Exhibition
Wednesday 23 June 2021, 6pm – Wednesday 30 June 2021, 6pm
Personal Perspectives is a screening of artists’ works curated from the LUX collection by four final year University of Westminster students, Alex Guiste, Jordan Blanchard, Tia Lewis and Jodie Lawal-Mcdonald, with support by curator Jemma Desai, artist Adham Faramawy and our own Alison Craighead. This project was funded by The Quintin Hogg Trust and supported by LUX.
The process of making the selection began with the group watching Alnoor Dewshi’s seminal work from 1992, Latifah And Himli’s Nomadic Uncle, where two cousins discuss ideas of culture and history while wandering through London. Described by John Akomfrah as an “excellent film on Nomadology and [the] diasporic sublime”, this subtly rich and often humorous work opens this screening: it was the catalyst for the discussions that led to the students’ selection of these three subsequent works: The Very Very End, George Barber, 2013; A Part of Me, Carl Callam, 1998; A is for Artist, Ayo Akingbade, 2018.
Details at: https://lux.org.uk/online-exhibition/personal-perspectives
12 October 2019-25 January 2020
Bury Art Museum & Sculpture Centre, Moss Street, Bury BL9 0DR
The North West Art School Record Machine
Part of this year’s annual Design Manchester festival, The North West Art School Record Machine has been developed out of John Beck and Matthew Cornford’s 2018-19 survey of the region’s art school buildings (exhibited at Bluecoat in Liverpool). The often grand nineteenth century art schools were intended to train workers for local industry, but after the Second World War they also served to incubate the generations of musicians and designers responsible for transforming British popular culture. The art school became, among other things, a record machine.
For this new exhibition, photographs of some of the region’s most distinctive art schools are accompanied by a display of over 100 record sleeves, selected by Bluecoat’s Artistic Director Bryan Biggs, that represent work produced by designers and musicians who all, in one capacity or another, emerged from the art schools of the North West. To complete the exhibition, the Record Machine also presents a display of unique mock-ups and material from renowned North West-trained designers Malcolm Garrett and Swifty.
Forthcoming gallery talks:
Saturday 16 November 2-4pm: John Beck and Matthew Cornford
Introduction to The North West Art School Record Machine
Wednesday 20 November 7-9pm: Bryan Biggs
Record Machine Collecting records and the phenomena of record sleeve design
Saturday 23 November 4-6pm: Malcolm Garrett and Swifty
Designing Records Two influential designers talk about designing for the music industry
Admission FREE. For more information, email artgallery@bury.gov.uk
or visit www.buryartmuseum.co.uk
UPDATE: there is now a Spotify playlist for the show: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/042eRogev6EDrajRq2GzKH
Deaths at Sea: Migration and Art symposium, Weds 10th July 2019
Wednesday 10th July 2019, 6-9 pm
P21 Gallery, 21-27 Chalton Street, London NW1 1JD
Death at Sea: Migration and Art
Accompanying the exhibition Sink Without Trace, co-curated by our colleague Federica Mazzara and the artists Maya Ramsay.
Speakers include:
Iain Chambers, Oriental University, Naples
Almir Koldzic, Co-Director, Counterpoints Arts
Federica Mazzara, Co-Curator of Sink Without Trace
Maya Ramsay, Co-Curator of Sink Without Trace
Valentina Zagaria, London School of Economics
Artists from the Sink Without Trace exhibition
Book a place here.
Thursday 13th June 2019, 6.00 pm
P21 Gallery, 21- 27 Chalton St, Kings Cross, London, NW1 1JD
Sink Without Trace: Exhibition on Migrant Deaths at Sea
Our friend and colleague Federica Mazzara will be launching her book Reframing Migration: Lampedusa, Border Spectacle and Aesthetics of Subversion, on June 13th at the P21 Gallery in London at 6pm in the context of the exhibition Sink Without Trace, on migrant death at sea, that she has co-curated with artist Maya Ramsay. The book launch is part of a series of events related to the exhibition, including a final symposium with guest speakers including Iain Chambers and Valentina Zagaria. Full details and registration here.
Full details about the exhibition and venue 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.
October 20th – November 16th 2017 (Private View: October 19th, 5-8 pm)
London Gallery West, University of Westminster, The Forum, Watford Road, Harrow, HA1 3TP
Hybrid Bodies
Ingrid Bachmann, Andrew Carnie, Alexa Wright
What does it mean to carry the heart of another person? Why do many heart transplants that appear clinically successful develop unexpected complications or fail? Hybrid Bodies is a multi-disciplinary research project, bringing together the arts, ethics, medicine and social sciences to investigate the complexities of heart transplantation. The project focuses on the lived experiences of heart transplant recipients, translating their stories into medical and academic literature as well as artworks.
Since 2007, artists Ingrid Bachmann, Andrew Carnie and the IMCC’s own Alexa Wright have been part of an international interdisciplinary team lead by Canadian cardiologist Dr Heather Ross and British philosopher Professor Margrit Shildrick. Uniquely for a collaborative project between artists and other specialists, the artists have worked in parallel with the scientists; exploring questions around the emotional, psychological and physiological experience of heart transplantation. The key research material is a collection of video interviews which reveal surprising levels of distress among post-transplant patients, strongly contradicting the belief that receiving a new heart is a simple solution to extending life.
Alexa Wright’s work explores the impact transplant can have on a recipient’s sense of self as a bounded and unique individual. In Heart of the Matter (2014), individual accounts of heart transplant are juxtaposed with personal narratives of lost loves and intimate relationships, forming a web of interconnected testimonies about the effects of a physical or emotional change of heart. Andrew Carnie is interested in how interconnections between different living systems can alter and extend a sense of self. A Change of Heart (2012) is a projected work based on drawings made while the artist listened to taped interviews with post-transplant patients and their analysis by social scientists. His constantly morphing figure captures a sense of everything in flux, in a continual state of becoming. Like the experience of transplant, Ingrid Bachmann’s A-part of Me (2014) is intensely physical, yet immaterial. Indicating both the challenges and benefits of empathetic listening, her sculptural listening device uses bone transducers to conduct sound to the inner ear using the skull as a resonating chamber, allowing participants to hear the narratives of the transplant recipients intimately, both in and through their body.
To find out more about this ongoing project and the people involved, visit www.hybridbodiesproject.com
May 13th – November 26 2017
Castello 1610/A, Riva Dei Sette Martiri, Venezia 30122
Empire II
An artist-led satellite project at the Venice Biennale this year includes work by our own Steve Smith. Curated by Vanya Balogh, Empire II will feature three chambers; beginning with an extensive library, engaging in film history and theory, curated attentively by participating artists from their personal book collections and intended for browsing and perusing; leading further on to a single screen darkroom, a pulsating digital heart, showcasing a sequence of 115 imaginative short films programmed to play on the continuous loop; and on to the final imaginary space, the Virtual Reality port which will evolve over time in collaboration with various artists.
Empire II Venice will be accompanied by a 260 pages, full colour limited edition catalogue, designed and produced by Victor Hotz Studio in Switzerland, and will host a number of intermediate events during the Venice Biennale to be announced after the inauguration week. It will feature participating artists, filmmakers, critical speakers and special guests in form of presentations, special evening screenings and outdoor projections across Venice, including talks and group discussions related to film, technology, science and art.
Further info here.
Facebook event page: https://www.facebook.com/events/425050341168709/
Carroll / Fletcher at Frieze New York 2017
Randall’s Island Park, May 5 – 7, 2017 (Booth B20)
Thomson & Craighead, Frame
Over the last two decades, Thomson & Craighead (b. 1969 and 1971, both UK) have developed a pioneering body of work, using technology as a means to explore one of the fundamental questions of our times: what does it mean to be human in the digital era? For Frieze New York, Carroll / Fletcher presents a selection of artworks that tackle subjects as varied as meme politics, the self-help industry, and the ever-more relevant notion of an impending apocalypse.
To download a copy of the press release, click here.
Thomson and Craighead are currently on show at the Young Projects gallery in Los Angeles with the exhibition Wake Me Up When It’s Over. The exhibition will feature nearly a dozen works spanning the years 1996-2016, thereby presenting an in-depth look into the couple’s practice and methodologies.
For the better part of the past two decades Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead have been “digging deep,” as curator Marc Garrett once described their practice, “into the algorithmic phenomena of our networked society; its conditions and protocols (architecture of the Internet) and the non-ending terror of the spectacle as a mediated life.” In the process they’ve employed web cams, data feeds, networks, movies, images, sound and text in their many installations, videos and art-objects–often with a wide array of art-historical reference points, including 1960s systems art, 1970s structuralist film-making, and the compositional experiments of the literature group, Oulipo.
Works featured in the exhibition include: A Short Film about War (2009/2010); Apocalypse (2016); Belief (2012); Common Era (2016); Flipped Clock (2009); Help Yourself (2016); Television Fan (1996); The Time Machine in Alphabetical Order (2010); Trooper (1998); Untitled (Balloon Work) (2016).
More details here.
FLOATING POINTS
Gavin Baily, Tom Corby
Ambika P3, University of Westminster, 35 Marylebone Road, London NW1 5LS
Exhibition Opening hours: Saturday 19th Dec – Monday 21 Dec, 12.00-6.00
Private view: 6.00 pm Friday 18th December
A new exhibition by Gavin Baily and Tom Corby consisting of 3 screen-based projects and an installation set within P3’s underground galleries. The Northern Polar Studies (2015) and Minima, Maxima (2015) are premiered, while The Southern Ocean Studies (in collaboration with Dr Jonathan Mackenzie 2010), and Cyclone (2005 – 2015) are uniquely shown together for the first time. All 4 works employ various forms of climate or meteorological data to visually and physically condense the aleatory, hidden and the systemic aspects of sites and landscapes as large-scale data animation or installation.
Art has long found ways to make tangible the Earth’s exhalation of atmospheres and climates. This exhibition can be seen as part of this tradition, but breaks from it by bringing contemporary scientific technologies, data and institutions to bear to show how universal concepts of human relations with landscape are still pertinent in a contemporary context of accelerating climate change. Additionally, the complex entanglements of the social, material, atmospheric and geographic explored throughout these works, extend our feel for landscape and also our sense of how time functions in it. Landscape through its laminations, layering and morphologies, is conceived in this work as a recording device that tracks the Earth’s changing energy signatures. This movement of time and matter reimagines environmental terrains as extended temporal forms resultant from long-term changes; which we might propose of as ‘deep time landscapes’.
In Process Private view
Thursday 10 December, 6.00 pm
Gallery West – Project Space, University of Westminster, Harrow Campus
In Process (2015) is the inaugural exhibition from the Centre for Research and Education in Art and Media (CREAM) doctoral caucus based at the University of Westminster, including work by our own Steve Smith. The exhibition is a showcase of the various vibrant strands of interdisciplinary research being undertaken at the university. The focus is on modes in which CREAM students further practice-based modes of inquiry as means of art-making and producing contributions to knowledge and contributions to experience. Students undertaking principally theoretical research will also present elements of their research using practical modes. The exhibition will present work from ten doctoral students in the Project Space of Gallery West, and will be paralleled by a programme of film showings and performances.
Estéfani Bouza, Cinzia Cremona, Sue Goldschmidt, Alexandra Jönsson, Mirko Nikolić, Fathima Nizaruddin, Alexa Raisbeck, Bhavna Rajpal, Arne Sjögren, Steve Smith.
University of Westminster, Watford Road, Harrow, Middlesex HA1 3TP
Nearest Tube station: Northwick Park (Metropolitan line)
10 December 2015 – 8 January 2016
Opening times: 10am – 10 pm daily
Further details: www.westminster.ac.uk/inprocess
IMCC’s Data Futures project launches its Merve Electronic Back-Catalogue at the Frankfurt Book Fair.
In collaboration with Berlin publisher Merve Verlag and Hybrid Publishing Consortium, IMCC has re-delivered more than a hundred previously out of print books in three independent electronic formats – book-in-browser, ePub2 and PDF – plus print-on-demand. Initially a research project accessible at http://merve.consortium.io using a workflow developed by Data Futures using its freizo software platform, the project is now focusing on reader customization of the texts and internet delivery models.
Data Futures has imported the original books as Optical Character Recognition (OCR) files and created a workflow for contributors in several countries to address OCR errors and to markup structure, such as chapter headings, illustrations, footnotes and citations. freizo then exports html5 which can be processed and re-paginated into multiple formats.
Wednesday 4 December, 5.30-8.30pm
Centre for Useless Splendour (previously The Swan public house), opposite Stanley Picker Gallery, Mill Street, Kingston upon Thames, KT1 2QJ.
Centre for Useless Splendour Reading Room Launch Event, School of Fine Art, Kingston University
5.30pm In Conversation: John Beck & Matthew Cornford will be discussing their new publication The Art School and The Culture Shed with Dean Kenning.
6-8.30pm Opening Reception: Reading Room is a temporary exhibition in the Stanley Picker Gallery Lobby which brings together publications commissioned by the Centre for Useless Splendour since its establishment in 2010 and launches new publications from Esther Windsor, Mark Greenwood, Roderick Harris, Enda Deburca & John Russell, Laura Cull & Simon O’Sullivan, John Beck & Matthew Cornford. The exhibition also plays host to a new sculptural commission from artist duo Ox Art.
http://www.stanleypickergallery.org/news/centre-for-useless-splendour-reading-room-december-2013/
Citizen Curators exhibition, Photographers’ Gallery
Tagged as art, London, photography
‘#Citizen Curators’
July 1 – August 27 2013, The Photographers’ Gallery, 16 – 18 Ramillies Street, London W1F 7LW
How does social media transform the way we record, share and ultimately remember major events? #citizencurators is a Twitter project co-directed by our own Peter Ride which documents the way Londoners responded to the Olympics of 2012. It aims to show how the contemporary history of London 2012 could be recorded by the people who experienced it without the filtering of an institution.
In the project, any citizen of London could become a curator using social networking and tweet their responses in words or images with the hashtag #citizencurators. These were then collected and archived by the Museum of London. On the occasion of the first anniversary of the Games, The Photographers’ Gallery presents and reanimates the many photographs and tweets created by #citizencurators.
Further details at: http://thephotographersgallery.org.uk/citizencurators
Thomson & Craighead are Being Social
Tagged as art, technology, thomson
Thomson & Craighead are part of the inaugural exhibition ‘Being Social’ in the new Furtherfield Gallery slap bang in the middle of Finsbury Park, North London where they are showing a version of ‘London Wall’. The exhibition is on already and runs until 28th April. Details here.
T&C are also showing a new projected version of ‘Flipped Clock’ and the short documentary artwork, ‘Several Interruptions’ as part of the exhibition ‘Mirror Neurons’ at the National Glass Centre in Sunderland, on until 20th May. Details here.
They’ve also completely revamped their 2001 online artwork ‘e-poltergeist’ for the Canadian journal ‘BleuOrange’, and this goes live on 20th March at 0300hrs GMT. And finally, a new artwork, ‘A live portrait of Sir Tim Berners Lee (an early warning system)’ will be part of the major new exhibition, ‘Life Online’ launching in the National Media Museum on 29th March. Further details here.
Exhibition at 309 Regent Street: AV London & Through the Lens
Tagged as art, London, photography, Urban
AV London
Through the Lens: Embodying the City
12th December 2011 to 12th January
309 Regent Street Gallery, University of Westminster, London W1B 2UW
A very successful opening party for two exhibitions, ‘AV London’ and ‘Through the Lens: Embodying the City’, curated by students on our Masters programmes in Cultural and Critical Studies, Museums, Galleries & Contemporary Culture, and Visual Culture. Thanks to Kristian Agustin for the photos. Both shows are on until January 12th at 309 Regent Street, so do go and check them out.
‘Through the Lens’ explores the relationship between the body and the urban environment. The collection of photographs explores the contrasts of corporeal dynamism and the solid urban canvas. The exhibition features contributions from four London based artists who each have an individual interpretation of the relationship between the people and the city: Michael Frank, Christina Lange, Peter Tweedie and Konstantinos Vasileiou. Further details on the exhibition website at: http://embodyingthecity.blogspot.com/
Curated by Eleni Tziourtzia, Angelica Sada, Xiaosong Liu, Ciara Fitzpatrick (curatorial); Alice Gibbs, Elena Griva, Katrina Macapagal (texts); Fliss Hooton, Nadia Little (production); Kristian Jeff Agustin, Alessandra Ferrini (design).
‘AV London’ is an exhibition of Stereoscopic (3D Photography) and Binaural recordings made the artist Gary Welch, which capture a cornucopia of sights, sounds and voices of the diverse metropolis of London. Welch’s installations transform the basic viewer into viewer-listener, who then becomes the ears and eyes of the ‘anyperson’ interacting with seven unique moments in London.
Curated by Elisa Adami, Miguel Corte Real, Leonardo Couto, Nihan Gumrukcuoglu, Silvia Morena, Menming Ran, Z Amber Richter, Kalliopi Tsipini-Kolaza, Simone van Eijk, Laura Vichick.
First Blip Prize for Creative Technologies
Tagged as technology, Urban, visual culture
We are pleased to report that the winner of the first Blip Prize for Creative Technologies was announced last night. The prize is awarded, courtesy of Blip Creative, to the best student project design for the IMCC’s new public display screen at Wells Street. The 2011 winner was Sophie Meter for her beautiful butterfly animation. Runners up were Kristian Agustin, Eleni Tziourtzia, David Itzcovitz and Yen Ooi. The winning videos can be seen (when opened in firefox) at http://www.blipcreative.com/blog.html Or, of course, you can check them out live on the corner of Wells Street and Booths Place.
The Blip Prize is the latest stage in the IMCC’s development of exciting content for the extraordinary state-of-the-art wall-hanging LED installation that is our contribution to The International Distributed Display Initiative, and which is part of the Institute’s New Media Theory research project, coordinated by Peter Cornwell at Blip with Alison Craighead and David Cunningham at the IMCC. Using an interface that has been designed such that no prior programming skills are assumed, staff and students will be making work for this experimental new media laboratory that will allow them to explore in hands-on fashion what it means to translate, phenomenalize, or even perform media-theoretical issues as, and in, new media.
Watch this space!
UPDATE: Video of the awards ceremony courtesy of David Itzcovitz:
ADVENTURES IN NIGHTLIFE: PAUL KHERA
Thursday 3 November 2011, 19.00 – 23.00
AMBIKA P3
EXHIBITION-FILM SCREENING-MUSIC
Presenting the work of Paul Khera in an evening of film, music and photography on the theme of London nightlife.
EXHIBITION
One off prints featuring intimate moments of London nightlife
FILM SCREENING – 8.00 pm
‘Being Continued’, 37mins
Part film-noir, part meditation, a cinematic discourse on the journey of wisdom, there’s greed, violence, kidnapping; love, tranquility and revelation. This is a film that follows the cycle of human comprehension, gathering knowledge, being perplexed by it, testing wisdom with experience, suffering at the hands of greed, expanding and condensing knowledge, and finding peace. The story is part of the folklore of the himalya, it can be applied to society as a whole, or in the case of this film to an individual.
MUSIC:
Late Night tunes by Maxology
Paul Khera has worked across the full spectrum of the visual arts. He started his career taking stills at Channel 4, playing in a band, and designing sleeves for another. Through a chance meeting at college, he started working for the ICA in London, designing posters and catalogues, for amongst others Jake & Dinos Chapman, Lawrence Weiner, William Wegman and Damien Hirst. After the Arts came fashion, a short stint at Elle, and then Vogue. Following that was a period at corporate design heavyweights Ideo, on large-scale projects for P&G in Geneve and Vodaphone in Lisbon. Interspersed were a few projects for the British Council, which took him from Tokyo (an interactive project, describing Britain to the Japanese) to Damascus to Kano (an attempt to foster Muslim Christian tolerance through typography). Lately the projects have mainly been self-motivated, he designed a Hospital in rural India, using only local know-how and vernacular and is currently working on a six year scheme, a hand built retreat in the Himalayas; in which he designed everything from the building to the interior and the furniture… in the meantime he found time to write a book on philosophy and folklore, and a suite of music to go with it. Khera has also been commissioned to follow around the rock band Suede for a year, taking photographs at various gigs from the 100 club to the Royal Albert Hall documenting their return to fame, as well as build up a riveting portfolio of portraits from the nightlife of London.
AMBIKA P3, 35 Marylebone Road, London NW1 5LS
Entrance free.
http://www.p3exhibitions.com/
http://www.paulkhera.com/
Thomson & Craighead in Brussels
Tagged as art, Europe, thomson
A new solo exhibition of the work of Thomson and Craighead has just opened in South East of Brussels (Watermael/Boisfort), where they are showing six artworks/installations at the same time across two sites, Watermael Station and Vénerie Stables, from 26th October to 18th December 2011. Alison and John will also be giving gallery talks at each site on Saturday 19th November from 15.30pm. Further info at: http://thomson-craighead.blogspot.com/
Brixton Calling! exhibition
Tagged as archive, art, London
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!
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.