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30 April — 3 May 2026 / Hawick

Embrace
the Strange

Schedule

Event

Exhibitions Q&A

Sunday 3 May

09:00 – 09:45 / 45'

Heart of Hawick

Artists in this year’s exhibitions programme discuss themes and methods key to their work.

Screening

Shorts

The Dreams Of Fishes

Sunday 3 May

10:00 – 11:30 / 64' + Q&A

Heart of Hawick

Amidst shrubs and marshlands, gardens and rivers, five films confront life and longing, existence and desire. 

Screening

Shorts

How Do We Communicate, How

Sunday 3 May

12:00 – 13:30 / 65' + Q&A

Heart of Hawick

Through dialogues and monologues, signs and gestures, seven films ponder the power and politics of language.

Event

Play It Forward

Sunday 3 May

13:45 – 14:30 / 45'

Heritage Hub

The 16mm premiere of a slice of Hawick heritage, spliced by you into a new work entirely.

Screening

Shorts

A Comrade Approaches

Sunday 3 May

14:30 – 16:00 / 65' + Q&A

Heart of Hawick

At mines and coalfields, across night shifts and bank heists, five films meditate on the textures and residues of labour.

Event

Play It Forward

Sunday 3 May

16:15 – 17:00 / 45'

Heritage Hub

The 16mm premiere of a slice of Hawick heritage, spliced by you into a new work entirely.

Screening

Performance

Stone and Mountain

Tetsuya Maruyama, Luke Fowler

Sunday 3 May

17:00 – 18:00 / 60'

Heart of Hawick

Tetsuya Maruyama joins forces with Luke Fowler for a spellbinding analogue rumination on contemporary mining activities in Brazil.

Event

Film Quiz

Sunday 3 May

20:00 – 22:00

Heart of Hawick

Join us for the weekend wind-down, another edition of our relaxed quiz. A whole lot of fun, prizes to be won, etcetera.

Event

Nightcap

Sunday 3 May

22:00 – 00:00

Heart of Hawick

A relaxed, unstructured gathering to mark the end of a festival day.

Exhibition

Contretemps + No Title

Ghassan Salhab

Friday 1 May to Sunday 3 May
10:00 – 17:00

Borders Textile Towerhouse

Two frontline dispatches from Lebanon chart the precarities of protest and the devastation of Israeli violence.

Exhibition

How to Cook a Wasp

Jade Wong

Friday 1 May to Sunday 3 May
10:00 – 17:00

Heritage Hub

A diasporic Asian food worker community is observed through the lens of wasp hunting and seaweed foraging.

Exhibition

Milk Report

Conway and Young

Friday 1 May to Sunday 3 May
10:00 – 17:00

Heritage Hub

A playful treatise and performance piece on the thrills, trials and travails of reproductive labour.

Exhibition

Oor Ain Film Archive

Friday 1 May to Sunday 3 May
10:00 – 17:00

Heritage Hub

The launch of a new permanent mediatheque preserving social histories of the Scottish Borders through film.

Exhibition

Out Of Office

Kialy Tihngang

Friday 1 May to Sunday 3 May
10:00 – 17:00

Borders Textile Towerhouse

A critique of capitalism and its abundant shape-shifting capacity plays out as a darkly funny corporate satire.

Exhibition

Stomach, Thighs, and Ass

Matthew Lancit

Friday 1 May to Sunday 3 May
10:00 – 17:00

Room 205, Heart of Hawick

Survival as performance art, one insulin injection at a time, as the artist documents an epic of the everyday.