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.

The Institute would very much like to welcome Vanesa Rodriguez Galindo as its new Junior Visiting Research Fellow.

Vanesa, who will be hosted by the Institute for three months, is currently completing her PhD at the Department of History of Art at UNED, Madrid. Her dissertation, ‘Retracing the City’s Steps: Constructing modernity, the urban gaze and public space in late nineteenth-century Madrid,’ examines perceptions of urban modernization as recorded in visual culture. By exploring the intersection between the tropes of costumbrismo, popular imagery, and the modernizing project, her research hopes to demonstrate that everyday experience of the city was not assimilated through the strict binary categories customarily associated to nineteenth-century Madrid – tradition and renewal, public and private, high and low culture – but was in fact fluid and mobile, generating a far more interesting and complex interplay of influences.

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.

Soho Poly Theatre Festival
40th anniversary celebrations
19-21 June, 2012

2012 marks 40 years since The Soho Poly Theatre (now Soho Theatre) moved into a tiny basement on Riding House Street and established itself as one of the most famous fringe venues of the 1970s and 80s. It was the home of innovative new writing, and a launch pad for many actors and directors still at work today. Under the early directorship of Fred Proud and Verity Bargate, the theatre inspired incredible devotion amongst those it worked with. It was also a pioneer of ‘lunchtime’ theatre, an innovation which liberated writers to experiment with new forms of dramatic writing. From 19-21 June, the theatre will be coming back to life for a series of short plays, readings and panel discussions about theatre then and now.

Tuesday 19 June, 7pm: Fred Proud, the Soho Poly Theatre’s first artistic director, will introduce the festival, followed by a reading of Robert Holman’s short play ‘Coal’.

Wednesday 20 June: The festival hosts The Miniaturists, who will present three twenty minute plays at 1pm and again at 7pm. There will also be a panel discussion on innovative theatrical forms with representatives from the current Soho Theatre, time TBC.

Thursday 21 June, 1-2pm: ‘Theatre Then and Now’ – a lunchtime conversation with Michael Billington, Michael Coveney and Irving Wardle.

Thursday 21 June, 7pm: An evening reading of David Edgar’s play ‘Baby Love’, followed by a drinks reception in a nearby venue, TBC.

Unless otherwise mentioned, all events will take place in situ in the original basement at 16 Riding House Street: http://g.co/maps/uev2w

Please email festival organiser Matthew Morrison at matt.morrison77@gmail.com for any further information about the individuals and companies involved, interviews and photos. Tickets are free, but because of the size of the venue, availability is limited. Please email sohopolyfestival@gmail.com for all reservations, mentioning which events you are interested in attending. You can also follow the festival on our blog http://sohopolyfestival.blogspot.co.uk/ and Twitter @SohoPolyFest.

“Rorschach Audio – Art & Illusion for Sound” by Joe Banks – “The earliest form of sound recording technology was not a machine but was written language…” (page 96)

What are the connections between Leonardo da Vinci and Dick Whittington, between the BBC Monitoring Service and punk band The Clash, between wartime military intelligence work, visual arts theory, battle management systems, Spiritualism, radio and recording technology and criminal witness testimony? What role do JG Ballard, Osama bin Laden, William Burroughs, Jean Cocteau, Jean Genet, Adolf Hitler, William Hogarth, Victor Hugo, Joe Meek, Pope Pius XII, Primo Levi, proto-Surrealist writer Raymond Roussel, teenage criminal Derek Bentley, Sigmund Freud and crystallographer Louis Albert Necker play in the disentangling of mysteries of human perception?

“Rorschach Audio” is a work of contemporary cultural scholarship and an exploration of the art and science of psychoacoustic ambiguities. Part detective story, part artistic and cultural critique, “Rorschach Audio” lifts the lid on an array of fascinating and under-examined perceptual and political phenomena.

“Rorschach Audio” is essential reading for everyone interested in air-traffic control, anechoic chambers, artificial oxygen carriers, audio art, bell-ringing, cocktail parties, cognitive science, communications interference, compost, the death penalty, Electronic Voice Phenomena, evolutionary biology, experimental music, ghosts, the historiography of art, illusions of sound and illusions of language, lip-reading jokes, nuclear blast craters, predictive texting, singing hair, sonic archives, sound design, steam trains, tinnitus, the Turing Test, Victorian blood painting, visual depth and space perception, ultrasonic visual music, ventriloquism, voices and warehouse fires and robberies.

Trade distribution by Turnaround
Production by Strange Attractor
Published by Disinformation

ISBN 978-1-907222-20-7
Hardback, 191 pages
UK £10 Non-Fiction
Psychoacoustics, Art Theory

RELEASE DATE MONDAY 21st MAY 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).

Following on from the pleasures of the 2010 Visual Culture Studies conference organized by the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture and hosted at University of Westminster, London, the International Association for Visual Culture’s first biennial conference will be taking place at New York University from May 31st – 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.

So it should be pretty decent.

You can find out more information on the conference here:

HOME

Social Sciences Humanities and Languages Studentships

The School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Languages at the University of Westminster is pleased to offer three research studentships for prospective PhD students from September 2012 for three years.

The Studentships are for full-time study in any of the School’s six Departments and include a fee waiver (Home/EU rate), plus a £5000 maintenance grant per year, for a maximum of three years. Please note that only Home/EU students are eligible to apply.

As part of the scholarship terms successful candidates will be required to contribute to teaching and research activities (up to 60 hrs per year), for which mentoring and development support will be provided.

Deadline for applications is 5pm on Friday 1 June 2012.

If your are applying for the English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies research area, your application will also be considered for the English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies Studentship and you do not have to submit two separate applications.

English, Lingusitics and Cultural Studies Bursaries

The Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies at the University of Westminster is pleased to offer three bursaries for prospective PhD students.

Applications are invited for awards which are tenable for up to three years for full-time study (pro-rata both in amount and length for part-time students). Please note that only home/EU students are eligible to apply

English Literature after 1800

Areas of staff expertise include: the literature and culture of the nineteenth century, the gothic, modernism, the avant-garde, Scottish writing, modern poetry, life writing, contemporary fiction, critical theory, aesthetics, the literature of London.

Museums and Galleries in the 21^st century

To consolidate the postgraduate community of our MA Museums, Galleries, and Contemporary Culture, taught in partnership with Tate and Museum of London, the department would welcome prospective PhD students with a particular interest in developing projects on audiences, digital culture, and curating.

Based in the heart of London, the department has an active research culture which includes regular seminars and conferences, and a lively research student community. In addition to this, staff and PG students are part of the University’s Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture.

For further information please contact:
Dr Leigh Wilson, PhD Coordinator
Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies
32-38 Wells St, London W1T 3UW

T: +44 (0)20 7 911 5000 Ext 2365
E: wilsonl@westminster.ac.uk

Deadline for applications is 5pm on Friday 1 June 2012.

Please note that your application will also be considered for the SSHL Studentship and they you do not have to submit two separate applications.

A great article on the BBC website about Alexa Wright’s A View for Inside. Here’s a snippet: `A View From Inside’ is an exploration of some alternative perspectives on reality. Her thought provoking portraits offer a window into the unique realities experienced by Theresa and nine other people who have been affected by a psychotic `disorder’ such as bipolar or schizophrenia. Alexa Wright’s aim is two fold. “One is bringing issues of mental health into the public domain, she said. ‘But the other is to look at our notion of reality. What is reality, we all operate in society on the basis that what we consider real is the same as what someone else might. But it’s interesting to look at a reality that only one person is privy to but for them is absolutely real when they are experiencing it.’

Read the full article here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-17618459

Sir George Cayley (1773-1857), the Father of Flight

Friday 27^th April, 1.00-.200 pm
The Royal Society, Carlton House Terrace, 6-9 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1Y 5AG

This Royal Society lecture discusses Cayley’s pioneering aviation work, and his roles as an inventor and as founder of the Royal Polytechnic Institution in Regent Street. Cayley’s work will be related to the scientific and intellectual milieu of the day, and to debates regarding the public engagement with science and technology. The lecture will be delivered by Alan Morrison, who is an Honorary Fellow in the IMCC at the University of Westminster, as well as a Lemelson Center Research Associate at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. He curated the exhibition ‘Sir George Cayley: the Father of Flight’ shown at the RAF Museum Hendon.

The lecture is open and free to the public – there is no need to book, and seats are allocated on a first-come, first-served basis.

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

Wednesday 21^st March, 1.15pm – 2.30pm
Room 257, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street

Aisling McKeown (University of Westminster)
‘Once Upon A Time In The West: the Rural Idyll in Contemporary Irish Fiction and Film’

Abstract: In 1952, John Wayne starred in John Ford’s film The Quiet Man, set in the west of Ireland. Playing a returned Irish-American emigrant, rather than his more customary role as that potent symbol of the American west, the cowboy, Wayne cut a swathe  through Ireland’s wild landscape. The film projected an image of Ireland as a rural idyll, populated by fiery yet charming natives. Contemporary film-makers and writers, unless being deliberately ironic, tend to avoid such clichéd treatment of rural Ireland. Combining discourses of tradition and modernity, their representations reflect the  socio-cultural evolution of this remote location, which inspired Yeats and Synge over a century ago. This paper will trace the development of these representations and discuss the blend of mythology and realism that underpins the work of today’s writers as they address such themes as immigration, identity and belonging.

David Cunningham will be speaking in the series of ‘Big Ideas’ pub philosophy talks held at the Wheatsheaf in London on Tuesday 27^th March, 8pm. The topic is: ‘Are Cities Important to Philosophy?’ And here’s the blurb:

Socrates in Athens; Kant in Konigsberg; Hegel in Jena; Russell in Oxford; Carnap in Vienna; Sartre in Paris. Cities, of course, attract cultural production of all kinds to themselves, and the great cities act as magnets for philosophers just as they do for artists, entrepreneurs and chancers. But is there something more to the relationship between philosophy and the city? Has the course of Western philosophy been influenced by its overwhelmingly urban setting?

Further details at: http://bigi.org.uk/events/cities-philosophy/

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.

‘Now! Visual Culture’ at NYU from May 31-June 2, 2012

Featuring:
*One Dozen Lightning Talks on the future of the field
*Workshops on multi-media software and film
*Open discussions on debt, academic publishing and interdisciplinarity
*Graduate student forum and a general assembly
*Practice, performance and diasporic art

Participants include: Safet Ahmeti, Giuliana Bruno, Wafaa Bilal, Jill Casid, Patsy Chang, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Beth Coleman, Jennifer Gonzalez, Raiford Guins, Gary Hall, Max Liljefors, Mark Little, Tara McPherson, Nicholas Mirzoeff, W.J.T. Mitchell, Lisa Nakamura, Paul Pfeiffer, Amanda du Preez, Martha Rosler, Joan Saab, Marquard Smith, Sina Najafi, Øyvind Vågnes, McKenzie Wark, Jason Wing, Joanna Zylinska, and many more

Full event details are at http://www.visualculturenow.org

As you may know, at the 2010 Visual Culture Studies Conference hosted by the Institute and held at University of Westminster in London, a decision was taken by those in attendance to constitute an International Association for Visual Culture. In 2011, at a follow-up meeting at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown MA, a group delegated from that conference set the process of forming the Association in motion and decided to hold a participatory conference in New York in 2012. The goal of the 2012 conference is to showcase as broad and diverse a range of visual culture practice as possible, consistent with the goal of a low-registration, high-participation event.

There can only be a relatively limited number of delegates both for space reasons (only certain spaces can be used cost-free at NYU) and to create a strongly interactive conference experience. These sessions will take place at 20 Cooper Square, New York, 10003 in the Humanities Initiative space, a beautifully designed space overlooking the architectural drama of the Bowery.

On the website you will find a registration form: please consider registering!

Why does the event have a registration fee of $50 for faculty and $25 for students?
1) we have no supporting body so all costs have had to be covered
2) Much of the amount will be ‘given back’ in the coffee, lunch and receptions
3) Given the limited space, a small registration seemed appropriate as a means of committing

From Nicholas Mirzoeff, organizer of the 2012 International Association for Visual Culture conference

Thursday 5 April 2012, 7pm
Whitechapel Gallery, 77-82 Whitechapel High Street, London E1
Price: £7.00 / £5.00 concessions (includes free glass of wine).

This season’s Whitechapel Salon organised by the IMCC in collaboration with the Whitechapel Gallery is on ‘Cultures of Capitalism’.  The fifth salon turns to that social and economic form at the very heart of capitalist cultures: Money. In the light of contemporary crises in financial capitalism, Professor Peter Osborne, Director of the Centre for Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University, and author of books including The Politics of Time, Philosophy in Cultural Theory, and Conceptual Art, will be in discussion with David Cunningham about money, cultural form, and the nature of the ‘real’ today.

Book your ticket at:
http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/shop/index.php/fuseaction/shop.product/product_id/1160?

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

UPDATE: 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/

You are invited to 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.

The Chinese presence in British cinema dates from James Williamson’s 1900 ‘documentary’ film, Attack on a China Mission, a recreation of that year’s ‘Boxer rebellion’ in which nationalist militants attempted to expel Christian missionaries and other foreigners from China. It was actually filmed in Brighton and Williamson had never visited China. A ‘yellow-face’ tradition followed, most popularly the Fu Manchu movies stretching through to the 1970s craze for kung fu – not until the early 1980s did Asian-British filmmakers finally make some inroads into the British film industry. In 1986 the first truly Chinese-British feature, Ping Pong (1986), reached the screen. Directed by the British-born director Po-Chi Leong, who had directed several features in Hong Kong, the film was set in London’s Chinatown, with a largely unknown cast – except for David Yip, best known as TV’s The Chinese Detective (BBC, 1981-82). Though critically lauded, however, the film failed to find the success it deserved, and neither it nor Mike Newell’s Soursweet (1988) adapted from Timothy Mo’s novel and scripted by Ian McEwan, has so far heralded the arrival of a healthy British-Chinese cinema. While China, Taiwan and Hong Kong-based directors like Zhang Yimou, Ang Lee and Wong Kar-Wai achieved arthouse and now mainstream success in Britain, other British-Chinese features such as BBC Film Peggy Su! (dir. Frances-Anne Solomon, 1998), failed to receive a proper release, despite favourable reviews. More recently Guo Xiaolu’s award winning film, She, A Chinese (2009), a British film in terms of its financing and much of its location, also failed to achieve due recognition from the film trade press and distributors. However a new generation of British-born or British-based Chinese are at the vanguard of positive change, amongst them University of Westminster alumna, Jo Ho, who created the hit BBC television show, Spirit Warriors (the first British series to star a predominantly East Asian cast) and who is now working on several feature films, and award winning director, Belfast born Lab Ky Mo.

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

Wednesday 7^th March, 1.15pm – 2.30pm
Room 257, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street

Matthew Taunton (Queen Mary, University of London)
‘Socialism, Literature and the Radiant Future: Before and After 1917’

Abstract: The idea that a “radiant future” (in Zinoviev’s phrase) was just around the corner was central to the Soviet myth. But how were Western ideas about the future affected by the advent of the Bolshevik revolution? This paper will suggest that the bright eyed visions of the future prevalent in the fin de siècle and the Edwardian period were increasingly replaced, after 1917, by sectarian debates about Russia. The future had become a spatial, rather than a purely temporal entity – whether it was to be welcomed as the true democracy (Shaw, the Webbs) or feared as a totalitarian nightmare (Orwell, Koestler, Nabokov). Speculative fictions like those of Morris, Bellamy, and Wells gave way to anti-Communist texts like Darkness at Noon, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Bend Sinister, and endorsements of Stalinism by Day Lewis, Shaw and others. This paper explores a range of ways in which ‘the future’ had to be rethought in light of the events of 1917.

PLEASE NOTE: We have changed seminar rooms this week and will be in Regent Street room 257.

The IMCC-affiliated MA in Museums, Galleries and Contemporary Culture at Westminster, in association with The Johns Hopkins Masters Program in Museum Studies, presents:

Teaching with Collections: A Discussion Forum
Tuesday 20 March 2012, 6.30 – 8.30
Fyvie Hall, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW

Keynote Speaker: Henry Kim, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Henry Kim is the Director of the University Engagement Programme, a three-year project sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, aimed at expanding the use of the museum’s collections in teaching across the University, as well as a specialist on archaic and classical Greek coins and European medals.  He has been a curator at the Ashmolean Museum and university lecturer in Greek numismatics at the University of Oxford since 1994, and was the Project Director for the Ashmolean Redevelopment Project, completed in November 2009 and the redevelopment of the Egypt Galleries, completed in November 2011.

Open and free to all. No booking required, but RSVP appreciated. Further information and RSVP: Helena Scott, scotth@westminster.ac.uk