Visual arts

Manchester International Festival 2019 continues its diverse and expansive programme with the premiere of grime superstar Skepta's DYSTOPIA987 installation on 17–18 July 2019. 

Siobhan Davies Dance (London) and BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art (Gateshead) are pleased to announce the expansion of their four-year partnership, CONTINUOUS, to form the CONTINUOUS Network which will incorporate institutions around the country. This major collaboration has been awarded an Arts Council England National Lottery Project Grant for £341,144 and £90,000 in support from the John Ellerman Foundation.

Manchester International Festival will take over the city centre of one of the UK's most creative and inspiring places with a vast programme of the best in UK and international arts, collaboration and curation.

The lineup, which takes place 4-23 July, is a daring selection of diverse works, including world premieres and unique collaborations.

Opened on 22 June–29 September 2019, the first-ever Yorkshire Sculpture International is the UK's largest dedicated sculpture festival.

The Yorkshire Sculpture International takes place across four major galleries - the Hepworth Wakefield, the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds Art Gallery and Yorkshire Sculpture Park. The next installment will play a major part in the cultural programme of Leeds 2023.

The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust (SBT) and Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) have commissioned a playable piece of augmented reality public art for Stratford-upon-Avon to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the first Shakespeare Jubilee.

The piece, I See The Future by Anagram, displays a vision of Stratford-upon-Avon dreamed up by its residents through two pairs of giant binoculars. Supported by Arts Council England and Watershed's Creative Producers International programme, the art will be installed for a weekend 6–8 September 2019.

British Council has announced the artists-in-residence for the first-ever at Ise Jingu, the spiritual home of the Japanese people.

The artists are:

Connect for Creativity will bring artists from the Greece, Serbia, Turkey and the UK together for art and technology residencies to create new work.

The open call wants artists who:

For 2019 Shubbak has commissioned a number of mobile installations for different locations across London.

Bricklab, the designers of the first Saudi pavilion at Venice Architecture Biennale create a new pop-up sculpture especially for Shubbak. 22 brightly coloured units equalling in number the 22 states of the Arab League are arranged in different constellations to offer new viewpoints of geographies, nations and the power to imagine other realities. No unit can stand on its own, but has to be grafted onto others.

Since 2011, Syria and Yemen have witnessed unprecedented destruction and degradation of art and cultural infrastructure, in addition to humanitarian crisis, as a result of the ongoing conflicts in both these countries. In this symposium, artists, curators and scholars investigate the current status and future of art and culture from the point of view of artists working inside these countries as well as those who are presently living outside Syria and Yemen. What are the challenges? How is war affecting artistic expression? What means are there for artists to communicate their practice?

Contemporary arts agency Arts&Heritage (