Directed by distinguished Beijing-based poet Yu Er, and curated by Cheng Xi, the inaugural Ruthin International Arts Festival will creatively enliven the historic North Wales town of Ruthin as a dynamic living arts scene - running 28 June - 28 July - via an exciting programme of site-responsive artistic experiences expressed across many disciplines and mediums.

The Ruthin International Arts Festival seeks to explore the fertile intersection of cultural diversity and human connection - creating spaces where international creativity can flourish within the local and cultural soils of Ruthin.

The Festival’s theme for 2024 is Elsewhere.

The Ruthin International Arts Festival 2024 centres on site-specificity, experimentation, medium diversity, community symbiosis, ecological integration, and sustainable growth in contemporary art practice. This year, we have shifted from representational strategies to active artist and public involvement. By engaging with Ruthin's history, culture, customs, climate, architecture, and community, curators and artists will transform the town into an art event, connecting with the host community through art. This approach integrates art into public spaces, events, and community life, creating a new collective living space and contributing to community development.

This year's festival adopts a "Site-Responsive" model, turning Ruthin into a living scene through everyday life practices. This fosters deeper community connections and long-term local engagement. The curators emphasize the art scene independent of institutions, focusing on site, body, moment, and organic spatial engagement. They aim to explore advanced concepts, innovative forms, and contemporary artistic mediums and ideologies. The festival seeks to revive the experimental and avant-garde spirit of late 20th-century contemporary art, reconnecting art with the real world.

Within the academic framework, the curators aim to merge multi-disciplinary research methods, exploring the overlap between contemporary art theories and sociology, politics, and relational aesthetics. They encourage artists to delve into the relationship between theoretical research and expanded practice based on existing academic research.

The concept of community in art reflects the diverse life experiences within a local context. Our goal is to build a new art ecosystem by merging expressions from different places to foster collaborations and transformations. The artists' collaborative recreations will engage locals in discussions about their living environment, both externally and internally. The Ruthin International Arts Festival will establish relationships with various communities through artistic interventions, mediation, and dialogue, encouraging long-term local field research projects. This initiative aims to blend artists' personal experiences with community life, returning the right of artistic creation to the community and allowing new ideas to grow alongside it.

This year's festival includes Home Curator project, Welsh Language writing open call, local ecological research and various community art workshops. Local residents will participate in the work-in-progress art programme and on-site execution, promoting art integration into daily life and strengthening connections between "here" and "elsewhere." The festival will adopt an interdisciplinary approach, creating dynamic interactions between artworks and their surrounding environment. This fosters a continuous dialogue between art and Ruthin's history, humanities, and natural environment, developing an organic art ecosystem and rich artistic narration in Ruthin.

An open-ended attitude that engages the audience in live performances with artists. We aim to experiment with spatial intervention, artistic improvisation, and organic production to transform public space discourse, creating a live art festival that grows organically.

Through poetry, sound, and physical performance, we seek diversity and coherence in art forms, moving viewers from solitary viewing to a collaborative, participatory process that activates sensory experiences. Participating artists' works include experimental performances, film screenings, poetry, installations, sound, theatre, writing, and socially engaged art. These activities emphasises openness and engagement, aiming to create a sustainable mode of knowledge production and a critical field to rethink the experiences of individuals or communities removed from their original environments.

Artists will break medium limitations and extend contemporary art boundaries within this boundless free field. We will open the exhibition to public improvisation and interaction, organise artist residencies and workshops, and selectively archive these practices for future exhibitions.

Ultimately, we aspire to realise the subversive potential of live art, challenging the art world with festival-born events and promoting a "museum without walls" ethos of openness, equality, and freedom.

Yu Er, the Festival Director for the 2024 Ruthin International Art Festival, is a distinguished poet and cross-media creator. Her artistic approach draws inspiration from dance and extends into visual arts and poetic expression, exploring artistic boundaries through interdisciplinary methods.

As an established poet, Yu Er has actively participated in the "Beijing Poetry Festival" for nine years, where she received the "Golden Sunflower Award" at its seventh iteration and was elected chairperson of the festival's council in 2021. Internationally recognized, her work has been featured at the Havana International Poetry Festival and translated into English and Spanish. Yu Er's poetry collections include "Late Spring Autumn Colors" and "Under the Light." In 2024, she founded the Ruthin International Arts Festival in the UK, established the Y Arts Centre and launched the Y Talent Award, contributing significantly to the promotion of youth arts on a global scale.

Yu Er

Festival Director

Cheng Xi, the Lead Curator for the 2024 Ruthin International Art Festival, is a renowned curator, researcher, writer, and social theatre practitioner from China. Cheng's work spans curation, documentation, poetry, documentaries, performance, and social theatre, focusing on avant-garde historical and contemporary practices based on social observations. Cheng has consistently collaborated with interdisciplinary researchers, creators, and grassroots workers to explore oral histories and document the folk memories, poetic communities, avant-garde art, and personal histories of China's 1960s and 1970s. His recent projects focus on youth cultural autonomy, community organisation, and the art ecosystem under different cultural backgrounds, especially during disruptive times like the 2020 pandemic. His work, renowned for bridging geographical, cultural, and conceptual divides, brings together innovators from various fields to explore the expressive potentials of art in today's global context.

Cheng Xi

Chief Curator