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

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

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

Provisional programme now announced:

Friday 31^st 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 1^st 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

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.

Group for War and Culture Studies, University of Westminster, Research Seminar Series 2012/2013

Through the Looking Glass: Shifting Perceptions of War

Wednesday 8 May 2013, 6 pm – 8 pm, Room 351
University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW

Joram ten Brink, University of Westminster
‘The Act of Killing’

Joram will talk about a documentary he recently produced: “The Act of Killing”, directed by Joshua Oppenheimer and a major outcome of the Arts & Humanities Research Council’s Genocide and Genre Research Project awarded to The Centre for Research and  Education in Arts and Media at the University of Westminster. The documentary challenges former Indonesian death squad leaders to re-enact their real-life mass-killings in whichever cinematic genres they wish, including classic Hollywood crime scenarios and lavish musical numbers. The film has received widespread critical acclaim most recently at the Toronto and the Berlin Film Festivals.

Maki Kimura, University College London
‘Narrative as a Site of Subject Construction: The “Comfort Women” Debate’

The ordeal of `Comfort Women’ who were sexually enslaved by the Japanese Imperial Military during the Second World War became widely known in the 1990s through these women’s accounts of their experience. Instead of considering their narratives as historical data which reflect the `true’ historical past, the talk locates them within a broader framework of thinking of narratives. Drawing on the understanding of narrative as a key to the self and the subject which has been developed in narrative research, as well as Judith Butler on interpellation and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak on subaltern agency, the talk argues that the `Comfort Women’s’ testimonies should not be read one-dimensionally in the light of `truth’ and `falsity’, but should rather be considered as the site of their subject-formation. Their narratives are where agency concurrently emerges, and `Comfort Women’ are thus not powerless victims but are active participants in their creation of their own narratives and their own selves.

Entrance free. To reserve a place, please R.S.V.P. Dr Caroline Perret at: C.Perret@westminster.ac.uk

Our Visiting Professor Allan Stoekl’s review of Adrian Parr’s book The Wrath of Capital: Neoliberalism and Climate Change Politics is currently up as a freebie on the Radical Philosophy site. Check it out here: http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/web/a-differing-shade-of-green

The latest in a series of interviews with major figures in contemporary architecture and architectural theory, to be found in Vol 2, no. 4 of ARCHITECTURE_MEDIA_POLITICS_SOCIETY, is now available on-line.

Michael Sorkin, ‘Driving on the Left: A View of the Street, the City and Architecture’

Sardonic, cutting, insightful, provocative: Michael Sorkin is one of today’s most radical architectural commentators with a staunch leaning to the political left and a literary bent for framing painful truths in ironic, and sometimes hilarious, verse. He is a Distinguished Professor of Architecture and Director of the Graduate Program in Urban Design at the City College of New York. He is also Chair of Terreform, Center for Advanced Urban Research. He was the architecture critic of the Village Voice for ten years and has recently been appointed as a Visiting Professor in Architecture at Westminster.

Read it at: http://architecturemps.com/

Hosted by our friends in the Contemporary China Centre:

Chinese Kunqu opera talk and demonstration
London Jing Kun Opera Association, led by Kathy Hall

Wednesday 3 April 2013,  5.30 – 7.30pm
Room 451, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW

Kunqu (Kun Opera) enjoys national opera status in China. It is highly refined, visually stunning and very demanding on the actor. The four elements of singing, recitation, acting/movement, and martial arts form the basis of this musical and dramatic art. Strict control and pace, but also immense fluidity, are required in the performers’ use of hands, eyes, body, and feet. Dynamic interaction between actors and musicians in performance further adds to its vibrancy. In recognition of the intrinsic value of Kunqu, in May 2001 UNESCO declared it one of the first 19 ‘Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity’.

The programme includes: a short movement demonstration, typical of the elegance of the Kunqu opera dan; slide show and talk; musicians from the London Jing Kun Opera Association Kunqu Ensemble talking about their learning and performing experience; performance with musicians, including invitation to the audience to sing some lines with accompaniment.

All welcome, but non-University of Westminster attendees please register with Dr Derek Hird: d.hird@westminster.ac.uk

The Smithsonian-Westminster Colloquium
Thursday 25^th April 2013, 6.15 – 8.00 p.m.
The Boardroom, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW

“Museum Futures”
A conversation with Lonnie Bunch, Director of the National American Museum of African American History and Culture, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC

All welcome, but please RSVP to: Sharon Sinclair: sinclas@westminster.ac.uk

Archiving: China in Britain #5
Saturday April 27^th, 2013, 9:30am – 5:00pm
The Boardroom, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW

10:00 ‘Shifting tastes in Chinese art: a history of the Berkeley Smith collection of Chinese ceramics at Cheltenham Art Gallery & Museum (1921-1958)’, Louise Tythacott (University of Manchester )

10:30 ‘Let’s talk about the money’, Helen Wang (Dept of Coins and Medals, The British Museum)

11.15 ‘The First Chinese Books in London’, Frances Wood (Keeper of China Collections at the British Library)

12:15 ‘Mapping An Archive of Chinese Representations in British Cinema’, Hiu M. Chan (University of Cardiff)

12:45 Title TBA, Katie Hill (Sotheby’s)

1:30 – 2:30 Lunch

2:30 ‘The Historical Photographs of China Project’, Robert Bickers (University of Bristol)

3.15 ‘Found In Time: My Shanghai Heritage’, Peter Hibbard MBE (Former President and Founder of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society)

3.45 ‘Maoist posters in London: A perspective from the University of Westminster’, Emily Williams (University of Westminster)

5:00 Drinks Reception

Wednesday 20th March, 4.00pm – 5.30pm
Room 106, University of Westminster, 32-38 Wells Street, London W1T

Matthew Charles (University of Westminster)
‘Brecht as Educator’

A welcome to Chih-Sheng Ni who is joining the Institute as a Junior Visiting Research Fellow in the Institute from March to September this year, supported by the National Science Council in Taiwan. Chih-Sheng is a doctoral student in the English Department of Tamkang University, and is working on a research project entitled “Spinning the Images of London: Space, History and Literature in the Work of Iain Sinclair,” which explores psychogeographic representations of London. Using Henri Lefebvre’s “trialectic conception”, the research focuses on the triadic dialectical relationship between material social space, language, and the creative, poetic act.

Modernity on Display: Technology, Science and the Culture Wars at International Expositions circa World War II

Thursday 4^th April 2013, 4 – 7 p.m.
Boardroom, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW.

Speakers:
Professor Robert Kargon, Willis K. Shepard Professor of the History of Science, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore.
Dr Arthur Molella, Director, The Lemelson Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC.

International expositions are receiving significant attention from historians of science and technology, and of culture more generally. These complex events mirror ideological and national rivalries as well as domestic social, economic and political struggles. In short, they are remarkable indices of important historical tensions. Especially interesting are the international expositions planned and/or mounted just before the outbreak of the Second World War. These expositions reflected the political regimes of the host countries, and in some cases serious divisions within them. They also highlight increasingly tense ideological divisions between nations representing liberal or social democratic republics (France and the US), communist (Soviet Union) and reactionary modernist or fascist regimes such as Germany, Italy and Japan.

The book in progress on which this seminar will be based includes chapters about World’s Fairs and expositions from 1937 to 1942, drawing upon three actually built, Paris, 1937, Dusseldorf 1937 and New York 1939, and two planned in detail but, owing to the coming of war, never executed, Tokyo 1940 and Rome 1942. The presentations will use two examples – New York 1939 and Rome 1942 – to illuminate the representation of science and technology at these fairs as indicators of modernity as part of the on-going culture and propaganda wars preceding actual hostilities.

Organised by the Graduate School, University of Westminster

R.S.V.P. Sharon Sinclair, sinclas@westminster.ac.uk

From our friends at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy. Now Open for Registration:

Romantic Transdisciplinarity: Art and the New
May 8–9 2013
Senate House, University of London, Malet Street (http://goo.gl/maps/Sjkmr)

An International Conference about the transdisciplinary legacies of early German Romanticism in contemporary theory and practice in the arts and humanities. Organised by the CRMEP as part of its AHRC project on Transdisciplinarity and the Humanities in collaboration with the Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London

Speakers include:
Howard Caygill (CRMEP, Kingston University)
David Cunningham (English, IMCC, University of Westminister)
Boris Groys (Slavic Studies, NYU)
Claude Imbert (Philosophy, ENS, Paris)
Gertrud Koch (Film Studies, Free University Berlin)
Olivier Schefer (Aesthetics, Panthéon Sorbonne, Paris 1)
Alison Stone (Philosophy, Lancaster University)
Hito Steyerl (artist, Berlin)
Peter Weibel (ZKM, Karlsruhe)

Registration is *REQUIRED* via: http://fass.kingston.ac.uk/activities/item.php?updatenum=2379.
Please note that the fees for the conference – waged £60.00; students & unwaged £20.00; Covers tea/coffee, the reception and lunch for both days.

Enquiries to: crmep@kingston.ac.uk

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

Does progress always have to mean expansion? Is culture dependent on increasing space, numbers and activity? The final Salon in the IMCC series on Cultures of Capitalism at the Whitechapel debates our cultural and political obsessions with growth. Speakers include architect, academic and urbanist Sarah Chaplin, Director at Counterculture Partners Stephen Escritt, and critical theorist and Professor at Penn State University Allan Stoekl.

Book your ticket at: http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/shop/product/category_id/22/product_id/1538?session_id=13608477991e2790ead5092a4e07ee56485172feaf

Wednesday 6th March, 4pm – 5.15pm
Wells Street, room 106

Allan Stoekl (Penn State University / IMCC)
“Le Corbusier and the Challenge of a Pascalian Technocracy”

Walter Benjamin, Pedagogy, and the Politics of Youth
Friday 31st May – Saturday 1st June 2013
Fyvie Hall, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW

Co-hosted by the Institute for Modern & Contemporary Culture (IMCC) and the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP).

Participants:
Antonia Birnbaum (Paris
Howard Caygill (CRMEP)
Matthew Charles (Westminster)
Élise Derroitte (Université catholique de Louvain)
Howard Eiland (MIT)
Milan Jaros (Newcastle)
Mike Neary (Lincoln)
Peter Osborne (CRMEP)

The conference is free and open to all. There is no pre-registration and attendance on the day will be allocated on a “first-come, first-served” basis.

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

David Cunningham’s reviews of Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi’s latest book, The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance, is currently up as a freebie on the Radical Philosophy website here.

Wednesday 20th February, 4pm – 5.15pm
Wells Street, room 106

Fran Bigman (University of Cambridge)
‘A Bit of Himself: British Male-authored Abortion Narratives from Waste (1907) to Alfie (1966)’

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

Does progress always have to mean expansion? Is culture dependent on increasing space, numbers and activity? The final Salon in the IMCC series on Cultures of Capitalism at the Whitechapel debates our cultural and political obsessions with growth. Speakers include Sarah Chaplin, Stephen Escritt and Allan Stoekl.

Sarah Chaplin is an architect, academic and urbanist. Formerly head of architecture at Kingston University and a professor specialising in Japan working in the field of visual and spatial culture, she now divides her time between writing and consultancy, and is currently working on the placemaking strategy for Battersea Power Station.

Stephen Escritt is a Director at Counterculture Partners. He has worked at the British Museum and the Whitechapel Gallery, where he was Director of Strategic Development. He is the author of two books on late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century architecture and design, published by Phaidon Press. He has recently worked with Art on the Underground and Kent Architecture Centre.

Allan Stoekl is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University. Allan’s many publications include the books Politics, Writing, Mutilation: The Cases of Bataille, Blanchot, Roussel, Leiris and Ponge (University of Minnesota Press, 1985); Agonies of the Intellectual: Commitment, Subjectivity, and the Performative in the Twentieth-Century French Tradition (University of Nebraska Press, 1992); and Bataille’s Peak: Energy, Religion, and Postsustainability (University of Minnesota Press, 2007). Allan is currently working on a new book provisionally entitled Avatars of the Postsustainable City.

Book your ticket at: http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/shop/product/category_id/22/product_id/1538?session_id=13608477991e2790ead5092a4e07ee56485172feaf

The Political Unconscious of Architecture
February 28 2013, 6.30pm

UCL Urban Laboratory @ Bartlett School of Architecture
UCL Royal Ear Hospital, Ground Floor, Capper Street, London WC1E 6AP

An evening of presentation and discussion to celebrate the publication of a new paperback edition of The Political Unconscious of Architecture, edited by Nadir Lahiji. Contributors David Cunningham (IMCC, Westminster), Donald Kunze (Penn State), Nadir Lahiji (Pennsylvania), Jane Rendell (Bartlett), and Robin Wilson (Bartlett), along with respondents Camillo Boalo (DPU, UCL) and Douglas Spencer (AA), take up Fredric Jameson’s radical critique at the juncture of aesthetics and politics. All welcome!