Manchester International Festival 2025:

The Manchester International Festival 2025 redefines contemporary curatorship through powerful intersections between visual art, football, and social engagement. Featuring collaborations between artists and athletes—such as Eric Cantona and Ryan Gander—the festival explores new cultural narratives, participatory practices, and global voices, including Shilpa Gupta and Santiago Yahuarcani. A compelling model for inclusive and interdisciplinary art-making.

INTERNATIONAL FAIRS & EXHIBITION

Charlotte Madeleine CASTELLI

7/3/20252 min read

Art, Sport, and Community Toward a New Cultural Canon

Among the leading global cultural events of the year, the Manchester International Festival 2025 stands out as a platform for experimentation, where contemporary art, performance, sport, and civic engagement converge to redefine the role of cultural production in post-industrial urban contexts.

At the heart of this edition is “Football City, Art United”, a curatorial project that investigates the intersections between contemporary visual art and football. The collaboration between former Manchester United icon Eric Cantona and renowned British artist Ryan Gander presents a hybrid visual lexicon where athletic gesture acquires symbolic and political significance. Further partnerships—such as those between Rose Wylie and footballer Lotte Wubben-Moy, and Alvaro Barrington and activist Rai—underscore the curators’ intention to blur the lines between high and popular culture.

Among the festival’s most impactful works is “An Inheritance”, a large-scale installation co-created with over 400 children, exhibited at Manchester Art Gallery. This collective piece reflects on cultural legacy and the possibilities of inclusive authorship. Here, childhood becomes both subject and creative agent, offering an alternative to the traditional artist-centered model and promoting a vision of art as a shared, democratic process.

The festival further expands its scope with contributions from internationally recognized voices. Indian artist Shilpa Gupta presents You Are the Place, an immersive installation questioning identity and borders, while Amazonian artist Santiago Yahuarcani brings ancestral cosmologies and ecological urgency to the European stage. These contributions frame the festival as a geopolitical platform, amplifying marginalized narratives and non-Western epistemologies.

A New Paradigm for Curatorial Practice

The Manchester International Festival 2025 exemplifies a new paradigm of curatorial agency—no longer confined to exhibition-making, but instead functioning as a cultural ecology that interweaves disciplines, temporalities, and sociopolitical urgencies. It moves beyond the display of objects to foreground relational practices and experiential formats that prioritize co-authorship, shared narratives, and performative knowledge. This expanded curatorship embraces contingency, polyphony, and vulnerability, positioning the festival as both a space of critical inquiry and a living infrastructure of cultural regeneration. By integrating local communities, global diasporas, and diverse knowledge systems, the festival redefines public culture as an active field of negotiation and transformation.

“Football, like art, is a universal language. Bringing them together offers a new narrative for contemporary society.” cit. Eric Cantona