(2025) John Butler  | 6m46s ArtBomb'25 | Saturday 16 August | 11am-1pm @ Unitarian Church The Fourth Planet  tells the story of the establishment of the first libertarian colony on Mars, inspired by the philosophies of Effective Altruism, Longtermism and Technological Solutionism. State of the art singing software has been used to create a suite of songs that constitute its operatic form, rendered in a clear infographic style resembling an expanded Powerpoint presentation. The film depicts a Neofeudal society, forged in the image, and serving the interests of its libertarian founder, a symbolic ‘Tech Titan’. The project first attempts to modify the environment to suit man, Terraforming. When this fails, man is modified to suit the environment, Bioforming. Finally, it is decided that perception is the problem, and the mind of man is modified to suit the environment, Psycho-engineering . https://sonic-a.co.uk/events/the-fourth-planet

(2023) Ciara O’Rourke  | 11m11s ​ArtBomb'25 | Saturday 16 August | 11am-1pm @ Unitarian Church “An angst-ridden teen has an itch she can’t scratch and she’s willing to do whatever it takes to be rid of it.”  18-year-old Jess is under the usual teen pressures:  suffocating under the pressure of her mother, unable to fit in at school and prom anxiety fast approaching. The last thing she needs is any more complications. But when she wakes to find an annoying rash, Jess must resist the urge to scratch. Even as it begins to grow during her increasingly terrible school day. ​ I’ve always loved the concept of transformation and subversion in horror. Partly due to my own identity growing up as a bit of a ‘happy-go-lucky’ child when, really, there was a lot of pent-up anger boiling beneath the surface. This influenced the Hellraiser  meets Derry Girls  atmosphere and made it authentic to the terrors of puberty we’ve all fallen victim to. I think horror is and always will be a place for transformation and the transformed – a space for us to process our constantly changing bodies and minds. Whether it be for better, for worse or for no purpose at all – horror has always celebrated these moments as a liberation. This liberation was something I wanted not only Jess to feel, but the audience too.

(2017) Denning  & Kyprianou | 13m & 14m ArtBomb'25 | Sunday 17 August | 12pm @ Unitarian Church ZAD Forever Two rarely seen historic films about La Zad in Brittany, France. For decades there had been a local campaign of resistance against the construction of a second airport near the city of Nantes. This resistance culminated in the establishment of a self-organised autonomous zone, known as the ZAD: Zone à Défendre (Zone to Defend) . Over 40,000 people took part in creative acts of disobedience to defend this zone, a non-hierarchical community with its own bakeries, brewery, newspaper and radio station. The first part charts the history of La Zad, the second presents day-to-day life in the zone. Directed by Roland Denning  & Kypros Kyprianou  for Dartmouth Films /teleSUR

Rendition: informally/covertly transferring or deporting a person from one jurisdiction to another with less regulation for their humane treatment. Rendition exists outside of the usual standard legal processes. Doncaster artist Fiona Cahill is a single mother, carer and artist, calling for an apology for the deportation of thousands of British citizens as infants because they were born to unmarried mothers. From the 1920’s to the early 70’s around 9,000 women, sometimes with their babies, who were born here, were deported to Ireland; despite the fact they had legal right to stay. They were officially labelled PFI’s which meant ‘Pregnant From Ireland'. Irish and African Caribbean children up to the age of 6 were also deported without their mothers. Many were the infants of women invited to Britain to work for the NHS. My grandmother, Philomena and mum Maria never saw each other again. Mum never knew she was born in England until she was 43. Philomena who tried to get her back, had sadly passed on, after decades of inaction from Irish authorities. She had kept a photograph of them together. Mum's expression of finding her mothers love in nature speaks to the energy of a constantly regenerating life force with no beginning and no end. Paper documents became both treasured and traumatic items in our lives. Through enmeshment in the paper making for this show, I aim to interrupt the harms of separation and extraction they suffered, that are seen in the colonised experience and in the commodification of the natural world: Baby shoes became a visual representation of our communities collective grief and a sigil against future harms back when we got Tuam to go viral. At that time I created a washing line protest outside the Irish Embassy in London using baby grows. Our success led to the commission of investigation and finally access to records for Irish  adoptees who previously were not even allowed their own birth certificates. 796 babies were found buried in a sewer at Tuam, a county ran mother and bab y institution which was previously a British workhouse during colonial times after the introduction of the poor laws. How grief and trauma fuel uncompromising survival, and social justice is less often seen. The space provides opportunities to record oral history and to take action. ‘Rendition’ will be touring community spaces and galleries throughout the UK and Ireland before landing at the planned site of conscience at the former Magdalene laundry on Sean McDermott street in Dublin. The British State, unlike Ireland, Australia and many other countries has yet to apologise for the historic treatment of unmarried mothers. WATCH Rendition will appear at Artbomb 60 Hallgate Doncaster DN13PB from 10th July to 9th August 2025. Contact Fiona: tcup@ymail.com

LIVE SPRAYPAINTING & WORKSHOP 12pm-3pm | Sat 16 August Masks and overalls provided, other painting activities available for younger audiences.Local spray-painting trio, Squiggle Gang, will be live painting a brand new commission in our beautiful courtyard. Come along to see them in action and give it a go yourself! Squiggle Gang is a collective of artists from Balby, Doncaster creating mind-bending works in a variety of styles and mediums, painting on pretty much anything from canvases to walls, charity shop tatt and CCTV cameras. The overall mission of Squiggle Gang is to use pure unbridled creativity and a sense of wonder with the hopes of lifting people's spirits, distracting from day to day struggles and provoking more questions than answers. During ArtBomb'25 festival Squiggle Gang aim to get everyone involved with spray paint and street art workshops where you can create something special to take home or leave for others to see.

Following successful festivals in 2021 and 2022 and a smaller scale forum in 2024, the August 15th–17th 2025 festival will form the core of ArtBomb’s year-round programme of pop-ups and workshops at its base. Our festival will provocatively explore topical issues, in a global context, kicking off a new residency program: Rethinking Migration, Arts and Homelessness and Deep Listening: Pin Back Tha Lug Holes. The festival presents world class art to spill onto the street and spread across public space, sparking discussion and curiosity through workshops, talks, performance, music, film and exhibitions. ArtBomb creative lead, Mike Stubbs , former CEO of the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, says: “It's testimony to all the artists and supporters, that we have maintained an experimental and engaged arts program, with this injection of support from the Arts Council of England along with our partners, we can bring further opportunities for local creative producers and audiences, whilst developing a more sustainable model.” Past ArtBomb festivals and residencies have been instrumental in shaping the careers of artists in Doncaster and further afield. Performance artist Miranda Whall took part in the 2022 festival, which attracted an impressive number of artists and visitors despite taking place on the hottest day of the year. Miranda comments: “Taking part in ArtBomb22 was an unforgettable experience. It was the hottest day of the year, coinciding with the weekend of the races, which amplified the charged atmosphere on the streets of Doncaster. Participating in the festival allowed me to push my Crawling with Trees performative practice to new heights. I believe that my work, alongside the other performances within the festival, challenged the public to engage with art in ways they would never have experienced otherwise”. Mark Hutchinson , a Unitarian minister who helped develop the bid, said: “This is a great opportunity to develop community activities and support from a central location for the whole of Doncaster with the new commission, Arts and Homelessness.” Through the year the ArtBomb shop front hosts artists’ residencies, workshops and pop-ups, including a monthly open mic night, Rhymes and Vibes , run by local poet Omole Eroje and street art workshops with the Squiggle Gang . For the 2025 program we have already intense interest in exhibitions from such artists as Rosie Gibbens and Spelling Mistakes Cost Lives . A diverse mini music festival of local artists and a regional electronic music open mic night will also form part of the festival, hosted by Beats and Pieces . Local music promoters GSD said: “GSD are excited to be aiding in the facilitation of this years Artbomb festival.  Our aim is to bring the crowd, experiment with new avenues, provoke thought, incite community engagement and expand the reach of local artists by creating an exciting and inclusive music programme consisting of both local and national talent”.  ArtBomb’s approach is to foster local creative talent and emerging practitioners, alongside established international artists in collaboration with our partners which include: Don Catchment Rivers Trust , Instytut Polski , Doncaster FoodBank , Doncaster City Council , DCLT , Doncaster College , North East Yorkshire Data Ecological Centre , Yorkshire & Humber Visual Arts Network and Changing Lives . ​ Follow @artbombuk on instagram or facebook to find out about upcoming events and exhibitions as our plans develop.

Janine Harrington The Human Clock (big time, 2013) is a functioning clock maintained by an operator using only their own embodied sense of time passing, and a little feedback from audiences. It is an exploration of time and labour. ​ Janine Harrington is an artist whose work includes writing, dance & choreography, drawing, video, installation, costume and space design. She works mainly in gallery and non-stage spaces where her work prioritises explorations around access, play, agency, confrontation by times/scales beyond the human, neuroqueer experiences of information processing and attention. ​ www.janineharrington.com

A review of the Full Circle Forum: Arts and Ecology Lab WATCH HERE We convened at the newly-opened Doncaster Danum Gallery, Library & Museum on 26th March 2022 for a forum to discuss the future of South Yorkshire’s post-industrial landscapes, in response to a newly commissioned artwork, Full Circle by Yu-Chen Wang and curated by Mike Stubbs. In addition to Wang’s commissioned film installation, the forum also serves to highlight two new initiatives in Doncaster: an artist residency entitled “Re-wilding the System” which will support four artists to work alongside environment scientists; and “Symbiosis”, a series of ten bursaries offered to artists, environmentalists, designers, ecologists and imaginative thinkers to work together in interdisciplinary workshops, around themes of biodiversity, sustainability and local ecologies. These lab-based residency programs will feed into the ArtBomb Festival in August. Making our way beyond the two steam locomotives housed on the ground floor of the building, Wang’s film is installed in the art gallery at the top of the new building. It sits amongst the permanent collection which features 19th-century landscapes, portraits of majestic racehorses, portraits of gentleman and once-important local dignitaries, a painting of Doncaster’s bustling cattle market at the turn of the 20th century, and some more contemporary paintings depicting intimate domestic scenes of 20th-century industrial society. Full Circle begins with a long, slow circular pan across a lowland fen. An alien, lilac sky reflects in the surface of a vast body of water whose surface seems impossibly still. The surface of the water is broken by a lone twisted branch which extends out from the water, a petrified arm emerging from the pool like that of an Arthurian Lady of the Lake. Synth tones rise and descend eerily, above the burbling and colliding textures of a subaqueous soundscape, suggesting another world beneath the eerily dead surface. A narrative voice-over declares, “This picturesque scene hides histories of enclosure, and violent insurrection… the relationship between ecology, topography and human geography is rather confused and precariously entangled. Over time we got what we wanted, and we lost what we had”. This collision of nature, technology and memory in Doncaster’s post-industrial landscape sets the scene for today’s forum. Liz McIvor Writer, historian and TV presenter Liz McIvor kicks off the forum with the first presentation, taking us to Clifton Country Park, site of the former Wet Earth Colliery. Now a nature reserve, the industrial history of the land is largely hidden today. McIvor illustrates with an image showing part of a network of 19th-century tunnels which run under the park, echoing the opening scene of Full Circle with the notion of a world that lies obscured beneath the surface. She doesn’t explicitly mention the eerie, but she talks about the ghosts inhabiting the post-industrial landscape, sometimes literally, as in the reported sighting of ghosts on the site of the Hexthorpe Railway Disaster of 1887 in which 25 people were killed. Thus far we are thinking about how we deal with our industrial histories in the present, but of course it is also an historian’s work to understand how those histories were perceived by their contemporaries. McIvor presents us with examples of mid-nineteenth-century artworks to illustrate some of the attitudes held at the time towards, for example, the development of the railways. One slide shows John Martin’s The Great Day of His Wrath , a painting which American artist Dan Graham recognised as: “the first shell-shocked reaction to the anguish of the new industrial age” Suggesting also that this artwork was perhaps an early work of science-fiction. McIvor tells that, whilst touring Britain’s northern cities in the 1850’s, this work was attacked by workers who felt the painting represented an assault on their livelihoods, which for the first time were based on a wage economy. Management of the ecologies of industry and landscape has always been political. Yu-Chen Wang Next Yu-Chen Wang gives some insight into her research process. Wang’s practice involves her working closely with local experts, in this case ecologists, conservationists and naturalists who study and work with the Hatfield Moors, several of whom feature in today’s presentations. Walking the terrain with her collaborators is important for Wang in order to navigate the multiple narratives of the landscape, and these interactions formulate themselves within Full Circle’s voiceover: “Let the terrain speak for itself, you and I walk the landscape. Landscape is something you look out from, not something to be looked at”. Wang’s work sits within a tradition of artists’ moving-image practice which synthesises ethnography with science-fiction, a strategy perhaps to be at ground level within the landscape, whilst simultaneously distanced from it through a process of estrangement. Within this tendency artists are often grappling with what lies hidden within the landscape, the layers of which include the ghosts of our colonial histories, in the work of Larissa Sansour, Jananne Al-Ani or Grace Ndritu, for example. Wang’s Full Circle allows colonial histories, collective memory and geological time to collide, whilst also infused by the auto-ethnographic voice: “you’re really intrigued to hear that I’m going to narrate the story myself this time” Seeking to understand the landscape as a web of connections beyond the surface. Louise Hill Ecologist Louise Hill and conservationist Michael Oliver, both of the Old Lindholme Moor Management Group, between them detail some of the challenges facing Lindholme Island, a peat mire located between Hatfield and Thorne moors. Both moors were decimated through a long history of peat extraction, but the parcel of land known as Old Lindholme Moor was privately owned and the owners didn’t allow peat cutting, as a result of which the peat is one of the deepest in the area. Water management is one of the key issues mentioned by both Hill and Oliver, and it’s critical to keep the peat in a saturated condition - not only to preserve and foster the carbon-sequestering mire habitat, but also to reduce the risk of wildfires. Hill describes how in 2020 a wildfire spread across the southern edge of the moor, the carbon dioxide emissions of which were estimated to be roughly equivalent to the annual emissions of 30,000 people. Michael Oliver Oliver highlights that the objective is to protect the moors area, and its particular habit with extremely rare invertebrates (later during the panel discussion Oliver talks about how the nightjar which feeds off these invertebrates, was crucial to achieving designation under the EU Habitats Directive as a Special Protection Area, which ironically didn’t prevent the cutting of peat in the surrounding Hatfield and Thorne moors since permissions for rights to cut peat pre-dated European laws designed to protect such areas). It’s impossible to completely restore the moor, but the aim is to preserve it until such time as the fauna may have the opportunity to spread further afield. This critical endeavour, full of hope, reverberates through the Full Circle soundtrack: “You say it is almost impossible to return the moor to its original condition, but you try to do what you can, while you can”. Simon Pickles Simon Pickles, Director of the North and East Yorkshire Ecological Data Centre, begins his presentation with an image depicting the Saddleworth Moor ablaze at night. This photograph taken in 2021, echoes the slide of the John Martin painting shown earlier by Liz McIvor. Pickles recalls, “You could smell the peat… and standing there with the breeze coming towards me, you kept getting buffeted by the heat coming off the distant fire”. He recounts that whilst the newspapers spoke to the family whose fireworks accidentally sparked the fire, the mountain rescue team, and the National Trust who were out looking for livestock, he and his colleagues were studying maps and satellite images to try to understand what kinds of habitats had been lost, and what species associated with those habitats might be effected. Pickles asks, how can he push the narrative towards data-driven stories that contribute to a better popular understanding of our local ecologies, and influence the people who make the political decisions which can impact on them? Pickles understands that for his work as an ecologist to be successful, he also needs to be an effective story-teller, and this leads him to speak passionately in support of collaborating with artists to tell these stories. Following the presentations, we begin a roundtable discussion chaired by Mike Stubbs, Creative Director of ArtBomb. David Bramwell, one of the four resident artists selected for Artbomb’s Re-wilding the System , talks about how he grew up in Doncaster without much of a sense of connection with the Don—the river from which the town derives its name (and which itself gained its name from a mythical river goddess Danu), which was declared biologically dead until the 1990’s. Bramwell speaks about the importance of challenging the metaphors commonly used to depict nature and our relationships with it in terms of conflict (typically battles between species of plants or animals, or between humans and the environment), favouring a discourse which places emphasis on metaphors of symbiosis and collaboration. This seems to contrast with Mick Oliver’s experience of political “battles" during his period as Doncaster Borough Council’s Case Officer for Thorne and Hatfield moors, but perhaps this is the point: if we are to make meaningful advances in the ways our lives, economies and biological environments interact, we need to create narratives based around mutual benefit and collaboration rather than around conflict resolution. Many of the contributions from the floor echo the importance of becoming better story-tellers. Richard Scott, Director of the National Wildflower Centre at the Eden Project, suggests that “these steely terms like ‘environment infrastructure’ don’t really work”, and that it is the human stories about our environment which really connect with us. Paulette Benjamin, who works at Gomde UK Buddhist Centre (current owners of the parcel of land known as Old Lindholme Moor) says: “It’s not like we want to get people to be tourists, we don’t need people to enjoy the countryside, we need to really connect with the depth of nature, and the vastness of what it represents”. Visual artist Carolyn Thompson asks: “How do we make things happen on a grander scale, beyond the conversations in this room? How do we reach more people? How do we influence and have impact at a higher level?” Mike Stubbs Thompson suggests that artists are often operating as a kind of low-level annoyance in terms of provocation, but need to find ways of making sure their questions and ideas have an impact at a level of policy. Simon Pickles offers one solution, expressing that he is seriously drawn to the idea of a regional arts and ecology lab. Pickles admits that he is less interested in “artworks” but is interested in process and wants to work with artists, to see how they research, to engage with people who “think differently” and challenge the accepted norm of scientific thinking. This ambition for a regional arts and ecologies lab - the first steps of which are now in motion with Artbomb’s Re-wilding the System artist residencies and the “Symbiosis” bursaries - can plug directly into Doncaster’s efforts to rebuild its identity as a forward-thinking centre for arts and culture, and a wider ambition to establish a Yorkshire Great Fen. It takes both guts and vision to attempt something new, and from what I see at this forum Doncaster has that in abundance. What we need now is for other sectors from small businesses to larger-scale industry, to the Borough Council and beyond, to get on board with this urgent thinking.

Rita Says and Jennifer is live performance of beats and oral recordings. Sampling workshop demonstrating the use of found sounds to create music. ​ Jennifer Rozenfelds was born in 1977 and grew up in Doncaster. As well as a house/techno producer, aka Jackhno, she is a sonic artist using found sounds to weave soundscapes. As an environmentalist, Jennifer explores the relationship of the River Don and the people of Doncaster, collecting the words of locals to build the narrative of her piece. ​

As part of the Wild Weed Kitchen , artists Sacha Gray and Anton Hecht, worked with the public to create a number of artistic responses to the theme of rewilding. This included making stencils and text to create temporary graffiti art that used poetry to instigate provocations in public space about the themes. This included text on the pavement and street furniture. There was also the use of photomontage, working with images the buildings down the street, to create a multimedia work on site in the space leading to the courtyard of the Unitarian church that allowed visualisation of the theme of rewilding. All the workshops' creative activities were focused on public space, and representing the theme of rewilding through creative means. It was great to work with the youth that popped in to see what was going on and eagerly got involved in the making and painting on the pavement whilst chatting about then idea of a 'wild' Hall Gate! The workshops were drop in and This workshop was in collaboration with Gallery Gate through an ARG found.