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Berwick’s gunpowder magazine appeared on the map in 1751 and is located to the east of Ravensdowne Barracks.
Thank you to English Heritage for allowing us the use of their spaces for exhibition venues.
The Magazine is a small stone 18th Century heritage building, used to store gunpowder. The venue is inside the Berwick walls accessed only via the public footpath. This venue is not barrier free or step free. Volunteers will be present during all opening hours. Guide dogs are warmly welcomed.
To enter the venue, you must first enter the Berwick wall footpath. There are two options, one via the gate on Ravensdowne adjacent to the venue, this is the step-free option and takes about 2 minutes at a leisurely pace from the gate to the venue. The second option is via the footpath entrance next to the allotments which is up 8 steps with one handrail, has a gentle incline and takes about 4 minutes at a leisurely pace to the venue. There are some steep inclines on the surrounding footpaths and the footpath is narrow. The footpath is raised from the entrance to the venue and you either need to go down a grass verge from the footpath to the gate or around from the side of the venue to stay on flat grass. Both the footpath and the grass are uneven surfaces.
The venue is surrounded by a stone wall with a large wooden gate which will be open. The gateway has a small stone lip with no ramp. From the gateway to the venue entrance there is grass with no footpath. The entrance door is accessed via 3 stone steps with no handrails or ramp.
Room Description: An arched brick room painted white with barrels stacked either side of a path. There are many vertical and horizontal dark brown wooden beams throughout the room. There will be a projector and screen.
Doorways: This information will be provided soon.
Venue Width: This information will be provided soon.
Seating: There is no seating available at this venue. Please email info@bfmaf.org or as a volunteer if you require a seat.
Temperature: The venue is unheated and quite chilly.
Lighting: The venue has dim lighting and relies on the natural light which comes through the door, as well as some dim lighting from the screened work
Flooring: Brown wooden floorboards, fairly smooth, some large nails.
Sound: Mostly quiet, birdsong
Patterns: The white walls and dark wooden beams in a confined space creates a high contrast geometric pattern.
There are no toilets within the venue. There is a non-accessible public toilet ‘Superloo’ costing 20p per use on Woolmarket around 6 minutes at a leisurely pace from the venue. Further down Ravensdowne or down the Berwick wall footpath at the Barracks are two more BFMAF venues with toilets, the Gymnasium Gallery and Mobhouse. They are both about 8 minutes at a leisurely pace from Magazine or 2 minutes drive. Please refer to the venue documents for further info on their toilets.
No food and drink available at this venue
Evacuate out of the only entrance, the front entrance door, onto the grass outside.
The Walls, Berwick-upon-Tweed TD15 1JG
A film, installation, and exhibition by artist and filmmaker Harry Lawson, created in collaboration with young inner-city horse riders from Stepney Bank Stables in Newcastle. Reimagining Byker as the Wild West, the project blurs the line between fact and fiction, weaving together recontextualised iPhone footage shot by the riders, archival material from the North East Film Archive, and Lawson’s own cinematography.
As chilling as it is absurd, Kamal Aljafari’s Paradiso repurposes found footage from Israeli military propaganda and turns it into a fictional drama of men playing at war. Aljafari takes the title from a short story by Borges and describes the work as a “cinematic self-portrait” – questioning our interpretation of screen violence, its relationship to real-world horrors, and troubling our positionality as spectators.
Aura Satz’s Preemptive Listening project focuses on sonic obedience and disobedience through the trope of the siren. The Fork in the Road comprises trumpet improvisor Mazen Kerbaj’s composition of a new siren sound using circular breathing, and actor/activist Khalid Abdalla speaking on the siren as the emblematic sound of resistance, oppression and lost futures during the Arab Spring. Shot on 16mm, the film is literally driven by its soundtrack, as the voice becomes a beacon, activating emergency rotating lights.
Shot in Colombia, The Magical State depicts the possession of a Wayuu woman by a 40 million year old oil demon. Framed as an interrogation, an off-screen male voice challenges the woman, who gazes back directly into the viewer’s eyes, placing a curse on ‘man’, the species who have woken it from geological time. The violence of natural resource extraction—and the resulting violation of land rights—are reflected in the demon’s iridescent-coloured rage and stroboscopic movements.
