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Nov 11, 2024 | 
corridor8.co.uk | Danielle Ash |Uma Breakdown |Annie O’Donnell |Annie O'Donnell
Middlesbrough Art Week (MAW) 2024, in its seventh edition, demonstrated once again how contemporary art can serve as a catalyst for community engagement and social change. Running from 26 September to 5 October, this year’s festival titled In the Now and the Far addressed the crossovers between urgent social action and long-term future-building in the North East of England.
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May 20, 2024 | 
corridor8.co.uk | Kate Liston |Michele Allen |Uma Breakdown
At seven minutes’ walk from the main festival venue of The Maltings, the Gymnasium Gallery feels far away. This is one way to scale this year’s Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival (BFMAF). It comes from aggregating walking times with programme schedules, film running times and the need to eat – a miscalculation of which meant some friends and I ended up in a screening with wrapped cod and chips stuffed in our bags. In fact, the distances are small.
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Dec 12, 2023 | 
corridor8.co.uk | Christie Yung-hei Chan |Amrit Randhawa |Marcus Barnett |Uma Breakdown
Christie Chan speaks to Dr Suzy O’Hara about Blue Futures, an interactive multimedia exhibition at The Word: National Centre for the Written Word in South Shields, featuring three projects: BE THE SEA, Sound Dig, and Renewable Blue. Curated and commissioned by O’Hara, this exhibition illuminates the dynamic and intricate relationship between humans and water in the coastal communities of South Tyneside.
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Dec 6, 2023 | 
corridor8.co.uk | Uma Breakdown
Arriving for Middlesbrough Art Week (MAW),the first thing that strikes me is how densely packed the city is with exhibitions, events, screenings, talks, and performances. Hub gallery The Auxiliary hosts six exhibitions, the majority of them group shows or collective projects, as well as multiple performances. There are twenty other venues, some also containing multiple exhibitions, and almost all group projects.
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Sep 27, 2023 | 
corridor8.co.uk | Steve Spithray |Laura Biddle |Uma Breakdown |Abi Mitchell
People Powered: Stories from the River Tees is unlike most exhibitions for the way it directly incorporates its audience, so that not just artefacts, photographs and paintings are included here but the local community itself. In Chris Davies’ ‘49 Bridges’ (2023), the photographer celebrates the interconnectivity of the architectural form and the River Tees through the ages.
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Sep 13, 2023 | 
liverpoolnoise.com | Uma Breakdown |Liverpool Noise
From 20 October 2023 – 28 January 2024, FACT presents two major solo shows by artists Jenkin van Zyl and Uma Breakdown. The artists’ works look to defy the nature of conventional heroic narratives. Through processes of retelling and reenactment they open up possibilities for centering the overlooked, the queer, and the monstrous. Their works offer glimpses into the transitory joy of building new communities, while also reflecting on the cyclical nature of time.
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Jul 27, 2023 | 
corridor8.co.uk | Ella Otomewo |Even Allen |Uma Breakdown |Emma Curd
Queer writer and philosopher Simon(e) van Saarloos speaks of rules as ‘physical, integrated knowledge; you follow the rules without questioning them’.1 This, they say, results in scenarios, relationships and games that lose their playful character where ‘nothing new is created any longer’. These ideas were playing on my mind whilst I explored Luke Beech’s first solo exhibition Winner Breaks First at Humber Street Gallery in Hull.
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May 2, 2023 | 
containermagazine.co.uk | Uma Breakdown
Play Élan Vitale A version with reduced animations is available here“In this situation,you’ve got yourself into a place where you shouldn’t be.”Uma Breakdown’s atmospheric, wry, gothic science-fiction text adventure Élan Vitale is the result of their residency with Container Magazine. A broken into flat. A pile of old machinery and energy drinks. A diary pointing to how it got this way. Dare you set foot inside and learn?
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Mar 29, 2023 | 
corridor8.co.uk | Michael A Orr |Uma Breakdown |Ian Scot Nesbitt |Holly Grange
Anne-Marie Atkinson’s ‘632700’ aims to bring overlooked voices back into direct view. Commissioned by Photo Fringe for their tenth edition festival in 2022 Real Utopias, the work brings together excluded perspectives to imagine new futures. For Atkinson, utopias are about ‘how we are constantly making the world’ and ‘how people evaluate themselves and their relationships within it’.
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Mar 2, 2023 | 
corridor8.co.uk | Uma Breakdown
02.03.2023 — Exploration by Uma Breakdown Installation view of 'Two Plus Two Makes Four', 2023, including works by Jochen Gerz, Tim Etchells, Lizz Brady, Martin Creed and Kirsty Harris. Photograph by Rachel Deakin. ‘Heat, noises, whirlwinds’ – Michel Serres, The Parasite, 1982I want you to think about heavy winds, the disturbances that they bring to systems of all scales, to bodies and legislature.
