Race Cards

Overview

One weekend in 2016, Birmingham-based performer Selina Thompson wrote a thousand questions about race.

Six years later, the ever-evolving and regularly updated Race Cards, both an installation and a durational performance event, comes to Australia following seasons in Canada, Ireland, Germany, USA and across the UK.

In the anonymity of the installation, you are invited to read all the cards, on the condition that you answer one of them. You are also invited to copy out a question to take home to ponder. The interactive exhibition will be accompanied by a filmed durational performance with Selina Thompson, as she reads out each of the thousand questions.

Language around race and identity feels as though it has moved faster in the last decade than it ever has before, with so much changing - and yet not changing - at the same time. In the face of this paradox, how do we hold transformative dialogue around this shaping factor in our lives and histories, when so many hold assumptions and prejudices they are yet to explore? This brilliantly conceived opportunity invites its participants into a global, conversation, five years in the making: a call and response that demands that we make a new route forwards, starting with ourselves.