London's Shubbak Festival Announce 2025 Line-Up May 23rd-June 15th
The UK’s largest festival of contemporary Arab cultures returns with a vision for art, resistance, and collective imagination.
With its second wave of programming, Shubbak Festival 2025 reaffirms its commitment to art as an act of defiance, survival, and dreaming. As the UK’s largest festival of contemporary Arab cultures, Shubbak continues to be a space where artistic expression is not just celebrated but serves as a means of resisting erasure, reinterpreting histories, and envisioning new futures.
This year’s edition brings together artists working across music, theatre, visual arts, and literature to explore themes of memory, colonial legacies, and cultural resistance. Palestinian company Khashabi Theatre presents Milk مِلْك, a time-warping reflection on catastrophe, while Ahmed Masoud’s Application 39 imagines Gaza as the unexpected host of the 2048 Olympics in a biting black comedy. Selim Djaferi’s Koulounisation and Marah Haj Hussein’s Language: No Broblem take language and colonization as sites of both grief and humor, while Sarah Al Sarraj’s Limbs of the Lunar Disc questions how ontological systems could be rooted in land, spirit, and ancestry.
Art-making as a revolutionary act threads through the festival. An Artist’s Manual Against Apartheid by chamæleon compiles resistance strategies, while Art of the Palestinian Poster, curated by Malu Halassa, draws from a history of cultural steadfastness. In an invitation to reclaim the body and its knowledge, The People’s Catwalk launches the festival, with 3EIB and Nafs Space staging a reclamation of public space and bodily autonomy.
Beyond the theatre and gallery, Shubbak embeds itself in community spaces. Young Shubbak works with Kilburn residents to archive songs of revolution and stories of resistance. In workshops, artist Issam Kourbaj explores craft-making as a means of creative well-being with the SWANA community of Grenfell. Contemporary and traditional music are honored in Syrian Rhythms, while For Sudan foregrounds the cultural production of Sudan as a means of imagining liberation.
Shubbak Festival 2025 insists that in times of crisis, imagination is both refuge and weapon. Across rehearsal rooms, kitchens, public spaces, and the very cells of our bodies, artistic expression holds the power to affirm presence, resist erasure, and insist on a different future.
