The Brighton Festival in pictures: celebrating culture off campus

The Children’s Parade opened the 2014 Brighton Festival with an impressive display of colour and sound reflecting this year’s theme of ‘the arts’. Photograph: Alessandro Mella

The parade, one of the largest of its kind in Europe, involved 83 schools and 5,000 young people in different displays of dance, theatre, film, visual arts, books and music, inspired by musician-in-residence James Keane.
Photograph: Alessandro Mella

Z-Star playing to the crowds in Brighton City Centre as part of Fringe City 2014. Music, performance and other street entertainment ran every weekend in Brighton throughout May as part of the free outdoor event. Photograph: Stuart Robinson

Street performers at the 2014 Brighton Festival, an annual celebration of music, theatre, dance, circus, art, film, literature, debate, outdoor and family events. Photograph: Stuart Robinson

A street artist captured mid-performance at 2014 Brighton Festival. This year marked the 48th year of the festival, which is the biggest curated mixed arts event of its kind in England, attracting some of the most innovative artists and companies from around the world. Photograph: Chantel Lucas

Yinka Shonibare’s new work for the Brighton Festival, The British Library, explores the impact of immigration on British culture by filling shelves of the Old Reference Library with books representing immigrants. TS Eliot, Henry James and Hans Holbein were among those whose names were on the books. Photograph: Stuart Robinson

Ester Svensson and Rosanna Martin’s sculptural installation in The Regency Town House for the No One Owns the Land exhibition combined ceramic, glass, thread, wire, sand, stones, glass wax, inks, soap, shower gel, nail varnish, paint, plaster and wood to represent journey and migration to the imagined land. Photograph: Alessandro Mella

The No One Owns the Land exhibition brought together artists from the worlds of film, digital technology, photography and sculpture on similar themes of cultural identity to The British Library. It saw the first collaboration between Ester Svensson and Rosanna Martin, whose work covers themes of travel and identity. Photograph: Chantel Lucas

The On Balance exhibition brought together two interactive works by Swedish artist Jacob Dahlgren that focus on the visual appeal of the mass-produced object. ‘Heaven is a Place on Earth’ used more than 700 sets of bathroom scales of different colours to show the appeal of some low-cost everyday objects. Photograph: Chantel Lucas

Jacob Dahlgren’s ‘The Wonderful World of Abstraction’, part of the On Balance exhibition at the Brighton Festival, consisted of thousands of metres of ribbon suspended from a metal frame to create a kaleidoscope effect which visitors were encouraged to move through and interact with. Photograph: Alessandro Mella