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Yu-Chen Wang Full Circle Forum, 26th March 2022 at Danum Gallery, Library and Museum, Doncaster Yu-Chen Wang is a Taiwanese-British artist who lives and works in London. Her work asks fundamental questions about human identity at a key point in history, where eco-systems and techno-systems have become inextricably intertwined. At the same time, her Taiwanese origins, combined with a London-based career, have created a vision that is personal and autobiographical. She has exhibited internationally, including at Science Gallery London, Manchester Art Gallery, FACT (Liverpool), CCCB (Barcelona) and Taipei Fine Arts Museum, and recently received the Honorary Mention Collide International Award, CERN (Geneva). ​ Creating an immersive cinematic video installation, Yu-Chen Wang took railwayana as a starting point for exploring Doncaster’s relationship to coal. With the support of local historians, geologists and environmentalists, this collaborative inquiry into regeneration and rewilding looks at the landscape surrounding South Yorkshire in the context of two major crises we are facing: inequality and environment. This poetic work dwells on our relationship to place, peat bogs, water, coal are dominant features within the local landscape formed through the layering of time and compression of matter. Pitheads, slag heaps, mining subsidence and flooding, the edgelands are still full of post-industrial scars and traces. All of which are revealed through evocative moving images and a soundscape, which portray and reflect on these problems within a global condition to re-imagine new routes into the future. The artist’s research focuses on how technologies enable movement of people, goods and information, as well as exploitation of natural resources and labour; how the land and ecologies, even our planet, have been altered and transformed through these activities. In this anthropogenic environment, a new version of nature is emerging—wildlife and modernity clash, human and non-human worlds entangle—a coevolution of human communities and their landscapes. Full Circle , although composed of images and places captured locally, asks us how Doncaster sits within a broader international landscape as we did once before.                  Yu-Chen Wang says: “My work is largely informed by the history of places, collective memories, individuals’ stories, and the relationships I have established with these places and people. Various methods, including undertaking artist in residencies, conducting field research, developing collaborations and site-responsive projects across the UK and internationally have served as important processes for connecting places and people, whilst exploring and reconfiguring my own evolving cultural identity.” ​Speakers included: Yu-Chen Wang, Mike Stubbs, Liz McIvor, Louise Hill, Simon Pickles, Michael Oliver and Damien Allen. Sound design: Kristian Craig Robinson aka Capitol K Cinematography: James Lockey, Tyrone Braithwaite Technical installation: Andrew Quinn Equipment: ArtAV ​Research support: Dave Rogerson, Chris Barron and Simon Ward of Doncaster Grammar School Rail Collection; Bob Gwynne and Thomas Spain of National Railway Museum, York; Warren Draper of Bentley Urban Farm/Doncopolitan; Sasha Gray; Simon Pickles of North & East Yorkshire Ecological Data Centre; Michael Oliver of The Lindholme Old Moor Management Group; Paulette Benjamin of Gomde UK Buddhist Centre; Nicola Fox of Doncaster Museum. Curated by Mike Stubbs, specially commissioned by Doncaster Creates for DGLAM. With financial support from Doncaster Culture and Leisure Trust (DCLT).

(2019) Rob Gawthrop  | 6m | QT Movie ArtBomb'25 | Saturday 16 August | 11am-1pm @ Unitarian Church Tailings are the material left after separating the valuable fraction from the uneconomic fraction of an ore. Such material is pumped into a water reservoir. The interaction of the metal wastes with algae produces unusual colours. The Cornish Mars Filmed from a single position at Wheal Maid tailings lagoon, Gwennap, Cornwall, April 2018, using 16mm colour negative film scanned and edited digitally. Audio, including a football rattle played around the lagoon and two bowed bell cymbals, recorded in stereo digitally. Location sound, camera and text Rob Gawthrop. Audio recording and video editing Jo Millett.

(2021) John B Ledger  | 6m ArtBomb'25 | Saturday 16 August | 11am-1pm @ Unitarian Church Compulsive Obedience  is one of a series of situational spoken word video-pieces I made during the 2020/21 pandemic. ​ Still from Compulsive Obedience   However, the motif of the plague doctor, holding the chancellor’s briefcase precedes the pandemic, and was actually an avatar through which I brought together elements of my own psyche, with what I saw as the contemporary English psyche, or what I prefer to call ‘a specifically English kind of trauma’. In light of this, Compulsive Obedience , is about self-hatred, people-pleasing, and an inability to stand up for oneself both personally and politically, and this leads to misdirected frustrations and contempt and ‘punching downwards’, either on a personal or collective level. WARNING: THIS FILM CONTAINS STRONG LANGUAGE & REFERENCES TO VIOLENCE.

(2023) Spence  & Irvine  | 4m ArtBomb'25 | Saturday 16 August | 11am-1pm @ Unitarian Church Chairs Falling Getting okay with not being ok, that things are not okay represents an exploration into ideas of precarity and collapse, moments of the not yet happening as well as irreversible destruction. How do we learn to live in uncertainty when the future holds promise of breakdown? We embrace absurdity, the moments of lightness and humour. We are actively trying to get OK with not being OK, that things are not OK . Screened at The Nickelodeon Theatre, Columbia, South Carolina, USA. Part of The Ann Arbor Film Festival (AAFF) traveling tour.

(2024) Aisling Phelan  | 5m27s ArtBomb'25 | Saturday 16 August | 11am-1pm @ Unitarian Church Goodbye Body  is a journey of becoming digital. An initiation. A story of mind uploading, and the subsequent degradation of the physical body. Through an intimate and reflective letter addressed to her physical form, the artist conveys her ultimate decision to transcend the confines of flesh and blood, choosing instead to explore the limitless potential of digital existence. Goodbye Body by Aisling Phelan This piece invites viewers to contemplate the evolving relationship between human experience and technological advancement, challenging conventional notions of identity, existence, and the essence of what it means to be human. Through evocative visuals and a deeply personal narrative, the artist offers a meditation on the future of humanity in an age where the digital and physical worlds increasingly converge. Goodbye Body has been named a Semi-Finalist in the AI Shorts category at Reel Intelligence 2025, a festival celebrating innovative explorations of artificial intelligence in moving image. Selected from hundreds of international submissions, the work stood out for its poetic meditation on identity, embodiment, and the shifting boundaries between human and machine.

(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.