David Cunningham’s review of Jacques Ranciere’s The Politics of Literature, published in the latest issue of Radical Philosophy, is currently up as a freebie on the website. You can read it here: http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/uncategorized/flaubert%e2%80%99s-parrot

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/

For the latest video from the Institute’s AHRC Research Fellow Joe Banks, please go to:

Neurogenesis by Disinformation + Usurp (Signature Version)
Copyright © Joe Banks & Poulomi Desai 24 Oct 2011
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurogenesis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Chtcheglov

Contributions to forthcoming open issues include:

Emmanuel Alloa on Visual Studies in Byzantium, David Cunningham on the Metropolis; Willem Flusser on the gesture of photographing, Tom Holert on Bildwissenschaft, Esther Leslie on liquid crystals, Lev Manovich on visualization, Lynda Nead on boxing, Jacques Ranciere on cinema, Nicole Starosielski on transoceanic cables, Janet Wolff on the power of images, Winnie Wong on appropriation in Chinese visual culture.

Forthcoming themed issues include:

In 2012

Ways of Seeing: 40 Years On, with contributors including: Mieke Bal, Jon Bird, Lisa Cartwright, Jill H. Casid, Hazel Clark, Laurie-Beth Clark, Mike Dibb, Jennifer Gonzalez, Dick Hebdige, Richard Hollis, Elizabeth Guffey, S. Heller, Ben Highmore, Martin Jay, Guy Julier, Louis Kaplan, Peter Lunenfeld, Tara McPherson, Marita Sturken, Griselda Pollock, Adrian Rifkin, Vanessa Schwartz, and Ming Wong.

In 2013:

The Archives R Us issue, with contributors including: Raiford Guins, Gary Hall, Chris Horrocks, Tom Holert, Juliette Kristenesen, susan pui san lok, Joanne Morra, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Vivian Rehberg, Marquard Smith, and Nina Lager Vestberg

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!

Flyer NVC1-2

For anyone interested in architectural models, design education, and photography, the Institute’s Dr Davide Deriu, a colleague from the Department of Architecture here at University of Westminster, has curated a fascinating exhibition entitled ‘Modernism in Miniature’ at The Canadian Centre for Architecture. If you happen to be in Montreal, why not swing by, it’s on until January 2012:

http://www.cca.qc.ca/en/exhibitions/1487-modernism-in-miniature

Our friends in the India Media Centre at University of Westminster are organizing a series of fascinating events, please see details below:

Thursday 13th October, 6.30pm

BHOPALI, a film
Bhopali, (dir. Max Carlson, 2011, 89 mins) is a multi-award-winning documentary about the survivors of the world’s worst industrial disaster, the 1984 Union Carbide gas leak in Bhopal, India. After the screening Mick Brown (journalist, writer and broadcaster) will chair a panel discussion with filmmaker Pawas Bisht (University of Loughborough), author, Meaghan Delahunt, (University of St Andrews) and Tim Edwards (International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal).
Venue: The Old Cinema, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW

Friday 14th October, 6.30pm

FORGOTTEN ERA: PARSI THEATRE AND EARLY INDIAN CINEMA
Kathryn Hansen, (University of Texas at Austin), a cultural historian with a special interest in Indian theatre, will present material from her new book Stages of Life: Indian Theatre Autobiographies (Anthem Press). This will be followed by a round-table discussion with Francesca Orsini, Reader in the Literatures of North India, SOAS; Rosie Thomas, Reader in Film and Director of CREAM and Co-director of India Media Centre at the University of Westminster; and Ravi Vasudevan, Professor of Film, Director of the Sarai Centre, Delhi, and Smuts Fellow at University of Cambridge.
Venue: Fyvie Hall, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW

Monday 17th October, 6.30pm

THE MAKING OF A MODERN INDIAN ARTIST-CRAFTSMAN: DEVI PRASAD
Devi Prasad was India’s pioneering artist-potter, visionary educationist and pacifist. This event looks at how his story exemplifies the importance of the Arts and Crafts Movement in shaping the nature of Modernism in India, and the role of pottery and the community of potters that Prasad set up. Naman P. Ahuja, (Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi), will speak about the themes of his new book, The Making of a Modern Indian Artist-Craftsman: Devi Prasad, followed by a conversation with architect Sunand Prasad, Devi Prasad’s son, and with potter and writer, Julian Stair, Visiting Lecturer in Ceramics at the University of Westminster.
Venue: The Boardroom, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW

Friday 2nd November, 5pm – 9pm

INDIAN ARTS ON FILM: Charles Correa, Bhupen Kakar, Nalini Malani and Vivan Sundaram
What makes a successful documentary about art? What specific issues arise when translating the visual arts onto film? How far do different cultural contexts require different approaches? Award-winning arts filmmakers and scholars, Arun Khopkar and John Wyver (Iluuminations and University of Westminster), together with art historian Partha Mitter (University of Sussex), discuss these questions, followed by a screening of two of Khopkar’s films: Figures of Thought (1990, 33 mins), on Bhupen Kakar, Nalini Malani and Vivan Sundaram, and Volume Zero: The Work of Charles Correa (2008, 59 mins) on India’s most eminent architect.
Venue: P3 Gallery (5pm) and Cayley Lecture Theatre (7pm), University of Westminster, 35 Marylebone Road, London NW1 5LS

These events have been organised in association with our partners, DSC-South Asia Literature Festival and Magic Lantern Persistence Resistance Festival. As spaces are limited, BOOKING IS ESSENTIAL (follow web-links for each event). For full details visit http://www.westminster.ac.uk/schools/media/cream

Wednesday 10th October 2011, 1.15-2.30pm
Room 106, University of Westminster, 32-38 Wells Street, London W1T 3UW

Helen Glew (History, University of Westminster)
“Women at the Regent Street Polytechnic, 1882 – 1945”

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

David Cunningham’s 2005 essay ‘The Concept of Metropolis: Philosophy and Urban Form’, originally published in Radical Philosophy, has been translated into Portuguese by Luciana Rocha for the Brazilian journal Revista Periferia.

Any Portuguese readers can see it here: http://www.febf.uerj.br/periferia/index.html

‘Rorschach Audio: Mysterious-devil-tale, Devil-bewitched-by-Death’
Wednesday 7 December 2011, 1.15pm – 2.45pm
Room 359, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B

Following on from the “Rorschach Audio” lecture demonstration presented to the IMCC in March 2011, and, in particular, that lecture’s discussions of Jean Cocteau, Salvador Dali, EH Gombrich, Primo Levi and Leonardo da Vinci, visual and sound artist Joe Banks presents further explorations of the influence of “Rorschach Audio” phenomena on contemporary literature and creative art. This presentation directly extends the material discussed in the previous lecture, so any guests not familiar with the earlier talk are encouraged to read the “Rorschach Audio” research publications available here…

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/lmj/summary/v011/11.1banks.html
http://www.slashseconds.org/issues/002/004/articles/jbanks/index.php

Michael Nath’s first novel La Rochelle was shortlisted for the 2011 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. At the award ceremony held at the Edinburgh Book Festival, chair of the judges Lee Spinks outlined his appreciation book in conversation with Sally Magnusson.

Money, Time, Representation: Literary Explorations (CFP)

In his Philosophy of Money, Georg Simmel notes that “we invest economic objects with a quantity of value as if it were an inherent quality” but “the question as to what value really is, like the question as to what being is, is unanswerable”. The element of unaccountability in money can also be seen in Marx, although he articulated the nature of money quite differently as an expression of social relations. Literature has always been very sensitive to the contingent, hence fictional, aspect of money.

A proposed session is planned on the topic for the IAPL (International Association for Philosophy and Literature) 2012 conference Archaeologies of the Future: tracing memories/imaging spaces to be held in Tallinn, Estonia next spring. We are looking for papers where the nature of money is explored in literature, and papers that ask how and if money in literature is the same as money in philosophy. The issues can include, but are not limited to, the nature of money as representation of value, or as representation of authority, or the role of money as an expression of a temporal pact that affects our sense of time. If you are interested in the topics of money in literature and/or money in philosophy, or parallels between writing and money, please send in your abstract ASAP (max. 1000 words) to the email address below. The session can include four to five speakers. Please note that all speakers must be IAPL members by the end of September 2011. For more details, see: www.iapl.info

Dr Tiina Käkelä-Puumala, University of Helsinki, Finland
email: tkakela@mappi.helsinki.fi

Thursday 15 September 2011, 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’. In the second of four events interrogating contemporary economies of art and culture, Julie Lomax, Head of Visual Arts, Arts Council England, London, Niru Ratnam, Director of Aicon Gallery, and Victoria Walsh, Research, Tate Britain, discuss The Future of Museums and Galleries: Culture, Education, and Policy. Chaired by Marquard Smith.

Book your ticket at: http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/shop/product/category_id/22/product_id/962?session_id=13148072992e2fd7d4c36c363f076298461909906a

A plug for the new website for Radical Philosophy. The address remains the same – http://www.radicalphilosophy.com – but as well as updating the way the website looks and works, every single item from the back catalogue has now been added to the online archive, from the first Radical Philosophy published in Spring 1972 through to the very latest issue.

Subscribers continue to have full access to and unlimited downloads from the archive, including all articles, interviews and reviews now available from RP1 to the present. Non-subscribing readers will enjoy free access all the commentaries, obituaries, conference and news reports, plus highlights from back issues and new access to hundreds of items from the expanded archive. A new feature of the website will also allow non-subscribers to purchase and download pdfs of individual items from the archive at an affordable price of £3 for any article or interview and £2 for the reviews sections from recent issues.

When the first issue of Radical Philosophy was published in January 1972, it sought – in the wake of the rise of the New Left and the student movements of the 1960s – to challenge the institutional divisions that it saw as contributing to the impoverishment of contemporary philosophical practice: divisions that existed between academic departments, between teachers and their students, and between the university and society. “Our main aim,” the Editorial Collective declared, “is to free ourselves from the restricting institutions and orthodoxies of the academic world, and thereby to encourage important philosophical work to develop: Let a Hundred Flowers Blossom!”. In the ensuing forty years much has changed about contemporary philosophy, in the UK and elsewhere.  But as testified by recent dossiers on transdisciplinarity, campaign reports on the revitalized student movement, and regular philosophically-informed commentaries on contemporary social and political issues, those problematic disciplinary, pedagogical and social divisions continue to be challenged by those writing in Radical Philosophy.

To access the expanded archive, subscribe to the journal, check out selected content from the latest issue, or download the current free gift from the back catalogue – Jacques Rancière’s ‘On the Theory of Ideology’ (originally published in RP7, Spring 1974) – simply click here.

A quick plug for a superb blog by IMCC affiliate Emma McEvoy, about late eighteenth-century gothic music and performance, on Stirling’s The Gothic Imagination site. As Glennis Byron puts it in the Comments: ‘The post, is, people, pretty amazing … As we plod along, talking about Twilight and True Blood and Zombies and all that ephemeral rubbish, and repeating the same old points about gothic over and over and over and over, some people are actually doing real research’. Read it here.

The University of Westminster’s Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies, in association with the Masters Program in Museum Studies, Johns Hopkins University, invite you to:

‘ONLINE’: What can Museums and Galleries learn from online education in Universities, and vice versa?
A Round Table discussion with keynote speaker Phyllis Hecht (Johns Hopkins University)
Wednesday 20 July 2011, 6.30-8 p.m.
The Board Room, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW

Entrance free. RSVP Sharon Sinclair, email sinclas@westminster.ac.uk

Phyllis Hecht is Director of the Master of Arts in Museum Studies program at Johns Hopkins University, USA. She is the Chair of the Committee on Museum Professional Training (COMPT) of the American Association of Museums (AAM). Most recently she co-edited and contributed to The Digital Museum: A Think Guide (2007), an anthology on museums and technology. Phyllis will discuss how the MA program at JHU is using social networking, including incorporating Facebook and Twitter into its learning strategy.

This event is part of the JHU Museum Studies London Onsite Summer Seminar held at the University of Westminster. The Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture launches its new MA programme in Museums, Galleries and Contemporary Culture in September 2011.

An early heads up on the line up of speakers and list of dates for next year’s first semester series of English Literature and Culture seminars. All will take place from 1.15-2.30pm on Wednesday lunchtimes in the University’s Regent Street building (room 359).

12th October 2011
Helen Glew (History Project, University of Westminster)
“Women at the Regent Street Polytechnic, 1882 – 1945”

26th October 2011
Anna Katharina Schaffner (University of Kent)
“Havelock Ellis and the Literary Imagination: On Sexology and Fiction”

9th November 2011
Caroline Edwards (Surrey University)
“Fictions of the Not Yet”

23rd November 2011
Samuel Thomas (Durham University)
“The Gaucho Sells Out: Thomas Pynchon, Nation Building & Argentina”

Further details at: http://seminarserieswmin.wordpress.com/

‘What’s New? The Changing Face of Indian Cinema: Contemporary and Historical Contexts’
Friday 8th and Saturday 9th July 2011
Marylebone Campus, 35 Marylebone Road, London NW1 5LS

Invited speakers include: Filmmakers, Anurag Kashyap and Rituparno Ghosh, Rachel Dwyer (SOAS, London), Shohini Ghosh, (Jamia Millia Islamia University, Delhi), Lalitha Gopalan, (University of Texas at Austin).

Is mainstream Indian cinema moving into a ‘post-Bollywood’ era?  In recent years a growing number of popular (and not so popular) films made for commercial release have been challenging the conventions of the mainstream multi-genre, song and dance extravaganzas. These films are being made – both within and outside the prevailing studio system – in Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata and elsewhere. From ‘Dev D’ to ‘Just Another Love Story, Udaan’ or ‘Peepli Live,’ cinematic language is being explored, songs are disappearing or being used in different ways, and strong alternative storylines are presenting a new face of modern Indian society.  These films’ hybrid sensibilities are increasingly appealing to the global aspirations of India’s urban ‘multiplex’ generation.

The London Indian Film Festival was set up in July 2010 to showcase this trend, bringing cutting edge Indian films and filmmakers to London audiences. Alongside this summer’s festival, the India Media Centre at the University of Westminster, in association with the London Indian Film Festival, is hosting a conference that will bring together filmmakers, industry professionals and academics to explore this new phenomenon within both a contemporary and an historical context.

Full conference: Standard rate £150. One day rate £100
Full conference: Student rate £65.  One day rate £45.
There is an early bird discount if you pay by Thursday 30 June:
Full conference: Standard rate £125. Student rate £50

This covers all conference documentation, refreshments, lunches, a reception, reduced cinema ticket prices to LIFF events, free entry to the final night party, and administration costs.

To register please download the registration form from: http://www.westminster.ac.uk/whats-new_080711

General enquiries: please contact Helen Cohen at: H.cohen02@westminster.ac.uk
Academic enquires: please contact Daisy Hasan at: D.Hasan@westminster.ac.uk
Conference team: Rosie Thomas, Daisy Hasan, Radha Dayal, Helen Cohen.

Our friends in University of Westminster’s Contemporary China Centre present:

Through Time and Space with Chairman Mao:? The Afterlife and Global Impact of the Great Helmsman
A panel discussion with Pankaj Mishra and Jeffrey Wasserstrom, chaired by Harriet Evans
Monday, July 4, 2011, 5.00 p.m. – 6.30 p.m.
The Boardroom, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B

How is Mao thought about in contemporary China and in other parts of Asia? In what ways have debates about his legacy and posthumous uses of his image paralleled or diverged from those of other larger-than-life figures associated with independence movements from Nehru to Nasser and from Ho to Che? What should we make of the “red song” movement sweeping through the PRC, which can be treated as fueled by nostalgic yearning or attributed to political manoeuvring?

Pankaj Mishra is the author of The Romantics: A Novel, which won the LA Times’ Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World, and Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet and Beyond. His new book The Rise of Asia and the Remaking of the Modern World will be published next year.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom is Professor of History and Chair of the Department at UC Irvine, where he also serves as the Editor of the Journal of Asian Studies. His books include Student Protests in Twentieth-Century China (1991), China’s Brave New World (2007), Global Shanghai, 1850-2010 (2009), and China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know (2011). He is a co-founder of the “China Beat” blog/electronic magazine.

Harriet Evans is Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies, and Director of the Contemporary China Centre, University of Westminster, and is curator of the exhibition ‘Poster Power: Images from Mao’s China, Then and Now.’

Contemporary China Centre
www.westminster.ac.uk/schools/humanities/research/asian-studies

For enquiries about the Contemporary China Centre, please contact
Professor Harriet Evans: evansh@westminster.ac.uk