The Norton Lectures with Steve McQueen: Pulse | Lecture Five: "Grenfell"

Photo: James Stopforth, Courtesy of Thomas Dane Gallery and Marian Goodman Gallery

THE NORTON LECTURES

2025-26 Norton Professor of Poetry: Steve McQueen

Discussants: Edward Daffarn, former Grenfell Tower resident and activist; Patricia Kingori, Oxford University

Moderator: Gary Younge, Manchester University

Introduction by Robin Kelsey, Harvard University

The 2025-26 Norton Lectures | Steve McQueen: Pulse

Norton Lecture Five: Grenfell

In December 2017, Steve McQueen made an artwork in response to the fire that took place earlier that year on 14 June at Grenfell Tower in North Kensington, West London. 72 people died in the tragedy. Filming the tower before it was covered with boarding, McQueen sought to create a record so that it would not be forgotten.

Steve McQueen: “I feared once the tower was covered up, it would only be a matter of time before it faded from the public’s memory. In fact, I imagine there were people who were counting on that being the case. I was determined that it never be forgotten. So, my decision was made for me. Remember.”

Shot from a helicopter in a single 24-minute take, the artwork approaches the building from the outskirts of the city. For further information about the work, visit grenfell.film.

After a presentation of the film, the panel will discuss the effects of the tragedy and the role of art as an act of remembrance.

Please note: Unauthorized photography and recording, including the use of cameras on phones and tablets, is prohibited at this event.

This is the fifth of six Norton Lectures with Steve McQueen. For all Lecture dates and information, click here.

Admission is FREE; tickets are required. Tickets can be obtained through the Harvard Box Office. Seating is first come, first served. Limit of four tickets per person. Tickets valid until 5:45pm.

Tickets will be available in advance one week prior to each lecture starting at noon online, in person at the Smith Campus Center box office, or by phone. Handling fees apply for online and phone sales. Tickets also available in person at Sanders Theatre starting two hours prior to each lecture, subject to availability.

Free parking for all six Norton Lectures is available at the Broadway Garage, located at 7 Felton Street, between Broadway and Cambridge Streets. Parking is from one hour pre-performance to one hour post. More info at Parking & Directions.

About the Speakers

Steve McQueen is recognized internationally as one of the most important artists of his generation. His work explores universal themes, often addressing painful and challenging histories and exposing the fragility of the human condition.

Awarded the Turner Prize in 1999, McQueen has had his artwork presented at some of the most significant venues and museums around the world. His work has been featured in Documenta, he represented Great Britain at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009, and was selected several times for the Venice Biennale’s central pavilion. Solo exhibitions of his work have been held at the Art Institute of Chicago; Schaulager, Basel; Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. In 2019 he presented YEAR 3 at Tate Britain and had a major solo exhibition at Tate Modern in 2020 which toured to Pirelli Hangar Bicocca, Milan in 2022. In Spring 2023, he presented Grenfell at the Serpentine South Gallery, London. In 2024 McQueen unveiled a new installation, Bass, co-commissioned by Dia and Schaulager Basel, at Dia Beacon in New York.

McQueen has directed four feature films. His first, Hunger (2008), was awarded the Caméra d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and his third, 12 Years a Slave (2013), received the Golden Globe, Oscar, and BAFTA awards for best picture in 2014. In 2020, he made Small Axe, an anthology of five films about London’s West Indian community and, in 2021, Uprising, a 3-part documentary with James Rogan, about the New Cross Fire in London in 1981. His documentary film, Occupied City, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2023. Blitz, his most recent feature, about the Second World War, had its world premiere as the opening film of the 68th BFI London Film Festival.

Edward Daffarn is a social worker and community organizer. He is a survivor of the Grenfell Tower fire and the co-author of the Grenfell Action Group blog, which recorded the ill treatment of residents in the years preceding the fire. Edward helped found and is a committee member of Grenfell United, the main group representing bereaved and survivors.

Patricia Kingori is a Wellcome Senior Investigator at the Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities, a Professor of Global Health Ethics at the University of Oxford’s Ethox Centre and a Senior Research Fellow of Somerville College. Her research explores the intersection between the Sociology of Science and Medicine. She has studied the ethical issues experienced by clinical trial fieldworkers, Ebola treatment staff, emergency healthcare professionals, and frontline responders in humanitarian crises. As a health ethicist, Professor Kingori has also advised international organisations including the WHO and the UK government’s SAGE COVID-19 advisory group.

Gary Younge is an award-winning author, broadcaster and a Professor of Sociology at the University of Manchester. Formerly editor-at-large at The Guardian, he has written seven books, most recently Pigeonholed: Creative Freedom as an Act of Resistance (Faber, 2025). Winner of the 2023 Orwell Prize for Journalism and the 2025 Robert. B. Silvers Prize for Journalism, he has written for the New York Review of Books, Granta, GQ and New Statesman, among others, and made radio and television documentaries on subjects ranging from gay marriage to Brexit. His fifth book, Another Day in the Death of America, won the J. Anthony Lukas Prize from Columbia School of Journalism and Nieman Foundation.

Robin Kelsey is Shirley Carter Burden Professor of Photography at Harvard University. A specialist in the histories of photography, modernism, and American art, Professor Kelsey has published on such topics as the role of chance in photography, geographical survey photography, landscape theory, ecology and historical interpretation, picture theory, and the nexus of art and law.

About the Norton Lectures

The Charles Eliot Norton Professorship in Poetry was endowed in 1925. Harvard’s preeminent lecture series in the arts and humanities, the Norton Lectures recognize individuals of extraordinary talent who, in addition to their particular expertise, have the gift of wide dissemination and wise expression. The term “poetry” is interpreted in the broadest sense to encompass all poetic expression in language, music, or the fine arts.