Birth Rites Collection Summer School
Location: The University of Kent, Canterbury Campus
1st to 4th July 2024
Birth Rites Collection’s Summer School is a unique programme of lectures, workshops, seminars and one-to-one tutorials. Four intensive days will introduce you to the collection and facilitate a dialogue between you, your practice and the artworks. The course is led by artist & BRC Curator Helen Knowles and artist Dr. Leni Dothan.
Birth Rites Collection Summer School will empower you to articulate your own practice and responses to the collection in a supportive environment whilst exploring critical perspectives in the field of birth.
Midwives, academics, curators, artists, medics, health professionals, art historians, policy advisors and the general public interested in childbirth through the lens of art, are all welcome. As a participant, you will enter the course with your own skill set and finish, with a bespoke multi-media pack of visual, textual, auditory, photographic, filmic and performative material, to be used thereafter in your own future work.
This year, workshops include reflecting on the themes of aesthetics, ethics, politics and the visual discourses of birth through visual and written materials with the emphasis on learning how to stage and document performances. Through lectures by leading artists in the field, we will introduce different perspectives to initiate in-depth discussions.
Summer School themes include:
• Collaborating and making work with family members.
• Staging, restaging and performative practice on themes of gender, birth, reproduction, and familial networks.
• How the collection informs and unpacks different perspectives in midwifery, medicine and education, and its potential to improve practice and policy.
• The Collection’s impact on feminist art practices and the rehabilitation of visual discourses of birth into art history.
• Censorship of artworks on birth, institutional responses, ethics and the law.
Pricing:
4-day course (In-person) University of Kent Campus, Canterbury
1st – 4th July, 10 – 5pm (with some late evenings) Cost £550 per person / £400 concession (for practicing artists, students and those with a low-income).
10 full-price places per course, 10 concession rate places.
Online access: £250 per person access to online live & recorded lectures.
For full price and concession rates make a deposit of £100.
Bursaries this year are offered to one member of staff/student at the University of Kent only