Posts from May 2011

W.J.T. Mitchell at University of Westminster on 13th June from 2-6, in The Board Room, 309 Regent Street.

Written by on Tuesday, posted in News (No comments yet)

The eagerly awaited ‘Audience with W.J.T. Mitchell’ will take place in The Boardroom, 1st Floor, 309 Regent Street, University of Westminster, on Monday 13th June 2011 from 2-6. All are welcome, and attendance is free, but you must RSVP to Sharon asap here: sinclas@wmin.ac.uk

Cloning Tom: An Audience with W.J.T. Mitchell

Monday 13th June 2011, 2:00-6:00pm , 309 Regent Street, University of Westminster

To celebrate the publication of Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present (University of Chicago Press), the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture is thrilled to host an audience with Professor W. J.T. Mitchell. Mitchell will deliver a presentation entitled ‘The Historical Uncanny:  Phantoms, Doubles, and Repetition in the War on Terror’. His presentation will be followed by a Roundtable with contributors including Maxime Boidy (Strasbourg), Abdelwahab El-Affendi (Westminster), Eyal Weizman (Goldsmiths), and Mitchell himself. The event will be chaired by Dr Marquard Smith (Westminster).

The event is FREE but booking is essential so please RSVP to Sharon Sinclair: sinclas@wmin.ac.uk

Professor W. J. T. Mitchell is Editor of Critical Inquiry and the Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature, the Department of Art History, and the College at the University of Chicago. He is the author of seminal books including What Do Pictures Want? and Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, and editor of collections such as Against Theory, Landscape and Power, On Narrative, and Picture Theory.

Maxime Boidy is the French translator of W.J.T. Mitchell’s Cloning Terror (with S. Roth) and has also translated books by Susan Buck-Morss and Mike Davis, as well as Mitchell’s Iconography. He is a doctorial candidate in the Laboratoire Cultures et Sociétés en Europe at Université de Strasbourg.

Dr Abdelwahab El-Affendi is Reader in Politics at the Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster and co-ordinator of the Centre’s Democracy and Islam Programme. He is also currently an ESRC/AHRC Fellow in the Global Uncertainties Programme working on a project entitled ‘Narratives of Insecurity, Democratization and the Justification of (Mass) Violence.’ Dr El-Affendi is author of books including About Muhammad: The Other Western Perspective on the Prophet of Islam, The Conquest of Muslim Hearts and Minds, For a State of Peace: Conflict and the Future of Democracy in Sudan, Rethinking Islam and Modernity, and Who Needs an Islamic State?

Dr Marquard Smith is Director of the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture, University of Westminster, and Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Visual Culture.

Dr Eyal Weizman is Director of the Centre of Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. His work includes buildings and stage sets in Israel/Palestine and Europe. Weizman works with a variety of NGOs and Human right groups in Israel/Palestine. He co-curated the exhibition A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture, and co-edited the publication of the same title. These projects were based on his human-rights research, and were banned by the Israeli Association of Architects. They were later shown in the exhibition Territories in New York, Berlin, Rotterdam, San Francisco, Malmoe, Tel Aviv and Ramallah. His books include Lesser Evils, Hollow Land, A Civilian Occupation, and the series Territories 1,2 and 3.

The Institute puts itself on display…

Written by on Saturday, posted in News (No comments yet)
Tagged as , ,

Any local flâneurs passing recently by the IMCC’s Wells Street base may have noticed the legend ‘All That Is Solid Melts Into Air’ beaming out of our side window. We can no longer keep it a secret! The IMCC is delighted to announce the installation of the Institute’s very own public display screen, provided courtesy of our friends and collaborators at Blip Creative, which will, once fully operational, be streaming a changing array of staff and student work at our site.

The state-of-the-art wall-hanging LED installation is our contribution to The International Distributed Display Initiative, which currently links together screens at Westminster, Central Saint Martins and Princeton, and is part of the Institute’s New Media Theory research project, coordinated by Peter Cornwell at Blip with Alison Craighead and David Cunningham at the IMCC. Using an interface that has been designed such that no prior programming skills are assumed, staff and students will be making work for this experimental new media laboratory that will allow them to explore in hands-on fashion what it means to translate, phenomenalize, or even perform media-theoretical issues as, and in, new media. When fully operational, the screen will then be part of a permanent internet link between installations at various international sites, allowing each collaborating institution to load and display and, using a webcam, observe content at the sites of the other organizations.

We will be staging an official launch soon, as well as announcing further details of staff and student artworks and curated exhibitions for the screen. Long live the Democratic Billboard! Watch this space …

Scarcity Exchanges: Iain Boal and Lydia Mehta

Written by on Saturday, posted in Event, News (No comments yet)
Tagged as

 

Scarcity Exchanges: Iain Boal and Lydia Mehta
Wednesday, 1 June 2011, 6.30 pm
University of Westminster, Maylebone Campus 

A reminder that, fresh from his appearance at the last of the Institute’s Matter Matters Whitechapel Salons, our friend Iain Boal is taking part in the Scarcity Exchanges organized by the Architecture Department this Wednesday, along with Lydia Mehta from Sussex. More info here.

Michael Nath shortlisted for James Tait Black Memorial Prize

Written by on Saturday, posted in News (No comments yet)
Tagged as ,

We are happy to announce the most excellent news that Michael Nath’s debut novel La Rochelle, for which we helped to organise the official launch in 2009, is one of four books shortlisted for the prestigious the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. The shortlist was announced at Dover House, London. The winners will be announced at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in August.

The James Tait Black Award, worth £10,000 to the winner, is awarded annually by the University of Edinburgh’s School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures, and were founded in 1919 by Janet Coats, the widow of publisher James Tait Black, to commemorate her husband’s love of good books. Past winners of the awards include the likes of DH Lawrence, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Muriel Spark, Angela Carter, Cormac McCarthy, Martin Amis, AS Byatt, William Golding and Ian McEwan.

The International Association for Visual Culture is coming…

Written by on Saturday, posted in News (No comments yet)

The International Association for Visual Culture is coming…

Keep a close eye out for forthcoming information on the International Association for Visual Culture.

A little background:

On 29th May 2010, as the final session of the three-day conference entitled ‘The 2010 Visual Culture Studies Conference’ held at University of Westminster, London, the subject under discussion was the proposal to establish an International Association for Visual Culture Studies. During the session, with presentations from Jeremy Gilbert (University of East London), Michael Ann Holly, and Stephen Melville (Ohio State), and convened by Marquard Smith, a motion was proposed formally by W.J.T. Mitchell (Chicago) that the Association be established. This motion was seconded by Lisa Cartwright (UC, San Diego), and the motion was passed.

At the start of April 2011, Michael Ann Holly, Starr Director of Research and Academic Programming at The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, and Marquard Smith, Founding Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Visual Culture, convened a colloquium of international scholars, museum educators, and practitioners of visual culture at The Clark to discuss further the founding of such an Association – what would be its aims and mission, and how it would function in its service to its members. Following on from this colloquium, the Clark group is moving forward with the formal founding of an International Association for Visual Culture.

The Association for Visual Culture will be launched officially at a conference in New York in May 2012, convened by a group of New York State-based scholars, led by Nicholas Mirzeoff (NYU).

Information will be available soon regarding the Association’s official launch, the chance to register interest in the Association, to receive updates, membership offers, etc.

Watch this space…

Ori Gersht: Artist in Conversation, University of Westminster, 16th June, 6:30-8:30

Written by on Thursday, posted in News (No comments yet)
Tagged as

Our friends in the Group for War and Culture Studies at University of Westminster warmly invited you to:

Artist in Conversation: Ori Gersht
Group for War and Culture Studies Seminar
Thursday 16 June 2011, 6.30pm – 8.30pm
Fyvie Hall, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW

Ori Gersht’s practice as a photographer is concerned with history and metaphor, journeys and geographical place, intertwined with metaphysical space. Such themes have been explored through major works that document, often obliquely, violent moments in Europe’s recent past: the scars and weals left on the sunlit, war-torn buildings in Sarajevo in his Afterwars series, the white images of ‘frustrating absence’ of his train journey to Auschwitz in White Noise, or the filmed forest loaded with the memory of war in the Ukraine in The Clearing.

At a pivotal moment in the history of photography where digital technology both threatens a crisis and promises a breakthrough, Gersht innovatively researches the possibilities and explores the materiality of his medium through still images and films that (literally) explode the genre of still life. In the films Pomegranate and Big Bang, Gersht has altered Renaissance-like still-life compositions with fast and violent interventions. Whilst a peaceful image is transformed into bloodshed and explosion, a dialogue is established between stillness and motion, peace and violence. In his most recent series of photographs, Chasing Good Fortune (2010), the cherry blossom resonates as a sign of the ephemerality of life. One of its illustrative manifestations was as propaganda in World War II as a representation of soldiers, who were thought of, in combat, to scatter like cherry blossoms, but also to die an honorable and therefore magnificent death.

At a time when many artists dealing with the political are producing work that has more in common with the medium of documentary, Gersht’s photographs, in between becoming and disappearing, have a fragile, phantom quality and dream-like texture on the verge of abstraction. More generally, his work is that of a provocative meditation.

Ori Gersht is an internationally renowned photographer and Professor of Photography at the University for the Creative Arts, Rochester.

Entrance free. R.S.V.P. Caroline Perret, tel. 020-7911-5000 ext 2307, or e-mail C.Perret@westminster.ac.uk.

Disinformation on the radio

Written by on Monday, posted in News (No comments yet)
Tagged as

A fine radio interview with our AHRC Fellow Joe Banks on ‘The Arts on Sunday’ in New Zealand.

Cloning Tom: An Audience with W.J.T. Mitchell, Monday 13th June, University of Westminster, 2-6

Written by on Friday, posted in Event, News (No comments yet)
Tagged as , ,

Cloning Tom: An Audience with W.J.T. Mitchell
Monday 13th June 2011, 2:00-6:00pm , 309 Regent Street, University of Westminster

To celebrate the publication of Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present (University of Chicago Press), the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture is thrilled to host an audience with Professor W. J.T. Mitchell. Mitchell will deliver a presentation entitled ‘The Historical Uncanny:  Phantoms, Doubles, and Repetition in the War on Terror’. His presentation will be followed by a Roundtable with contributors including Maxime Boidy (Strasbourg), Abdelwahab El-Affendi (Westminster), Eyal Weizman (Goldsmiths), and Mitchell himself. The event will be chaired by Dr Marquard Smith (Westminster).

The event is FREE but booking is essential so please RSVP to Sharon Sinclair: sinclas@wmin.ac.uk

Professor W. J. T. Mitchell is Editor of Critical Inquiry and the Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature, the Department of Art History, and the College at the University of Chicago. He is the author of seminal books including What Do Pictures Want? and Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, and editor of collections such as Against Theory, Landscape and Power, On Narrative, and Picture Theory.

Maxime Boidy is the French translator of W.J.T. Mitchell’s Cloning Terror (with S. Roth) and has also translated books by Susan Buck-Morss and Mike Davis, as well as Mitchell’s Iconography. He is a doctorial candidate in the Laboratoire Cultures et Sociétés en Europe at Université de Strasbourg.

Dr Abdelwahab El-Affendi is Reader in Politics at the Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster and co-ordinator of the Centre’s Democracy and Islam Programme. He is also currently an ESRC/AHRC Fellow in the Global Uncertainties Programme working on a project entitled ‘Narratives of Insecurity, Democratization and the Justification of (Mass) Violence.’ Dr El-Affendi is author of books including About Muhammad: The Other Western Perspective on the Prophet of Islam, The Conquest of Muslim Hearts and Minds, For a State of Peace: Conflict and the Future of Democracy in Sudan, Rethinking Islam and Modernity, and Who Needs an Islamic State?

Dr Marquard Smith is Director of the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture, University of Westminster, and Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Visual Culture.

Dr Eyal Weizman is Director of the Centre of Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. His work includes buildings and stage sets in Israel/Palestine and Europe. Weizman works with a variety of NGOs and Human right groups in Israel/Palestine. He co-curated the exhibition A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture, and co-edited the publication of the same title. These projects were based on his human-rights research, and were banned by the Israeli Association of Architects. They were later shown in the exhibition Territories in New York, Berlin, Rotterdam, San Francisco, Malmoe, Tel Aviv and Ramallah. His books include Lesser Evils, Hollow Land, A Civilian Occupation, and the series Territories 1,2 and 3.

Multi-Personae Disorder of Mme Dragu

Written by on Friday, posted in Event (No comments yet)

Multi-Personae Disorder of Mme Dragu
Thursday May 19 2011, 6.00-8.00pm
Fifth Floor, 32-38 Wells Street, London W1T

Hosted by Stefan and the Institute, this lecture and performance is FREE, but participants are asked to bring some fresh fruit for the Art Tea Party fruit salad… Request a place by emailing Stefan at: s.szczelkun@westminster.ac.uk

Thomson & Craighead this summer

Written by on Friday, posted in Exhibition, News (No comments yet)
Tagged as , ,

Thomson & Craighead are showing three pieces of template cinema called, ‘Somewhere in Sweden’, ‘A short film about nothing’ and ‘Five Ghosts’ as part of the online component of this years Biennale de Montreal, curated by Paule Mackrous. The exhibit is published by the Centre International d’Art Contemporain de Montreal’s electronic magazine, issue 39/2011. Other artists include: Mark Amerika, Grégory Chatonsky, Jhave and Mouchette (aka Martine Neddam). More about template cinema here.

In other news, the duo are showing ‘Tallinn Wall’ (a re-working of their installation ‘London Wall’) and ‘BEACON’ as part of Gateways:  Art and Network Culture at the Kumu Art Museum, Tallinn, Estonia: the museum’s keynote exhibition for Tallinn’s year as European Cultural capital in 2011. Also, a solo presentation of ‘Flipped Clock’, curated by Richard Rinehart, will run from June 1st – August 31st 2011 at the Berkeley Art Museum, California.

Whitechapel Salon: Cultures of Capitalism I, May 12th

Written by on Tuesday, posted in Event, News (No comments yet)
Tagged as , ,

Thursday 12 May 2011, 7pm
Whitechapel Gallery, 77-82 Whitechapel High Street, London E1
Price: £7.00 / £5.00 concessions (includes free glass of wine).

This season’s new Whitechapel Salon organised by the IMCC in collaboration with the Whitechapel Gallery will be on ‘Cultures of Capitalism’. In the first of four events interrogating contemporary economies of art and culture, Esther Leslie, author of Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism, Adrian Rifkin, author of Street Noises, and David Cunningham, co-editor of Adorno and Literature, discuss ‘The Culture Industry Now’. Chaired by Marquard Smith.

Book your ticket at:
http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/shop/product/category_id/22/product_id/871