The Ignorant Art School: Outside the Circle x Belfast
Weekly
Next date:
Golden Thread Gallery
84-94 Great Patrick Street, Belfast
Belfast
Co. Belfast
BT12LU
Golden Thread Gallery presents The Ignorant Art School: Outside the Circle x Belfast, an exhibition and event programme inviting you to witness and respond to radical emancipation, resistance, survival and collective action inspired by and generated from feminist and queer movements.
Come and explore a dazzling array of archives, drawings, ephemera, manifestos, paintings, performance, photographs, sculptures, video works and writings reverberating with the attitude, poise and pose of feminist and queer ‘acting up’ and speaking the difficult truths of lived experience and social knowledge courageously to power.
Outside the Circle unfolds the possibilities of assembly, collective actions and spirited protest as pedagogical interventions that defiantly empower the oppressed and marginalised.
Curated by Sophia Yadong Hao, Director of the Cooper Gallery, University of Dundee, the exhibition is inspired by the essential words of African-American writer, feminist and civil rights activist Audre Lorde in her seminal essay ‘The Master’s Tools will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’.
Outside the Circle is an invitation to witness and participate in a season of radical emancipation, resistance, survival and collective action from both western and Global Majority countries.
(l-r): Moody and the Menstruators, a feature in The Sunday times Magazine, 1974. Photo Hans Feurer, courtesy of Anne Bean; Phyllis Christopher, Dyke March, San Francisco, CA, 1999; Slide sheet from The Thin Black Line exhibition file in the Women’s Art Library. Photo Althea Greenan. Courtesy of Women’s Art Library, Goldsmiths University of London.
Sophia Yadong Hao, Cooper Gallery Director & Principal Curator
The first iteration of this exhibition took place at the Cooper Gallery at the University of Dundee from October 2024 to February 2025, as part four of its five-chapter project The Ignorant Art School: Five Sit-ins towards Creative Emancipation.
About the Artists
Outside the Circle brings together a dazzling spectrum of artists, activists, collectives, writers, and thinkers including: Sam Ainsley, Anne Bean, Sutapa Biswas, Sheba Chhachhi, Phyllis Christopher, Akwugo Emejulu, Margaret Harrison, Barbara Howey, Carol Massey Lingard and Jenny Stevens, Tari Ito, Amelia Jones, Mary Kelly, Suzanne Lacy, Audre Lorde, Annabel Nicolson, Griselda Pollock, Monica Ross, Georgina Starr, Jo Spence, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Maud Sulter, Ronald Wright, Ajamu X, alongside collective actions and groups including Cyber feminist collective Old Boys Network, Fenix, Feministo: Women’s Postal Art Event, Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, Haven for Artists, Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, The Hackney Flashers, OutRage!, and Womanifesto.
The exhibition will also feature archive material from feminist and queer movements held in the Linen Hall Library in Belfast.
Accessibility
The Lower Gallery is accessed via the ground floor, which is step-free. The Upper Gallery is reached via the stairs or via wheelchair-accessible lift.
Large print versions of exhibition texts are available.
Access videos of the gallery are available on our website here, with BSL and ISL signed versions.
Please let us know if you have any questions or additional requirements, we are working hard to make the gallery as accessible as possible for everyone.
Golden Thread Gallery is proud to hold an Arts & Disability Access Award 2025 Venue Accreditation.
The Ignorant Art School Sit-in #4: Outside the Circle exhibition and events at Cooper Gallery was funded by the National Lottery through Creative Scotland and the University of Dundee. Research on Audre Lorde’s activities in Europe was supported by the Goethe-Institut Glasgow.
Entrance Fee
Free
