Please note: this event has passed
The first of two Summer School courses taking place in July, with the second in September 2021 (see details).
Birth Rites Collection Summer School is a unique programme of lectures, workshops, seminars and one-to-one tutorials. It will introduce you to the art collection and facilitate a dialogue between you, your practice and the artworks. The course is led by Helen Knowles, BRC Curator and artist, Hermione Wiltshire, artist and Senior Lecturer at the Royal College of Art. They will help you to articulate responses to the art collection in a supportive environment.
If you are a midwife, academic, curator, artist, medic, health professional, art historian or policy advisor, you will enter the course with your own skill set and finish, with a bespoke multi-media pack of visual, textual, auditory and filmic material, each your own responses to art on birth, to be used thereafter in your own future work.
Workshops include shooting and editing short films on mobile phones and reflecting on the themes through visual and written material. We will introduce different perspectives from international guest speakers and chair in-depth discussions that address aesthetics, ethics and the visual discourses of birth.
This five-day course is currently scheduled take place on Guy's Campus, but due to the coronavirus pandemic, may be subject to change.
Themes include
- How the collection informs and unpacks different perspectives from midwifery, medicine and education, and its potential to change practice and policy.
- Artistic and midwifery practices that address reproduction in the digital age including AI, simulation, VR and new reproductive technologies amid changing perspectives on the non-binary and notions of kinship.
- The Collection’s impact on feminist art practices and the rehabilitation of the visual discourses of birth into art history.
- Censorship of artworks on birth, institutional responses, ethics and the law.
- Sexual reproduction and reciprocity.
Visiting speakers
- Laia Abril
- Sophie Lewis
- Francois-Jospeh Lapointe
- Joscelyn Gardner
- Nora Heidorn
- Elsa Montgomery
- Anna Battaglia
- Marta Stysiak
More to be announced soon.
Full details and costs
Visit the Birth Rites Collection website for full details of the Summer School, including location, costs and how to book your place.
Event details
Guy’s Campus
Great Maze Pond, London SE1 1UL