Posts from May 2013

An Encounter with Agnes Heller, June 11

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An Encounter with Agnes Heller

Tuesday 11th June, 11am – 7pm
The Boardroom, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW

Organised by our friends in the Centre for the Study of Democracy

10.30-11.00 Registration

11.00-1.00 Roundtable I
Bethania Assey (Rio de Janeiro), Laura Boella (Milan), David Cunningham (Westminster), David Roberts (Monash)

2.30-4.30 Roundtable II
Albena Azmanova (Kent), Steglinde Rosenberger (Vienna), Kate Soper (London Met), Simon Tormey (Sydney)

5.00-6.30 Public Lecture by Agnes Heller
“What went wrong with the religion of Reason?”
Chaired by Chantal Mouffe

This is a free event but registration is required.
Registration link: csdagnesheller.eventbrite.com

E. gemma.jamieson@my.westminster.ac.uk

Final Reminder: Walter Benjamin, Pedagogy and the Politics of Youth

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Walter Benjamin, Pedagogy and the Politics of Youth

Friday 31 May & Saturday 1 June 2013
Fyvie Hall, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London, W1B 2UW

Friday 31st May

13.15-14.00 Registration
14.00 –14.30 Welcome
14.30-15.30 Antonia Birnbaum (Paris 8), ‘The Life of Students is a Great Transformer’
16.00-17.00 Howard Caygill (CRMEP), ‘Attunement and Interference:
Benjamin’s Hölderlin Reading’

Saturday 1st June

09.45-10.30 Registration
10.30-11.30 Milan Jaros (Newcastle), ‘Quo Vadis? Knowing and being in the digital age’
12.00-13.00 Élise Derroitte (Louvain), ‘Chockerlebnis and Education: Learning from Modern Experience’
13.00-14.15 Lunch
14.15-15.15 Mike Neary (Lincoln), ‘Student as Producer’
15.30-17.00 Howard Eiland (MIT), ‘Education as Awakening’, with Response by Peter Osborne (CRMEP)

The conference is free, open to all and there is no need to pre-register. Attendance on each day will be allocated on a “first come, first served” basis: the registration desk will be open on Friday 31st May from 13:15 – 14:00 and on Saturday 1st June from 9:45 – 10:30 and will be located in the main entrance hall to the University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London.

Further details: http://benjaminpedagogy.wordpress.com/2012/12/10/conference-announcement/
Help publicise the conference: http://www.facebook.com/events/339458196165504/

Whitechapel Salon: Between Philosophy and Practice, Sat 8th June

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Saturday 8 June, 3pm-5pm
Clore Creative Studio, Whitechapel Gallery, London E1 7QX

The Whitechapel Salon: Between Philosophy and Practice

We are pleased to announce a one-off Whitechapel Salon organised by the IMCC in collaboration with the Whitechapel Gallery and the Institut Français, London.

From the classroom to the studio, what is the status of philosophy in contemporary art teaching and practice? With guests Elie During, Stewart Martin and Jean-Marie Schaeffer. Hosted by David Cunningham and Marquard Smith (Westminster).

Elie During is Maître de Conférences in the Department of Philosophy at the Université de Paris Ouest – Nanterre La Défense. His publications include La Science et l’Hypothèse: Poincaré (2001), Faux raccords: la coexistence des images (2010), Bergson et Einstein: la querelle du temps (2013), and, in collaboration with Dominique Gonzales-Foerster, Donatien Grau and Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Qu’est-ce que le curating? (2011). He is on the editorial board of the journal Critique.

Stewart Martin is Senior Lecturer in Modern European Philosophy, Aesthetics and Art Theory at Middlesex University. He has published widely on Critical Theory, capitalism and philosophy, and contemporary art in journals including Mute, Oxford Art Journal and Third Text. He is a member of the editorial collective of the journal Radical Philosophy.

Jean-Marie Schaeffer is Directeur d’études at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales and Directeur de recherche at the Centre International d’Etude de la Philosophie Française Contemporaine. His publications include Petite écologie des études littéraires (2010), La fin de l’exception humaine (2007), Why Fiction? (2011; originally in French, 1999), Art of the Modern Age (2000; French, 1992), and, in collaboration with Nathalie Heinich, Art, création, fiction. Entre philosophie et création (2004).

Tickets £8/6 concessions (£4 Members). Booking is essential.

Book your ticket at: http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/shop/product/category_id/22/product_id/1644?session_id=13694768703e937a4cd471a409be17f1ad7f6d57df

UK Premiere of Wu Wuna’s The Dream Never Sets, May 29th

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Wednesday 29 May, 2013, 17.00 pm
Fyvie Hall, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B

UK Premieres of Farewell 1999 (25’) and The Dream Never Sets (74’), directed by Wu Wuna
Followed by conversation between Wu Wuna, Professor Harriet Evans and Dr. Kiki Yu

Following up on Farewell 1999 about her mother, The Dream Never Sets is another highly personal documentary from Wu Wuna, this time focusing on her father, who has claimed to be an inventor of note for as long as she can remember. A somewhat lighter, though equally complex offering, the film reviews her difficult relationship with the man who introduced sex toys to Taiwan and who now dreams of marketing the ultimate food blender around the world. The film sees Wu laying bare their often strained father-daughter bond in an effort to understand it herself, matters being made more difficult when she learns that he is seriously ill.

Organised as part of the 2013 Chinese Visual Festival.

Call for Papers: ‘Visual Studies as Academic Discipline’ conference, Centre for Visual Studies, Zagreb, Croatia, November 2013

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The past two decades have witnessed a large increase in academic interest in all visual phenomena, including those strictly visual – from painting and film to experimental video and multimedia installations – as well as all the forms of applied arts: graphic and industrial design, fashion and advertising. In many countries, this interest in visual practice is accompanied by the interest in visual theories, primarily in the new discipline of visual studies that keep acquiring academic legitimacy at universities worldwide.

Visual studies have emerged as a result of parallel expansion that occurred respectively in the fields of art history and film studies, whose radical members have converged particular theories of still and moving images, towards an integral science of images. After W.J.T. Mitchell and Gottfried Boehm have sanctioned the pictorial turn as the basic interest of hyper-mediatized society, it became clear that various visual phenomena demand a much wider theoretical platform, one which would take into consideration the definitive erasure of borders between high and low art, between elite and popular culture, as well as between creators and consumers of visual messages.

For the first time in history, the users of images became the producers of images, within an unrestrained circular process, wherein images yield new insights, while insights demand their instantaneous pictorial foundation. The development and expansion of telecommunication technologies have transformed the traditionally understood technical images into a new communication code that is accessible to everyone. However, does this accessibility simultaneously presume that the new communication code is intelligible to everyone using it? Do we really know what are the images telling us, what do they want from us or what is it that we want from them? Do we know in which manner the most recent researches in technosciences prove, by the way of visualization, their radical tenets on biocybernetic complex systems, and how is the notion of image inscribed into the performative bodies of art and fashion today?

The International Scientific Conference Visual Studies as Academic Discipline aims to gather a wide circle of university oriented theorists, so that they can jointly consider the ways in which they deliberate and teach about images, primarily about their overlapping meanings, that arise through the intermedia networking of various visual practices, as well as through the transdisciplinary analyses of contemporary theories. This symposium wishes to examine the theoretical legitimacy of a wide field of visual representations: art, film, photography, design, fashion and performance. It also wishes to consider the disciplinary status of actual visual studies as an (established) scientific paradigm.

We invite all the concerned colleagues to submit their presentations on one of the proposed subjects:

1. The theoretical and disciplinary status of visual studies – two decades after the pictorial turn
2. Visual studies as a “radical” version of art history or a critical detour?
3. The epistemological aspects of visual studies in university curricula
4. The potentials of the applied science of images: interactions between art, film, design, fashion and performance
5. “Non-disciplinarity” as an approach to the multimedia image of the world
6. Fashion studies today: from the theory of fashion to the design of body

Presentations are limited to 20 minutes. In order to participate at the Conference, please send abstract of your paper (150 words) together with short CV to email: purgar@vizualni-studiji.com and zarko.paic@zg.t-com.hr until 21st of July 2013. The scientific board will notify you of the status of your proposal until 25th of July 2013.

Keynote speaker:

W.J.T. Mitchell, University of Chicago, USA

Plenary speakers:

Michele Cometa, University of Palermo, Italy
Marquard Smith
, University of Westminster, London, GB

Members of the workgroup Visual Culture in Europe:

Nina Lager Vestberg, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway
Øyvind Vågnes
, The Bergen Center for Visual Culture, Norway
Joaquín Barriendos
, Columbia University, New York, USA
Ana Maria Guasch
, University of Barcelona, Spain
Safet Ahmeti
, Center for Visual Studies, Skopje, Macedonia
Max Liljefors
, Lund University, Sweden
Almira Ousmanova
, European Humanities University, Vilnius, Lithuania

Scientific and organisational board:

Žarko Paić, PhD, Associate Professor, Faculty of Textile Technology, University of Zagreb
Krešimir Purgar
, PhD, Center for Visual Studies, Zagreb
Sandra Bischof
, PhD, Dean of Faculty of Textile Technology, University of Zagreb
Katarina Nina Simončič
, PhD, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Textile Technology, University of Zagreb
Nikola Petković
, PhD, Professor, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Rijeka
Leonida Kovač
, PhD, Assistant Professor, Academy of Fine Arts, University of Zagreb
Suzana Marjanić
, PhD, Senior Research Associate, Institute of Ethnology and Folklore, Zagreb
Goran Sergej Pristaš
, Associate Professor, Academy of Dramatic Art, University of Zagreb
Silva Kalčić
, Lecturer, Faculty of Textile Technology, University of Zagreb
Petra Krpan
, MSc, Faculty of Textile Technology, University of Zagreb
Laura Potrović
, MSc, Academy of Dramatic Art, University of Zagreb
Nikola Devčić
, Director of the Association “White Wave”, Zagreb

Organizers:

Center for Visual Studies, Zagreb; Tvrđa – Magazine for theory, culture and visual arts; Croatian Writers’ Society; Faculty of Textile Technology, University of Zagreb; Association “White Wave”, Zagreb

The Conference will take place at the Faculty of Textile Technology in Zagreb, from 7th to 9th November 2013. Details will be regularly updated on the web site www.visual-studies.com.

The Conference is organized within the activities of the workgroup Visual Culture in Europe, and is the fourth such event, following previous ones held in London (2010), Barcelona (2011) and Trondheim (2012).

The Conference Visual Studies as Academic Discipline is endorsed by The International Association for Visual Culture.


Conference announcement: Memory and Restitution, 5-6 July

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Memory and Restitution
July 5-6 2013, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B

Conference website at: http://www.memoryandrestitution.co.uk/

Keynotes:
Professor Stef Craps, University of Ghent
Professor Lyndsey Stonebridge, University of East Anglia
Professor Anna Reading, King’s College London

Following recent attention to the “cosmopolitan” or “multidirectional” dimensions of memory, this colloquium foregrounds commemorative practices as global positioning systems that enable individuals and collectives to situate themselves (temporally and spatially, emotionally and intellectually, politically, and ethically) in relation to others. Having conceptualised memorative processes thus, we seek to investigate the complex relationship between memory and restitution in the aftermath of both human and natural destruction.

Interrogating the implicit hierarchies of life encoded in disparate forms of historical reckoning, the colloquium considers whether it is possible to imagine a universal model of restitution, or whether processes of redress are necessarily a product of the cultural and historical context in which they arise. We ask how memorial discourses contribute to official and unofficial forms of justice through their imbrication with the diverse institutions of the public sphere.  We analyse the ways in which memory may be shaped by the medium of representation and redress, asking whether different types of disaster (environmental, genocidal, terrorist) demand disparate modes of restitution and/or commemoration and articulation.

Organised by: Lucy Bond (Westminster), Rick Crownshaw (Goldsmiths) and Jessica Rapson (Goldsmiths)

Co-sponsored by the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture

For more info, please contact: memoryandrestitution@gmail.com

Walter Benjamin, Pedagogy and the Politics of Youth conference programme

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Walter Benjamin, Pedagogy and the Politics of Youth

Friday 31 May & Saturday 1 June 2013
Fyvie Hall, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London, W1B 2UW

Provisional programme now announced:

Friday 31st May

13.15-14.00 Registration

14.00 –14.30 Welcome

14.30-15.30 Antonia Birnbaum (Paris 8), ‘The Life of Students is a Great Transformer’

16.00-17.00 Howard Caygill (CRMEP), ‘Attunement and Interference:
Benjamin’s Hölderlin Reading’

Saturday 1st June

09.45-10.30 Registration

10.30-11.30 Milan Jaros (Newcastle), ‘Quo Vadis? Knowing and being in the digital age’

12.00-13.00 Élise Derroitte (Louvain), ‘Chockerlebnis and Education: Learning from Modern Experience’

13.00-14.15 Lunch

14.15-15.15 Mike Neary (Lincoln), ‘Student as Producer: a pedagogy of the avant-garde; or, how do revolutionary teachers teach?’

15.30-17.00 Howard Eiland (MIT), ‘Education as Awakening’, with Response by Peter Osborne (CRMEP)

The conference is free, open to all and there is no need to pre-register. Attendance on each day will be allocated on a “first come, first served” basis: the registration desk will be open on Friday 31st May from 13:15 – 14:00 and on Saturday 1st June from 9:45 – 10:30 and will be located in the main entrance hall to the University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London.

Further details: http://benjaminpedagogy.wordpress.com/2012/12/10/conference-announcement/

Help publicise the conference: http://www.facebook.com/events/339458196165504/

Never Odd or Even: Thomson & Craighead, May 24-July 6

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Never Odd or Even

Carroll-Fletcher, 56 – 57 Eastcastle St, London W1W 8EQ
May 24 – July 6 2013

This is the first survey exhibition by Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead in the UK, bringing together a range of new and recent works.

Interested in how information about the world is filtered through the prism of the world wide web, and other forms of information technology, Thomson & Craighead play with this data to create poetic, compelling works that ask fundamental questions about what it is to be human.

Encompassing small-scale quotidian encounters, as well as works that point up the smallness of humankind in the vastness of the universe, there is a lyricism and lightness of touch that enables the artists to address major political and social themes from unexpected angles.

The exhibition is accompanied by a new publication with an essay by David Auerbach. The publication can be purchased from the gallery or via the online shop. The essay can be downloaded here.

China in Britain # 6: Diasporic Translations

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ARCHIVING CHINA IN BRITAIN: MYTHS AND REALITIES #6
DIASPORIC TRANSLATIONS

Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies, University of Westminster
Co-hosted with the Contemporary China Centre

Friday 24 May 9.30am–5.30pm, The Cayley Room, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW

Entrance is free but strictly limited so it is essential to book your place by emailing Anne Witchard: anne@translatingchina.info

9.30AM – Coffee served in Room UG05

10.00AM – ‘The work of Ming-Ai (London) Institute 院 徽 涵 意 and their historical project on British Chinese history’

Chungwen Li and Aubrey Ko will be talking about Ming-Ai, set up in 1993 to promote social, cultural, educational and economic exchanges among the peoples of Hong Kong, China and Britain, http://www.ming-ai.org.uk

10.30AM – ‘On Not Speaking Chinese – The Hidden Lives of the Chinese in the Caribbean’

Chrys Chijiutomi, Associate Research Assistant for ‘China in Britain: Myths and Realities’ # 6, currently taking the MA, Culture Diaspora Ethnicity at Birkbeck College, University of London.

This paper will examine the historical and contemporary presence of Chinese communities in the Caribbean and consider what ‘Chineseness’ means in an age of globalisation and diaspora, looking at the socio-cultural impact and influences of Chinese Caribbean communities on artforms such as music (e.g. reggae), literature, theatre, dance, food cultures and visual art.

11.00AM – Morning Coffee served in Room UG05

11.15AM – ‘China in Britain: China in the Caribbean’

Dr. Judith Misrahi-Barak (Paul-Valéry University Montpellier III, France).

11.45AM – Diasporic Migrations panel chaired by Dr. Diana Yeh

12.00PM – ‘How Jim was Shanghaied: 1930s Shanghai and its lasting influence on the writing of JG Ballard’

Duncan Hewitt (New York University in Shanghai)

The unique environment of the Shanghai of the 1930s and ‘40s has exerted a lasting influence on the world of English literature through its impact on the distinctive vision of the writer JG Ballard. This paper looks at how Shanghai’s rampant consumerism, highly developed media culture and constant threat of violence influenced not only those of Ballard’s works which deal explicitly with his Shanghai childhood, but also the author’s writing and worldview throughout his career. It’s something Ballard initially denied, but came to acknowledge in his later years – though it’s a connection which has yet to be embraced by the Shanghai authorities.

12:45PM – ‘East West Connectivities in Two Dances: Red Detachment of Women (1964) and The Nightingale (1981)’

Dr. Geraldine Morris (Roehampton University)

The paper examines the notion of identity by reference to two dance works created in contrasting nations, the Peoples Republic of China and the United Kingdom, and considers the extent to which an aesthetic object can be a representation of a country’s culture. Using a multidisciplinary approach, Morris will examine the ways in which opposing ideologies merge in these works producing an East/West fusion. Red Detachment of Women (1964), created by a collaborative team of three, Li Chengxiang, Jiang Zuhui and Wang Xixian, was made in the years leading up to the Cultural Revolution. It was conceived as a patriotic, anti-bourgeois work, derived entirely from Chinese values, and yet is suffused with Western ideals and imagery. The Nightingale (1981) choreographed by Frederick Ashton, the founder choreographer of the Royal Ballet, is a hybrid work, comprising dance and song mixing East and West but perceived as Western. Dances are identified mainly through their choreography, so a dance that embodies a Western style of movement can only ever be partially Eastern, whatever the narrative content. In Red Detachment of Women, while the story, sets and costume are evidently Chinese, the movement and form is balletic and embraces a Western aesthetic. In contrast, The Nightingale borrows from Chinese regional dance but is framed by British balletic culture. The paper demonstrates that by teasing out the complexities of a dance work, the perception of its cultural identity can be both disturbed and challenged.

1.15PM – Buffet Lunch in Room UG05

2:15PM – ‘Only Connect: New Media and Chinese Overseas from the Age of the Telegraph to that of the Internet’

Jeffrey Wasserstrom (Chancellor’s Professor of History at University of California, Irvine)

This presentation will look at comparisons and contrasts between the ways that different technologies of communication have fascinated and been used by Chinese to keep in touch with one another and learn about the world from the 1870s through the present. Points of departure will include globetrotter Li Gui’s accounts of telegraphy in his book about his 1876 trips around the world; the role that circular telegraphs played in political struggles of the late 1800s and early 1900s; the significance of the then-very-new form of email in spreading word of the Tian’anmen rising among Chinese studying in the West; and the growing importance of blogs, microblogs, online only journals, and other digital forms in connecting people within and beyond China.  

3:00PM – ‘Cosmopolitans Four Ways: Artists of Hong Kong’s Visual Diaspora’.

Pamela Kember is an Independent Art Historian, Curator, and a Director on the Board of the Asia Art Archive Hong Kong.

The ‘cosmopolitan nomad’ articulates the state of existence of a number of migrant Chinese artists originally from Hong Kong who seem to inhabit a transnational existence, in the sense of constantly crossing borders, cultures and communities, internationally. This paper will examine the creativity of four such émigré Hong Kong artists, John Young (AUS) Paul Chan (USA) Suki Chan, (UK) and Simon Leung (USA) and focuses on specific diasporic subjectivites that inform their respective practices to date. The paper will examine the relationship between the diversity of their practices whilst dealing with specific frames of reference: concepts of memory, belonging and displacement.

3:30PM – ‘Transcultural Curating – Global perspectives on Contemporary Chinese Art’

Rachel Marsden is Research Curator (part-time) for Chinese Arts Centre (Manchester, UK) and Coordinator (part-time) for the Centre for Chinese Visual Arts (CCVA) (Birmingham, UK and China).

4:00PM – Afternoon Tea in Room UG05

4.15PM – The Fu Manchu Complex’

Daniel York will discuss his work as a founding member of the British East Asian Artists’ group who have pressured the UK theatre industry to offer more opportunities to East Asian theatre artists. As a result of this, the Arts Council, Equity & SOLT/TMA recently sponsored an event at the Young Vic Theatre attended by 200 people to raise awareness of East Asian theatre practitioners, which Daniel helped organise as a member of the event steering committee.

Deadly Cuts to the Arts

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The Museum of Contemporary Cuts (MoCC) is developing a research project, under the directorship of Lanfranco Aceti, to assess and map the impact of the arts funding reductions in several European Countries and North America, and would like to invite individuals and funded organizations to contribute their data.

This is a form that will provide us with the data regarding art organizations that have closed as a consequence of the current economic crisis or that have had their funding cut.

The research project will analyze the impact of the current economic crisis on the arts throughout the following countries (Austria, Canada, Belgium, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, Spain, Turkey, United Kingdom and United States) comparing official data with data provided on each specific territory.
The project aims to create a repository of data that can be accessed and poured through to gain a clear impression of the affected organizations and the current state of the arts from 2007 to present.

MoCC will create, using the information gathered, a series of data visualizations, as well as art commissions, curatorial projects, exhibitions, research analyses and publications. It will promote initiatives that will be showcased and presented at international events and biennials.

At the end of 2012, one such organization effected, was the NIMk. The activities of the Netherlands Media Art Institute ceased as of 31 December, 2012.

To assist us with this task, we are asking individuals and arts organizations to send us the following information on the art organizations that have closed or have received funding cuts in the period 2007 – present.

You can provide this information by using our online web form available at this link: http://museumofcontemporarycuts.org/deadly-cuts-form/

Also, we would like to display, online, the Letter of Funding Cuts that art institutions received during the period 2007 – present.

These Letter of Funding Cuts can be scanned at 300dpi resolution and emailed to: museumofcontemporarycuts@gmail.com or posted, as a physical copy to be archived by MoCC.

Postal address: Ref. Letter of Funding Cuts To: Lanfranco Aceti, MoCC Director, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Sabanci University, Orhanli/Tuzla, 34956 Istanbul, Turkey

Letters should be sent ideally by December 31, 2013 – but we will continue to accept them throughout the life of the Museum of Contemporary Cuts.

Enquires about this particular project, collaborations for exhibitions and research with MoCC should be sent to: info@museumofcontemporarycuts.org

To stay informed please subscribe to our newsletters: http://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/newsletters

Follow MoCC on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/MuseumOfContemporaryCuts

Follow MoCC on Twitter: http://twitter.com/MoCC_2012

We acknowledge the support of Operational and Curatorial Research (OCR), International Association for Visual Culture, Kasa Gallery, Sabanci University, Chelsea College, Westminster University and Goldsmiths College.

Image credit: Jonathan Munro, Vacant, 2013. Digital image.