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

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

ARCHIVING CHINA IN BRITAIN

Saturday 27 April, 9.30am–6pm
The Boardroom, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW

This one-day conference is co-hosted by the Department of English, Lingusitics and Cultural Studies with the University of Westminster Contemporary China Centre, keeper of the Chinese Poster Collection, an archival holding of more than 800 posters from the Mao era.

RSVP anne@translatingchina.info

For further details please visit translatingchina.info

Our friends in the Art, Globalization, and Interculturality research group in the Department of Art History, University of Barcelona, are pleased to announce a ‘call for papers’ for their upcoming international conference entitled ‘Critical Cartography of Art and Visuality in the Global Age’. Please see further details below.

1st INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
Critical Cartography of Art and Visuality in the Global Age.

April 26-27, 2013, Barcelona, SPAIN

AULA MAGNA. Department of Art History, University of Barcelona (UB)
AUDITORIUM. Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA)

The First International Conference Critical Cartography of Art and Visuality in the Global Age aims to engage with the complexities of the new status of art and visuality in contemporary art practice in the context of “globalization”. Focusing on the paradigms of identity, alterity, memory, locality and interculturality, as well as on new ways of understanding the political, ecological, technological, economical and scientific dimensions of the current age, the conference seeks to locate the topos from which each of these paradigms forges links between theoretical concepts and innovative work methodologies.

Scholars, artists, and research students working in the field of global art are invited to submit proposals for one of the following panel themes:

1. Media Art Documentation. New Tools for the Humanities.
Convenor: Carles Guerra, Keynote: Oliver Grau

2. The Utopian Globalists
Convenor: Anna Maria Guasch, Keynote: Jonathan Harris

3. Labor, Woman and Politics
Convenor: Juan Vicente Aliaga, Keynote: Angela Dimitrakaki

4. Art and the Post-Natural Condition
Convenor: Joaquín Barriendos Rodríguez, Keynote: T.J. Demos

Each panel will be comprised of four speakers, each allocated 20 minutes for their presentation, with the convenor encouraging debate among the presenters.

All abstract submissions (even if not selected for a panel presentation) will be considered for the publication Critical Cartography of Art and Visuality in the Global Age. New Methodologies, Concepts, and Analytic Scopes, an edited collection resulting from the conference to be published by the University of Barcelona.

A completed application form including a 300 word abstract and a brief CV should be submitted to Nasheli Jiménez del Val at artglobalage@gmail.com by February 18, 2013. Authors will be notified of acceptance for the panel, the publication, or both, by March 8, 2013.

http://artglobalizationinterculturality.com/activities/conferences/conference-2013/

Eyal Weizman, The Roundabout Revolution

January 29th 2013, 7pm
Department of Architecture, University of Westminster, 35 Marylebone Road, London NW1 5LS

Eyal Weizman, architect, curator and author of The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza will speak at the first of a 6 part lecture series: ‘Critical Humanitarianism’.  Eyal Weizman is Professor of Visual Cultures and director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. Since 2011 he also directs the European Research Council funded project, Forensic Architecture, on the place of architecture in international humanitarian law. He is a founding member of the architectural collective DAAR in Beit Sahour/Palestine.

Religious tension, diminishing resources, city dwelling and environmental catastrophes continue to create vulnerable regions throughout the world.  The necessity for architects to address humanitarian and environmental issues in their practice is increasing.  Do architects have the means to address these issues through their work?  Or are we powerless to act?  Through a series of 6 talks addressing ‘Critical Humanitarianism’ by Architects volunteering for Charities or working with NGOs in the Development Sector we aim to raise some of the difficult ethical and political questions about Humanitarian work and it’s relation to power.

China in Britain: Myths and Realities
Aesthetics: Visual and Literary Cultures

December 8^th 2012, 9:30am – 4:00pm
The Cayley Room, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW

You are warmly invited to the fourth in this University of Westminster/AHRC funded series. The day will present an eclectic programme with presentations on modernist architecture, fashion and literature, chinoiserie, and both literature and photography ‘then and now’. Speakers in the morning are Sarah Cheang (Royal College of Art), Edward Denision (Bartlett, UCL), Patricia Laurence (City University of New York), and David Porter (Michigan). The afternoon sessions will include a presentation by photographer Grace Lau and conversations with Paul French, author of Midnight in Peking (Penguin 2012) and novelist Xiaolu Guo. The day will end with a drinks reception.

The full programme along with abstracts and biogs can be found at: www.translatingchina.info

UPDATE: You can find an excellent account of the day’s event on Rachel Marsden’s blog at: http://rachelmarsdenwords.wordpress.com/2012/12/08/china-in-britain-4/

China in Britain: Myths and Realities
Aesthetics: Visual and Literary Cultures

December 8^th 2012, 9:30am – 4:00pm
The Cayley Room, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW

You are warmly invited to the fourth in this University of Westminster/AHRC funded series. The day will present an eclectic programme with presentations on modernist architecture, fashion and literature, chinoiserie, and both literature and photography ‘then and now’. Speakers in the morning are Sarah Cheang (Royal College of Art), Edward Denision (Bartlett, UCL), Patricia Laurence (City University of New York), and David Porter (Michigan). The afternoon sessions will include a presentation by photographer Grace Lau and conversations with Paul French, author of Midnight in Peking (Penguin 2012) and novelist Xiaolu Guo. The day will end with a drinks reception.

The full programme along with abstracts and biogs can be found at: www.translatingchina.info

Entrance – including lunch and refreshments – is free of charge so for catering purposes it is essential to book your place by emailing: anne@translatingchina.info

Alexa Wright is taking part in Digital Aesthetic³ 2012, an international exhibition and conference which explores the impact that the digital has on our sense of self and our relationship to the physical world. The exhibition is housed in the Harris Museum & Art Gallery, and the University of Central Lancashire’s PR1 Gallery in Preston. It demonstrates some of the diverse ways that artists are utilising digital technology, including projection, digital print, 3d work, screen based video work, touch panel installation, and a live interactive website. The conference takes place over Friday Oct 5^th and Saturday Oct 6^th. In a great line up, other participants include Mark Amerika, Sean Cubitt and Sophie Calle.

Further details at: http://digitalaesthetic.org.uk/

ARCHITECTURE_MEDIA_POLITICS_SOCIETY is a new on-line, fully peer reviewed academic journal.

The journal is a forum for the analysis of architecture in the mediated environment of contemporary culture. It seeks to expand an understanding of architecture and its relationship with media, politics and society in its broadest sense. One international paper is published each month that deals with an issue or theme relevant to the journal. Dual language publications are encouraged. Selected authors are also invited to submit articles for a printed version of the journal.

Currently, the journal forum operates as a platform for a research project entitled Architecture as Political Image; an investigation into the use of architecture in political campaign imagery in the United States and the United Kingdom. It is run in affiliation with Ravensbourne (University College), London, and Florida State University, Tallahassee.

ISSN 2050-9006 For details about submissions visit the web site: www.architecturemps.com

UPDATE: The second volume of issue one has just been published entitled Mythopoetics of the Kunsthalle. The issue contains an article arguing for a major reconsideration of the architectural profession that uses the notion of the Kunsthalle as its theoretical framework. The author, Manuel Schartzberg, is an architect and tutor currently working in the US. Previously, he worked for David Chipperfield Architects in the UK and his paper is partly based on his time there. You can read it at the web site: www.architecturemps.com

Wednesday 6^th June 2012, 4pm
Room 358, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW

Professor Thomas Y. Levin
Princeton University / IKKM Bauhaus University, Weimar

“Ghostly Surveillance: Some Stabs in the Ciné-Narratological Dark”

Simultaneous with the increasingly widespread use of surveillance as a narrative device in contemporary cinema – its most obvious manifestation being the rise of so-called “real-time” transmission characteristic of CCTV systems in films such as The Truman Show — we are also witnessing a curious proliferation of ghosts within the surveillant machinery, from disturbing videocasettes desposited mysteriously on doorsteps (Lost Highway, Caché) to the re-appearance of people who are supposedly dead on the screens of corporate security systems (Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet [2000]) and the documentation of the presence of demons by means of home surveillance cameras (Paranormal Activity).  While it could be argued that at least since Bentham, there has always been a ghostly dimension to surveillance (the panoptic tower functions despite the complete inability to determine whether anyone is actually really inside), what might these ghostly apparitions reveal about the assumptions we make about surveillance images, indeed about cinema as such?

Thomas Y. Levin teaches media theory and history, cultural theory, intellectual history, and aesthetics. His essays have appeared in October, Grey Room, New German Critique, Screen, The Yale Journal of Criticism, and Texte zur Kunst. He translated and edited the critical edition of Siegfried Kracauer’s The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays (1995). He was part of the curatorial collective responsible for the first exhibition on the Situationist International at the Centre Pompidou, ICA London and the ICA Boston in 1989. Levin also conceived and curated the exhibition CTRL [SPACE], Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother which opened at at the ZKM Center for Art and Media Technology in Karlsruhe in October 2001 and edited the catalogue under the same title (with Ursula Frohne and Peter Weibel). His more recent curatorial activities include Anxious Omniscience: Surveillance and Contemporary Cultural Practice (Princeton University Art Museum, 2002), 911+1: The Perplexities of Security (Watson Institute, Brown University, 2002) and The Arts of the Future will be Radical Transformations of Situations, or They will be Nothing’: Guy Debord Cineaste (Slought Foundation, Philadelphia, 2006).

Our friends at the Associação Cultural Videobrasil in partnership with Delfina Foundation and Casa Tomada (São Paulo, Brazil) are pleased to invite applications from visual artists living and working in Brazil and the Middle East, North Africa & South Asia (MENASA) for a three-month artistic residency split between São Paulo and London. The Videobrasil em Contexto Prize (Videobrasil in Context) is focused on artists, under the age of 35, whose practice involves a strong element of research and production. Two artists (one from Brazil and another from MENASA) will be selected to undertake the three-month residencies from mid-September 2012 and produce a new works in response to Videobrasil’s Collection.

The Collection available for each artist are the works that have been part of the Southern Panoramas show each year since 1990, when Videobrasil focused on the geopolitical South.  An overview of this 20+ year selection is available for the applicants at:  www.videobrasil.org.br/vbonline During the residencies, various public platforms will be created for the artists in São Paulo and London.  At the end of the residency, the artists will be asked to prepare a presentation of their projects to be part of the activities of the 30th Anniversary of the International Contemporary Art Festival SESC_Videobrasil in October 2013.

- Deadline for applications: 8th June 2012
- Artists shortlisted: June 15th, 2012
- Interviews with shortlisted artists through Skype: June 20th to July 22nd, 2012
- Announcement of Selection: 2nd July, 2012
- Program Length: September 17th – December 29th, 2012
[São Paulo: September 17th – October 29th, 2012; London: October 29th – December 17th, 2012]

For more information on the programme and selection process, please download an application form here in English.

Hosted by NYU, the International Association for Visual Culture’s biennial conference will take place later this week (Thursday May 31st – Saturday June 2nd). Contributors include:

Dena Al-Abeeb, Safet Ahmeti, Katherine Behar, Wafaa Bilal, Maxime Boidy, Shane Brennan, Giuliana Bruno, Lisa Cartwright, Jill Casid, Dean Chan, Alexandra Chang, Patty Chang, Hazel Clark, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Beth Coleman, David Darts, Craig Dietrich, Ellen Esrock, Jessica Freedman, GB Tran, Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, Jennifer Gonzalez, Jaleen Grove, Elizabeth Guffey, Raiford Guins, Gary Hall, Natalie Jeremijenko, Alexandra Juhasz, Elizabeth Koslov, Max Liljefors, Mark Little, Kevin Matz, Meerkat Media Collective, Keith Miller, Nicholas Mirzoeff, W.J.T. Mitchell, Naeem Mohaiemen, Stephen Monteiro, Tara McPherson, Sina Najafi, Lisa Nakamura, Amy Ogata, the OWS Student Debt Campaign, Trevor Paglen, Amanda du Preez, Martha Rosler, Joan A. Saab, Marquard Smith, Landon van Soest, Marita Sturken, Francesca Martinez Tagliavia, Thomas Tsang, Magda Szczensniak, Diana Taylor, Oyvind Vagnes, Carlin Wing, Jason Wing, McKenzie Walk, and Joanna Zylinska.

Further details on the conference are available here: http://www.visualculturenow.org/

The International Association for Visual Culture (IAVC) means to foster communication and exchange among individuals and institutions engaged in critical analyses of and interventions in visual culture. For details of the IAVC, visit its website: http://iavc.org.uk/

For forthcoming news, including information on Membership, please find the Association on Facebook and follow it on Twitter: http://iavc.org.uk/contact Thanks.

Thomson and Craighead are premiering their new documentary artwork, ‘Belief’ as part of the Edinburgh Film Festival. It’s the final work in the Flat Earth Trilogy following on from Flat Earth (2007) and A short film about War (2009/2010), and will be shown at Inspace, Edinburgh from 21st June – 1st July 2012. e-flyer: http://www.thomson-craighead.net/belief

In other news, Thomson and Craighead have donated a print for an Animate Projects fundraiser aiming to help keep the brilliant Animate Projects archive online. So if you fancy donating to the cause and walking away with an artists’ print, then do go along on Wednesday 13 June, 6.30-8.30pm, Berners House, 47-48 Berners Street, London. Email: tarnia@animateprojects.org for more information about this.

Finally, work by Thomason and Craighead is also appearing in two group shows: ‘Image Counter Image’ at the Haus der Kunst, Munich, 10th June 2012 – 16th September 2012; and ‘Gateways: Art & Networked Culture’, Haus für elektronische Künste, Basel, 2nd June 2012 – 19th August 2012.

Wednesday 6^th June 2012, 4pm
Room 358, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW

Professor Thomas Y. Levin
Princeton University / IKKM Bauhaus University, Weimar

“Ghostly Surveillance: Some Stabs in the Ciné-Narratological Dark”

Simultaneous with the increasingly widespread use of surveillance as a narrative device in contemporary cinema – its most obvious manifestation being the rise of so-called “real-time” transmission characteristic of CCTV systems in films such as The Truman Show — we are also witnessing a curious proliferation of ghosts within the surveillant machinery, from disturbing videocasettes desposited mysteriously on doorsteps (Lost Highway, Caché) to the re-appearance of people who are supposedly dead on the screens of corporate security systems (Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet [2000]) and the documentation of the presence of demons by means of home surveillance cameras (Paranormal Activity).  While it could be argued that at least since Bentham, there has always been a ghostly dimension to surveillance (the panoptic tower functions despite the complete inability to determine whether anyone is actually really inside), what might these ghostly apparitions reveal about the assumptions we make about surveillance images, indeed about cinema as such?

Thomas Y. Levin teaches media theory and history, cultural theory, intellectual history, and aesthetics. His essays have appeared in October, Grey Room, New German Critique, Screen, The Yale Journal of Criticism, and Texte zur Kunst. He translated and edited the critical edition of Siegfried Kracauer’s The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays (1995). He was part of the curatorial collective responsible for the first exhibition on the Situationist International at the Centre Pompidou, ICA London and the ICA Boston in 1989. Levin also conceived and curated the exhibition CTRL [SPACE], Rhetorics of Surveillance from Bentham to Big Brother which opened at at the ZKM Center for Art and Media Technology in Karlsruhe in October 2001 and edited the catalogue under the same title (with Ursula Frohne and Peter Weibel). His more recent curatorial activities include Anxious Omniscience: Surveillance and Contemporary Cultural Practice (Princeton University Art Museum, 2002), 911+1: The Perplexities of Security (Watson Institute, Brown University, 2002) and The Arts of the Future will be Radical Transformations of Situations, or They will be Nothing’: Guy Debord Cineaste (Slought Foundation, Philadelphia, 2006).

China in Britain #1. Film
Thursday May 10th 2012, 10.00 am – 6.00 pm

An important message from the organisers: because of our support for UCU Strike Action on May 10th, the venue has been transferred from the University of Westminster to The Brunei Gallery, School of Oriental and African Studies, Thornhaugh St., Russell Square, London WC1H OXG: http://www.soas.ac.uk/gallery/

The first in a series of colloquia organised as part of China in Britain: Myths and Realities, an AHRC-funded research network project to investigate changing conceptions of China and Chineseness in Britain, and based at Westminster. The colloquia will connect up the important yet disparate work being done by cultural historians, literary critics, curators, archivists, contemporary artists, film makers and Sino-British organisations. In bringing these specialists together, the project aims to provide a high profile platform for the discursive elaboration of the changing terms of engagement between British and Chinese people and to widen the terms of debate from diaspora studies and simplistic reductions around identity to an inter-disciplinary network of research practice relevant to contemporary debate.

Participants include: Ross Forman (University of Warwick); Felicia Chan (University of Manchester) and Andy Willis (University of Salford); Jo Ho (filmmaker). The day will end with Guo Xiaolu introducing a screening of her film She, A Chinese, followed by a Q and A.

RSVP – Places are free but strictly limited so it is essential to register with the project’s Principal Investigator, Anne Witchard, at: anne@translatingchina.info

WEBSITE:  http://www.translatingchina.info

The Institute’s friends and colleagues in the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM) at University of Westminster are organizing a three-day international conference this coming weekend on ‘exhibiting video’, please see below for full details:

Exhibiting Video – International Conference
Date: 23, 24 and 25 March, 2012
Venue: University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London, W1B 2UW

To coincide with the new David Hall Ambika P3 commission ‘1001 TV Sets (End Piece)’ 1972-2012 the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM) of the University of Westminster is convening Exhibiting Video, a three-day event considering issues central to the display of video art. Bringing together notable artists, curators and writers the event will provide a forum for a number of related questions:

· On what terms has the rise of video in contemporary arts taken place?
· How do notions of medium specificity and site specificity shape video art work made for exhibition?
· What is the legacy of analogue video technology in the digital age?
· How do our museums and galleries understand video art?

Confirmed participants include:
Mark Bartlett, Irit Batsry, Amanda Beech, Steven Ball, Steven Bode, Margarida Brito Alves, David Campany, Stuart Comer, Sean Cubitt, Shezad Dawood, Catherine Elwes, Solange Oliveira Farkas, Terry Flaxton, David Hall, Adam Kossof, Anya Lewin, Adam Lockhart, Chris Meigh-Andrews, Stuart Moore, Marquard Smith, Kayla Parker, Margherita Sprio, Minou Norouzi, Stephen Partridge, Ken Wilder and Lori Zippay

To register please go to:

http://www.westminster.ac.uk/research/a-z/cream/events/exhibiting-video-conference

http://www.visualculturenow.org/itinerary/

“Now! Visual Culture” is a participation event, to be held at New York University, May 31-June 2 2012. The goal is to showcase as broad and diverse a range of visual culture practice as possible in order to create a snapshot of the field of visual culture as it is currently practiced from Cape Town to California.

At the 2010 Visual Culture Studies Conference in London, hosted by the Institute at University of Westminster, a decision was taken to constitute an International Association for Visual Culture. A key principle was that the Association should ask as little as possible financially from its members while involving as many people as possible in decision making. This is the first event organized under this platform. By the end of the event, delegates will have both experienced and created the transformation of the field from an interaction of cinema studies and art history (as it was in the 1990s) to the present intersection of Web 2.0, iconology, contemporary art practice, and critical visuality studies.

The event is structured so that all delegates will attend a single stream of sessions to create a strongly interactive conference experience. The event begins with 15×5 minute lightning talks on the state of the field by people ranging from postdocs to professor emeritus. There are eight sessions following, organized by people in a variety of locations, including the Visual and Cultural Studies Program at the University of Rochester, the Brooklyn Filmmakers Collective, the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture and the Diasporic Asian Art Research group. Each session will be independently organized in keeping with the horizontal ethics of the Association.

Particular time slots have a hands-on workshop, film screenings, panel discussions or a combination of the above.

Current session themes include:

a workshop with Scalar, a born-digital multi-media authoring platform
the role of design in globalization
new media coverage of the Occupy Wall Street movement
Asian diaspora art practices
practice in and as visual culture
a graduate student forum
the general assembly of the International Association for Visual Culture
keynote ‘listeners’ and talkback
Lots of time for networking and enjoying New York, with receptions every night, a gallery exhibition of online and material work, and maybe a late-night shenanigan or two!

http://www.westminster.ac.uk/research/a-z/cream/events/exhibiting-video-conference

CALL FOR PAPERS – EXTENDED CALL
DEADLINE 15 February 2012

Exhibiting Video – International Conference
Date: 23 – 25 March, 2012
University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London, W1B 2UW

In March and April 2012 Ambika P3, the flagship exhibition space at the University of Westminster, will present a major solo exhibition of the influential pioneer of video art, David Hall in association with REWIND. To mark the occasion the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM) of the University of Westminster is convening Exhibiting Video, a three-day event considering issues central to the display of video art.

We welcome proposals for papers of a maximum of 30 minutes. Send abstracts of no more than 250 words. They must include the presenter’s name, affiliation, email and postal address, together with the title of the paper and a 150-word biographical note on the presenter. Abstracts should be sent to Helen Cohen at photography@westminster.ac.uk and arrive no later than Wednesday 15 February 2012.

Wednesday 8th February, 4 – 6pm
Westminster Forum, University of Westminster, 5^th Floor, Wells Street, London W1T 3UW

PROPAGANDA ON THE SOCIALIST PERIPHERY
Power, reform and identity in Soviet Uzbek posters
Dr Elizabeth Waters, University of Westminster

Recent work on Soviet propaganda has looked both at the techniques used to convey political messages and the extent to which the USSR succeeded in controlling information and public opinion. Scholarship on Central Asia has examined the power of peripheral elites to influence centrally generated plans and of populations to resist communist change. Disagreement continues over whether the ‘Soviet project’ in the region was one of affirmative action or of colonial intent. This seminar looks at these issues in relation to Uzbekistan in the early decades of Soviet power and assesses the evidence on the character and impact of social, economic and political reforms that is provided by posters used in campaigns to promote women’s emancipation, cotton production and Uzbek identity.

Elizabeth Waters is Principal Lecturer in the Department of Modern and Applied Languages at the University of Westminster. Most of her previous research has been on Soviet social history in the 1920s. Recently she participated in a study of alcohol consumption in Kazakhstan. This seminar represents work-in-progress on her new project on Uzbek Soviet propaganda.

Hosted by the Contemporary China Centre. All welcome, but non-University of Westminster attendees please register at: d.hird@westminster.ac.uk

Back in July, IMCC Visiting Fellow Dr Young-Paik Chun from Hongik University in Seoul programmed an event on Korean contemporary art on British soil at London’s Korean Cultural Centre. Details here.

Following the event, a report entitled ‘Situating Korean Fine Art Practice in a Western Context’ written by Dr John Cussans came to our attention. It is attached here, many thanks to John for making it available, and our apologies for the delay in posting it:

SITUATING KOREAN FINE ART