Posts from March 2013

Lonnie Bunch on Museum Futures, April 25th

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The Smithsonian-Westminster Colloquium
Thursday 25th 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

China in Britain #5: Archiving, April 27

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Archiving: China in Britain #5
Saturday April 27th, 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

Brecht as Educator talk, Weds 20 March

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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’

Welcome to Chih-Sheng Ni, Visiting Junior Research Fellow in the IMCC

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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.

‘Educating Mind, Body and Spirit: Adult Education since 1838’, 24-25 April

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Educating Mind, Body & Spirit: Adult Education since 1838
24 and 25 April 2013

Staff and graduate students from the Institute will be contributing to the two-day conference ‘Educating Mind, Body & Spirit: Adult Education since 1838.’ Fees for the two days, including refreshments, are £60 or £30 for students/unwaged. To book, please email archive@westminster.ac.uk Other enquiries may be directed to Dr Helen Glew via h.glew@westminster.ac.uk

Day 1

10.30 Welcome/Opening Remarks

10.40 Keynote: Mark Freeman, University of Glasgow, ‘Writing the History of Adult Education: Where Next?’

11.40 Coffee

11.55 John K Walton, University of the Basque Country, Vitoria, ‘Adult Education in the Humanities: What Sort of Future?’

12.30 Lunch

13.20 Panel: Adult Education and Institutions
Contributions from Elaine Penn, Darlene Clover, Kathy Sandford, Maureen Park, Kate James, Edward Bottoms, and Jim Rahahan

15.00 Coffee

15.20 Panel: Educating Through Culture
Contributions from Alex Warwick, Neil Mattews, Sara Dominici, Tom Woodin

18.30 Reception

Day 2

9.45 Panel: Gender and Adult Education
Contributions from Helen Glew, Fay Lundh Nilsson, Mervi Kaaminen, and Lajos Olasz

11 Coffee

11.20 Panel: Adult Education Initiatives and Personalities
Contributions from: Peter Catherall, Bill Bailey and Lorna Unwin, Lawrence Goldman, and Kate Bradley

12.50 Lunch

13.50 Keynote: William Whyte, University of Oxford, ‘Still Travelling in a Strange Country? Writing Adult Education back into the History of Universities’

14.50 Coffee

15.00 Panel: Adult Education: Comparative Perspectives
Contributions from Mark Freeman, Jana Sims, Kirsi Ahonen, Darly Leeworthy, and Anders Nilsson

16.50 Closing Remarks

Tom Corby, ‘Body of Evidence’ exhibition, Kaza Gallery, Istanbul, from March 21st

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Body of Evidence by Tom Corby and Gavin Baily
Kasa Gallery, Istanbul, March 21 to April 20, 2013.
Visiting hours: 10:00 – 17:00 every day except Sunday

The Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture’s Governing Board member Dr Tom Corby has a fascinating and challenging exhibition entitled ‘Body of Evidence’ opening next week at Kaza Gallery in Istanbul. If you’re in the neighbourhood, check it out. You can find further information below or by following this link: http://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/2013/03/body-of-evidence/

Produced in collaboration with MoCC (Museum of Contemporary Cuts), Goldsmiths College, Sabanci University and the University of Westminster. Curatorial team: Lanfranco Aceti (Kasa Gallery Director and Senior Curator), Vince Dziekan (Associate Curator), Ozden Sahin (Curator) and Jonathan Munro (Curatorial Assistant)

The exhibition initiates a series of new artworks and installations designed to blur the boundaries between medicine, data, documentation, economics and art. Conceived as a complex autoportrait of the body undergoing advanced treatment for cancer, the exhibition serves as the primary site where the possibilities, visibilities and public manifestations of the body at its most vulnerable are tested to their limits. Body of Evidence forms part of a larger, multi-faceted project (Blood and Bones) in which the artist faces a complex set of questions about the meaning of life and death. These are fundamental questions that art has wrestled with for centuries. The challenge presented in the case of Tom Corby’s exhibition is how to make sense of the relationship between physicality and data; materiality and immateriality; medical intervention and metastasis (where, in the broadest material and clinical sense of the word, the death spiral of the afflicted body is mirrored by the wider economic and environmental ecologies within which it is situated).

Employing an idiosyncratic set of approaches to the process of data visualization, the installation is composed of a series of objects related to the artist’s treatment that together act as a physical visualization of the data his illness is producing during his treatment. These data touch upon and use personal objects such as the hats he wears on a daily basis and which he documents via his blog. Together, these elements reveal a meticulous and methodically structured approach that challenges viewers to detach themselves from all emotional aspects. As the body becomes subjected to the procedures and processes of ordering, selecting, sectioning and framing, it transforms into a grand taxonomic work. In this sense, the exhibition exhibits a certain character typical of the British mindset; particularly, calling upon the indexing fetish attributable to the great scientific explorers of the Victorian era.

In this case, however, the exploration that Tom Corby is embarking upon is not across an uncharted ocean, unexplored land mass or previously unseen/inaccessible dimension of physical reality. The exhibition Body in Evidence charts the artist’s expedition inside his own body and across his own soul, exploring the existential data of a body/object subjected to medical intervention; the body as a system that while in the process of shutting down, continues to produce data. In equal parts heroic and obsessive, this project touches on attitudes to death and disease in a wider sense, namely a desire to find ways, processes and forms to transcend the act of termination and come to an accord with our feelings about it.

Tom Corby is the Director of CREAM’s Doctoral Programme, deputy Director of CREAM and coordinates the experimental media cluster research at Westminster. His interdisciplinary artworks (in collaboration with Gavin Baily and Jonathan Mackenzie) have been internationally exhibited and have won numerous awards including: nomination for the FILE Festival Digital Language award 2010; the jury nominated award at the 10th Japan Media Arts Festival in 2007; honorary mentions at the Prix Ars Electronica 2006 and 2000; honorary mention: “The Post-Cagian Interactive”, “Art on the Net” The Machida City Museum of Arts, Tokyo and the main festival prize Cynet Art 1999. In 2000 he was nominated for the “International Media Art Award 2000″, at Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) in Karlsruhe, Germany and was the artist in residence at the ICA London 1998.

Modernity on Display: International Exhibitions seminar

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

Thursday 4th 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’ conference, April 27th, 2013

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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

Romantic Transdisciplinarity: Art and the New

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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

Reminder: Cultures of Capitalism salon on ‘Growth’, March 7th

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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

Le Corbusier and the Challenge of a Pascalian Technocracy

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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 – further details

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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 8)
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/