Sunday 7 December
Setting off from PS² at 1pm, the tour will last approximately one hour. Please dress for the early December weather.
Venus Patel: performance walking tour
Part of How We Get Free: A Black Feminist Performance programme at PS²
Tickets are free by should be booked via Eventbrite here.
Join us for this performance walking tour, in which Venus Patel will act as a tour guide, taking the viewers through the streets of Belfast to uncover our past through a speculative historical lens. The event draws inspiration from Patel’s ongoing research into monsters as sites of exploration and imagination. This performance deals with the erasure of queer people and people of colour throughout history. What has been lost due to systemic erasure and denial of existence? She will unlock the true secrets of our past: the existence of a civilisation of queer monsters that lived here before us.
How We Get Free: A Black Feminist Performance Art Programme is curated by Clodagh Assata Boyce. The programme invites global majority artists from the Island of Ireland and beyond to engage with and unpack ideas around refusal and marginalisation posed by Black, queer, feminist artists in the late 20th century.
About Venus:
Venus Patel is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist working in visual arts, performance, and film, based in Ireland. Born in Los Angeles, she graduated from TU Dublin in 2022 with a BA Honours in Fine Arts. Her practice utilises a unique blend of humour, absurdity, and abjection to create multi-faceted work that speaks on subject matter such as hate crimes, religious guilt, and Queer POC bodily suppression. Solo exhibitions include: “Daisy: Prophet of the Apocalypse” (Sirius Arts Centre, Cobh, 2024) and “Monsters of the Apocalypse” (Pallas Projects, Dublin, 2023). She is a recipient of the RDS Taylor Art Award (2022), Arts Council Bursary Award (2024), and Romilly Walton Masters Award (2023). Selected performances include: “Monsters” (Dublin Fringe Festival, 2024), “The Biscuit Without a Home” (Re-rooting Tallaght Festival, Rua Red, 2024), “The Preacher’s Monster” (FIX Festival, Catalyst Arts, Belfast 2023), and “Preacher’s Ceremony” (Convergence Festival, Live Art Ireland and Livestock, Tipperary, 2023). Her work has been exhibited across Ireland and has screened in film festivals across Europe and the US.
How We Get Free is funded by Esmé Mitchell Trust. Commissions by Outburst Arts through the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Art Fund.
PS² is supported by The National Lottery through Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Belfast City Council’s Artists’ Studio and Makerspace Organisational Grant, and Arts & Business NI’s Blueprint Investment Grant.