AV Festival

AV Festival is an international Festival of contemporary art, film and music, based in Newcastle upon Tyne. A biennial event, the Festival is thematically curated across contemporary artistic practice and wider society.

AV Festival 2014: Extraction ran from 1 – 31 March 2014. The curated programme featured 11 exhibitions, 36 film screenings, 10 concerts and 11 new commissions.

Highlights of the Festival included newly commissioned art works, sound walk and performances by Akio Suzuki, new commissions by Susan Stenger and Lara Almarcegui, with weekend focuses on Digging for Sound and Post-Colonial Cinema. The closing weekend saw the music group Test Dept return with their debut event since the group disbanded in 1997. This large-scale outdoor event took place at the dramatic Dunston Staiths. Viewed from boats on the River Tyne over three nights, the event marked the 30th anniversary of the Miners’ Strike.

AV Festival 2012: As Slow As Possible ran from 1–31 March 2012, and had the curatorial theme of slowness. Titled after ASLSP (As SLow aS Possible), by artist John Cage, the AV Festival 2012 theme explored how artists have stretched, measured and marked the passage of time. Some works lasted the full 31 days of the Festival.

For the first time, the Festival ran for a whole month. It took place at different speeds, paces and times of day, across Newcastle, Gateshead, Middlesbrough and Sunderland, including 22 exhibitions, 38 film screenings, 15 concerts, six walks, a 744-hour continuous online radio, plus 16 new commissions and 18 UK premieres.

AV Festival 2012 achieved 94,096 visits, a 33% increase on 2010. It attracted 24% of visitors from outside the region, contributed £516k GVA to the local economy, and achieved a return on investment of £2.88 for every £1 of public funding received. 92% of the audience rated the quality of the Festival as good or outstanding. In his Guardian article Sukhdev Sandhu described the Festival as “one of the most imaginative festivals to be staged in the UK for many years.”

Highlights of AV Festival 2012 included: new commissions by Yoshi Wada, Susan Stenger, Phill Niblock, Jonathan Schipper and Torsten Lauschmann; the closing Festival Slowalk by Hamish Fulton; a tribute concert to John Cage; Kenneth Goldsmith in Morden Tower; and public readings of On Kawara’s One Million Years.

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