ArtBomb Festival 2025: in pictures

In August 2025, ArtBomb Festival returned with a weekend of creative disruption, deep reflection, and curated chaos. Last year’s theme — A Meaningful Use of Time — invited artists, audiences, thinkers, communities, and dreamers to slow down and tune in.

Time is spoken of like money. We spend it, waste it, try to save it. This commodification of time has roots in the Industrial Revolution, when the sun gave way to the clock as the measure of a working day. That legacy persists — not only in the Amazon warehouse, but in how we define ourselves: by what we do, not who we are or how we live.

Live art interventions, spoken word and live music spilled out from ArtBomb's hub and onto the streets of Doncaster city centre, disrupting the rhythms of ‘normal’ life.

Alongside over 20 artists, including the folk behind The Fete of Britain, a touring arts festival celebrating the people and places making our neighbourhoods and nation amazing, ArtBomb invited local audiences to spend time in the public realm differently: to make, debate and dance, to listen and loiter with strangers in an urban ecology which brandishes street dwelling as anti-social behaviour.

Over 3 days, we welcomed around 1450 festival visitors to our activities, with thousands of members of the public encountering our promenaging performances and robot bins wreaking joyful havoc through the city-centre.

Read on to hear more about our ArtBomb Festival 2025 highlights, alongside some brilliant photos by Matt Hass.

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'We need more spaces like this'

- Audience member

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'A highlight for me personally was sitting quietly in the church courtyard hearing the flow of gentle hubbub around me, as groups of people met, chatted, created things together, explored their community connections in Doncaster, and just had a happy time.

I saw how the courtyard offers space that is accessible yet secluded, public yet well looked after, and offers an inclusive welcome where sacred meets social'

- Liz Slade, Unitarian Chief Officer

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'the way you can create an audience, a theatre and dialogue between people who wouldn't usually talk to each other just by moving a bin became fascinating... the idea behind all the work that we do is to make people smile and think, and by making people smile and think, we can encourage people to talk to each other'

- Roger Hartley, Bureau of Silly Ideas

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'I loved Karolina's workshop, especially the fact that it was combining activity in nature (foraging) and an art project linked to materials derived from it. Would love to see more similar initiatives.'

- Audience member

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'My son who is 5 absolutely loved the experience. I personally loved that I got to attend something so different in Doncaster and didn’t have to travel out the city to gain access to culture & art'

- Audience member

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'For me this [Ray Lee's Siren] was the standout work. Evoking feelings of censorship, landmines, people in tenterhooks much like what we are living right now. The sporadic sound lent an eerie feelings, especially with it being in a dark room with these red flashing lights'

- Linda Cassels

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'Something is waiting here, quietly, if you pause long enough to notice it'

- Jack Clarke, Z Magazine

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A huge thanks to everyone who helped us make ArtBomb Festival 2025 so memorable, and for supporting ArtBomb's mission of becoming a northern platform for creative resistance & solidarity!

Reading list

Dive into some of the ideas which informed our thinking around "A Meaningful Use of Time"

• How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell (2019)

• Out of Time  by Andrea Phillips (ed. Hull Time Based Arts, 1998)

• Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life by Hector Garcia & Francesc Miralles (Penguin, 2016)

• The Things You Can See Only When You Slow Down by Haemin Sunim (Penguin, 2012)

• Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024)

• Essays in Idleness – The Tsurezuregusa of Kenko (Translations from the Asian Classics) trans. Donald Keene (Columbia University Press, 1998)

• Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative? by Mark Fisher (Zero Books, 2009)

• Apartheid Apartments: A Showroom for a Genocide We’re Still Furnishing by Jack Clarke https://znetwork.org/znetarticle/apartheid-apartments-a-showroom-for-a-genocide-were-still-furnishing/