Arts Week 2025

Playing with Reality brings together vivid animation, sharp-witted gameplay and dramatic first-hand accounts.

Join us to see or participate in a script-in-hand investigation of an unknown English Renaissance play. Ships ahoy.

How can openness and secrecy shape the past, present and future of Northern Ireland? Explore this pressing question with Birkbeck's Ben Worthy.

We are all discussing whether AI might generate thinking machines. Hear media theorist and historian Simone Natale discuss the illusion of machine intelligence, from the Victorians to now. Bring thoughts to the Q&A.

Author Will Storr discusses stories, writing and his latest book with Birkbeck writer Wes Brown. Is a story a deal? Q&A follows.

Carolyn Burdett talks about Victorian investigations of movement, Joseph Pilates’s ‘Contrology’, and the art critic Vernon Lee.

Join us for an interactive spinning and weaving workshop. Discuss provenance and data flows while making a textile.

This practical workshop and discussion rethinks the integration of the digital and the theatre space. How can that work? Birkbeck’s Seda Ilter chairs speakers including Kirsty Housley and Maddy Costa who will take your comments and questions.

Attend the premiere of the film "Dear Video Diary" (by the Derek Jarman Lab) and join makers and panellists for a Q&A. Explore how we tell stories about ourselves, tracing the evolution of self-narration across time, media, and disciplines, and examining its creative potential and psychological impact.

Listen to French songs performed and explore the music in French poetry and the poetry inside the music. Bring your thoughts for the Q&A.

A film introduces the extraordinary painted house of David Parr, one of William Morris's 'art-workmen'. Then a panel discussion. Bring ideas!

Speakers Nadia Latif (director and writer of theatre, film, and television) and Sara Masry (an actor, writer, and director working in theatre and film) speak on how British theatre artists and venues have responded to the assault on Gaza.

Join us in a reading of an ancient play by a female playwright. We investigate how we can meet this amazing but troubling medieval drama on its own terms, while wrestling with its challenging representation of women, sex, and sex work. Led by Birkbeck staff, participants and observers welcome.

See Inside the Cauldron, a short film exploring Leonora Carrington’s ecological vision. Join co-creator Sophie Mei Birkin, producer Robyn Jakeman and Marina Warner for discussion afterwards.

A contemporary performance inspired by seventeenth-century non-elite writing. Devised and performed by students on Birkbeck’s MFA Theatre Directing programme. Q&A with performers and researchers.

Join our panel to investigate what happens to prints when they enter or come out of books and are modified and reshaped by gluing, cutting, and pasting. Bring your thoughts for the Q&A.

Dig deeper into the meanings of cursed objects with the Cursed Objects podcast's live show team. Bring your ideas and questions.

Join us for a writing workshop that uses prompts from nature to explore aspects of the past.

Come to a poetry reading by UK-based Hong Kong Anglophone poets and bring your thoughts for the Q&A.

Performers Dickie Beau, Liv Morris, Louise Mothersole, Vijay Patel discuss queer performance, joy, gravity and grief.

This is a screening and conversation with filmmaker Jon Jost and Ian Christie. Starting in 1965, Jost has made films in different forms and media, largely focusing on specific American topics.

Theatre collective Good Friends for a Lifetime perform and read from their newly published drama The Netherhole Martyr. A discussion follows.

What future for ports and islands in a melting world? Birkbeck's crew navigate islands and rising waters (Aideen Foley) tariffs, China and ports (David Styan) and maritime internationalism (Alex Colas). Bring your Q&As, expect storms.

Dr Isabel Davis asks what perspectives can history, particularly medieval history, give on the glossy, high-tech, modern fertility industry?