Oxford International Women’s Festival
WOMEN CREATING LANDSCAPES
27 February—14 March 2021
Join us for two weeks of events around Oxford celebrating women’s strengths, successes & solidarity.
WOMEN CREATING LANDSCAPES
FEBRUARY 27th – MARCH 14th, 2021
The annual Oxford International Women’s Festival returns to present a varied and exciting series of events, but in very different circumstances to earlier festivals. Sadly, as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, all events this year are online.
Since the Oxford International Festival began in 1989, it has not only always focused on Women’s International Day, March 8th , but has also covered a wide range of topics ranging from the arts to the sciences, as well as women’s creativity and initiating and supporting campaigns on women’s rights.
The 2021 theme is based on women’s creativity, particularly their contributions to a variety of landscapes. Landscape can be interpreted in numerous ways, for example it can be natural or imaginary. It can be designed, changed and recorded by both individuals and groups of people. In all these interpretations women have played major roles in transforming and adapting to landscapes, although they are often forgotten or ignored. All this has been particularly relevant over the last year.
As usual the Festival is organised by local women. On behalf of the OIWF collective I would like to thank you all for your contributions. I would particularly like to thank Tracy Walsh for all her hard work in ensuring that the 32nd Oxford International Festival takes place.
Katherine Bradley, on behalf of the OIWF collective. 2021
Behind the Illustration
Zahra Haji Fath Ali Tehrani
Zahra is a musician, composer, and performer who has been creating music for over 15 years. She is the director of the Young Women’s Music Project (YWMP), based in Oxford, which provides an inclusive, supportive space for young women to get together to make music, learn new skills, express themselves, and grow in confidence.
Haiffa Al Mansour
Haifaa is a Saudi Arabian film director. She is one of the country’s best-known and most controversial directors, and the first female Saudi filmmaker. Her feature debut, Wadjda, which she wrote as well as directed, made its world premiere at the 2012 Venice Film Festival; it is the first full-length feature to be shot entirely in Saudi Arabia and as of 2013, the only feature-length film made in Saudi Arabia by a female director.
Dorothy Hodgkin
Dorothy Mary Crowfoot Hodgkin OM FRS Hon FRSC (12 May 1910 – 29 July 1994) was a Nobel Prize-winning British chemist who advanced the technique of X-ray crystallography to determine the structure of biomolecules, which became an essential tool in structural biology. In1964 she became the third woman to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Diana Forster
Diana Forster is an artist who focuses on the area of art and conflict as a result of her Polish mother’s experiences in a Russian labour camp during the Second World War. She makes work that avoids horrific and disturbing images but that draws viewers in to slowly understand the story.
Rana Ibrahim
Rana is a founder/ leader of Iraqi Women Art and War (IWAW) project as a freelance Artist, Education and Outreach officer, working with Iraqi women based in Oxfordshire to capture their war surviving oral stories through art. Rana has been doing her own artwork through COVID19 her work displayed via Tumblr.
The artist Beth Shearsby
Beth is a multidisciplinary artist based in Oxford. In her illustration work, she mainly uses pen and ink to create detailed drawings inspired by nature. She also explores sound, using synthesisers, tape-loops and a range of other materials during improvisational soundscape performances.
You can check out Beth’s illustrations here: www.instagram.com/shearsbys_sketchbook/
and her sound work here: www.instagram.com/bethshearsby
2021 EVENTS ORGANISED BY OUR PARTNERS
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