Posts from November 2018
Monday 10th December
Fyvie Hall, University of Westminster
7:00-9:00pm
IMCC Presents An Evening of Feminist Film: Redell Olsen, Now Circa (2018) and Katharine Meynell, Elizabeth (2017)
Redell Olsen will present her short film Now Circa (2018), recently shortlisted for the AHRC Research in Film Awards 2018. Katharine Meynell will present her short film Elizabeth (2017).
Now Circa (1918), directed by Redell Olsen, 2018
Now Circa (1918) marks the one hundred year anniversary of female suffrage for some women in the UK. The film revolves around dialogues between two women and their counterparts one hundred years earlier, each on the eve of a march for women’s rights. Their conversations are interrupted by a mysterious poetic and out-of-time visitor; Joan Boadicea, whose speech and antics reflect the tensions, parallels and differences between women across time from the era of the suffragettes, to our own present in the age of Trump and #MeToo in 2018.
Redell Olsen is a poet, film-maker and academic. Her recent books of poetry include Film Poems (2014) and Punk Faun: a bar rock pastel (2012). She teaches poetry and poetics at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Elizabeth, directed by Katharine Meynell, 2017
Elizabeth concerns the life and work of typographer Elizabeth Friedlander, the only woman of her generation to have designed a Western typeface. The film takes an essay form, describing what is known of her life, using archive footage interspersed with landscape and speculative images and text, probing the practical and political life of women surviving on wit and skill in early twentieth century Europe.
“I liked it very much indeed — cinematically and in terms of its subject matter … Elizabeth’s roots in German modernism, her exile, the familiarity of her anonymous designs” – Laura Mulvey.
Katharine Meynell has been working as an artist since the late 1970’s across material media, using moving image, performance, drawings and artists’ books.
Tickets free, register here
Saturday 17 November 2018 – Sunday 10 March 2019
Bluecoat, School Lane, Liverpool L1 3BX
The Art Schools of North West England
John Beck and Matthew Cornford
As part of their ongoing exploration of the history of art schools in the UK, this exhibition of new work by IMCC’s John Beck and artist Matthew Cornford focuses on the art schools of the North West. The core of the exhibition is a collection of over thirty photographs by Matthew Cornford of art school buildings or the sites upon which they stood. Monuments to the economic power of the region in the nineteenth century, and often the result of tangled social and cultural forces — where working class struggles for education and self-organisation collide with the industrialists’ desire for a narrowly trained and compliant workforce and growing middle class demands for local cultural institutions — the art school buildings are markers of past social, political and aesthetic ambition and, especially in those cases where buildings have been sold off and, at best, repurposed as flats or offices, reminders of the extent to which that ambition has shrunk as it has been progressively individualised, privatised and monetised.
More information here.
The Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture
University of Westminster Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies
32-38 Wells Street, London W1T 3UW. United Kingdom.