Launch: Saturday 4th July 1pm-3pm

Dates: 4th July – 29th August 2026

Gallery: Upper & Lower Galleries

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 was 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.

“The Cooper Gallery team and I are thrilled to collaborate with the incredible team at the Golden Thread Gallery to realise this new iteration of The Ignorant Art School. With its rich and radical histories enthusing the city, Belfast is tailor-made for The Ignorant Art School: Outside the Circle. Focusing on resistance and collective action, Outside the Circle X Belfast reflects the city’s activist pulse, connecting global feminist and queer movements with Belfast’s distinctive history.”

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, 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. 

Golden Thread Gallery is supported by: