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Birth Rites Summer School 2025

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  • Birth Rites Summer School 2025

    • Birth Rites Collection’s Summer School is a unique programme of lectures, workshops, seminars and one-to-one tutorials.

    This intensive programme will introduce you to the collection and facilitate a dialogue between you, your practice, this year’s themes, and the artworks.

    The Birth Rites Collection Summer School is led by artist and BRC Curator Helen Knowles and artist Dr. Leni Dothan. The course 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 bespoke visual, textual, auditory, photographic, filmic and/or performative material, to be used thereafter in your own future work.

    Summer School workshops will explore the aesthetic, ethical, political and visual discourses of birth via text, film, and performance. In addition, this year we present a unique opportunity to engage with a curated selection of works from the collection that are not ordinarily accessible to the public. In a dedicated space (in person & online), these pieces will enrich participants’ engagement of the summer school themes.

    Summer School themes include:

    • Navigating mortality from preterm birth to post-partum

    • Artistic responses to preterm birth

    • 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

    2025 speakers include: Griselda Pollock (online keynote), Anna Perach, Hannah Conway, Courtney Conrad, Catherine Williamson, Andrea Khora, Helen Knowles and Leni Dothan, with more announced soon.

    More information and booking on the Birth Rites Collection website.

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    Birth Rites Summer School 2025

    Mon 7 - Thu 10 July 2025

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