Thursday 10 February 2011, 7pm
Whitechapel Gallery, 77-82 Whitechapel High Street, London E1
Price: £8.00 (includes free glass of wine).

In collaboratiion with the Whitechapel Gallery, the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture is hosting the final discussion in this year’s ‘Matter Matters’ Salon at the gallery. Social historian Iain Boal, philosopher Kate Soper and cultural theorist Allan Stoekl discuss the matter of sustainability. Chaired by David Cunningham.

Book your ticket at: 
http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/shop/index.php/fuseaction/shop.product/product_id/815?

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!

Wednesday 15 December 2010, 4-6pm
Room 350, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW

Paul Gladston (University of Nottingham)
‘Towards a Polylogue of Western and Chinese Contemporary Art Criticism’

Organised by our friends in the Contemporary China Centre.

Paul Gladston is Associate Professor of Critical Theory and Visual Culture in the Department of Culture, Film and Media at the University of Nottingham. He has written extensively on the subject of contemporary Chinese art and contemporary Chinese art criticism for numerous magazines and journals, and recent publications include the monograph Art History after Deconstruction (Magnolia, 2005) and an edited collection of essays China and Other Spaces (CCCP, 2009). He is currently preparing a monograph on the theory and practice of contemporary Chinese art for Reaktion and, in collaboration with Katie Hill, a guest edited edition of the journal Contemporary Art Practice with the theme ‘Contemporary Chinese Art and Criticality’.

Wednesday 8 December 2010, 1.15-2.30pm
Room 106, University of Westminster, 32-38 Wells Street, London W1T 3UW

Stephen Ross (University of Victoria, Canada)
‘Ghostmodernism and Ethics’

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

Wednesday 1 December 2010, 4.15-5.45pm
Room 306, University of Westminster, 32-38 Wells Street, London W1T 3UW

Siobhan Chapman (University of Liverpool)
‘Implicated Meanings in Dorothy L. Sayers’s Gaudy Night: a Neo-Gricean Approach’

Westminster English Colloquium #16: Apocalypse and its Discontents
Saturday 11th – Sunday 12th December 2010
The Boardroom, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London

UPDATE: REGISTRATION FOR THIS EVENT IS UNFORTUNATELY NOW CLOSED

The programme for Apocalypse and its Discontents has been announced. See below the line for details.

Admission is free, but to register please send your name, email and affiliation to Monica Germana: m.germana@westminster.ac.uk

  Continue reading Apocalypse and its Discontents: Programme Announced

For our Spanish friends: this coming Saturday 4^th December, IMCC Director Marq Smith will be one of those contributing to As the Academy Turns, a three-day symposium organised as part of Manifesta 8 at CENDEAC, Centro Parraga, Murcia.

As the Academy Turns is a multilayered project exploring the potentials and the tensions in the growth of artistic research and the current academization of art education. The ‘academicisation’ of art is increasingly marked by the strong expectation of research trajectories and how these will be shaped within the changing institutional framework of art education. In that context, the present possibilities of PhD research within visual art are particularly at the centre of attention and debate. What do those challenges mean for the art academy as such? Will novel forms of academic elitism pop up or will research induce a novel form of intellectual conscience in the art academy? How will research and artistic practice be intertwined? Will they produce redefinitions in both domains or is research rather doomed to be a fringe phenomenon at the art academy? And the ultimate question, how will research be conducted within art academies?

The programme is here.

At the end of the 2010 Visual Culture Studies Conference hosted by the IMCC in May, the final session discussed the prospect of establishing an International Association for Visual Culture Studies. During this session, a motion was put forward to establish the Association; the motion was carried.

We’ve set up an online forum as a space where we can discuss the Association, its purpose, role, ambitions, aims and objectives, etc. You are invited to contribute to these on-going discussions by registering as a user at www.journalofvisualculture.org/bbpress. Once you have registered, you will have to be approved as a user (so we can stop trolls and spam). Do bear with us as we open up this forum to you all. Should you encounter any technical issues, please email contact@visualculturestudies.org.

About the online forum

We have kept the forum open, with one section for aims and objectives, and another for activities – please feel free to add topics under these headings. Also if you have any suggestions for the forum’s development, do let us know.

To explore the Association’s possible composition, structure and purpose, one forum asks:
How do we need to imagine this community of scholars, students, emerging scholars, curators, educators, museum professionals, practitioners, and cultural sector specialists?
What are the academic, intellectual, and professional ambitions of the Association?

To explore the possible activities of the Association, another forum asks:
What will the Association do?
What kind of forums are most appropriate/necessary (meetings, networks, conferences, etc.) to support the activities of this community, and facilitate the (formal and informal) exchange of ideas and information, as well as its conviviality, sociality, and collaborative impulse?

Here’s to New York City 2012, and to the launch of the International Association for Visual Culture Studies. And to the many productive conversations that will take place in the next few weeks and months – many thanks for contributing.

Wednesday 24 November 2010, 1.15-2.30pm
Room 106, University of Westminster, 32-38 Wells Street, London W1T 3UW

Martin Willis (University of Glamorgan)
‘Martian Astronomy and Popular Fiction’

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

Boundaries and Communities
Friday 26 November 2010, 6.30pm
The Showroom, 63 Penfold Street, London NW8

David Cunningham will be one of the participants in a discussion at The Showroom gallery in North West London organised as part of the exhibition The Church Street Partners’ Gazette curated by Turkish artist Can Altay. Boundaries and Communities focuses on visible and invisible boundaries, how they are negotiated, neglected, transgressed, or forcefully maintained, in the contemporary metropolis. Other contributors include: Neil Bennett (Terry Farrell and Partners), Janna Graham (Serpentine Gallery), Chloe McCarthy (My City Too), Jonathan Mosley (architect) and a representative of the Migrants Resource Centre.

The Showroom is a short walk from Edgware Road underground station, which is served by the Hammersmith and City, Circle and Bakerloo lines.

Westminster English Colloquium #16: Apocalypse and its Discontents
Saturday 11th – Sunday 12th December 2010
The Boardroom, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London

UPDATE: REGISTRATION FOR THIS EVENT IS UNFORTUNATELY NOW CLOSED

Registration is now open for the Apocalypse and its Discontents conference. Admission is free, but please send your name, email and affiliation to Monica Germana so as to give her an idea of numbers: m.germana@westminster.ac.uk

Keynote Speakers:
John R. Hall (University of California, Davis)
Adam Roberts (Royal Holloway)
Pat Wheeler (Hertfordshire)

David Cunningham’s essay ‘Capitalist Epics: Abstraction, Totality and the Theory of the Novel’, published in the September issue of Radical Philosophy, is now available online as a pdf on the journal’s Recent Highlights page of their website.

Download it here.

Update: David will be speaking on Philosophy, Capitalism and the Novel at the University of Dundee on Wednesday 24 November (4-6pm). He’ll also be in Glasgow on Thursday 25 giving a talk on the concept of modernism.

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

Joanne Murray (Birkbeck College, University of London)
“JG Ballard and New Brutalism”

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

Monday 29 November 2010, 6.30pm
The Foyer, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B

The Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies at Westminster is holding a wine reception to celebrate the publication of a plethora of new books, many of which have been publicised already on this site: new books on creative writing and on Scottish women’s gothic by Matt Morrison and Monica Germana, respectively; the collection London Gothic, co-edited by Anne Witchard; and new editions of Mary Coleridge’s poetry and Mona Caird’s The Wing of Azrael by Simon Avery and Alexandra Warwick.

If you’d like to attend email Sharon Sinclair at: sinclas@westminster.ac.uk

For the interest, entertainment, and amusement of IMCC-types: A new publication of visual and material culture, a newspaper called Paperweight, has been launched in the last week.

Paperweight draws together writers, researchers, academics, enthusiasts, designers, artists and curators, with each issue taking a timely theme related to visual and material culture; contributors use this theme as a starting point, or an end point, or something in-between, to explore the territory from different vantage points. The aim for the publication is to offer an alternative space to the journal article, the book, the exhibition catalogue or the gallery; and to promote the work of visual and material culture to as broad an audience as possible. For more information see here.

The first issue of Paperweight, ‘Screen: The Birthday Issue’ is now available for sale via the newspaper’s website for an incredibly modest £3. To order a copy, see here. As a special introductory offer,Paperweight is also offering a subscription to issues 2 and 3 for only £4.

The contents of the first issue of Paperweight are:
Mervyn Heard on Smoke Screens / Øyvind Vågnes on the Cultural History of the Zapruder Film / Matt Lodder on Televising the Tattoo / Marquard Smith on Metadata / Howard Pensly on Boatology / Zoe Hendon on Sun and Screens / Laine Nooney on Female Gamers / Geo Takach on Writing Between Stage and Screen / Paul Micklethwaite on Screen Ecology / Scientific Encounters with Alexander Doust / Harriet Riches on Sally Mann’s ‘The Family and The Land’ / Rebecca Onion with Some Notes on Toys

The second issue, due for publication in April 2010, will take ‘ghosts’ as its theme. Ideas for possible submissions are invited through submissions@polygraphia.co.uk.

The Institute takes great pleasure in welcoming Dr Young-Paik Chun as Visiting Research Fellow 2010-11. Dr Chun is Reader in the Department of Art History and Theory at Hongik University, Seoul, Korea. She has published numerous articles on modern and contemporary British, European, and Korean art and visual culture, is the author of Cezanne’s Apples: Thinkers attracted by Cezanne (Seoul: Hangilart, 2008), editor of Twenty-Two Artists Talk through Generations: Self-Portrait of Korean Contemporary Art since the 1970s (2010), and has translated and co-translated books by Thomas Crow, Hal Foster, Griselda Pollock, Madan Sarup, and Kaja Silverman.

Her time as a Visiting Research Fellow is sponsored by the National Research Foundation of Korea. While in England, she will be conducting research on a project entitled ‘“Good Eye” Looking at the Other: Readership in Korea and British Contemporary Art in Each Other’s Terrain’ concerning cross-cultural and inter-cultural non-communicability and mis-recognition, focusing in particular on the case of British cultural perceptions of Korean art.

Our colleagues in the Contemporary China Centre at Westminster present a workshop on:

Changing Subjects: Male Sexualities and Masculinities in Asia
Friday 5 November 2010
Westminster Forum, University of Westminster, 5th floor, 32-38 Wells Street, London, W1T 3UW

The diverse new male sexual and masculine identities of Asia’s burgeoning economies suggest radical re-formations of the male subject in recent years. The figure of the cool, sleek and fashionable ‘metrosexual’ man, for instance, in his various national incarnations, adorns magazine covers and billboards across Asia’s megacities. At the same time, the figure of the gay male has emerged in countries across Asia, diffracted in various forms, through social and activist group efforts, gay dating websites, and commercial and cultural venues and events that celebrate queerness. Metrosexual, straight or gay, these figures inflect the assumptions, processes and practices of Asia’s modernities with a range of gendered characteristics that derive from transnational circulations of meaning, often associated with self-interested desires and consumer practices.

Male sexualities and masculinities in Asia, however, may not be what they appear to be from media images, particularly to the ‘Western’ eye. Ethnographic research shows that men who identify with attributes of transnational, gay, metrosexual and other identities also simultaneously identify with locally and culturally embedded notions of gender that interrupt the neat outlines of discursive renderings. Investigation of men’s subjectivities through what they say and do shows that what their performances mean to them can be very different from what the observer thinks. This workshop, then, seeks not only to contribute to understandings of how notions and practices of sexualities and masculinities mutually interact to produce and regulate the sexual, gendered male subjects/subjectivities emerging in contemporary Asia, but also to think beyond them to consider their relational effects on wider configurations of sexuality, gender and power within and across Asian countries and cultures.

MORNING SESSION
10:00–10:10     Welcome—Dr Derek Hird (University of Westminster)
10:10–11:25     Dr Will Schroeder (University of Manchester)
‘For Fun: Affect and Belonging in Contemporary Gay Beijing’
        Discussant: TBA        
11:25–11:40     Tea and Coffee Break
11:40–12:55     Dr Paul Boyce (Institute of Education, University of London)
‘The Object of Attention: Same-sex sexualities in small town India and the contemporary sexual subject’
        Discussant: Dr Akshay Khanna (University of Sussex)            
12:55–13:55     Lunch Break

AFTERNOON SESSION
13:55–15:10     Dr Jonathan Mackintosh (Birkbeck, University of London)
                ‘Historicising the “Feminisation of Masculinity” in Japan’
        Discussant: TBA
15:10–15:25     Tea and Coffee Break   
15:25–16:40     Dr Derek Hird (University of Westminster)
‘Contesting white-collar norms: Gay metrosexuals and homosocial yingchou in contemporary China’
        Discussant” Professor Henrike Donner (University of Goettingen)
16:40–16:45    Break
16:45–17:30     Summing up and closing discussion—Professor Harriet Evans (University of Westminster)

All welcome. This workshop is free. For enquiries or to reserve a place, please contact

Dr Derek Hird
Email: d.hird@westminster.ac.uk

Contemporary China Centre, Department of Modern and Applied Languages
University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW
http://www.westminster.ac.uk/asian-studies

Wednesday 27^th October, 1.15-2.30pm
Room 106, University of Westminster, 32-38 Wells Street, W1T 3UW

Nick Hubble (Brunel University)
‘Naomi Mitchison: From Intermodernism to Science Fiction (via Mass-Observation)’

From her 1920s novels, influenced by Lawrence but aimed at the audience of Wells, to her subsequent deployment of modernist techniques for political ends, Naomi Mitchison may be considered a key intermodern writer. Her relentless pursuit of the ‘just society’, free from gender-based and sexual repression, made her a controversial figure even in that controversial decade. And her close literary associates of that decade – including Auden, Aldous Huxley, Olaf Stapledon, Stevie Smith, Wyndham Lewis and Walter Greenwood – suggest different ways of thinking about literary networks and cultural history in general. She was also a friend and supporter of Tom Harrison and Mass-Observation, for whom she kept a wartime diary. Nick Hubble’s paper analyses this intermodern work and investigates how it relates to Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962), a forerunner of the 1970s feminist utopian science fiction of writers such as Ursula Le Guin, Marge Piercy and Joanna Russ.

Rescheduled from last semester. Further details here.

Wednesday 17 November 2010, 4-6pm
The Westminster Forum, 5^th Floor, University of Westminster, 32-38 Wells Street, London W1T 3UW

Professor Rebecca Karl (New York University)
‘Mao Zedong and China in the World’

Rebecca E. Karl is author of Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, and of Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World: A Concise History (both Duke University Press). Her most recent book, The Magic of Concepts: Philosophy and ‘the Economic’ in Twentieth Century China, is forthcoming.

Co-organised by The Contemporary China Centre and the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture