Events

Welcome to our Events page. Here you will find all upcoming and past Club des Femmes events. The search facility above can be used for searching Events listed, old and new.

Our Culture Club logo is used to identify all CC posts. We use it on our Events listings to signify that there is an article in our Culture Club pages about this event, and as a link to the relevant article.

A feminist street protest in Hackney in the 1980s, featuring a sign reading "every liberation struggle brings us nearer to peace." A white, fair-haired woman is leaning out from behind the sign to talk to a white, dark-haired man who is walking past.

CDF x Tate Britain, 21 Feb: every liberation struggle brings us nearer to peace

Join Club des Femmes for a specially curated film night celebrating women’s engagement with the peace movement as part of Tate’s WOMEN IN REVOLT exhibition.

Tate Britain, London, Weds 21st Feb, 7-9pm. £5/3.50. Book now.

Still image from Alanna Kelly, Chant Down Greenham, 1984, Recorded on 1/4 inch analogue tape, transferred to digital format, Duration: 09:10 min, Collection Irish Museum of Modern Art, Purchase, 2021. Image courtesy IMMA and the artist. The image incorporates an original photograph by Raissa Page, Dancing on the silos, Greenham Common, 1 January 1983. Protected by copyright. Not to be reproduced without permission, please contact Richard Burton Archives, Swansea University (Ref. DC3/14/1/67)

From legendary protest singer Peggy Seeger to contemporary artist filmmaker Sarah Wood, the experience of the women’s peace camp at Greenham Common is a secret thread running through British feminist art making.  Inspired by viewing the rushes from Amanda Richardson and Beeban Kidron’s germinal Carry Greenham Home, Club des Femmes set up camp at Tate Britain to learn and think across Greenham’s feminist art practices, histories and liberation struggles. Our programme will include work by Alanna O’Kelly, Sandra Lahire, Sarah Wood, Lin Li and a sequence from the recently digitised Carry Greenham Home rushes. 

Club des Femmes will be in conversation with Sarah Wood, Lin Li and Alanna O’Kelly.

Still image from Witnessing Peace by Lin Li.

Read Sophie Brown on CARRY GREENHAM HOME from CDF’s Revolt, She Said 2018 season, and CDF’s So Mayer on the impact of our previous Greenham screenings at the Rio.

Three Minute Warning, image courtesy of the artist. 

Chant Down Greenham (Alanna O’Kelly, 1984), 9:10 mins, digital

Sounds of the camp collide in the powerful form of keening. O’Kelly’s voice and body echo Greenham women chanting, drumming, whistling, laughing, weaved in with the noise of circulating helicopters that signals military aggression. Irish artist O’Kelly went to Greenham in 1983 to take part in ‘Sounds Around the Base’ that had 30,000 to 50,000 women surrounding the 9-mile perimeter fence all making sounds on the hour every hour. 

Serpent River (Sandra Lahire, 1989) 31 mins, digital

Lahire’s searing anti-nuclear trilogy (Plutonium BlondeUranium Hex and Serpent River) are key films coming out of the feminist anti-nuclear / Greenham movement. Shot on 16mm, the politics of the film medium and the politics of the subject are one and the same, emerging as politicised queered and gendered bodies through a breath-taking alchemy of images and sounds. Serpent River looks at the dangers of Uranium mining near Serpent River First Nations community in Ontario, Canada. 

Carry Greenham Home rushes (Amanda Richardson and Beeban Kidron, 1983), 12: 51 mins, digital

This part of the rushes presents a different style of video recording to much of the finished documentary. It is an extended sequence, shot largely in the dark, that shows the Greenham camps as both a place of vigil-keeping watch in dark times for the benefit of others and for peace, as well as a celebration of the togetherness, solidarity and creativity of the women. The sound brings the voices of the women together to make them louder and more beautiful. The images are almost abstract, lights and candles piercing the darkness as eternal symbols of hope. The sequence shows the something more sacred or mystical (which can mean many things), a significant element of the community alongside the political. 

Witnessing Peace (Lin Li, 2020) 1 min, video 

Originally from Hong Kong, now based in Scotland, Li’s camera captures a peace demonstration outside the Faslane Naval Base in Scotland, where Britain’s nuclear weapons are kept. Witnessing Peace shows some of the photographic activities during the demonstration, highlighting the importance of the freedom to record, part of the checks and balances system against state surveillance and power. 

Three Minute Warning (Sarah Wood, 2012), 3 mins, video

The parallel histories of cinema and aviation revolutionised the twentieth century, generating irresistible fantasies of freedom and control. Three Minute Warning is a fast-forward history of the real impact of blue-sky thinking. You’ve had your three-minute warning: now is it time to resist?

Serpent River. Image courtesy of LUX and the artist.

Club des Femmes would like to thank the BFI, Amanda Richardson, Beeban Kidron, Johanne Mullan, the Glasgow Women’s Library, Pratibha Parmar, Lucy Reynolds and Linsey Young. 

The BFI National Archive has carefully preserved the original unedited footage shot for Carry Greenham Home, comprising almost 100 U-matic videotapes. This material was selected for digitisation through the BFI’s Lottery-funded Heritage 2022 project, among 100,000 items preserved on a variety of videotape formats selected from the UK’s regional and national archives and the BFI National Archive’s own collections. Thousands of these are now available for public viewing on a new service for UK libraries, BFI Replay.

Read MoreCDF x Tate Britain, 21 Feb: every liberation struggle brings us nearer to peace