The IMCC-affiliated MA in Museums, Galleries and Contemporary Culture at Westminster, in association with The Johns Hopkins Masters Program in Museum Studies, presents:

Teaching with Collections: A Discussion Forum
Tuesday 20 March 2012, 6.30 – 8.30
Fyvie Hall, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW

Keynote Speaker: Henry Kim, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Henry Kim is the Director of the University Engagement Programme, a three-year project sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, aimed at expanding the use of the museum’s collections in teaching across the University, as well as a specialist on archaic and classical Greek coins and European medals.  He has been a curator at the Ashmolean Museum and university lecturer in Greek numismatics at the University of Oxford since 1994, and was the Project Director for the Ashmolean Redevelopment Project, completed in November 2009 and the redevelopment of the Egypt Galleries, completed in November 2011.

Open and free to all. No booking required, but RSVP appreciated. Further information and RSVP: Helena Scott, scotth@westminster.ac.uk

Brixton Calling!
28 October-21 December 2011, weekdays 10am-5pm
198 Contemporary Arts & Learning, Brixton

This exhibition is the final stage of Brixton Calling! archiving and community project that connects contemporary Brixton to its past through the history of the late Brixton Art Gallery & Artists Collective in the 1980s. Exhibition opening: Thursday 27 October 2011, 6.30-10pm.

UPDATE: Further details on the 198 website here: http://198.org.uk/pages/currentexhibition.htm

Brixton Calling! events at 198 

Saturday 19 November, 2-4pm,  Curators/artists talk
Friday 25 November, 7-9pm, Brixton Fairy Night
Saturday 26 November, 1-5pm, Radical Printing
Saturday 10 December, 2-5pm, Black Art

Other Brixton Calling! events:

’80s Women Lens Based Media Event
Brixton Village, Thursday10 & Friday11 November, 7-12pm, Saturday12 November, 10am–9pm
For more information contact: info@198.org.uk

Women Artists Feminism in the 80s and Now
Goldsmiths, University of London 3rd December, 10am-5pm, in collaboration with the Women’s Art Library
For more information contact: a.greenan@gold.ac.uk

Archive installation by Stefan Szczelkun and Oral History documentary on show continuously along with many other sub-projects!

Wednesday 10th October 2011, 1.15-2.30pm
Room 106, University of Westminster, 32-38 Wells Street, London W1T 3UW

Helen Glew (History, University of Westminster)
“Women at the Regent Street Polytechnic, 1882 – 1945”

Further details on the English Literature and Culture research seminar series here.

Thursday 15 September 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 Whitechapel Salon organised by the IMCC in collaboration with the Whitechapel Gallery is on ‘Cultures of Capitalism’. In the second of four events interrogating contemporary economies of art and culture, Julie Lomax, Head of Visual Arts, Arts Council England, London, Niru Ratnam, Director of Aicon Gallery, and Victoria Walsh, Research, Tate Britain, discuss The Future of Museums and Galleries: Culture, Education, and Policy. Chaired by Marquard Smith.

Book your ticket at: http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/shop/product/category_id/22/product_id/962?session_id=13148072992e2fd7d4c36c363f076298461909906a

Materialities of Text: Between the Codex and the Net
An Online Conference, from October 24^th – November 4^th 2011.

Remit:
The book, in its traditional codex form, appears in transition from print media to digital media; a condition nevertheless complicated by its forms of survival, as indicated by the term ‘webpage’. Despite the epochal significance of the scroll, the codex, and the digital text, such material figures of inscription are necessarily hybrid; a hybridity that especially characterises the current historico-technical relation between print and digital media. Hybridity, of course, has been championed, for example, in postcolonial studies, as a figure of subversion, but it is also clear that hybrid text, as much as it is an object of possible democratisation within the digital public sphere, is also an object of intense capitalisation. Thus, the apparent waning of the hegemony of print is drawing questions of the politics of textual materialism into critical perception, and the need to interrogate the specificity of these materials, in their complex relations to the sensual form of paper and the ‘dispersed’ textuality of the digital medium. What, then, are the new materialities of hybrid text-media? What are the politics of digital/print hybrids, artists’ books, writing technologies, and digital publishing? How does media hybridity transform the political book, the artists’ book, or the work of literature? What effects do new materialities of text have on patterns of reading? Has media process replaced the media object? What are the sensory forms of new media materialities? How is the commodity-form of the book altered by new media platforms? What are the conditions and forms of specific media hybridities? What does new media do to the ‘perversions’ of the book – to bibliomania, to fetishism? Are we still ‘people of the book’ – what remains of the authority of the book? How has independent publishing responded to new materialities of text? What might figures of the book offer in the way of new or counter-knowledges, forms of community and communication?

Platform / Participants:
In keeping with its theme, the project will centre on an online conference, held on this website, which will allow the uploading of short texts and images, and user-generated commentary and debate. The organisers invite responses to texts and related questions from thinkers in all disciplines: literary-cultural studies, art-practice, critical theory and philosophy, book and publishing history and practice, etc.

Abstracts of included texts: Janneke Adema & Gary Hall (Coventry University): ‘(Im)materialities of Text: The Book as a Form of Political & Conceptual Resistance in Art and Academia’; Richard Burt (University of Florida): ‘Shelf-Life’; Johanna Drucker (UCLA): ‘Diagrammatic Writing’; Davin Heckman (Siena Heights University): ‘The Politics of Plasticity: Neoliberalism, Deliberation & the Digital Text’; Sas Mays (University of Westminster) ‘Mnemopolitics: Philosophy & the Archive in the Digital Public Sphere’; Daniel Selcer (Duquesne University): ‘Invisible Ink: Atomizing Textual Materialism’; Nick Thoburn (university of Manchester): ‘Materialities of Political Publishing’.

The organisers – Sas Mays (IMCC, Westminster) and Nick Thorburn (Manchester) – intend this forum to allow discussion that may be included within the second form of dissemination, and may feed into contributors’ articles within it: a special issue of the journal New Formations to be published in 2012.

The University of Westminster’s Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies, in association with the Masters Program in Museum Studies, Johns Hopkins University, invite you to:

‘ONLINE’: What can Museums and Galleries learn from online education in Universities, and vice versa?
A Round Table discussion with keynote speaker Phyllis Hecht (Johns Hopkins University)
Wednesday 20 July 2011, 6.30-8 p.m.
The Board Room, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW

Entrance free. RSVP Sharon Sinclair, email sinclas@westminster.ac.uk

Phyllis Hecht is Director of the Master of Arts in Museum Studies program at Johns Hopkins University, USA. She is the Chair of the Committee on Museum Professional Training (COMPT) of the American Association of Museums (AAM). Most recently she co-edited and contributed to The Digital Museum: A Think Guide (2007), an anthology on museums and technology. Phyllis will discuss how the MA program at JHU is using social networking, including incorporating Facebook and Twitter into its learning strategy.

This event is part of the JHU Museum Studies London Onsite Summer Seminar held at the University of Westminster. The Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture launches its new MA programme in Museums, Galleries and Contemporary Culture in September 2011.

Heather Ewing (The Smithsonian), ‘The Increase and Diffusion of Knowledge’
Smithsonian-Westminster Colloquium
Wednesday 23 February 2011, 6.30–8.00 pm
The Boardroom, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B

Heather Ewing is a graduate of Yale University and the Courtauld Institute of Art. An architectural historian, she is a research associate at the Smithsonian Archives and has worked for the Ringling Museum of Art. She is the author of The Lost World of James Smithson: Science, Revolution and the Birth of the Smithsonian (Bloomsbury 2007); and co-author with Amy Ballard of Smithsonian Architecture (Random House 2009). She organised a successful campaign for the placing of a blue plaque at 9 Bentinck St, London W1, the address at which James Smithson wrote his famous will bequeathing his fortune to the United States to found in Washington ‘an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men’. Join Heather for a discussion on the historical and contemporary role of museums, galleries and universities.

The Smithsonian-Westminster colloquium is a scholarly collaboration examining issues of educational, social and cultural policy and practice, and includes, in association with Johns Hopkins University, a major research project on environmental sustainability.

Entrance is free but is by invitation. If you would like to attend please email the coordinator of the Smithsonian-Westminster colloquium, Alan Morrison: morrisa1@westminster.ac.uk

BACA (Brixton Artists Collective Archives group) and 198 Contemporary Art and Learning inform us of the launch of their project Brixton Calling!, funded by Arts Council England and Heritage Lottery Funding. and organised in partnership with Lambeth Archives, Tate Archive, Women’s Art Library, and the IMCC at Westminster.

Brixton Calling! is a collaborative and participatory project as well as an exhibition that connects contemporary Brixton to its past. The intergenerational project will bring together Brixton artists and communities to explore some of the Gallery’s collaborative and artistic approaches to social/political issues and create new artworks that are relevant to Brixton today.

The first stage of the BACA Project will be: 50 Reasons to Celebrate, Brixton Art Gallery – 1983-86, Archiving Brixton Art Gallery & Artists Collective. The project’s main activity is a series of Community Archiving and Engagement projects that will be developed in Brixton between January and September 2011. The outcomes will form, alongside BACA archives, an exhibition that will be held October-December 2011 at 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning. The second stage will be a 2012-201 archiving and research project: BAG Archiving. At the end of the project, archives collected and produced during both stages will be transferred to Tate Archive, Women’s Art Library (Goldsmiths), Lambeth Archives and Carpenter Hall Archive (LSE).

Brixton Calling! Launch Party is scheduled for February 2011. Watch this space!

Thomson and Craighead have  uploaded a short video extract from their fabulous installation The Time Machine in alphabetical order to their website, along with a few other juicy additions to their archive.

Check it out here.

Stefan’s report on the most excellent Scratch Orchestra event at the Culturgest, Porto, as part of their Cornelius Cardew: The Freedom of Listening exhibition, is now available here and also below the break.

Continue reading Scratch Orchestra Dealer Concert Report

A new website documenting the IMCC’s Archiving Cultures series of events and projects is now up at: http://archivingcultures.co.uk/

The website includes programmes, paper abstracts and artworks relating to the Hole in Time, Old Media / New Work and Vernacular Photographic Archives projects taking place at Westminster, in collaboration, respectively, with the Sussex Centre for German-Jewish Studies, the Magic Lantern Society and Photographer’s Gallery.

Archiving Cultures is organised by the IMCC’s Sas Mays and follows on from the 2008-09 research project, funded by the AHRC Beyond Text award, entitled ‘Spiritualism and Technology in Historical and Contemporary Contexts’.

Activating Brixton Art Gallery, 1983-86: Archives and Memories
Saturday 5^th June 2010, 11am-4pm
Westminster Forum, University of Westminster, 32 Wells street, London W1T 3UW

A collaboration between BACA (Brixton Artists Collective Archives) group, and the 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning, the project 50 Reasons to Celebrate, Brixton Art Gallery – 1983-86, Archiving Brixton Art Gallery & Artists Collective (2010-2012) will be officially launched in Autumn 2010.  BACA consists of five individual and original members of the Brixton Artists Collective: Teri Bullen, Guy Burch, Françoise Dupré, Rita Keegan, and the IMCC’s Stefan Szczelkun.  They were part of a significant group of artists, the Brixton Artists Collective, and were instrumental in the foundation, development and running of the Brixton Art Gallery.

The ‘Activating Brixton Art Gallery, 1983-86: Archives and Memories’ symposium at Westminster is the first of two university-based symposia that will contribute to the Project’s research and development in relation to content, context, process and dissemination.  An invited group will discuss the Brixton Art Gallery & Artists Collective’s socio-political and artistic concerns and contemporary relevance.

Speakers include: Paul Dash, Department of Educational Studies, Goldsmiths; Adrian Glew, Tate Archive; Althea Greenan, curator Women’s Art Library, Goldsmiths; Ajamu, artist; Sally Mould, Brixton Art Gallery exhibiting artist and Copyart.

The 50 Reasons to Celebrate, Brixton Art Gallery – 1983-86 project promotes and celebrates the achievement and legacy of the Brixton Art Gallery & Artists Collective and provides contexts and opportunities for the re-opening of existing archives and for future archiving of the Gallery and its Collective. The project incorporates public events and participation including a postcard project, an oral history project, a community archiving project, community-based workshops, gallery talks, symposia, a publication and a major archiving exhibition at the 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning (winter 2011). At the end of the Project, Brixton Art Gallery & Artists Collective’s old and new archives will be transferred and donated to Tate Archive for safekeeping and for broader public access (Spring 2012). Lambeth Archives, Tate Archive, Young People’s Programmes, Tate Britain and the Women’s Art Library, Goldsmiths, University of London have confirmed their support.  Artist Studio Company, Autograph ABP, Birmingham City University, London School of Economics, Hall Carpenter Archive and the University of Westminster are also confirmed partners.  

For further details about the syposium, please contact Stefan Szczelkun at: S.Szczelkun@westminster.ac.uk

For more information about the Brixton Art Gallery and its Collective and first 50 exhibitions please visit the website set up and developed by Brixton Art Gallery & Artists Collective co-founder Andrew Hurman: http://brixton50.co.uk

The Hole in Time: German-Jewish Political Philosophy and the Archive
Date: Wednesday 23rd June – Thursday 24th June 2010, 9.30-6.00 

Venue: Portland Hall, University of Westminster, 4-16 Little Titchfield Street, London W1W 7UW

Admission is free, but, since places are limited, please contact the organisers to book a place by the 17^th of June at theholeintime@live.com

Wednesday 23^rd of June

9.30 – 10.00 Introduction: Sas Mays (Westminster), Leena Petersen (Sussex)

10.00 – 12.00 Panel 1: Modern Crisis and the History of the Present – Part 1

Nicholas Lambrianou (Birkbeck): ‘Figures of Interruption: Philosophical Dramas of Temporality and History in Benjamin and Rosenzweig’
Sami Khatib (FU Berlin): ‘The Messianic and the Archive: Walter Benjamin’s “Politics of Time”’
Leena Petersen (Sussex): ‘Messianic Libertarianism and Linguistic Philosophies of History in Benjamin and Related Writings of His Time’
Chair: Christian Wiese (Sussex)

1.00 – 3.00 Panel 2: Poetics of Temporality

Howard Caygill (Goldsmiths): ‘Paul Celan’s Visual Archive’
Nitzan Lebovic (Tel Aviv / Sussex): ‘Paul Celan: Language of Loss at the Heart of Time’
Shela Sheikh (Goldsmiths): ‘The Wounded Archive: Derrida Reading Celan’
Chair: Keston Sutherland (Sussex)

3.30 – 5.30 Panel 3: The Temporality of Archives – Part 1

Elina Staikou (Goldsmiths): ‘Vigil of the Archive: On Derrida Dreaming Benjamin’
Rebecca Dolgoy (Montreal / FU Berlin): ‘The Work of Art as Archive: Examining Adorno’s Zeitkern as Time Capsule’
Tommaso Speccher (FU Berlin): ‘The Hole in Space: Fragmenting and Re-piecing the Archive between Walter Benjamin and Daniel Libeskind’
Chair:  John Roberts (Wolverhampton)

Thursday 24^th of June

10.00 – 12.00 Panel 4: Modern Crisis and the History of the Present – Part 2

Reut Paz (Humboldt University Berlin): ‘The Legal Transcendentalism of Hans Kelsen as a Hole in Time’
Birte Loeschenkohl (Frankfurt): ‘Kairos: The Right and Opportune Moment as a Caesura in and of Time’
Veronika Koever (Queen Mary): ‘Reversing the Irreversible: Jean Améry’s “ressentiments” and the Moralisation of Time’
Chair: Leena Petersen (Sussex)

1.00 – 3.00 Panel 5: The External Archive

Andy Fisher (Goldsmiths): ‘”Quiet Life”: History, Pathos and the Archive in Ernst Friedrich’s Kriege dem Krieg’
Manu Luksch (London): ‘Moonwalking in Real Time’
Chair: Esther Leslie (Birkbeck)

3.30 – 5.30 Panel 6: The Temporality of Archives – Part 2

David Cunningham (Westminster): ‘Abstract Times: Benjamin, Kafka and the Modernism of Tradition’
Matthew Charles (Middlesex): ‘The Snow Line of the Archive: Walter Benjamin On the Trail of Old Letters’
Andrew McGettigan (Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, London): ‘The Archive and the Idea: Walter Benjamin’s Experiences of Time’
Chair: Nitzan Lebovic (Tel Aviv/Sussex)

Organised by Sas Mays (Westminster), and Leena Petersen and Nitzan Leibovic (Sussex), as part of the research project ‘Archiving Cultures’ at the IMCC.

The Hole in Time: German-Jewish Political Philosophy and the Archive.

A call for papers for a workshop organised by the Centre for German Jewish Studies at Sussex and the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture at Westminster
23^rd – 24^th June 2010

Abstracts by the end of January 2010 to: theholeintime@live.com

Left discussions of politics and history owe much to German-Jewish theories of temporality that emerged in response to the political crises of twentieth-century Europe; yet, other than in the attention paid to issues of technological memory in Benjamin, there has been relatively little discussion of the archival ramifications of, for example, Adorno, Bloch, Celan, Rosenzweig, and Simmel, as well as other canonical Marxist thinkers. While Benjamin’s thought has often been mobilised to think the revolutionary potential of the archive, less has been done to think through the archival attitudes and implications of the work of such other thinkers, or the extent to which such attitudes are specifically predicated upon German and Jewish philosophical and political tradition. Continue reading Call for Papers: Temporality and the Archive