Posts from April 2016

Sexual Violence Against Women: Voice and Representation

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

Friday 17th June 2016
St Pancras Room, King’s Place, 09:30-17:00

This one-day symposium organised by Dr Georgina Colby and Hannah Camplin aims to bring keynote academics and practitioners in the fields of law, politics, and charities into dialogue with writers, artists, and filmmakers who take up the issues surrounding sexual violence against women in their works. The symposium will open with a keynote address by Professor Jacqueline Rose (FBA, Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, University of London), titled ‘Feminism and the Abomination of Violence.’ Professor Rose’s keynote address will be followed by a lunchtime keynote paper by Keir Starmer MP, Holborn and St Pancras. There will be two afternoon panels on ‘Sexual Violence, Belief, and Credibility’, and ‘Voice and Representation: Empowering Voice and Enacting Change Through the Arts and Humanities’.

Tickets are priced at £6.00, excluding booking fee (£1.52). All proceeds from tickets sales will go to the Women’s Project at Asylum Aid. Tickets include coffee and refreshments throughout the day.

Tickets are available through Eventbrite.

Contact Georgina Colby for further information: g.colby@westminster.ac.uk.

Mark Amerika, Mobile Phone Film, Immobilité

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

Wednesday, 11 May 2016, 6:00 pm
Regent St Cinema, 309 Regent St, London W1B 2UW

amerika

We are delighted to announce the UK premiere of Mark Amerika’s work of early mobile phone video art, Immobilité.

Released in 2009, Mark Amerika’s Immobilité appropriates the stylistic tendencies of the “feature-length foreign film.” The artwork introduces the creative use of subtitles that double as a literary text depicting a future world where the dream of living in utopia can only be sustained by a nomadic tribe of artists and intellectuals living on the edge of apocalypse.

According to Amerika, “Immobilité mashes up the language of auteur-driven ‘foreign films’ with a more amateur video vernacular we now associate with social media platforms like YouTube and Vine.” By experimenting with a low-tech glitch aesthetic associated with pre-HD mobile phone video recording technology as well as more sophisticated forms of motion picture narrative found in European art-house movies, Amerika makes an attempt at interrogating the question: “What is the future of cinema?”

Shot entirely on a Nokia N95 mobile phone in 2007 (before the release of the iPhone), Immobilité was filmed on location in the Cornwall region of England and received support from the University of Falmouth iRES research group, Tate Media, and the University of Colorado Innovative Seed Grant. Solo exhibitions of Immobilité have taken place at the Denver Art Museum, the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Athens, and the Chelsea Art Museum.

For more information on Immobilité, visit immobilite.com
For further information about the event, please contact Kaja Marczewska: k.marczewska@westminster.ac.uk

The film will be introduced by Mark Amerika, in conversation with Chris Meigh-Andrews.

The event is free and open to all. Booking is essential and tickets are available here.

Luxury Book Club discussion on Hangover Square

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

You can listen to a podcast of our own Anne Witchard discussing the novel Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton for the inaugural meeting of The Luxury Book Club. Other panelists include poet Declan Ryan and actor and playwright Mark Farrelly. Have a listen here.

Artistic Connections Between Animals and Humans lecture

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Talita Jenman, who is currently studying on the Institute’s MA in Art and Visual Culture, is giving a lecture on the Artistic Connections Between Animals and Humans at the National Gallery in London on May 9th.

Monday 9th May 2016, 1.00 pm
Salisbury Wing Theatre, National Gallery

Finding the Animal

How have depictions of animals in Western art changed through time, and what might this tell us about the evolving relationship between the human and natural world? This lecture explores the changing concept of both wildness and society and how this has impacted on the ways in which we depict animals.

Talita Jenman is an artist and art historian who previously ran the Arts and Culture Programme at ZSL London Zoo.

Further details here.

Piecing It Together exhibition

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

April 29th – July 4th 2016, 9am – 6pm, Monday to Friday
The Conference Centre, St Pancras Hospital, 4 St Pancras Way, London NW1 0PE

“Piecing It Together”

‘Piecing it Together’ is an exhibition of collages and photo-text books produced as part of a participatory art project based at two North London NHS Foundation Trust Acute Day Units for people who have experienced a recent deterioration in their mental health, and facilitated by our own Alexa Wright.

Between January and September 2015 artist, Alexa led weekly workshops for service users at the two day centres. These Art Project workshops offered an opportunity for participants to use collage as a direct, visual means to communicate what they had been through. Some people also continued to work with Alexa on a 1-1 basis to create small photo-text books about their experiences. As well as providing individuals recovering from acute mental difficulties with a means of coming to terms with what happened to them, the project aims to challenge stigma around mental health more generally. Interactions with the people Alexa met during the workshops will form part of her ongoing research towards a new suite of video and sound works reflecting on some of the often surreal, but always very human themes that emerged during the residency.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a Symposium to be held on Thursday 16th June.

Some further details about the project at: http://piecingittogether.org/

 

Wallpaper: The Shanghai Collection – interview by Anne Witchard

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

An excellent interview with James H. Bollen, author of Wallpaper: The Shanghai Collection, by our very own Anne Witchard at the Los Angeles Review of Books. As Anne writes in her introduction: “The title of James H. Bollen’s new book — Wallpaper: The Shanghai Collection — makes an ironic gesture towards the materialism and consumerism that drives the ongoing destruction of Shanghai’s domestic heritage. This collection of wallpapers is available only as torn remnants clinging to half-demolished walls. The conceptual framework of this project could not be more apt. The images are grouped according to quotations from the essays of William Morris, genius both of wallpaper design and of a bygone socialist optimism. The peeling layers of bulldozed homes reveal the declining fortunes of successive generations of Shanghai’s shikumen tenants.”

Read the full interview here.