Manchester International Festival: 5 Things You Can’t Miss

The Manchester International Festival (MIF) returns in 2025, with events taking place at venues across the city. This year’s theme, ‘Dream Differently’, invites audiences to respond in new and imaginative ways to the physical and political worlds we inhabit. The programme features concerts, dance, painting, theatre, art and sound installations, with Festival Square – located outside Aviva Studios – offering free live music throughout. MIF25 showcases the work of local and international artists, interrogating forms of protest, planetary extraction and the limits and possibilities of the body, as well as offering immersive experiments across a range of media. In addition to the main events, the programme also includes talks by artists, curators and the festival’s directors. 

‘Football City, Art United.’ / North Warehouse, Aviva Studios / 4 July–24 August 2025

MIF25 draws on Manchester’s iconic football history and identity with the multidisciplinary, interactive exhibition ‘Football City, Art United.’. The works – which explore themes from celebrity and myth-making to spectacle and play – were created through collaborations between footballers, artists and architects from around the world. The exhibition was conceived by footballer Juan Mata, curator Hans Ulrich Obrist and film-maker Josh Willdigg. 

A number of the pieces explore the actions and spaces associated with the sport. A sound and sensory installation by Edgar Davids and Paul Pfeiffer – Crowds and Power (2025) – recreates the experience of walking from the locker room to the pitch in a football stadium, while The Playmaker (2025), by Stefano Boeri, Sandro Mazzola and Eduardo Terrazas, transforms the gallery space into a dynamic playground where visitors are invited to kick a ball through a series of obstacles. Other works focus on individual players, such as Jill Mulleady’s installation La Mano de Dios (The Hand of God, 2025), which features a holographic illusion of the celebrated – and sometimes controversial – Argentinian footballer Diego Maradona, playing with the blurred boundaries between reality, illusion and memory. Some projects consider the lesser-seen pressures players may face. The artist collective Keiken has created The Divine Puppeteer (2025), a mask of a Shetland pony that, when worn, plays the voice of English footballer Ella Toone, describing different aspects of her life, both on and off the pitch. Meanwhile, artist Ryan Gander and iconic former player Eric Cantona’s Privileges of Hindsight (2025) puts a roving spotlight on random visitors to communicate how the fame some footballers experience can become invasive and alienating.

A Symphony of Flesh and Bones by Juliet Ellis / South Warehouse, Aviva Studios / 10–13 July 2025

Multidisciplinary artist Juliet Ellis presents a new work of expanded cinema, combining live performance with moving images projected across multiple screens. A Symphony of Flesh and Bones (2025) examines the tripartite relationship of body, mind and self. Using film footage of her father and brother – who pursued respective careers as a professional bodybuilder and a cage fighter – Ellis questions the role of our bodies as protective shells, and asks how the ravages of age impact how we perceive ourselves. 

In addition to directing the piece, Ellis also performs live. In doing so, she reflects on the body as an impermanent yet physical and active agent on stage, juxtaposed with recorded images that present the body as a captured but fleeting presence. Drawing on her own personal history, the work offers intimate reflections that engage broader ideas of self-representation, the desires we project onto the body, and the ways it is both ephemeral and preserved through memory and art.

FALE SĀ / SACRED HOUSE by FAFSWAG / HOME / 4 July–10 August 2025

FAFSWAG is a Māori and Pacific Island queer art collective based in Aotearoa (New Zealand), whose interdisciplinary practice centres on a collaborative approach to Indigenous culture that decentralises colonial frameworks. Inspired by Harlem ballroom culture, FAFSWAG is known for creating events and exhibitions that feature dance and photography. For MIF25, the group has curated a multimedia takeover of HOME, one of Manchester’s most prominent cultural venues. The exhibition was developed during FAFSWAG’s two-year artistic residency, which began during MIF23, and centres on responses to the idea of ‘home’ from people Indigenous to the Pacific Islands, who have historically faced displacement and precarity.

HOME’s gallery space will host the exhibition ‘Fāgogo’ (Storytelling), presenting new digital artworks and large prints from six artists. In addition to the exhibition, the FAFSWAG takeover also includes the Talanoa programme – featuring discussions with artists – a short film programme screening works by Pacific-region artists, a vogue dance workshop, and SAUNIGA, a ceremony directed by Pati Tyrell that presents Samoan culture through dance and chanting.

 ‘The Beginning of Knowledge’ by Santiago Yahuarcani / Whitworth Art Gallery / 4 July 2025–4 January 2026 

As part of MIF25, the Whitworth Art Gallery will host the first international solo exhibition of Santiago Yahuarcani’s work. Yahuarcani uses visual storytelling and harnesses ancestral memory to ask how Indigenous knowledge can help shape a more interconnected future. Drawing on the history of colonialism in Peru – specifically the Peruvian Rubber Boom and the Putumayo genocide – Yahuarcani’s canvases often feature hybrid creatures with scales, wings, teeth, mammalian limbs and tails that merge with or sit alongside human figures, typically shown in violent struggle. Surrounding these forms are intricate patterns, textures and organic terrains that form dense tableaux. These images diverge from the compositional norms of the Western canon of painting, instead offering an Indigenous perspective on the colonial extraction of planetary resources, human labour and subjugation – expressing the pain caused when people are severed from nature.

A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood / Aviva Studios / 2–6 July 2025

Director and choreographer Jonathan Watkins presents a new adaptation of Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel A Single Man, co-produced by the MIF and The Royal Ballet. The narrative follows a day in the life of George, a gay professor in Los Angeles who is mourning the death of Jim, his long-term partner. Fashion designer Tom Ford directed the film adaptation in 2009, which many visitors may be familiar with.

In this stage version, Watkins collaborates with musician John Grant, composer Jasmin Kent Rodgman, costume designer Holly Waddington (notably known for her work on the film Poor Things, 2023) and dancer Ed Watson. In this live version, the protagonist’s internal voice and physical expression are articulated by different artists. While Watson performs as George’s physical presence, Grant’s original music and lyrics convey his inner voice, offering what promises to be a dynamic and original interpretation of this melancholic story of grief, friendship and desire.

Manchester International Festival 2025 will be on view at Aviva Studios, Manchester, until 20 July 

^{Main image: Ryan Gander x Eric Cantona, Until death let us be immortal (detail), 2025. Courtesy: © Ryan Gander; photo: Ryan Gander Studio}