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performance

performance

maw25 performance

Across ten days, artists will intervene in shopping streets, public spaces, and empty retail units to create encounters that are playful, uncanny, and politically charged.

Jeremy Hutchison’s Dead White Man haunts the high street, a shuffling presence that unsettles and provokes. Liberty Hodes’ Marge 2.0 reimagines Marge Simpson in a deserted shopfront.

Filippos Tsitsopoulos’ Auction of Morality confronts Europe’s necrotic moral theatre, voicing contradictions and warnings against selective empathy. Kirsten Luckins’ I Love The World invites audiences into intimate conversation about our fractured relationship with nature. Finally, Linda Cassels’ Promenade: Quid Pro Quo positions a red briefcase in the heart of the city, questioning who has the power to speak of money, policy, and futures.

Together, these performances blur the line between art and the everyday, opening space for reflection, provocation, and collective imagination.

  • Opening Night Performance

    Location: Middlesbrough Town Centre, walkabout

    Sat 27 Sept • 11:30am // 1:30pm // 3:30pm

    Dead White Man is Jeremy Hutchison’s ongoing performance and installation project exploring the global trade in second-hand clothing. Wearing sculptural costumes made from discarded garments, Hutchison performs as the “Dead White Man,” a spectral figure haunting the economies of waste colonialism, the work confronts histories of consumption, dispossession and the afterlives of Western excess.

  • Opening Night Performance

    Location: Pineapple Black Arts, Hill Street Centre, Middlesbrough, TS1 1SU (Window Gallery)

    Thu 2 Oct - Sat 4 Oct 11am-3pm (intermittently)

    Liberty Hodes presents Marge 2.0, a live art performance and window installation set in a shopping centre shopfront, where Marge Simpson reappears; strangely out of place and slightly lost. Over a decade after Hodes first transformed with yellow paint, blue cotton wool hair, and a hand-crafted cardboard version of The Simpsons kitchen, this new iteration places Marge in abandoned retail space, caught between satire and sincerity. Hovering somewhere between pop culture relic and suburban ghost, Marge2.0 explores domesticity, identity, and disorientation in a world where The Simpsons and Shopping Centres are no longer the centre of shared cultural experience.

  • Location: Concourse (by Muffin Break), Hill Street Shopping Centre, Middlesbrough, TS1 1SU

    Sat 4 Oct

    11am-3pm (intermittently)

    Writer Kirsten Luckins loves the natural world, but these days thinking about the environment raises more questions and concerns than her writing knows how to answer. What about you?Equipped only with questions taken from classic nature poems, she’s here to start a conversation with you about it all…

    Meet Kirsten on the bench.

  • Location: Middlesbrough Town Centre, walkabout

    Sat 4 Oct • 11am-3pm (intermittently)

    This performance begins with contradiction: a white European artist invoking the words of a Native American leader whose people were silenced and whose language was colonised. The speech attributed to Chief Seattle, remains a haunting relic of environmental and spiritual clarity, and here it is neither claimed nor represented, but allowed to lead into the present, exposing the West’s compulsive recycling of voices it once sought to erase. Europe, meanwhile, cloaks cruelty in humanitarian fabric, shouts justice while harbouring fascism, racism, and imperialism under new logos and soft diplomacy. 20. performances

    This performance insists that morality must be actioned and calls not for a spectacle of solidarity but for the urgent decolonisation of Europe’s own soul. Liberation elsewhere cannot be performed until Europe dismantles its delusions, its necrotic moral theatre, and its selective empathy. This is not a lesson but a warning.

  • Location: Middlesbrough Town Centre, walkabout (starting Dundas House)

    Sat 4 Oct • 11am // 1pm

    Linda Cassels presents Promenade Performance: a figure steps into public space with deliberate presence, carrying a bold red briefcase marked

    MOF, a reimagining of the UK’s iconic Budget Day “red box.” This simple yet charged gesture confronts the city’s colonial legacies, economic disparities, and silent architectures of power. Both resistance and provocation, the act questions who gets to speak of money, policy, and futures, while refusing invisibility and erasure.

    The MOF becomes not a prop but a demand for accountability, an invitation for witnesses to reflect on whose knowledge, labour, and histories are valued in shaping the world ahead.

    Co-commission with Artbomb Doncaster.

  • Opening Night Performance

    Location: 12 Captain Cook Square, Middlesbrough (former TK Maxx)

    Thursday 25 September

    7:30pm

  • Opening Night Performance

    Location: 12 Captain Cook Square, Middlesbrough (former TK Maxx)

    Thursday 25 September

    8:15pm