100. THE DALAI LAMA AND HOPE FOR 2023 - With Josef O’Connor

Break Out Culture With Ed Vaizey by Country and Town House

We’re celebrating our 100th episode of Break Out Culture by talking about hope to Josef O’Connor, the young Irish-born artist and curator who’s on a mission to use art to spread a sense of optimism globally.

In October 2020 Josef launched CIRCA (the Cultural Institute of Radical Contemporary Arts) as a platform to showcase digital art with a purpose in the public sphere, starting with Piccadilly Circus’s famous lights screen.

Every night at 20:23 throughout 2023, Piccadilly Circus, and other screens around the world, will show newly commissioned work by artists on the subject of hope. The film will change every month. January’s film is slightly longer, at three and a half minutes, because it contains a recorded message from the His Holiness the Dalai Lama– which you too can hear by tuning into the podcast. He talks about the oneness of humanity in turbulent times and a three-minute animated film has been made with CIRCA to accompany his message.

£150 buys you a screen print of ‘The Art of Hope’ by the Dalai Lama till the end of 2023 and proceeds go to Tibet Hope Centre and to the #CIRCAeconomy. What we also discover on the podcast is that subscribers to CIRCA will receive an original framed print monthly for just £1,000 a year.

Listen in to find out how Josef O’Connor is radically changing the way art can be distributed and hear about the success he’s had so far, working with artists ranging from Ai Weiwei and David Hockney to Patti Smith and Yoko Ono.