Join Artes Mundi and audio describer Anne Hornsby for a series of tours of Artes Mundi 9. Designed for Blind and Partially Sighted people, each session will explore a selection of artworks or moments from the Artes Mundi 9 prize-winning artists.

Anne Hornsby is a pioneer of UK Audio Description, having introduced the second audio description service in England to the Octagon Theatre, Bolton, in 1989. She launched Mind’s Eye in 1992 to offer audio description for theatres, galleries, museums, dance, film festivals and online content. She has won two awards for her work and is an accredited trainer. Prior to lockdown, she was audio describing over 100 events a year in addition to offering training on a regular basis.

Meiro Koizumi’s videos investigate the boundaries between the private and the public, the authentic and the staged, in particular as evidenced within moments of collective or civic memory, a domain of specific importance to his Japanese cultural heritage. His work often deals specifically with individual moments where questions are asked about how we might engage with, relate to and confront, painful moments within nation’s histories and how we remember conflict without recourse to nostalgia, revisionism or jingoistic propaganda. Typically his videos unfold to present everyday situations transformed into sites of tension. His 2018 work Battlelands was the first time the artist had worked with non-Japanese subjects, Koizumi investigating the psychological dimension of the violence of war through performances by five US combat veterans from wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Their stories of traumatic experiences are countered by the picturing of the domestic spaces of their homes and US landscapes, created by the veterans wearing body cams, to create emotionally moving physical and mental space of those returning from war. In 2018 he was included in the prestigious Mercedes Benz Art Scope residency program for artists.