Platform films

Platform Films are Chris Reeves, Ann Diego, Christine Tongue and Norman Thomas.

Platform emerged in 1982, inspired by the legacy of Cinema Action, a London-based collective whose films reflected the socialist ideas and trade union militancy of the 1960s and 1970s.

Platform continues the tradition of left-wing filmmaking begun in the 1930s by the Film and Photo League and the Progressive Film Institute, with the goal of raising political and social awareness and inspiring change.

As well as making its own documentaries, and in the past making programmes for Channel 4 and the BBC, Platform also curates a major archive of left-wing films with titles dating back to the 1930s, on topics such as war, trade unions, housing and Ireland.

Major documentaries in Platform’s library include “Wapping The Workers Story”, “Not In My Name” (about the campaign to stop the attack on Iraq), and “Who Killed Mark Faulkner” (about homelessness in London). More recent productions are “Oh Jeremy Corbyn – The Big Lie” (2023) about the rise and fall of Jeremy Corbyn and “Censoring Palestine” (2025) about the suppression of the truth about the Gaza genocide.

youtube.com/@chrisreeves599

facebook.com/platformfilmsuk

Platform Films at MAW25:
Censoring Palestine Screening + Q&A
Thursday, 2nd October, 7-9 pm
The Auxiliary Project Space

Get free tickets on the Middlesbrough Art Week Eventbrite page here.

Sigita Silina

Sigita is a contemporary Latvian-born photographer, filmmaker, and visual artist currently based in Darlington.  Her practice takes a keen interest in sociocultural dynamics and looks into the transformative power of visual language, technology, and social ideologies on the intricacies of human behaviour.

Informed by the realms of cognitive science and visual expression, Sigita's interdisciplinary approach seamlessly merges still images and videos, employing both digital and analogue mediums.
 

'I am deeply honoured to have been selected for the Tees Valley solo Show. This opportunity means a great deal to me, and I know the support and platform provided will be invaluable, and I can’t wait to share the final piece with audiences. Over the next few month I look so much forward to collaborate with the team. I am extremely excited to bringing this project to life at MAW25'

www.sigitasilina.com

@sigitasilina

Jack Willshaw

Jack Willshaw is a 20-year-old visual artist from Thornaby on Tees, in the North East of England. His work explores themes of memory, class, and cultural erasure in post-industrial Britain. Drawing from his own lived experience, he critiques the systems that attempt to shape working-class life. At the heart of his practice is a desire to create space for a more sensitive, nuanced understanding of class, one that moves beyond stereotype and misrepresentation.

@artjbw

Close and Remote

Close and Remote are Sophie Mellor and Simon Poulter, who frequently collaborate with artists such as Roney Fraser-Munroe and Jon Dovey. They have a national practice working with organisations including the Brigstow Institute, Cabot Institute, Cultural Engine, FACT, and others.

Their work spans film, performance, VR, drawing, and music, often focusing on climate change, culture, and overlooked or marginal spaces. Key projects include We Are Making A Film About Mark Fisher (2025), Live Model (2024) – a performance game on Net Zero – and Orchard (2024), exploring the social and ecological role of green spaces.

From 2024 to 2025, they lead the Personal to the Planetary cohort, a group of artists and activists engaging deeply with the climate emergency. Their approach values co-creation, embraces uncertainty, and sees aesthetics as a vital force in shaping cultural conversations.

www.closeandremote.net

@markfisherfilm

Rosie Gibbens

Rosie Gibbens (b.1993) is a London-based sculpture artist. Gibbens studied BA Performance Designs and Practice at Central Saint Martins in 2015 and then went on to study MA Contemporary Art Practice Performance in 2018. She has had many solo exhibitions and performances that have included ‘Parabiosis’, The Bomb Factory, London in 2024, ‘Skin of my Teeth’, Midlands Arts Centre, Birmingham in 2022 and ‘Carrot and Stick’  at the Somers Gallery in London in 2019. 

Gibbens makes performances and photographs that use her body. She explores the overlaps between identity, labour and consumer desire. She often makes sculptures that combine household gadgets with sewn body parts. Rosie playfully blends these things to unpack and question the future body as it becomes increasingly ‘optimised’ by technological development.

Co-commission with Artbomb Doncaster.

www.rosiegibbens.com

@rosiegibbens

Darren Cullen

Darren Cullen is a satirical artist, activist,  illustrator and writer. He was born in Leeds to Irish immigrant parents and is currently based in London. Cullen studied advertising at Leeds College of Art, where he learnt the techniques and language of the medium, but changed direction when he learnt about the ethical implications involved in this career path. After moving away from advertising, Cullen moved on to study fine art at Glasgow School of Art.

In his work, Cullen used the language of advertising to communicate the empty promises of consumerism and the lies of military recruiters. Cullen has gone on to publish several comics, releasing his first one in 2013 called ‘Join the army’. Cullen has also written a series of short films called "Action Man: Battlefield" to draw attention to the way the Ministry of Defence targets children as young as five with its official toy range, which includes an RAF Drone Playset.

www.spellingmistakescostlives.com

@spellingmistakescostlives

Filippos Tsitsopoulos

Filippos Tsitsopoulos (1967) is a painter, installation, media and performance artist who explores the limits and the interfaces between performance and painting since the 1990s. His practice engages the spectator/participant in a “new” form of theatre that integrates performativity as a catalyst of our daily life. Theatrical conventions and props are applied to his visual practices, such as masks made from living materials, including animals or plants.

His video installations have been exhibited at a variety of distinguished venues and contemporary art institutions including: The Serpentine Gallery, FACT Liverpool, The Bluecoat, in Frieze Art Fair London, in Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin, twice in the Tate Modern, in Toynbee Studios and in Artsadmin, in CGAC de Santiago de Compostela, at the Chelsea Theatre in London this last year and in Alte Nationalgalerie in Berlin with the project “Goya Prophet der Moderne” at 2005, /“Les Bourgeois de Calais”- Performance. 

Neue National Galerie in Berlin at 2007, his project “Jelly and Sugar” at Círculo de Bellas Artes 2004 and “Craze” at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid at 2007 /“ASHES PERFORMANCE”, CAM Naples Museum ARTWAR, DOCUMENTA 13 Kassel Performance Department, 13 Location- 2012, /“Feldeinsamkeit”. BONE 14. Festival für Aktionskunsk in Bern. Cur. Norbert Klassen. Bern 2011, / “Just a Laugh, Just a Cry”.

filippostsitsopoulos.com

@filippos_tsitsopoulos

Kirsten Luckins

Kirsten Luckins is a writer, performer and artist based in Hartlepool. As founding director of the Tees Women Poets, she leads women of all backgrounds in Teesside to create and perform work about the issues that affect them and the values they live by.

Her own poetry is inspired by ekphrasis, eco-poetics, and experimentation generally, and has been highly commended by the Laurel Prize for Eco-Poetry and the Rialto Nature & Place Competition.

She is currently artist-in-residence at Tees Valley Wildlife Trust, and has recently exhibited written and visual works on climate and biodiversity loss as part of her commitment to Culture Declares Emergency. 

kirstenluckins.com

@imelda_says

John B Ledger

John B Ledger (b. 1984, Barnsley, South Yorkshire) is a visual artist whose work emerges from lengthy autoethnographic and socio-political assessments. Taking the form of large-scale drawings, maps or films, his practice is deeply informed by the post-industrial landscape and the post-historical culture that defined his formative years. John’s work also looks at our relations to the ‘self’ in late capitalism and an age of social media overload.

john-ledger.co.uk

@jb_ledger

Bobby Benjamin

Tees-based artist Bobby Benjamin creates work in sculpture, installation and painting inspired by his direct experience of poverty and working-class life, questioning the role of the underprivileged within the arts.

Through his playful use of found objects and recurring salient thematic motifs, Benjamin balances tension and fragility with strength and solidity to create work that evokes both nostalgia and unease in the viewer. His multidisciplinary practice challenges traditional composition and concerns of cultural hegemony and industry voyeurism. 

Alongside his visual practice, Benjamin serves as director/curator of Middlesbrough art space, Pineapple Black and as a Special Lecturer with Teesside University. His work is held in the Middlesbrough Collection at MIMA.

@bobbybenjamin

Kitty McKay

Kitty McKay is an artist and researcher eternally preoccupied with the ways in which public space is made and unmade. Working across installation, moving-image, sculpture, sound, collage and writing, their approach to practice is informed by feminist, queer and crip frameworks for understanding and overcoming the ways power constructs place. Their installations seek to evoke the errant, dissonant and unauthorised socialities and practices that happen in urban space through the dislocation of materials and media that comprise and enforce spatial hegemony. 

Kitty is in the final year of an MFA at Newcastle University. They are a former member of the School of the Damned and received a BA in Fine Art and History of Art from Goldsmiths University in 2018. Kitty works in and around many of Newcastle’s artist-led DIY initiatives, and they are a researcher on various collaborative projects exploring long-term futures for artist-led spaces and workspaces in the North East of England. Kitty also runs Incursions, a collaborative, socially-engaged art and research project, which uses group walking to deepen relationships between people and place. Incursions’ regular ‘walking forums’ generate group discussion in order to imagine what lies beyond neoliberal spatial hegemony, drawing on psycho/socio-geography, social histories, pop cultures, personal experiences, participatory research methods, mapping, archiving and friendship. 

They have exhibited with and programmed public activity for BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, New Contemporaries, Farrell Centre, The NewBridge Project, Institute for Contemporary Arts, South London Gallery, Firstsite Gallery, The National Trust, Vane Gallery and Art Licks.

@kittmck

Slow White Fall

Slow White Fall is the experimental music project of British artist Oliver Ho, known for pushing the boundaries of sound through heavy atmospheres and emotional intensity. Drawing from ambient, post-rock, industrial, and death metal, the project creates music that is both meditative and overwhelming.

Slow White Fall made its live debut at Berlin Atonal, a key moment that revealed the full power and immersive nature of the project. In 2021, Oliver released the album Flesh In The Modern Age, a deep dive into slow-burning, cinematic soundscapes. This was followed in 2023 by Flood, released on Avalanche Recordings, the label run by Justin Broadrick of Godflesh. Joining Broadrick’s roster marked a natural progression, allowing the music to evolve into even denser, more distorted sonic realms. Slow White Fall. Each chapter of Slow White Fall reflects Oliver Ho’s personal exploration of sound—music that is not only heavy and hypnotic, but also deeply emotional and transcendent.

deathandleisure.bandcamp.com

@brokenenglish.club.oliver.ho

Svitlana Dovbush

Ukrainian artist. Born in 1996 in Kyiv. She works with moving image, sound, photography, and performance. Her practice explores productive archiving, corporeality, and the relationships between humans, nature, and technology. Since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, Svitlana has worked across Ukrainian cities as a producer with international media outlets such as ZDF (Germany), Corriere della Sera (Italy), RAI (Italy), and ANSA (Italy). Since September 2023, she has been studying time-based and visual arts at the University of the Arts London (UAL), Central Saint Martins.

@sveta_svetomuzyka

Sophie Beresford

Sophie Beresford is a Sunderland-based artist who uses her considerable creative imagination to visually represent what she calls “council estate culture”. 

Key to Sophie’s practice is an overarching theme of regional pride, her work espouses the benefits that culture in the wider sense can have on people. “My experience of my own culture is that we have no time for creativity because we are supposed to get on with getting a ‘proper job’ and working full time for a pittance doing some shit we have no interest in to survive. There is so much creativity in people it is a travesty to see it being locked away, so I’m interested in reconnecting people to their creativity and dreams and supporting them to put it/them into action.”

The visual element of the exhibition takes influence from the use of symbolism used to represent culture’s visual language, from Adidas stripes to the Lacoste crocodile emblem and the tree of life used on Timberland shoes. “Expect lots of velvet, sportswear and trippy shizzle and geometry.”

Richie Culver

Richie Culver (born Hull) is a multidisciplinary artist working in painting, music, performance and photography. He graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2023 on the MA painting programme.

Culver’s practice is becoming increasingly difficult to pin down. The myriad of processes employed by the artist seem to act in criticism of one another, providing layers of discourse - a heavy, schizophrenic internal monologue concerned only with the eternal deconstruction of itself. 

Discovering Art (with a capital ‘A’) after stumbling across a copy of Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency at an afterparty, Culver found that he understood the images. In the haze of skunk smoke, twisting conversation, and creeping anxiety of the early morning, there came a convalescence. Throbbing Gristle, through a broken speaker, talked in the same tongue as Goldin’s arresting photographs, situation as curator, jittering atmosphere provides the context. 

Often, when described as having a multidisciplinary approach, artists utilise different mediums as a means of approaching the same concern. A sculpture of a painting, a performance to activate the space, a book of everything to take home with you. 

Unique to Culver’s practice is the antagonistic relationship that each process seems to have both with itself and the other methodologies existing within the miasma.

Paintings seemingly designed with the express purpose of undermining painting elbow their way into the foreground, developing in layers against their will until brushing up against the edge of formalism: The swagger and sardonicism of the text giving way, submitting to its role as a formal device. In spite of themselves, they continue to exist - paintings in denial of painting. 

Aesthetically, the paintings employ devices found in the work of artists like Kippenberger or Meese, whilst equally echoing the process-driven approach of Christopher Wool or Wade Guyton - albeit with the artist’s gesture acting in place of printer and stencil. 

For all of their pomp and ardour, Culver’s paintings provide inroads both to viewers enamoured by their self-deprecation and mockery of art-world tropes as well as those taken in by their clear and coherent relationship to the history of painting.

Formally, the works are becoming increasingly aware of how they perform as paintings, with areas being reworked or removed entirely, seemingly with the aim of creating a compositional harmony, or employing the rejection of one as an intentional device. Forever at odds with themselves, Culver’s paintings are cannibalistic, with particular phrases, shapes or styles piling on one another until they reach their point of expiration. Meaning isn’t derived, it’s squeezed until the fruit is dry. 

The artist’s prolific sonic output exists in another field, taking influence from outsider music, experimental synthesis and Power Electronics to produce a body of work typified by stark use of minimal sampling and synthesis chewing on the often-modulated chunks of spoken word. His 2024 release, Hostile Environments, provides the output closest to music, employing the use of ambient atmospherics and cut-up melody as a backing to the increasingly effect-driven spoken word and sampling. 

Performing live in a variety of settings, from squats and basement bars to Berlin Atonal or Camden Arts Centre, Culver takes the stage with a sort of ambivalence to his surroundings. Nowhere is ever perfect because it could be somewhere else, certainty is an enemy when you make a friend of clouded memory, undulating sense of self and the endless need to move and reassess. 

www.richie-culver.com

@richieculver

Regis

Regis is prominent figure in the UK’s electronic underground, Regis (the pseudonym of Irish-born Karl O’Connor) has been pushing against the grain of techno since the early 1990s. Grounded in the post-punk and industrial scenes of the '80s, his early work helped define a distinctively British strain of loop-driven, raw-edged techno.

Co-founder of the influential label Downwards, Regis championed a fiercely D.I.Y. ethos,  releasing music by a close-knit group of like-minded artists and cultivating a sound that fused industrial abrasiveness with minimalist drive. His early records, including the 1995 12" Montreal and debut album Gymnastics (1996), carved out a cold, stripped-back aesthetic that would echo throughout the genre.

In the 2000s, O’Connor’s practice evolved into darker, more textural territories. Albums like Penetration (2001) incorporated field recordings and drones, blurring the line between techno and sonic art. Collaborations followed, including with Chrislo Haas (of D.A.F.) and long-time peers Surgeon, Function, and Female, culminating in the formation of Sandwell District, a label and collective that became one of the most influential forces in reshaping 21st-century techno.

With his deep influence stretching from warehouse basements to Berlin’s Berghain, Regis continues to shape the future of techno by mining its most confrontational roots, resisting polish, rejecting compromise, and always sounding one step ahead.

@regis.dns

Oksana Kazmina

Photo by Andriy Boyko

Oksana Kazmina is a Ukrainian artist, filmmaker and educator, who works at the intersection of performance and moving image. She is also a participant in the cine-movement and NGO “Freefilmers,” which was originally founded in Mariupol, Ukraine. Since 2015, Kazmina has been working on her debut feature, “Underwater,” which evolved into an online exhibition www.dokvira.cam. Just before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Kazmina initiated a series of media performances “Contemporary History of Ukraine,” (CHU). Currently, Kazmina teaches video art courses at Syracuse University (USA), and conducts research on ritual and moving image, with focus on the work of Kyiv-born avant-garde artist and filmmaker Maya Deren.

At Middlesbrough Art Festival, Kazmina will present 21st episode of CHU. CHU is a live montage of audiovisual materials from Kazmina's personal archives, including footage from Kyiv’s underground art and music scene of the past decade, film expeditions to Eastern Ukraine with cine-movement and NGO Freefilmers, maps, microscopic imaging of Kazmina’s biome, and more.

@okazmina

Nika Krykun

Nika is a Ukrainian multimedia artist from Kyiv, based in London since May 2022 after the full-scale war reshaped her life. With 12 years of classical piano and organ training, she also works across painting, sculpture, performance, and film. A graduate of the Kyiv School of Art and Music No. 5 (2019), she has participated in concerts and exhibitions across Ukraine and Europe and appeared in the Berlinale-winning feature Stop Zemlia by Kateryna Gornostai.

Since 2024, she has been part of Triyka, an art collective she co-founded, which has held exhibitions in London. In 2025, she was nominated for Photo London. Currently focusing on analogue photography and film, Nika sees cinema as a medium that unites visual art, sound, performance, and storytelling, her way of communicating with the world and connecting with herself.

@nikakrik

Liberty Hodes

Liberty Hodes is an artist and facilitator based at The NewBridge Project in Shieldfield. Their practice spans multiple disciplines, with a primary focus on performance, video and writing, often tangled up in humour.

They are interested in bringing a feeling of ancientness into a contemporary context, exploring links between stone circles and tower blocks and bollards as stone or stone-like structures. Recently, they’ve been reflecting on the presence of demolition and regeneration in Newcastle, and have wanted to explore the links between demolition, the body and queerness, and have been working on a series of performance and performance-to- camera works called “demolition bodies”, which have involved the destruction of varied scale cardboard replicas of the North East. Although

They were born and live in the North-East of England and graduated with an MA in Performance Making from Goldsmiths in 2021, following a BA in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts in 2015, and have since taken part in The NewBridge Project’s alternative education programme, The Collective Studio. In 2022, they worked with another NewBridge Project studio member to set up NeighbourHood Watch, a monthly in-person screening event for video and digital moving image work intended to give artists and video-makers a space to share their work outside of the context of social media.

@libertyhodes

Jeremy Hutchison

Jeremy Hutchison (b. 1979) is a British artist based in London.

Working across performance, sculpture, and video, his practice explores themes of power and resistance. Much of his work intervenes in systems of global production, interrogating the complex relationship between consumerism and Empire.

Hutchison has produced work in China, India, Palestine, Senegal, Taiwan, Egypt, Somalia, Cambodia, Mexico, and Greece. In each context, he seeks to collapse geographic, historical, and bodily space to expose the entanglement between contemporary consumer practices and colonial histories. His work frequently appropriates the aesthetics of capitalist spectacle—its forms, structures, and surfaces—collaborating with industrial facilities, film crews, and fashion photographers to develop a visual language marked by “wrong-headed commercialism”: a seductive kind of nonsense that continually punctures its own logic.

At its core, Hutchison’s practice challenges the tyranny of common sense. Through rupturing logic, collapsing norms, and weaponising humour for political ends, he constructs a form of radical absurdity plunged through the surface of neoliberalism. The result is a self-devouring monster—an absurd spectacle that turns on itself.

jeremyhutchison.com

@jeremyhutchison