The opening events for the year-long Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture have been revealed.
RISE (opening event) 10th-11th January 2025 is a spectacular outdoor theatrical event that will take place in City Park and Centenary Square, launching the year-longprogramme. Bradford 2025 will celebrate contemporary culture in all forms and showcase the rich history and heritage of the area. Events, performances and activities will spread from the city to the towns, villages and green spaces across the district, running from January to December 2025.
Audiences for RISE will be greeted with a buzz of activity and a festival atmosphere as City Park is taken over by DJs, food trucks and entertainers ahead of the show, which is created by the district’s own magician Steven Frayne (formerly known as Dynamo) and directed by Kirsty Housley. The event will feature aerial performers, acrobatics and magic, and will have local people, voices and stories at its heart. Performers include a community choir led by the Friendship Choir, the Airedale Symphony Orchestra, and a multi-generational community ensemble of Bradford residents aged from 12 to 65. Bradford-born poet, spoken word artist and playwright Kirsty Taylor, also joins the creative team as dramaturg, alongside locally based writers and performers Kemmi Gill, Nabeela Ahmed and Kenzo Jae, composer and conductor Ben Crick, and composer and DJ Jae Depz.
Two major exhibitions will open in Bradford in January as part of the City of Culture Programme: Nationhood: Memory and Hope (11th Jan – 26th Apr 2025) by acclaimed Ethiopian artist Aïda Muluneh featuring a major new collection of the artist’s surrealist images that reveal the overlooked stories, forgotten histories and quiet moments that shape who we are; and Fighting to be Heard (17th January – 27th April 2025) at Cartwright Hall explores connections between the ancient art of calligraphy and boxing, in collaboration with the British Library.
Also launching in January is DRAW! a nation-wide drawing project inspired and supported by Bradford-born artist David Hockney in which members of the public are invited to take part. The National Science and Media Museum reopens in January following a major £6 million development. It presents David Hockney: Pieced Together (15th January – 18th May 2025) which explores the artist’s pioneering use of film and photography.
The internationally acclaimed Akram Khan Company will perform in Bradford for the first time, with performances of Jungle Book reimagined at the Alhambra Theatre. The production is based on the book by Rudyard Kipling. Khan and his team have reimagined the journey of Mowgli through the eyes of a refugee caught in a world devastated by the impact of climate change.
Cinema is celebrated through the programme in Northern Soul, a season of films from working-class northern women curated by award-winning West Yorkshire born artist and filmmaker Clio Barnard (30th Jan – 9th Feb 2025). Asian Dub Foundation make a welcome return to Bradford to reprise one of their most acclaimed projects, their powerful soundtrack to cult classic French thriller La Haine, performed live to a screening of the film (15th Jan 2025).
Shanaz Gulzar, Creative Director of Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture states:
“All eyes will be on Bradford as we mark the start of 2025 UK City of Culture. Our ambitious opening event will bring the district together reflecting Bradford’s youthfulness, diversity and heritage, lighting the creative spark that will fuel this incredible year and forge unforgettable memories. We’ll introduce audiences to our rural landscapes, pay tribute to our local heroes, and platform the astonishing talent emerging from our radical city. Our time is now – and it starts with RISE.”
Bradford 2025 UK City of Culture is supported using public investment from HM Government, City of Bradford Metropolitan District Council, West Yorkshire Combined Authority and through National Lottery funding from Arts Council England, The National Lottery Heritage Fund, National Lottery Community Fund, Spirit of 2012, as well as private investment and donations from a number of trusts, foundations and corporate sponsors.
Full listings for January – March 2025
RISE (opening event) 10th-11th January 2025 City Park and Centenary Square will be the stage for an astonishing show in January to mark the start of Bradford 2025 – bringing magic to unexpected places. RISE is an unmissable celebration of the people and the communities who make Bradford magic.
Created by Steven Frayne (fka Dynamo) and director Kirsty Housley, RISE will be an astonishing show with local people, voices and stories at its heart. Performers include a community choir led by the Friendship Choir, the Airedale Symphony Orchestra, and a multi-generational community ensemble of Bradford residents aged from 12 to 65 – as well as Bradford-born poet, spoken word artist and playwright Kirsty Taylor, alongside locally based writers and performers Kemmi Gill, Nabeela Ahmed and Kenzo Jae, composer and conductor Ben Crick, and composer and DJ Jae Depz.
DRAW! From January 2025 Bradford-born artist David Hockney has drawn the world around him for 60 years, using everything from pencils to iPads. The artist spent four years studying at the Bradford School of Art, which he joined in 1953 at the age of 16. The focus was on life drawing and he went on to discover a love of painting, often using the streets of post-war Bradford as a subject. Inspired by Hockney, Bradford 2025 is inviting people of all ages across the UK to take part in a drawing project to reflect our everyday lives.
Nationhood: Memory and Hope 11th January – 26th April 2025 Impressions Gallery an outstanding collection of new photography celebrating the diversity of the UK in 2025. The exhibition offers a wealth of insights into the UK’s four nations today, exploring how we each try and shape both our identities and our communities to make the world a better place.
The centrepiece of the exhibition is The Necessity of Seeing, a major new collection of constructed images by Ethiopian photographer Aïda Muluneh. Shot through her surrealist lens at iconic locations in Bradford, Belfast, Cardiff and Glasgow, Muluneh’s new work reveals the overlooked stories, forgotten histories and quiet moments that shape who we are.
First seen on billboards around Bradford in autumn 2024, the exhibition also presents A Portrait of Us, Muluneh’s potent black and white photographs of unsung community heroes from the same four cities.
Nationhood: Memory and Hope also showcases striking new portraits by seven rising stars in UK photography: Shaun Connell and Roz Doherty from Bradford; Chad Alexander from Belfast; Robin Chaddah-Duke and Grace Springer from Cardiff; and Miriam Ali and Haneen Hadiy from Glasgow.
Nationhood: Memory and Hope opens at Impressions Gallery before travelling to Belfast Exposed, Ffotogallery in Cardiff and Street Level Photoworks in Glasgow – making this the first ever UK City of Culture project to take place in all four nations of the UK.
La Haine – Live 15th January 2025 St George’s Hall Asian Dub Foundation make a welcome return to Bradford to reprise one of their most acclaimed projects – their powerful soundtrack to cult classic French thriller La Haine, performed live to a screening of the film for one night only.
La Haine (‘Hatred’) chronicles 24 hours in the lives of three friends from a poor suburb of Paris, where tensions are at breaking point following the death of a local man at the hands of the police. Directed by Mathieu Kassowitz, the film celebrates its 30th anniversary in 2025.
Fighting to be Heard 17th January – 27th April 2025 Cartwright Hall Art Gallery. The ancient art of calligraphy and the noble art of boxing are an unlikely pairing, but they share a surprising amount of common ground. This free exhibition explores connections between the two disciplines through the eyes of a group of British South Asian Muslim men living in Bradford today.
Razwan Ul-Haq is an acclaimed calligrapher and one-time boxing trainee. Tasif Khan is current world champion boxer and founder of Bradford’s Tasif Khan Community Boxing Academy. Together with boxers and trainers from the Academy, they have chosen a selection of rare items from the British Library’s Arabic and Urdu collections, and from the collections of Bradford District Museums & Galleries – from ninth-century calligraphy to extraordinary contemporary work.
Fighting to be Heard also features the men’s personal stories and their reactions to the collections, offering fascinating new perspectives on these objects.
Jungle Book reimagined 24 & 25 January Alhambra Theatre Akram Khan Company perform in Bradford for the first time as part of Bradford 2025. Akram Khan’s Jungle Book reimagined is based on the much-loved story by Rudyard Kipling. With a new sense of urgency, Khan has reinterpreted this known story from another perspective, through the lens of today’s children – those who will inherit our world and become our future storytellers. Embedded in the roots of The Jungle Book is the deep threat that mankind poses towards nature. Khan and his team have reimagined the journey of Mowgli through the eyes of a refugee caught in a world devastated by the impact of climate change. They tell the story of a child who will help us to listen again, not to our voices but to the voices of the natural world that we, the modern world, try to silence. Jungle Book reimagined speaks to all generations as a step to remind, to relearn and to reimagine a new world together.
Northern Soul 30th January – 9th February Pictureville Cinema at the National Science and Media Museum Northern Soul is a celebration of northern women in cinema – as writers, directors and trailblazers behind the camera, and as the subjects of some of the most compelling stories in contemporary cinema. Presented at Pictureville in the newly reopened National Science & Media Museum, the season is curated by Clio Barnard, the West Yorkshire-raised writer director of The Arbor, centred on Bradford writer Andrea Dunbar, The Selfish Giant and Ali & Ava, a moving romance set in the city.
The selections in Northern Soul span six decades, from a ’60s British New Wave classic to the latest feature from one of our most exciting directors. Screenings include Gurinder Chadha’s Bhaji on the Beach, Carol Morley’s Typist Artist Pirate King and Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights and will be complemented by discussions, interviews and other special events.
BBC Introducing 28th February The Underground BBC Introducing, the BBC’s music discovery platform, will be shining the spotlight on the region’s best unsigned and emerging artists for Bradford 2025. Across four gigs at Bradford’s Underground, we’ll be hearing from some of the most exciting new bands and singers from Bradford District and around – hand-picked by the tastemakers at BBC Introducing. They’ll be following in the footsteps of Florence + the Machine, Olivia Dean and Sam Fender, just some of the acts who received BBC Introducing support at the start of their careers.
PLAY: Grue 8th–23rd February 2025 Damart Mill, Bingley Made by Yorkshire artist Steve Wintercroft and produced by charitable community producing company ARCADE, Grue is a fantastical world, built alongside the community entirely from recycled and repurposed cardboard. Grue invites audiences to step into a series of enchanting landscapes to meet a host of incredible characters. It features live performers, gentle lighting effects and a beautiful soundscape.
The Dreams I Had: Andrea Dunbar 12th March 2025 St George’s Hall Andrea Dunbar wrote vividly and brilliantly of the Bradford she knew. Born and raised in Buttershaw, she made her name as a teenager when The Arbor, her first play, premiered to huge acclaim at London’s Royal Court, one of the world’s leading theatres for new writing. She followed it with Rita, Sue and Bob Too and Shirley, two plays that combine domestic drama, social comment and wicked humour to extraordinary effect – and that remain just as relevant and powerful today.
Bradford 2025 is paying tribute to Dunbar, marking 45 years since the premiere of The Arbor and 35 years since her tragically early death. The Dreams I Had is directed by Erica Whyman, former deputy artistic director at the Royal Shakespeare Company, with dramaturgy from Bradford born and based, Kat Rose-Martin. The Dreams I Had presents staged readings of selections from her works, celebrating the explosive talent of this once-in-a-generation writer.
People Powered Press, March Venues tba The People Powered Press is a non-profit company based in Shipley, formed in 2021 around the largest letterpress printing press in the world. It engages communities through creative writing, typography and letterpress printing to amplify the voices of local people with important and interesting things to say about the world and their place in it, co-creating prints, zines and large-scale murals for exhibition in indoor and outdoor public spaces.
The Press is working with members of four groups from around the district: People First Keighley & Craven, students at Co-op Academy Grange, Bradford’s Gypsy and Traveller community, and a girls’ group based at MAPA Bradford community centre. Through creative writing workshops with Antony Dunn, the Press’s Poet in Residence, the participants will write a collection of poetry, and each will collaboratively create a single phrase that gets to the heart of the issues they’ve explored in the workshops. Each group will then visit the Press to help hand-print the letters of their phrase into four giant murals, which will be seen in venues around Bradford in March 2025.
MORE: bradford2025.co.uk
