Date:                     24 March 2017

Time:                    12.30 to 2pm

RSVP:                    To book a place please RSVP by Wednesday the 22nd March by email to [email protected] or call 028 90330920

Location:             Golden Thread Gallery, 84 – 94 Great Patrick Street, Belfast, BT12LU.

Yael Bartana’s deeply stirring and contentious film trilogy And Europe Will Be Stunned explores propaganda, longing and migration through an uneasy fusion of fiction and reality.  The exhibition runs in Golden Thread Gallery from 23 March to 13 May 2017.  Throughout the course of the exhibition we have developed a programme of events and activities to help us engage with some of the themes raised by the artwork.

Katy Radford will use Mur i wieza (Wall & Tower) the second film in Yael Bartana’s trilogy as a starting point for a 15 minute presentation.  The presentation will be followed by a making, building and talking activity that will play with the concept of building “a new utopia” using simple ingredients and props.

During her presentation, Katy will introduce two questions that are relevant to contemporary Belfast and which are posed to provoke dialogue and debate about people, place and the past.

  1. The first question is how our individual worlds are impacted on the one hand by diversity and globalisation and on the other by the push and pull of competing nationalisms and ethno-political identities.
  2. The second is related to the role of artists in historical revisionism and how that is mediated by media scrutiny and state interventions of or lack of.

The discussion will be integrated into the making & building activity.

Dr Katy Radford is a social anthropologist with the charity, the Institute for Conflict Research.  She is Vice-Chair of the Arts Council Northern Ireland and the only woman appointed to the Commission for Flags, Identity, Culture and Tradition and formerly worked in the motion picture industry and for the British Film Institute.  She was awarded an MBE for community relations in 2011.