From Oldham to the World Stage: Peshkar at the University of Manchester

Peshkar was invited to the University of Manchester recently to deliver a guest lecture exploring our international journey and the story behind the Global Canvas programme. The session looked at how a small arts organisation rooted in Oldham has built meaningful creative partnerships across eight countries over the past 15 years.

Two Parts, One Story

The session was split into two halves. The first introduced Peshkar – our founding in 1991, and the four interconnected strands of work that drive everything we do: Engagement, Arts Award, Artist Development, and our flagship Young Digitals Festival, which celebrates its landmark tenth edition this year.

The second half dived into Global Canvas – the international programme that has taken Peshkar artists from Oldham to Valencia, Lisbon, Berlin, Seoul and Washington DC. The session traced the journey from its earliest chapters, including the Crazy Masala Club for the 2002 Commonwealth Games and the pivotal FutureDesh trip to Bangladesh in 2010, right through to the European Union-funded projects that saw us deliver across eight countries and secure over €370,000 in cultural funding.

From Brexit to Global Canvas

A key part of the session explored what happened when Brexit and the pandemic closed the doors to European funding programmes. Rather than treating this as a full stop, Peshkar developed a new approach – what we call “fleet of foot” cultural mobility – that prioritises getting artists onto planes and into studios, not into two-year application cycles.

The provocation at the heart of Global Canvas is simple: why should £200,000 in institutional partnerships create less artist impact than £2,000 in direct mobility support? The methodology is built on four pillars: accessibility over scale, digital documentation as cultural product, participatory decision-making, and rapid response capability.

The 2025 Berlin Excursion was a perfect example – three Peshkar artists, Madison Hawley, James Dobbs and Joshua Tarinson, spent five days immersed in the city’s arts scene for just £2,000. That same year, Peshkar presented at the International Symposium on Visual Culture in Washington DC whilst simultaneously exhibiting at CICA Museum in Seoul, and was invited to speak at the Gwangju Museum of Art’s 30th anniversary forum in South Korea.

What’s Ahead

The session also shared some exciting news about what’s coming next. We’ve just been selected for the Cultural Bridge 2026-2027 programme – a bilateral initiative celebrating artistic partnerships between the UK and Germany. Our project, Bridging Voices: Youth Arts for Inclusion, pairs us with Miteinander leben e.V. in Mölln, Schleswig-Holstein – an organisation founded in 1992 following racially motivated arson attacks, which has spent over three decades using arts and education to foster peaceful coexistence.

Beyond that, 2026 is a huge year – our 35th anniversary, the launch of the Peshkar Artist Lab, and the publication of our new anthology, Global Canvas 2026, co-edited with Korean-British artist Yoosang Erin Kim.

Why These Conversations Matter

The Q&A got right to the heart of what makes our international work distinctive – how we balance being rooted in a particular place whilst maintaining connections across the world, and what the idea of the “global” really means for a community arts organisation.
The honest answer is that being rooted and being global aren’t competing priorities – they’re complementary. It’s precisely because Peshkar is deeply embedded in Oldham that our international work has authenticity and credibility. When we take artists to Seoul or Berlin, we’re bringing the creative energy of a specific community with a specific story to tell.

We’re grateful to the University of Manchester for the invitation and to the students for their brilliant questions and engagement.