READING INTERNATIONAL PRESENTS – NINA WAKEFORD “AN APPRENTICESHIP IN QUEER I BELIEVE IT WAS”

About the Event

A FREE BUS SERVICE IS AVAILABLE FROM READING STATION TO GREENHAM COMMON. BOOK YOUR FREE TICKET HERE.

Nina Wakeford will perform her film and spoken word work in a unique event at the Control Tower at Greenham Common. Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp was active from 1981 to 2000 and was established by women to protest nuclear weapons being sited near Reading at RAF Greenham Common. The work explores the capacity of the women’s peace camp to transform the identity of those who lived there. It includes thousands of images of forget-me-nots from the nearby memorial Peace Garden, photographed one by one on 16mm film. The performance combines this footage with words from first-person accounts of women who were interviewed in a study of the peace camp, alongside archival documents, and a song. Re-performed in the Control Tower and relayed to the audience below, the flowers and the words of the women are broadcast across the landscape where previously the women themselves were surveyed.

This work was originally produced as a result of a commission from the British Film Institute and the Wellcome Collection

More information on the Reading International Website

Nina Wakeford is an artist based in London. Her work begins with the unfinished business of past social movements and the challenges of revisiting the energies that these movements created. Recently, drawing on a personal collection of feminist materials from the 1970s and 1980s, Wakeford has made a series of film and performance works that involve singing as a way of attaching herself to objects or images. Exhibitions include Focal Point Gallery, Southend; Almanac, London; Glasgow International 2018. She is currently working on commissions for the Barbican and Art on the Underground.

The event is part of (Un)Commoning Voices & (Non)Communal Bodies, a series of workshops, performances, and an exhibition, interrogating the relationship between artistic practices and protest movements via the performative scores of collective bodies and voices. The interdisciplinary program was inspired by the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp.

Reading International is Reading’s new contemporary visual arts organisation promoting and commissioning major solo exhibitions, group and thematic shows, a programme of events including performances, film screenings, workshops and talks as well as offsite projects and temporary public artworks. Led by artists from the Reading School of Art at the University of Reading and hosted by a rich mixture of partners within the town, Reading International produces several major projects each year, in which artists and curators are given a platform to make new work in response to the unique social and historical context of Reading and wider Berkshire.

Supported by Artis Grant Programme, Reading Buses, Loddon Brewery and SJWines.

PLEASE BE AWARE THE OBSERVATION DECK WILL BE CLOSED TO THE PUBLIC ON SATURDAY 27th APRIL DUE TO THIS EVENT