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Still We Rise Sheba Festival 2026 A celebration of culture, creativity, and community, co-created with artists and local residents to amplify diverse voices and stories. Building on themes of healing, unity and recognition, the festival aims to create a joyful, inclusive space that honours heritage, storytelling, and resilience within migrant and diaspora communities. Taking place at Longsight Art Space, the festival offered a blend of live performances, workshops, exhibitions, and communal activities that connect generations and cultures through art, food, and collective storytelling. |
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Launch Event
13 June, Longsight Art Space An evening of art, performance, music, and community, featuring:
learn how to be human. Through themes of cultural assimilation, naming, and historical rupture, Lo-ting’s identity is continuously fragmented and reshaped. Like Hong Kong, identity here is never singular - always shifting, always in the process of becoming.
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Community Crafts & Tea in Crowcroft Park
14 June | 11am-1pm | Crowcroft Park, Orchard Garden Community Crafts & Tea brought people together for a joyful day of creativity, connection, and celebration. Visitors of all ages gathered in Crowcroft Park to take part in hands-on activities, enjoy live music, and share stories in a welcoming outdoor space. Tea Making Workshop with The Community Patch Participants created their own herbal tea blends while sharing memories, traditions, and stories inspired by herbs, plants, and recipes from home. Community Banner Making with Tina Ramos People of all ages contributed to a vibrant collaborative banner celebrating identity, resilience, and the strength of community. Live Music with Martim Pocinho The afternoon was brought to life with live music, creating a relaxed atmosphere where people could connect, unwind, and celebrate together. |
Sheba Arts Youth Group 14 June | 2-4pm | Longsight Art Space This event celebrated the creativity, confidence, and talent of Sheba Arts' young artists, giving them the opportunity to share original work with family, friends, and the wider community. As part of Sheba Festival 2026, each participant was commissioned to create a new piece or performance inspired by the festival theme, Still We Rise. The showcase featured a vibrant range of performances and artworks, including music, poetry, dance, animation, painting, and photography. Highlights included Kian's violin performance of the Iranian song Golnar, Aria's original poem The Peaceful Flames We Once Used to Know, Aisa's animation Rise, Ava's multidisciplinary performance combining dance, santour, and singing, Hana's painting A Small Heart, a Great Light, and Dorsa's photography piece The Rose in a Desert. Together, the works explored themes of identity, cultural heritage, resilience, hope, and belonging, reflecting the powerful voices and creative vision of Sheba Arts' next generation of artists. |
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Poetry Workshop – The Time We Gathered To Eat…
18 June | 2-4pm | Longsight Art Space Led by poet Jack So, this interactive workshop invited participants to explore themes of food, family, and migration through poetry, storytelling, and creative writing. Through guided exercises, free-writing, and discussions, participants reflected on personal memories and the sensory experiences connected to home and belonging. The workshop explored how poetry can capture emotion through taste, smell, sound, and imagery, inspiring participants to create their own recipe poems based on meaningful people, places, and moments. The workshop created a welcoming space for sharing stories, sparking conversation, and using creativity to explore identity, memory, and belonging. |
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Poetry, Play & Music
18 June | Longsight Art Space Poetry, Play & Music brought together spoken word, live performance, and music for an inspiring evening of creativity and storytelling. The evening opened with an Open Mic, where participants from the earlier poetry workshop and members of the Sheba Scribe group, including Hadisa Afzaly, shared original poems exploring themes of identity, migration, and belonging. The programme also featured Asking A Masc Lesbian To Open A Jar, a newly commissioned play-in-verse by Jack So and Nara Rasool. Created in response to the festival theme, Still We Rise, the performance explored gender, identity, and colonial legacies with humour, warmth, and insight. The evening concluded with a captivating live performance by Gulcin Bulut, whose music blended traditional Turkish folk and Sufi influences, creating a reflective and uplifting close to the day. |
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Theatre & Concert Day
19 June | Longsight Art Space
Theatre & Concert Day brought Sheba Festival 2026: Still We Rise to a powerful close with an evening of theatre, live music, and shared reflection, celebrating stories of migration, identity, resilience, and belonging.
The evening opened with The Migrant Bird by Noushin Afshar, a moving solo performance exploring displacement, grief, hope, and the search for identity through theatre and movement.
This was followed by Osinobi by Aliah Brewster, a captivating live concert blending strings, percussion, live electronics, and personal field recordings. Meaning "from the heart" in Igbo, the performance explored intergenerational connection, memory, and the meeting of tradition and contemporary experience.
Guests also shared food from Sips & Dips, creating a warm and welcoming space to connect, reflect on the festival, and celebrate the community that came together throughout the festival..
19 June | Longsight Art Space
Theatre & Concert Day brought Sheba Festival 2026: Still We Rise to a powerful close with an evening of theatre, live music, and shared reflection, celebrating stories of migration, identity, resilience, and belonging.
The evening opened with The Migrant Bird by Noushin Afshar, a moving solo performance exploring displacement, grief, hope, and the search for identity through theatre and movement.
This was followed by Osinobi by Aliah Brewster, a captivating live concert blending strings, percussion, live electronics, and personal field recordings. Meaning "from the heart" in Igbo, the performance explored intergenerational connection, memory, and the meeting of tradition and contemporary experience.
Guests also shared food from Sips & Dips, creating a warm and welcoming space to connect, reflect on the festival, and celebrate the community that came together throughout the festival..
Still We Rise Exhibition
The Still We Rise exhibition formed the heart of Sheba Festival 2026, bringing together commissioned, local, community, and youth artists to explore themes of migration, identity, resilience, and belonging. Presented at Longsight Art Space, the exhibition created opportunities for dialogue, reflection, and cultural exchange.
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The exhibition featured newly commissioned works by Haleema Aziz (Suspended Invocation), Smriti Rai (Threads In Between), and Blessing Wheto Ogunjimi (Threads of Becoming: Mapping Our Resilient Stories), each responding to the festival theme through sculpture, mixed media, textiles, and painting.
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Suspended Invocation Haleema Aziz Created through a collaborative workshop with refugees and migrants, this work explores faith, memory, and resilience. Inspired by participants' stories of what sustained them through displacement, the piece centres on a set of functional prayer beads engraved with personal drawings representing faith, family, home, and belonging. Suspended against a Persian rug, the installation reflects the shared spaces where stories are exchanged and communities are formed. Together, these elements honour the memories and values people carry with them, highlighting faith as a source of strength, continuity, and hope. |
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Threads In Between
Smriti Rai
Through colour, the work traces the migrant journey: white represents loss, red symbolises restoration and rebuilding, and blue reflects the emergence of a new identity, drawing on Homi K. Bhabha’s concept of the “third space.”
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The installation also featured contributions from members of the Nepali diaspora, who shared something they lost, something they gained through migration, and a colour representing their journey. Their reflections are suspended throughout the work, creating a collective portrait of migration, memory, resilience, and belonging.
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Threads of Becoming: Mapping Our Resilient Stories
Blessing Wheto Ogunjimi
Blessing Wheto Ogunjimi
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This mixed-media painting is a tactile meditation on how memory, identity, and belonging are carried across time, distance, and disruption. Rooted in Blessing's lived experience and community practice, the work draws on stories shaped by migration, resilience, and cultural inheritance. Through layered paint, textiles, found materials, and fragments of pattern and form, Blessing explored how lives are continuously stitched together, sometimes gently, sometimes through rupture and repair.
Each element within the composition acts as both trace and testimony, which is a mark of presence, survival, and transformation. The act of mending, binding, and layering becomes symbolic of how individuals and communities navigate displacement while holding onto what matters. This work invites viewers to reflect on their own narratives of belonging and change. It offers a space to recognise the quiet resilience embedded within our everyday lives, and to honour the unseen labour of carrying our stories forward. Ultimately, Threads of Becoming is the connection between the past and the present, self and community, fragility and strength, resulting in rising against all odds! |
The Still We Rise exhibition also showcased work by local creatives, community participants, and members of the Sheba Arts Youth Group.
Together, the artworks explored themes of migration, identity, resilience, and belonging.
Longsight Artists
Sheba Artists
Wigan Community Exhibition
Sheba Arts Youth Group
Together, the artworks explored themes of migration, identity, resilience, and belonging.
Longsight Artists
- Andrew Kuwornu – Unseen, Unhealed explores Black men's mental health and the impact of systemic racism.
- Nadia Sultana – Interwoven Patterns celebrates cultural heritage through community-created henna-inspired designs.
Sheba Artists
- Melika Rafat – Nahan reflects on migration, displacement, and the experiences of women affected by war.
- Lizzie Hobbs – Off The Map is an interactive installation exploring connection, movement, and belonging.
Wigan Community Exhibition
- A collection of artwork created by participants from Sheba Arts' creative workshops in Wigan and Leigh.
Sheba Arts Youth Group
- Original artworks created by members of the Sheba Arts Youth Group in response to the festival theme, Still We Rise.
Filmmakers: Omari Taylor and Solomon Hughes
Photographers: Omari Taylor, Solomon Hughes and Iqra Saied
Thank you to our amazing volunteers – Helen, Santiago, Hormoz, Rushaun, and Holly – for supporting us at the festival and helping with our evaluation too.
Photographers: Omari Taylor, Solomon Hughes and Iqra Saied
Thank you to our amazing volunteers – Helen, Santiago, Hormoz, Rushaun, and Holly – for supporting us at the festival and helping with our evaluation too.
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Community Consultation Group
The Community Consultation Group came together in October 2025 to help us shape the festival. They are active community members, artists, members of our boards who shared their ideas, experiences, and creative visions for the Sheba Festival 2026. Their insights have been central to shaping the festival’s themes of storytelling, healing, and collective strength. Each member brings a unique cultural and professional perspective, from music and poetry to theatre and community engagement.
We are expanding this group to include more members. They will help us evaluate the festival’s development, ensuring it remains community-led, inclusive, and truly reflective of the voices it represents. Through our consultancy sessions and online surveys, we asked what you would like to see at the next Sheba Festival. Here’s what you told us:
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Members present at the meeting; Ahmed Elzber, Evelyn Mbuluku,
Oluwatobi Alapelode, Ibrahim Alimamy, Cansu Han Online participants: Malini Sachdeva-Masson, Iman Javaid |
- We need stories to express issues such as the hostile rhetoric towards the refugee and migrant people.
- Transphobia is a product of colonialism rather than an inherent part of any society. Colonial empires and their imposed moral frameworks have shaped how trans people are treated in some places today. Storytelling can reveal the diversity of human experience and show that trans people have always existed across cultures, rejecting the idea that being trans is ‘new’ or ‘unnatural’.
