 2020.

The opportunity is a freelance position and is available for candidates based in the UK and overseas.

Apply before 8:00pm GMT (UK time) on 15 December 2019.

Working closely with the festival directors and producers, the responsibilities of the curator include:

Glasgow has been named the UK’s top cultural and creative city in 2019 as part of a landmark report by the European Commission.

The report puts Glasgow at the top of the UK list above London, Bristol, Brighton and Manchester in the top five. Edinburgh is ranked 6th on the list. The report also ranked Glasgow as Europe’s leader for ‘openness, tolerance and trust’.

British Council has partnered with PRS Foundation again to bring emerging UK musical talent to Brazil for three musical residencies.

Musicians in Residence is a regular programme that sees three musicians make their temporary home in three different cities. In 2019 Belfast-based musician and producer Chris Ryan is going to São Paulo; singer and musician Anaïs is going to Salvador; and violinist, writer and composer Midori Komachi is going to Diamantina.

British Council is now inviting applications from UK organisations with which to partner, design and deliver four residency programmes under a new programme called Net//Work.

Each residency will run for four weeks, host a total of 16 artists and will be open to UK-based and international mid-career visual artists whose practices engage with digital technologies.

Read our November 2019 newsletter featuring the collaborative ties between the UK and East Asia including the Culture Diary and Arts Council Hong Kong visual arts and design mission in December, British Council's UK in JAPAN 2019-20 and a selection of events combining East Asian and British culture.

We also request high quality imagery for the Culture Diary calendar and possible promotional opportunities.

This is in addition to our usual selection ofstrategic partner and industry news, and welcomes to our latest registered organisations.

The Culture Diary and Arts Council England is taking a delegation of visual arts leaders and emerging designers from across the UK to Hong Kong next month from 2–7 December. The mission takes place at Business of Design Week and is a direct result of working with a number of Culture Diary members eager to expand their creative and cultural practices internationally. The mission will work with the Department for International Trade and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office via the GREAT Britain Campaign.

After two years of work, Sarah Lucas’s major retrospective opens 2 November 2019 – 16 February 2020 at Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing, realised in close collaboration between the artist and curator Yan Shije, director of the museum.

Deputy Mayor for Culture, Justine Simons, has written for the Art Newspaper stating that "London's resilience, creativity and innovation...will help us keep open for the world."

The article talks about the close creative connections with the rest of the world - how a third of the city's workforce is international and around 40 per cent of creative services and goods are exported to the EU. The art market in the UK is worth £14 billion, and London is Europe's second largest art market after New York.

London's creative economy, meanwhile, Justine says:

VisitBritain has announced that its largest annual global travel trade event Explore GB will take place in Belfast 18–20 May 2020.#

The event will see hundreds of international buyers meeting travel industry suppliers from across the UK to do business. Buyers and journalists from the UK’s largest inbound visitor markets including Australia, France, Germany and the US are expected to attend as well as from Brazil, Canada, China, India and the Gulf Coorperation Council (GCC) markets.