esea contemporary and Manchester Art Fair are pleased to present Making Worlds: Producing as Creative Practice, a panel exploring the people, relationships and infrastructures that shape contemporary art and cultural production.
Artists may be at the centre of cultural conversations, but the worlds in which art is made are collective. Producers, writers, commissioners, editors, curators and cultural organisers all play a role in how ideas are developed, realised, circulated and remembered.
Manchester has long been a city of makers, shaped by its histories of industry, independent publishing, music, broadcasting and contemporary art. Against this backdrop, the panel asks: What does it take to build a sustainable contemporary art ecosystem, not only through remarkable artworks and exhibitions, but through the conditions that allow artists, organisations and ideas to flourish?
Bringing together perspectives from contemporary art, journalism, broadcasting and international cultural practice, the conversation considers producing as a creative, critical and relational practice. It explores how relationships, collaboration, mentorship and care shape artistic possibilities, create platforms and audiences, and enable ideas to travel across places and communities.
Rather than treating producing as something that happens behind the scenes, Making Worlds considers it as a form of collective cultural authorship, and asks how those who make, support and connect cultural work can contribute to the longer-term development of creative communities and institutions.
Moderator
Xiaowen Zhu
Director, esea contemporary (Manchester, Berlin)
Panelists
Location
Manchester Central Convention Complex
Windmill St, Manchester M2 3GX
The event is included with your Manchester Contemporary ticket and will take place on Friday, 20 November, 2:30–4:00pm, at Central 5, near the main entrance.
To find Central 5, turn left in the foyer of Manchester Central immediately after entering through the main entrance.
About Manchester Contemporary
The Manchester Contemporary takes a uniquely artist-focused approach, inviting the most exciting international and UK galleries to participate. With careful selection and bold curatorial vision, The Manchester Contemporary showcases the strength of the UK’s regional artists and galleries alongside key international presentations that can only be seen in Manchester.
The Manchester Contemporary is supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.
Vivienne Chow is an award-winning journalist, writer and a content strategist whose work examines art, cultural ecosystems and identity at the nexus of East and West. Through her reporting and analysis, she aims to break down cultural barriers, uncover untold stories, and foster dialogue among art-world players from diverse backgrounds. She is a Salzburg Global Fellow and an IJP Premium Fellow.
Over more than two decades, she has built an internationally recognised career spanning Asia and Europe, served as Senior Reporter at the South China Morning Post, and London Correspondent at Artnet News, where she co-founded The Asia Pivot newsletter. Her byline has appeared in BBC Culture, Variety, The Art Newspaper, the Financial Times, and the New York Times, among others.
Beyond journalism, she founded the non-profit Cultural Journalism Campus and has taught arts writing and reporting at universities. She was the editor of A New Reality, the monograph of Hong Kong artist Stephen Wong Chun Hei. She also advises cultural organisations on strategy and research, and is a regular speaker and moderator at international art and cultural forums.
Freo Majer is the Artistic Director of Forecast, an international facilitating program dedicated to mentoring and promoting audacious minds and their creative practices. Since 2015, Forecast has conducted one-on-one mentorships and workshop series and initiated research programs that bring together art and science institutions. The various strands of development and production each lead to what Forecast calls prototypes, which are showcased at transdisciplinary festivals. Majer looks back at a career as an opera director and producer in European theaters and festivals. Recognizing a gap in the support available to cultural workers, he founded Forecast in 2015. He initiated the international research programs Housing the Human (2017–2019), Driving the Human (2020–2023), and the ongoing Shifting the Human (2024–). Freo Majer serves on various boards and juries, including the Cultural Forum of Social Democracy, and the jury of the KAIROS Prize of the Alfred Toepfer Foundation.
Luka Yuanyuan Yang (b. 1989, Beijing) is a visual artist and filmmaker based in London and Beijing, working across documentary film, video, photography, installation and performance. Weaving documentary and archival materials, her practice explores identity, migration and memory, often challenging conventional historical narratives and bringing overlooked voices to the foreground.
She has held solo exhibitions at High Line Art, New York (2025), Flowers Gallery, Hong Kong (2024), ARTiX3, Tokyo (2023) and OCAT Shanghai (2020), with her work also presented at institutions including Rockbund Art Museum, Power Station of Art, New Taipei City Art Museum, Centre for Heritage Arts & Textile, Times Art Center Berlin and Three Shadows Photography Art Centre.
Her debut feature documentary Chinatown Cha-Cha premiered at Pingyao International Film Festival and Hawaii International Film Festival, receiving the New Filmmaker Award at the 14th China Documentary Academy Awards (2024), as well as Best Feature and Audience Choice Award at MINT Chinese Film Festival (2025). The film was released theatrically across China in 2024 and subsequently toured internationally in Europe and the United States. Her short films have also been featured in The New Yorker.
Yang is a recipient of the BAZAAR Art Awards – Cross-Cultural Creator of the Year (2024), the BVLGARI Avrora Award (2023) and the ART POWER 100 Award (2019). Her work is held in the collections of Power Station of Art, Kadist Art Foundation and FENIX Museum of Migration.
Ekene Akalawu is based at the BBC’s MediaCity home in Salford, where she is a producer on Front Row, BBC Radio 4’s flagship arts magazine programme, and The Verb, Radio 4’s poetry performance and discussion programme.
She has made many special editions of Front Row, including Making Culture At Home, which looked at how arts organisations root themselves in their local communities; A First and A Final, which followed an RSC production of Cymbeline; The Blue Edition, an exploration of the colour blue; and a Bank Holiday edition dedicated to Scarborough.
This year, she has produced a special edition of The Verb at the Hay Festival, The Love Verb marking Valentine’s Day, and a Verb edition recorded around a flotilla of handmade boats.
For over two decades, she has produced a wide variety of programmes for Radio 4, Radio 3, Radio 1 and the World Service, including Speaking in the Streets, a Radio 4 documentary about Motown’s spoken-word label, Black Forum. The Guardian devoted a radio review column to the programme, describing it as “inspirational” and “Storytelling at its most powerful”. She would like to think those descriptions apply to many of the programmes she’s made.
