Created in partnership with HOME, Horizons features newly commissioned theatre, performance, visual art, film, community events, family-friendly workshops, plus live music
This year’s Horizons features HOME’s commissions of a short film, visual art, and theatre. CAN’s community programme features visual art, live music, dance, and family-friendly workshops. All ticketed events are Pay What You Can.
Co-curated with CAN/HOME’s Arts and Migration Network of displaced local artists, the festival’s theme is Our Planet, Our Home, expanding on the theme of the UK’s Refugee Week: Our Home.
Horizons 2024 underlines that home can be a place of refuge, a feeling, or a state of mind. It can be found in smells, tastes, and sounds, from the clothes we wear to the words we grew up with. Home is in the food, music, and arts we experience. Home is in our cultures and our landscapes. Our home is global. We’re interconnected; we share the earth’s resources, climate, and challenges.
We’re proud to have led the development of the festival’s community programme. The exciting programme features Greater Manchester-based artists and companies. They have developed and delivered creative projects, across dance, visual art, textile art, drumming and music with communities in the run-up to the festival creating new work, which will be shared with audiences and they will lead family-friendly workshops during the festival. HOME has commissioned a film-maker, theatre artist and two visual artists to create new work for the festival.
Friday 21 June, 5.30pm
Communities Not Camps Intro and Workshop
Curated with Refugee Action and Asylum Matters, this event led by campaigners with lived experience of forced migration highlights the Communities not Camps national campaign, which advocates for asylum seekers to live within communities, not barges, camps, or barracks. The event features printmaking to make and take home a banner and the option to take part in social media action to support the campaign.
Pay What You Can: £0, £2, £5, £10
Friday 21 June, 7.45pm, 90 minutes
Horizons: Hanimale
Created by Horizon’s commissioned artist, A.M.M. Noor-Saiyem Khan, Hanimale is a compelling and thought-provoking portrayal of the refugee experience. The piece urges the audience to reflect on the imposition of power on humans in seemingly humane situations.
Hanimale is preceded by a performance of dance and movement by sanctuary seeking women choreographed by Maisha Kungu, led by and co-created with Afrocats.
Pay What You Can: £0, £2, £5, £10.
From 6.45pm live music in the cafe bar.
Saturday 22 June, 12pm – 4pm
Drop-in Clay Art Painting Workshop
Painter and illustrator Tina Ramos Ekongo will lead a family-friendly clay art and tile painting workshop. Drop into HOME’s ground-floor foyer to create a painted tile, which will become part of a collective art mosaic piece. You can take your painted tile home. All materials are provided.
Pay What You Can: £0, £2, £5, £10
Saturday 22 June, 1pm, 73 minutes, Certificate to be announced
Dounia and the Princess of Aleppo
Directed by Andre Kadi and Marya Zarif
In this family-friendly film, six-year-old Dounia leaves her home of Aleppo, Syria, to embark on a challenging journey. She bravely travels towards a new world with the guidance of the Princess of Aleppo. Dounia is in Arabic with English subtitles.
Pay What You Can: £0, £2, £5, £10
In partnership with Celebrating Syria.
Saturday 22 June, 1pm
Angolan Dance Workshop with Angelina Abel
In a 45-minute-long family-friendly dance workshop, Angelina shares dance moves based on her Angolan heritage—no previous experience needed.
Pay What You Can: £0, £2, £5, £10
Saturday 22 June 2pm
Family Music Workshop with Sanja Govorcin
This family-friendly workshop, led by musician and music facilitator Sanja Govorcin, features musical games and the opportunity to learn a small part of a popular song. No musical experience is necessary.
Saturday 22 June, 2.30pm
Our Planet Our Home: Inspire Gallery Exhibition Launch
Enjoy a mix of live drumming and singing from the Zimbabwean-born Mancunian Godfrey Pambalipe to launch the exhibition. There’s also a live performance by children new to Manchester led and co-created with Afrocats.
HOME’s Inspire Gallery exhibition features artwork created by refugees, children, and adults from more settled communities in Stockport, working alongside Kurdish artist Amang Mardokhy co-founder of Culture Bridge.
The Horizons banner, exhibited in the café bar, is a newly commissioned and co-created piece featuring culturally specific fabrics and patchwork representing the many nationalities living in Manchester. Adults and young people with forced migration heritage and those from more settled communities have worked with textile artist Kate Rothery to create the work.
Free with no booking required.
Thanks to our partners, Afrocats, Culture Bridge and Global Grooves.
From 6.45pm, live music in the café bar.
Saturday 22 June, 7.45pm – 9.15pm
Counterpoints Arts present
No Direction Home featuring Tadiwa Mahlunge
Enjoy stand-up comedy from the refugee comedy collective No Direction Home with the guest headliner Tadiwa Mahlunge.
Tadiwa Mahlunge has established himself as one of comedy’s hottest names as seen on BBC 1, BBC 2, Dave, Comedy Central, UTV, Comic Relief and heard on BBC Radio 4.
Leading comic, Nish Kumar says:
The No Direction Home comedians are an inspiring, interesting, and creative bunch of people to be around. And they are very funny, the material is really good.
Pay What You Can: £0, £2, £5, £10
Sunday 23 June, 3pm – 115 minutes
Horizons Filmmakers Showcase: Making Your Heart at Home
An afternoon of short films by international filmmakers who are now based in Greater Manchester.
The films explore the themes of asylum, migration and exile, trauma, joy, and healing.
The screening includes the premiere of a short documentary film by Valeriia Lukianets, which HOME has commissioned. Her film explores the lives of three people displaced to Manchester and how they make the city their home. Valeriia came to the UK from Ukraine in 2022.
The screening also features Two Reports for the Academy by Bilal Korkut, Blue Sandals by Shahrokh Nael, Kintsugi Gold by Chanje Kunda, and Untitled Until No Longer Bored by Joyce Joumaa.
Pay What You Can: £0, £2, £5, £10
Sunday 23 June, 6pm – 9pm, Free
Horizons Arts and Migration Social
Calling artists, creatives, and their friends! Meet fellow artists at a social hosted by the Arts and Migration Group.
To celebrate the end of Horizons 2024, the social with free food and refreshments welcomes theatre makers and performers, visual artists, facilitators, and producers with experience of forced migration. The social is for creatives new to the UK or who have lived here for longer.
Throughout the festival and into early July, audiences can enjoy HOME’s Horizons visual art commissions across the HOME building. Deeqa Ismail’s installation is on the ground floor, and Nisa Chisipochinyi’s work is exhibited on HOME’s ground-floor windows throughout June and the beginning of July.
Deeqa Ismail has created Aqal Somali, an installation based on a traditional Somali hut but using contemporary references to reflect the impacts of conflict and climate change in the 20th and 21st centuries. The hut is constructed using plastic plumbing pipes and is wrapped in wax. The installation features frankincense resin, which is sacred in Somali culture. Within the hut, recordings of the tapes by which her parents communicated with each other during the Somali Civil War in 1988 play.
Nisa Chisipochinyi’s work is characterised by her use of bold, vibrant colours and geometric shapes. She explores the global storytelling traditions and captures the essence of her experience and heritage of being born in Zimbabwe and raised across Botswana, South Africa, and England.
In association with Afrocats, Culture Bridge and Global Grooves, CAN’s community programme commissioned artists include Amang Mardokhy, Godfrey Pambalipe, Kate Rothery, Magdalen Bartlett, Angelina Abel, Sanja Govorcin, Tina Ramos Ekongo and Masresha Wondu.
CAN is supported by
