Avant Art Festival is one of Poland’s most progressive and consistently curated festivals dedicated to experimental music and contemporary art. Founded in Wrocław in 2008, it brings together experimental music, documentary film, visual art, performance and interdisciplinary practices. The 19th edition unfolds across four locations - Lower Silesia, Wrocław, Warsaw and Lublin - taking over more than 25 venues and presenting artists from over 17 countries. A strong strand of the 2026 programme focuses on the contemporary UK scene, ranging from radical improvisation and experimental electronics to noise, post-punk, club music and practices combining sound, language and performance.
Website: https://avantart.pl/2026/
The project is supported by Fundacja British Council.
UK ARTISTS AND PROJECTS
| Yeah You (UK) |
03.09.2026, 21:00 |
Wrocław Contemporary Museum, Wrocław |
| Yeah You is a Welsh father-daughter duo formed by Gustav Thomas and Elvin Brandhi. The project grew out of spontaneous recording sessions during family car journeys, with mobility becoming central to their practice. Thomas’s fractured synths collide with Brandhi’s improvised streams of language, creating lo-fi noise, dismantled freestyle and distorted pop requiems. Each performance responds directly to its location and circumstances, making the music unpredictable, immediate and radically rooted in the present moment. |
| Gustav Thomas (UK) |
04.09.2026, 19:45 |
Klub Bolko ŚOK, Świdnica |
| Gustav Thomas is from Bridgend in South Wales. His compositional practice is rooted in ephemerality, spontaneity and a rejection of fixed, repeatable form. He treats performance as a process created in real time, blurring the boundary between everyday life and artistic action. He coined the term Wild Pop to describe this aesthetic and, since 2013, has also co-created the duo Yeah You. |
| Elvin Brandhi (UK) |
04.09.2026, 21:15 |
Klub Bolko ŚOK, Świdnica |
| Elvin Brandhi is a producer, sound artist and improvising lyricist from Bridgend, Wales. She works with field recordings, tape, vinyl, instruments and voice, building intense, glitched structures in which language breaks apart and becomes sonic material. She is one half of Yeah You and also develops a wide range of solo and collaborative projects. Her 2025 album OWsT is a radical exploration of the relationship between voice, language, identity and chaos. |
| @xcrswx (UK) |
09.09.2026, 20:00 |
Showroom Sound Experience, Wrocław |
| @xcrswx is the duo of Crystabel Efemeny Riley and saxophonist Seymour Wright. They combine drums, membranes and saxophone with digital and analogue technologies, including Android-based devices. Their music emerges from the encounter between the physicality of acoustic instruments, ritual, contemporary production tools and digital culture. Layered beats, patterns and textures create a sound focused on rhythm, tension, care, protest and everyday experience. |
| PLF (AT/UK) |
10.09.2026, 21:00 |
Klub Szalonych, Wrocław |
| PLF is the trio of Peter Kutin, Lukas König and Elvin Brandhi, working at the intersection of post-punk, free improvisation and post-digital experimentation. Kutin’s self-built light-feedback instruments, König’s percussion-electronics and Brandhi’s raw improvised voice generate intense, unpredictable live performances. Rooted in the ethos of free jazz and DIY culture, PLF create a kind of stroboscopic improvisation: brutal, precise and charged with uncontrolled energy. |
| Everything is Psychedelic (UK) |
11.09.2026, 22:00
18.09.2026, 24:00
|
HUTA, Wrocław
Hydrozagadka, Warszawa |
| Everything is Psychedelic is a collaboration between Birmingham rapper Tony Bontana and the anonymous London production collective psychedelic ensemble. Their music brings hip-hop together with the philosophy of no wave, industrial sound and punk abrasion. The debut album The Beautiful Malaise quickly drew attention online and was listed by The Wire among the 50 best releases of 2025. Their Avant Art appearances are among the first opportunities to experience the project live. |
| aya (UK) |
11.09.2026, 24:00 |
HUTA, Wrocław |
| aya is an artist from the Pennine region whose work draws together soundsystem culture, decentralised online scenes and post-hardcore expression. Her raw, ambiguous music explores the ways experience and memory transform the body. Her Hyperdub debut im hole received Pitchfork’s Best New Music distinction, followed in 2025 by her second album hexed!. aya is also known for highly physical live performances and DJ sets. |
| Mariam Rezaei (UK/IR) |
11.09.2026, 01:00 |
HUTA, Wrocław |
| Mariam Rezaei is a British-Iranian composer, turntablist and performer whose practice moves between contemporary experimental music, free improvisation, noise, warped club music and hip-hop. She treats turntables as fully fledged compositional instruments, developing original techniques for transforming samples in real time. Her 2024 album FRACTURED brings punk, breakcore, electroacoustics, grime, hip-hop and free noise into a raw, physical and rapidly shifting form. |
| feeo (UK) |
18.09.2026, 01:00 |
Hydrozagadka, Warszawa |
| feeo is the solo project of vocalist, songwriter and artist Theodora Laird. Song and storytelling sit at the centre of her work, with personal narratives placed within the political and socio-cultural landscape of contemporary London. Her 2025 debut album Goodness, released by AD 93, blends drone, ambient, experimental electronics, improvisation and minimalist dance music. Her distinctive voice and poetic writing move through tensions between intimacy and isolation, solitude and community. |
| أحمد [Ahmed] (UK) |
20.09.2026, 21:00 |
Pardon, To Tu, Warszawa |
| The quartet أحمد [Ahmed] brings together Pat Thomas, Antonin Gerbal, Joel Grip and Seymour Wright. Their starting point is the work of Ahmed Abdul-Malik, the New York bassist, oud player and composer who connected jazz with Arabic and East African traditions. Rather than reconstructing his compositions, the group extracts rhythms, melodies and fragments of ideas to create its own language of contemporary improvisation, driven by heavy repetition, syncopation, motoric pulse and ecstatic physical energy. |
FILMS CONNECTED TO THE UK
- Nick Cave’s Veiled World
Mike Christie | United Kingdom | 2026 | 65 min
05.09.2026, 19:00 | Kino Piast / Kino Apollo / Kino Lot, Dolny Śląsk
20.09.2026, 19:00 | U-jazdowski Kino, Warszawa
Nick Cave’s Veiled World does not attempt to tell the chronological story of Nick Cave’s career. Instead, it looks at an artist who, after personal tragedy, redefined his life, creative practice and relationship with audiences. Drawing on archive material, Cave’s voice recordings and the memories of collaborators, Mike Christie builds a multidimensional portrait centred on grief, spirituality, transformation and creativity. Contributors include Warren Ellis, members of The Bad Seeds, Flea, Florence Welch, Wim Wenders and Rowan Williams.
- S/He Is Still Her/e: The Official Genesis P-Orridge Documentary
dir. David Charles Rodrigues | United Kingdom | 2024
22.09.2026, 18:00 | Centrum Kultury w Lublinie, Lublin
An authorised, candid and intimate documentary about Genesis P-Orridge, one of the most radical figures of British counterculture. The film follows the artist during the final year of life and the confrontation with mortality, while also drawing on previously unseen archive material and performances by COUM Transmissions, Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV. The film features William Burroughs, Timothy Leary and David J, among others, and is executive produced by Laura Jane Grace.
Programme subject to change.
