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.

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.