Richmond Arts and Ideas Festival
June 2025

Richmond Arts and Ideas Festival takes place across the borough of Richmond bienially. Piloted in 2023, the festival returned to Richmond in 2025 as a celebration of arts, culture, and community building.

Inspired by a theme, events fill venues and streets over two weeks in June. There are moments that provoke noisy ideas, thoughts, and discussions as well as moments for quiet reflection. What unites this festival is the opportunity to seek a more positive future though art and culture.

In 2025 the festival included over 70 events across 40 venues, including outdoor performances, exhibitions, screenings, installations, comedy and music events.

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All images courtesy of Richmond Arts and Ideas Festival

Image: Memory of Birds by Tanya El Khouri

Image: Garbh by Shyam Dattani and Mira Salat

Image: Garbh by Shyam Dattani and Mira Salat

Image: Garbh by Shyam Dattani and Mira Salat

Image: RIchmond Arts and Ideas

Image: Origin by A Right/Left Project

All images courtesy of Richmond Arts and Ideas Festival

Highlighted festival projects

Imagining the Forest

Three communities from three different parts of the world come together to explore and share knowledge on our relationship with nature, filling Richmond galleries and streets with stories, photos, film and cross-cultural objects of these places and new-found friendships.

The Guarani Community in Sao Paulo with ally artist Rafael Vilela, artists Nadeem Alkarimi, Sadqain Riaz, and Qadir Jhatial along the River Indus in Pakistan with the Karachi Biennale, and Richmond Arts & Ideas Festival with artist Eelyn Lee have listened and found common ground through rivers, caring for ecology and championing marginalised voices.

This project, supported by the British Council, grew through a series of online sharings – Wisdom Conversations – hosted by each place and culture.

Nhemboaty – Clash of Worlds is an exhibition that explores the profound historical and ongoing clash between indigenous traditions and the forces of urban expansion, environmental destruction, and modernity in Brazil. The exhibition brings together the photography of Rafael Vilela in collaboration with the Guarani Yvyrupa Commission, shedding light on the Guarani Mbyá people’s struggle for survival in the midst of São Paulo’s vast megalopolis.

In honour of the critically endangered European Eel, Anguilla Anguilla, way of the eel, by Eelyn Lee depicts a floating procession on the River Thames. Guided by a polyphony of voices, an eel deity drifts downriver - an embodiment of loss and grief, transforming into an incantation of healing.

The River Sublime trilogy is a philosophical film looking at three different ecospheres of the River Indus through the poetic lens of artists Nadeem Alkarimi, Sadqain Riaz, and Qadir Jhatial. The film flows from the Karakoram glaciers to the deltaic mouth of the river on the Arabian Sea. A project by the Karachi Biennale Trust and part of the Imagining the Forest programme.

Nhemboaty – Clash of Worlds by Rafael Vilela and the Guarani Mbyá Community of Pindó Mirim (Image: Anne Tetzlaff)

Nhemboaty – Clash of Worlds event performance by Tainara Takua (Image: Anne Tetzlaff)

Nhemboaty – Clash of Worlds by Rafael Vilela and the Guarani Mbyá Community of Pindó Mirim (Image: Anne Tetzlaff)

Nhemboaty – Clash of Worlds by Rafael Vilela and the Guarani Mbyá Community of Pindó Mirim (Image: Anne Tetzlaff

Anguilla Anguilla, way of the eel, by Eelyn Lee

The River Sublime by Nadeem Alkarimi, Sadqain Riaz, and Qadir Jhatial