Birth Rites Collection

19/06/2026

https://networks.h-net.org/group/announcements/20154720/call-participants-birth-rites-collection-summer-school-2026-online

15/06/2026

https://britishartnetwork.org.uk/uncategorised/event-programme-birth-rites-collection-summer-school/

The world's only contemporary art collection dedicated to childbirth invites you to a programme of lectures, workshops, seminars and one-to-one tutorials with the theme of Reproduction and the State.

15/06/2026

https://forarthistory.org.uk/opportunities/birth-rites-collection-summer-school-2026/

The world’s only contemporary art collection dedicated to childbirth invites you to a programme of lectures, workshops, seminars and one-to-one tutorials. This Year’s theme: Reproduction and the State How do artists contest dominant narratives of birth and maternity? Whose bodies are heard, trea...

09/06/2026

✦ SUMMER SCHOOL 2026 — COURSE LEADER ✦ Helen Knowles

Helen Knowles (b. 1975) is an artist who established and directs the Birth Rites Collection. In 2025 she completed a practice-based PhD at Northumbria University and was nominated for the Jarman Moving Image Award. Recent shows include Patterns of Entanglement at Neort+++ Tokyo (2025), More Than Human Healthcare at Gallery North (2025), Hyundai Motor Studio Beijing, Kunsthaus Graz, and the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo. She is currently overseeing a series of commissions on preterm birth with Imperial College London and Tommy's, to be acquired by the Birth Rites Collection.

Her chosen artwork to highlight from the BRC Collection is ‘Giving Birth in Beauty’ (2019) by Himali Singh Soin. The work re-imagines Diotima's speech from Plato's Symposium — the only woman to appear in the dialogue, and only via the voice of Socrates — proposing rebirth as a non-dual, q***r way of being. Pouring over language and refusing the authorial voice, the performance labours away at a post-human thought process: “Our in-betweenness relies on our relinquishing the self: birth and death at once.”

In this year's Summer School, Helen will be leading a detailed tour of the Collection — highlighting important works that speak to the theme of Reproduction and the State — presenting a history of the Collection's censorship, facilitating a mock jury trial, and supporting the moving image practices of the cohort.



🔗 Five-week online Summer School, 1–29 July. Theme: Reproduction and the State. Booking link in bio.

📷 Slide 1: Helen Knowles.
📷 Slide 2: 'Indexed Beings', 2025. Film still, Helen Knowles
📷 Slide 3: 'Giving Birth in Beauty' 2019, Himali Singh Soin. Lecture performance, also available as MP3 and printed text (25 mins). Commissioned by BRC with Arts Council England, in collaboration with Procreate Projects. Courtesy the artist and Birth Rites Collection

05/06/2026

✦ SUMMER SCHOOL 2026 KEYNOTE ✦ Candice Breitz

We're thrilled to announce that Berlin-based artist Candice Breitz (b. Johannesburg, 1972) will give this year's keynote. Her moving-image installations have shown internationally — at SFMOMA, Tate Liverpool, Palais de Tokyo, the National Gallery of Canada, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art and Castello di Rivoli, among many others. In 2017 she represented South Africa at the 57th Venice Biennale.

Labour (2017 — ongoing) is a series of single-channel video installations, each sharing footage from an actual birth. The births are installed in semi-circular viewing cabins, in a nod to the peep-show aesthetics of Courbet's L'Origine du monde (1866) and Duchamp's Étant donnés (1966). Breitz reverses each birth: we observe as each baby is slowly and surreally sucked back into the womb. Accompanying the work is a Matricial Decree, issued by the Secular Council of the Utopian Matriarchat — a fiercely feminist authority committed to reproductive justice. The first piece in the series, Labour (PMURT), was shot days before Donald Trump's inauguration in 2017; other titles invoke Bolsonaro, Kim, Orbán and Putin — twenty-first-century leaders whose discourse and legislation around reproductive justice has been violent. Each, by order of the Matriarchat, is to be ceremonially undone.

At the keynote, Candice will expand on Labour in relation to this year's theme Reproduction and the State, in conversation with the Summer School cohort.

🔗 Five-week online Summer School, 1–29 July. Booking link in bio.


📷 Slide 1: Candice Breitz. Photo: Till Cremer
📷 Slide 2: Candice Breitz, Labour, 2017 – ongoing. Installation view, (cropped) Neuer Berliner Kunstverein. Courtesy: n.b.k. Berlin
📷 Slide 3: Candice Breitz, The Matrix, 2019. Courtesy: n.b.k. Berlin

04/06/2026

✦ OUR BURSARY ✦
Each year we offer one fully-funded place on the Summer School — highly competitive, and awarded because cost should never be a barrier to taking part. Here are two of the artists and curators our bursary has supported — swipe through, and if this could be you, application details are on our website.

Slide 1 — Our fully-funded bursary place is highly competitive — could you be our 2026 recipient? One place is available for this year's Summer School, Reproduction and the State, ONLINE, 1–29 July.
Slide 2 & 3 — BRC Summer School participants 2025 in front of Aquadural by Natalie Lennard, 2018 and Kinderwunsch by Ana Casas Broda - in person summer school at University of Kent.
Slide 4 — Chloe Maguire — Curator, Mothering Spaces. Bursary recipient, [2025].
Slide 5 — Roya Piraei — Iranian-born artist. Bursary recipient, [2024].

🔗 Booking and bursary details — link in bio.

03/06/2026

✦ SUMMER SCHOOL 2026 SPEAKER ✦ Rayvenn Shaleigha D'Clark
Rayvenn Shaleigha D'Clark (MA, FHEA, MRSS) is a London-based digital sculptor whose work commemorates overlooked figures in the public realm, exploring race, representation and digital hybridity. In October 2025 she launched Mother Vérité, widely described as the first public statue in the UK dedicated explicitly to the postpartum body.

Research by UCL Institute for Global Prosperity and MTArt Agency surrounding the work shows that in London, only 4% of statues depict women; in the US, fewer than 8% do — and even fewer represent women as mothers. Childbirth and the postpartum experience remain largely invisible: erased from culture, censored in the media, and absent from public art. Mother Vérité seeks to make the invisible visible.
Her chosen piece from the BRC Collection — The Whiteness of the Whale (2012, Samantha Sweeting): “It drifts between tenderness and unease. The origami boat becomes both vessel and trespasser, the breast an oceanic terrain — nurturing yet uncanny. Motherhood here is not romanticised but rendered as a site of vulnerability and quiet tension.”

At the Summer School, Rayvenn is most interested in exploring censorship in digital spaces — the disparity in who gets represented in public monuments, and how we reframe the transformations a body undergoes across a lifetime.

🔗 Five-week online Summer School, 1–29 July. Theme: Reproduction and the State. Booking link in bio.

With thanks to (UCL Institute for Global Prosperity) and for the research underpinning Mother Vérité.
.dclark

📷 Slide 1: Mother Vérité. Photo by Razia Dukes
📷 Slide 2: Rayvenn Shaleigha D'Clark in conversation
📷 Slide 3: Samantha Sweeting, The Whiteness of the Whale, 2012. Courtesy of the artist and Birth Rites Collection

02/06/2026

✦ SUMMER SCHOOL 2026 SPEAKER ✦ Sarah Sudhoff

Sarah Sudhoff is a Cuban-American artist born in Honolulu and based in Houston, Texas. She is currently working on a commission with Birth Rites Collection, Tommy's Preterm Birth Research Centre & Imperial College London, supported by Guy's and St Thomas', where she is attending the clinic and meeting women with lived experience:

“I am interviewing women who have undergone preterm birth. Each handwrites her experience on a vellum sheet, transferred to a cyanotype — capturing the gesture as a photographic image. The result is both a portrait and a representation of her experience, while keeping some obscurity and anonymity. Collectively, these works will be stitched into a textile that embodies a shared voice.”

Working across data, performance, photography, print, sound and video, Sarah unpacks the socio-cultural impacts of the gun violence epidemic, the psychological landscapes of caregiving and motherhood, gender-based violence, and transgenerational memory. Her work has shown at the Nasher Museum of Art (Duke), the Blaffer Art Museum, the Donggang Photo Museum (South Korea), Pioneer Works (New York) and the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans, and has featured in The New York Times, Wired, Time and Cabinet.

She has chosen to highlight Private View (2006) by Liv Pennington from the Birth Rites Collection saying: “It offers contact with a very private experience through the collective presentation of pregnancy tests — each reaction and story unfolding behind and beyond the image.”



📷 Slide 1: Sarah Sudhoff
📷 Slide 2: Liv Pennington, Private View, 2006. Digital C-type on aluminium, 80 × 76 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Birth Rites Collection

🔗 Five-week online Summer School, 1–29 July. Theme: Reproduction and the State. Booking link in bio.

18/05/2026

Birth Rites Collection Summer School 2026

The world's only contemporary art collection dedicated to childbirth invites you to a programme of lectures, workshops, seminars and one-to-one tutorials.
This Year’s theme: Reproduction and the State

How do artists contest dominant narratives of birth and maternity? Whose bodies are heard, treated and believed in maternal healthcare? How do states instrumentalise reproduction through policy, imagery and ideology? How can the maternal become a site of resistance and reimagining?

Led by artist and BRC Curator Dr Helen Knowles and artist Dr Leni Dothan, the course brings you into dialogue with the collection, this year's themes, and your own practice. You'll leave with bespoke visual, textual, auditory, photographic, filmic or performative work to carry into your future practice.

This year, participants gain exclusive access to a curated selection of works from the collection not ordinarily available to the public, presented in a dedicated online space.

Workshops explore the aesthetic, ethical, political and visual discourses of birth through text, film and performance. Lectures from leading artists and academics open up the following themes:

• Institutional bias in maternal healthcare — race, class, and the politics of care
• Pronatalism, border regimes, and reproductive justice
• The Collection's impact on feminist art and the visual history of birth
• Censorship, ethics and the law around artworks on birth
• How the Collection can shape practice and policy in midwifery, medicine and education

Open to midwives, artists, academics, curators, medics, health professionals, art historians, policy advisors — and anyone engaged with childbirth through the lens of art.

Our 2026 Keynote Speaker is the renowned video artist, CANDICE BREITZ. Other artists invited to speak are: Sarah Sudhoff, RAYVENN SHALEIGHA D'CLARK, Andrea Khora, Helen Knowles and Leni Dothan, with more announced soon.

Any questions? Read our FAQs for more information about the BRC Summer School

Five-Week Course (Online):Dates: Wednesdays, 7:00 PM – 9:30 PM BST July 1,8,15, 22, 29 & Saturday 18, 2:00 PM – 5:00 PM BST. All lectures, workshops, and discussions will take place online.
Cost: 600 GBP per person 450 GBP Concession Rate.

A 100GBP deposit is required to secure a place for the course. There is one bursary place available. For more information please email [email protected] or visit our website

https://www.birthritescollection.org.uk/summerschool2026

17/03/2026

Join us a week on Friday for a conversation about birth, photography and the body.
Deborah Elenter — Montevideo-born visual artist, photographer and doula. Her decade-long project Puérpera documents the lived experience of childbirth across Uruguay. In conversation with Helen Knowles — Curator of the Birth Rites Collection and artist. Chaired by Althea Greenan, Curator of the Women’s Art Library at Goldsmiths.

Friday 27 March, 5–6.30pm. Women’s Art Library, Goldsmiths. Free — book via link in bio.

Also: informal book signing at The Photobook Cafe , Mon 30 March, 7-9pm.

HASHTAGS:
📸 Deborah Elenter, artist with Puérpera
📸 Althea Greenan inside the Womens Art Library Goldsmiths.
📸 Helen Knowles giving a tour of Birth Rites Collection in front of Youtube Portraits.