The Nomad Artist in a Transnational Era: Korean Contemporary Art on British Soil
Friday 1^st July 2011,14:30-19:00 pm
Multi-purpose Hall, Korean Cultural Centre UK in London, Grand Buildings, 1-3 Strand, London, WC2N 5BW (Main entrance on Northumberland Avenue)

The Institute’s Visiting Research Fellow Dr Young-Paik Chun (Hong-Ik University, Seoul) has programmed this exciting forthcoming event.

14:30 – 15:00
Digital Film Screening
Interview with Eemyun Kang
4482 Korean Contemporary Artists Group Exhibition

15:00 – 16:15
Session 1. Theoretical approaches
Chair: Marquard Smith (Director, IMCC, University of Westminster)
Speaker: Young-Paik Chun (Art History and Theory, Hong-Ik University, Seoul)
Commentator: Edward Allington (Head of Graduate Sculpture, Slade School of Fine Art)

16:15 – 16:30 coffee break

16:30 – 17:40
Session 2. Panel Discussion in Art Practice I – Curatorial Practice
Chair: Jade Keun-Hye Lim (Independent Curator / APG in Museum Studies, Leicester University)
David A Bailey (Director, International Curators Forum)
Ji-Yoon Lee (Director, Suum Contemporary Art Project & Academy)
Sook-Kyung Lee (Curator, Tate Liverpool)

17:50 – 19:00
Session 3. Panel Discussion in Art Practice II – Making Art Works 
Chair: Stephanie Seung-Min Kim (Director, Iskai Contemporary Art)
Mee-Kyung Shin (artist)
Chan-hyo Bae (artist)
Jin-Kyun Ahn (artist)

‘New Ways of Working with Image’ Seminar and Workshop
Wednesday 14 September 2011
University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London

How do we understand ‘image’ today, and how has our notion of the image changed over time? What is the status of the image in current theory, and how does the study of image translate into visual culture? In which ways do words and verbal communication relate to or conflict with images? Do we work differently with images today, compared to the practices of previous generations? And if we do, why? Questions such as these underlie the Institute’s autumn Workshop which focuses on a practical, hands-on angle approach to working with image today.

Participants in this experiment are invited to discuss what they understand by the notion of ‘image’ and which methods they have chosen to work with it. Instead of discussing general themes and motifs without knowledge of each other’s premises, talking about what one does, and how one does it, reduces the chance of conceptual miscommunication and provides the opportunity for learning from new viewpoints. Interested academics, scholars and postgraduate students are all invited to attend.

The format of the day will be an interactive opening panel of invited speakers from art history, photographic theory, visual culture, philosophy and literary studies reflecting on their own approaches to the image in both disciplinary and transdisciplinary terms, followed by smaller group workshop sessions open to signed-up members of the audience, and concluding with general discussion. Individual workshop themes will include: (1) Image and Performance: on the nature and role of images in and as performance; (2) Imagescapes: what kinds of scenes and spaces images form and come to interact in; (3) Imaginary Image: how images condition and affect the reading experience; (4) Remediating Image: the slide and change of images between different semiotic modes.

Confirmed panel participants and workshop chairs include: David Cunningham (IMCC, Westminster), Mick Finch (Fine Art, Central Saint Martins), Andrew Fisher (Visual Culture, Goldsmiths College), Elena Gualtieri (Centre for Visual Fields, Sussex), Nigel Mapp (English Literature, Westminster), Lise Majgaard Mortensen (Aarhus University/IMCC), Luke Skrebowski (History of Art, Cambridge), Marquard Smith (IMCC, Westminster), Jarkko Toikanen (Tampere University/IMCC)

This workshop is convened by our Visiting Research Fellows in the Institute, Lise Majgaard Mortensen and Jarkko Toikkanen. For further information or to reserve a place (numbers are strictly limited!), please email Jarkko at: Jarkko.Toikkanen@uta.fi

The Institute is pleased to welcome Dr Nina Lager Vestberg from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, who will be a Visiting Research Fellow at IMCC from 13^th-30^th June.

Nina is an Associate Professor of Visual Culture at NTNU, and a Founding Member of the Visual Culture in Europe Network. She was educated in the UK, where she studied photography and multimedia at the University of Westminster (BA Hons), and history of art at Birkbeck College, London (MA and PhD). Nina has published articles on French photography and cultural memory, the indexicality of the photographic archive, and issues of copyright. Her current project investigates the cultural implications of the transformation of the photographic archive from an analogue, physical and visual environment to a digital, virtual and largely textual one. This will be the focus of her work during her stay in London, where she will be consulting primary sources in various London-based archives and collections of photographs.

The eagerly awaited ‘Audience with W.J.T. Mitchell’ will take place in The Boardroom, 1^st Floor, 309 Regent Street, University of Westminster, on Monday 13^th June 2011 from 2-6. All are welcome, and attendance is free, but you must RSVP to Sharon asap here: sinclas@wmin.ac.uk

Cloning Tom: An Audience with W.J.T. Mitchell

Monday 13^th June 2011, 2:00-6:00pm , 309 Regent Street, University of Westminster

To celebrate the publication of Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present (University of Chicago Press), the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture is thrilled to host an audience with Professor W. J.T. Mitchell. Mitchell will deliver a presentation entitled ‘The Historical Uncanny:  Phantoms, Doubles, and Repetition in the War on Terror’. His presentation will be followed by a Roundtable with contributors including Maxime Boidy (Strasbourg), Abdelwahab El-Affendi (Westminster), Eyal Weizman (Goldsmiths), and Mitchell himself. The event will be chaired by Dr Marquard Smith (Westminster).

The event is FREE but booking is essential so please RSVP to Sharon Sinclair: sinclas@wmin.ac.uk

Professor W. J. T. Mitchell is Editor of Critical Inquiry and the Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature, the Department of Art History, and the College at the University of Chicago. He is the author of seminal books including What Do Pictures Want? and Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, and editor of collections such as Against Theory, Landscape and Power, On Narrative, and Picture Theory.

Maxime Boidy is the French translator of W.J.T. Mitchell’s Cloning Terror (with S. Roth) and has also translated books by Susan Buck-Morss and Mike Davis, as well as Mitchell’s Iconography. He is a doctorial candidate in the Laboratoire Cultures et Sociétés en Europe at Université de Strasbourg.

Dr Abdelwahab El-Affendi is Reader in Politics at the Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster and co-ordinator of the Centre’s Democracy and Islam Programme. He is also currently an ESRC/AHRC Fellow in the Global Uncertainties Programme working on a project entitled ‘Narratives of Insecurity, Democratization and the Justification of (Mass) Violence.’ Dr El-Affendi is author of books including About Muhammad: The Other Western Perspective on the Prophet of Islam, The Conquest of Muslim Hearts and Minds, For a State of Peace: Conflict and the Future of Democracy in Sudan, Rethinking Islam and Modernity, and Who Needs an Islamic State?

Dr Marquard Smith is Director of the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture, University of Westminster, and Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Visual Culture.

Dr Eyal Weizman is Director of the Centre of Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. His work includes buildings and stage sets in Israel/Palestine and Europe. Weizman works with a variety of NGOs and Human right groups in Israel/Palestine. He co-curated the exhibition A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture, and co-edited the publication of the same title. These projects were based on his human-rights research, and were banned by the Israeli Association of Architects. They were later shown in the exhibition Territories in New York, Berlin, Rotterdam, San Francisco, Malmoe, Tel Aviv and Ramallah. His books include Lesser Evils, Hollow Land, A Civilian Occupation, and the series Territories 1,2 and 3.

Any local flâneurs passing recently by the IMCC’s Wells Street base may have noticed the legend ‘All That Is Solid Melts Into Air’ beaming out of our side window. We can no longer keep it a secret! The IMCC is delighted to announce the installation of the Institute’s very own public display screen, provided courtesy of our friends and collaborators at Blip Creative, which will, once fully operational, be streaming a changing array of staff and student work at our site.

The state-of-the-art wall-hanging LED installation is our contribution to The International Distributed Display Initiative, which currently links together screens at Westminster, Central Saint Martins and Princeton, and 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. When fully operational, the screen will then be part of a permanent internet link between installations at various international sites, allowing each collaborating institution to load and display and, using a webcam, observe content at the sites of the other organizations.

We will be staging an official launch soon, as well as announcing further details of staff and student artworks and curated exhibitions for the screen. Long live the Democratic Billboard! Watch this space …

Scarcity Exchanges: Iain Boal and Lydia Mehta
Wednesday, 1 June 2011, 6.30 pm
University of Westminster, Maylebone Campus 

A reminder that, fresh from his appearance at the last of the Institute’s Matter Matters Whitechapel Salons, our friend Iain Boal is taking part in the Scarcity Exchanges organized by the Architecture Department this Wednesday, along with Lydia Mehta from Sussex. More info here.

We are happy to announce the most excellent news that Michael Nath’s debut novel La Rochelle, for which we helped to organise the official launch in 2009, is one of four books shortlisted for the prestigious the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. The shortlist was announced at Dover House, London. The winners will be announced at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in August.

The James Tait Black Award, worth £10,000 to the winner, is awarded annually by the University of Edinburgh’s School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures, and were founded in 1919 by Janet Coats, the widow of publisher James Tait Black, to commemorate her husband’s love of good books. Past winners of the awards include the likes of DH Lawrence, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Muriel Spark, Angela Carter, Cormac McCarthy, Martin Amis, AS Byatt, William Golding and Ian McEwan.

The International Association for Visual Culture is coming…

Keep a close eye out for forthcoming information on the International Association for Visual Culture.

A little background:

On 29^th May 2010, as the final session of the three-day conference entitled ‘The 2010 Visual Culture Studies Conference’ held at University of Westminster, London, the subject under discussion was the proposal to establish an International Association for Visual Culture Studies. During the session, with presentations from Jeremy Gilbert (University of East London), Michael Ann Holly, and Stephen Melville (Ohio State), and convened by Marquard Smith, a motion was proposed formally by W.J.T. Mitchell (Chicago) that the Association be established. This motion was seconded by Lisa Cartwright (UC, San Diego), and the motion was passed.

At the start of April 2011, Michael Ann Holly, Starr Director of Research and Academic Programming at The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, and Marquard Smith, Founding Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Visual Culture, convened a colloquium of international scholars, museum educators, and practitioners of visual culture at The Clark to discuss further the founding of such an Association – what would be its aims and mission, and how it would function in its service to its members. Following on from this colloquium, the Clark group is moving forward with the formal founding of an International Association for Visual Culture.

The Association for Visual Culture will be launched officially at a conference in New York in May 2012, convened by a group of New York State-based scholars, led by Nicholas Mirzeoff (NYU).

Information will be available soon regarding the Association’s official launch, the chance to register interest in the Association, to receive updates, membership offers, etc.

Watch this space…

Our friends in the Group for War and Culture Studies at University of Westminster warmly invited you to:

Artist in Conversation: Ori Gersht
Group for War and Culture Studies Seminar
Thursday 16 June 2011, 6.30pm – 8.30pm
Fyvie Hall, 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW

Ori Gersht’s practice as a photographer is concerned with history and metaphor, journeys and geographical place, intertwined with metaphysical space. Such themes have been explored through major works that document, often obliquely, violent moments in Europe’s recent past: the scars and weals left on the sunlit, war-torn buildings in Sarajevo in his Afterwars series, the white images of ‘frustrating absence’ of his train journey to Auschwitz in White Noise, or the filmed forest loaded with the memory of war in the Ukraine in The Clearing.

At a pivotal moment in the history of photography where digital technology both threatens a crisis and promises a breakthrough, Gersht innovatively researches the possibilities and explores the materiality of his medium through still images and films that (literally) explode the genre of still life. In the films Pomegranate and Big Bang, Gersht has altered Renaissance-like still-life compositions with fast and violent interventions. Whilst a peaceful image is transformed into bloodshed and explosion, a dialogue is established between stillness and motion, peace and violence. In his most recent series of photographs, Chasing Good Fortune (2010), the cherry blossom resonates as a sign of the ephemerality of life. One of its illustrative manifestations was as propaganda in World War II as a representation of soldiers, who were thought of, in combat, to scatter like cherry blossoms, but also to die an honorable and therefore magnificent death.

At a time when many artists dealing with the political are producing work that has more in common with the medium of documentary, Gersht’s photographs, in between becoming and disappearing, have a fragile, phantom quality and dream-like texture on the verge of abstraction. More generally, his work is that of a provocative meditation.

Ori Gersht is an internationally renowned photographer and Professor of Photography at the University for the Creative Arts, Rochester.

Entrance free. R.S.V.P. Caroline Perret, tel. 020-7911-5000 ext 2307, or e-mail C.Perret@westminster.ac.uk.

A fine radio interview with our AHRC Fellow Joe Banks on ‘The Arts on Sunday’ in New Zealand.

Cloning Tom: An Audience with W.J.T. Mitchell
Monday 13^th June 2011, 2:00-6:00pm , 309 Regent Street, University of Westminster

To celebrate the publication of Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present (University of Chicago Press), the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture is thrilled to host an audience with Professor W. J.T. Mitchell. Mitchell will deliver a presentation entitled ‘The Historical Uncanny:  Phantoms, Doubles, and Repetition in the War on Terror’. His presentation will be followed by a Roundtable with contributors including Maxime Boidy (Strasbourg), Abdelwahab El-Affendi (Westminster), Eyal Weizman (Goldsmiths), and Mitchell himself. The event will be chaired by Dr Marquard Smith (Westminster).

The event is FREE but booking is essential so please RSVP to Sharon Sinclair: sinclas@wmin.ac.uk

Professor W. J. T. Mitchell is Editor of Critical Inquiry and the Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature, the Department of Art History, and the College at the University of Chicago. He is the author of seminal books including What Do Pictures Want? and Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, and editor of collections such as Against Theory, Landscape and Power, On Narrative, and Picture Theory.

Maxime Boidy is the French translator of W.J.T. Mitchell’s Cloning Terror (with S. Roth) and has also translated books by Susan Buck-Morss and Mike Davis, as well as Mitchell’s Iconography. He is a doctorial candidate in the Laboratoire Cultures et Sociétés en Europe at Université de Strasbourg.

Dr Abdelwahab El-Affendi is Reader in Politics at the Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster and co-ordinator of the Centre’s Democracy and Islam Programme. He is also currently an ESRC/AHRC Fellow in the Global Uncertainties Programme working on a project entitled ‘Narratives of Insecurity, Democratization and the Justification of (Mass) Violence.’ Dr El-Affendi is author of books including About Muhammad: The Other Western Perspective on the Prophet of Islam, The Conquest of Muslim Hearts and Minds, For a State of Peace: Conflict and the Future of Democracy in Sudan, Rethinking Islam and Modernity, and Who Needs an Islamic State?

Dr Marquard Smith is Director of the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture, University of Westminster, and Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Visual Culture.

Dr Eyal Weizman is Director of the Centre of Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. His work includes buildings and stage sets in Israel/Palestine and Europe. Weizman works with a variety of NGOs and Human right groups in Israel/Palestine. He co-curated the exhibition A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture, and co-edited the publication of the same title. These projects were based on his human-rights research, and were banned by the Israeli Association of Architects. They were later shown in the exhibition Territories in New York, Berlin, Rotterdam, San Francisco, Malmoe, Tel Aviv and Ramallah. His books include Lesser Evils, Hollow Land, A Civilian Occupation, and the series Territories 1,2 and 3.

Thomson & Craighead are showing three pieces of template cinema called, ‘Somewhere in Sweden’, ‘A short film about nothing’ and ‘Five Ghosts’ as part of the online component of this years Biennale de Montreal, curated by Paule Mackrous. The exhibit is published by the Centre International d’Art Contemporain de Montreal’s electronic magazine, issue 39/2011. Other artists include: Mark Amerika, Grégory Chatonsky, Jhave and Mouchette (aka Martine Neddam). More about template cinema here.

In other news, the duo are showing ‘Tallinn Wall’ (a re-working of their installation ‘London Wall’) and ‘BEACON’ as part of Gateways:  Art and Network Culture at the Kumu Art Museum, Tallinn, Estonia: the museum’s keynote exhibition for Tallinn’s year as European Cultural capital in 2011. Also, a solo presentation of ‘Flipped Clock’, curated by Richard Rinehart, will run from June 1st – August 31st 2011 at the Berkeley Art Museum, California.

Thursday 12 May 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 new Whitechapel Salon organised by the IMCC in collaboration with the Whitechapel Gallery will be on ‘Cultures of Capitalism’. In the first of four events interrogating contemporary economies of art and culture, Esther Leslie, author of Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism, Adrian Rifkin, author of Street Noises, and David Cunningham, co-editor of Adorno and Literature, discuss ‘The Culture Industry Now’. Chaired by Marquard Smith.

Book your ticket at:
http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/shop/product/category_id/22/product_id/871

Our friends in the Department of Art and Media Studies at NTNU, Trondheim, Norway, are organizing The 10th International Conference of the Nordic Society for Intermedial Studies, 26th-28th October, 2011. Entitled ‘Media Acts’, confirmed speakers include Jacques Ranciere, James Elkins, Sara Danius, Frederik Tygstrup, and Aud Sissel, Hoel. The ‘Call for Papers’ is here – Media Acts October 26-28 2011 Call for papers – and the deadline for abstracts is 15th May!

Scarcity Exchanges
University of Westminster, 35 Marylebone Road, London NW1
All talks start at 6.30pm at 5LS

Hosted by our friends in Architecture, a series of exchanges on and around the topic of scarcity, bringing together some of the leading thinkers in the field to expound on one of the most pressing, but often avoided, issues of the day. That resources are diminishing is a commonplace, but scarcity is about much more than the destruction of our natural resource base: it is a socially and economically constructed condition that affects us all, and will increasingly do so. If the 2000s was the decade of false abundance, then the 2010s will likely be defined through scarcity. This series of exchanges will open up the discussion as to what scarcity might mean, and its social, economic, and environmental implications.

11 May: Economies of Scarcity
Dougald Hine and Andrew Simms

18 May: Cities of Scarcity
Alfredo Brillembourg and David Satterthwaite

25 May: Scarcity and Consumption
Ed Van Hinte and Steve Broome

1 June: Concepts of Scarcity
Iain Boal and Lyla Mehta

13 June: Fabricating Scarcities
Saskia Sassen

Tickets are free but please register at http://scibe.eventbrite.com/  

The research project, Scarcity and Creativity in the Built Environment, is led by Jeremy Till at the University of Westminster, with partners at the Oslo School of Architecture and TU Vienna. The project is funded by HERA (Humanities in the European Research Area). For further details visit http://scibe.eu

Wednesday 11th May 2011, 6:30-8:30 p.m
309 Regent Street Gallery, University of Westminster, London

You are invited to the Private View of:
‘Poster Power: Images from Mao’s China, Then and Now’

Exhibition continues 12th May – 14th July

Invitation to the Private View attached. Further information here.

Posters from Mao’s China exercise an enduring appeal to audiences across the globe, more than sixty years after the events that produced them. They are revisited in modern and contemporary Chinese art and commercial design, and curated in exhibitions in China, the US and Europe.

So why does imagery produced to support a revolutionary ideology half a century ago continue to resonate with current Chinese and Western audiences? What is the China we see between posters of the Mao years and their contemporary consumerist reinventions? How do we explain the diverse responses such imagery evokes? And what does the appeal of the posters of Mao’s China tell us about the country’s ‘red legacy’?

Poster Power explores some of these questions through setting up a visual dialogue between posters produced during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) and their echoes in recent years. With posters from the University of Westminster’s Chinese Poster Collection, Chinese video art, documentary film, photographs, and contemporary items such as playing cards, nightclub advertising and tourist travel publicity, the exhibition invites viewers to explore the posters’ ambiguities of appeal to their audiences. As visual reminders of both autocratic rule and exuberant youthful idealism, they evoke diverse responses, challenging the idea that Cultural Revolution poster propaganda transmitted a single, transparent meaning. These posters’ capacity to inspire ambiguous responses opens up new narratives of what remains a complex period of China’s recent past, and sheds light on its changing significance in contemporary China.

Please do come along. And bring a friend. Or two.

Last week the ‘Visual Culture in Europe Network’ held its second annual conference, programmed marvelously by Joachin Barriendos and Anna-Maria Guasch, members of the ‘Global Visual Cultures’ project based in Barcelona.

The conference, entitled ‘Visualizing Europe: The Geopolitical and Intercultural Boundaries of Visual Culture’ was hosted by University of Barcelona and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona (MACBA).

An incredible couple of days, over 20 conference participants hailed from Vienna, Rome, Vilnius, Trondheim, Lisbon, Berlin, Lund, Skopje, London, Bergen, Zagreb, and Barcelona. Each and every one of them delivered fascinating and at times provocative presentations that led to a great deal of productive, meaningful, and at times even fractious debate. It was a timely reminder that there’s nothing tidy about what we as academics, scholars, educators, curators, and practitioners care about, why we care about it, and how that care is articulated as a politics, an ethics, as a praxis.

Following the conference, the Visual Culture in Europe Network held its second annual meeting. (For details of the Network please see: http://culturasvisualesglobales.net/vcine/). For your information, the Network’s 2012 conference will be held in Trondheim, Norway, hosted by Nina Lager Vestberg (NTNU) and Øyvind Vågnes (Bergen). The 2013 conference will take place in Croatia, hosted by Kresimir Purgar, Centre for Visual Studies, Zagreb.

Watch this space for further details of the conference themes, calls for papers, etc.

The University of Westminster is seeking a Writer-in-Residence in the University Archive for one academic year starting September 2011.

The award seeks to:

• Develop research activity in relation to Creative Writing and the Westminster Archive;
• Develop student interest and involvement with the archive; and
• Publicise the Westminster Archive and its holdings.

Remuneration: £1,000 for residency during one academic year.

Proposals should highlight how you would use the Westminster archive in your own creative writing, and ways in which you would generate Creative Writing activity in the university related to the archive. Given the range of materials available, we are looking for stimulating approaches to some of the possibilities afforded by the university archive. As part of the residency, you would be expected to lead one workshop with Creative Writing students and present a talk to staff and students on your own work related to the archive towards the end of the academic year.

Applicants should be authors of proven merit. Experience of working in archives would be beneficial but not essential, you will be given a full introduction to the archive. There will be research space available in the archive office, and you will have access to various university facilities including the library. High quality copies of materials in the archive can be provided.

Applications should include:

• Detail of published/performed writing and work in progress;
• Outline of writing project(s) to be undertaken during the period of appointment, up to a maximum of 500 words;
• Confirmation of EU citizenship/residence status.

The deadline for submission is Monday 9 May 2011.  Applications may be sent in hard copy to Dr. Andrew Caink, Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies, 32-8 Wells Street, London W1T 3UW or on attachment to A.Caink@westminster.ac.uk

Shortlisted candidates will be invited to interview in late May/early June.

The Archive includes records from the University’s predecessor bodies, the Polytechnic of Central London, the Regent Street Polytechnic, and the Royal Polytechnic founded in 1838. The collections consist of an enormous range of materials, engravings and illustrations of scientific experiments, books and pamphlets, events programmes and posters, legal agreements, photographs, magazines and periodicals, and World War One rolls of honour and service records. Details of the archive’s holdings can be found at www.westminster.ac.uk/about/archive-services/archive-holdings and exploratory enquiries can be directed to Elaine Penn (E.S.Penn@westminster.ac.uk)

It was the Institute’s pleasure to collaborate this last weekend with Fitzrovia Noir, an arts group based in central London, on their fascinating ‘Intervention Art Trail’. Around 350 people thoughout the day came on the working tours around our neighbourhood and to the book event, which was followed by a networking buffet for gallerists, artists, organizers, and community groups. All in a day’s work for the energetic crew at Fitzrovia Noir. A resounding success!

For visuals, please see: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fenoswin/5584625877/in/photostream/

We look forward to collaborating with Fitzrovia Noir again in the not too distant future.

For more on Fitzrovia Noir see: http://www.fitzrovianoir.com/

Dr Amy Jane Barnes
‘Representing Communism: exhibitions of revolutionary Chinese art in 1970s Britain’
Tuesday 5th April, 2011, 4.00–6.00 pm
Westminster Forum, University of Westminster, 5th Floor, 32-38 Wells Street, London W1T

In 1972, President Richard Nixon visited China, facilitating a period of rapprochement between East and West, which corresponded with a discernable shift in popular attitudes towards the People’s Republic and the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) in both North America and Western Europe. This presentation looks at the development and reception of two exhibitions of Chinese revolutionary art held in Britain as a direct result of the renewal of Sino-British diplomatic relations in 1971-1972: a small display of woodblock prints held at the Gulbenkian Museum of Oriental Art, Durham, in the summer of 1974 and Peasant Paintings from Hu County (Arts Council), which toured Britain in 1976-1977. The presentation will focus on how utopian visions of the People’s Republic were translated into, and consolidated by exhibitionary practice.

Amy Jane Barnes completed her PhD in Museum Studies at the University of Leicester in 2010. She is currently working as an independent researcher, undertaking projects on behalf of the Eunamus project (http://www.eunamus.eu/), and New Walk Museum and Art Gallery in Leicester. She recently co-edited National Museums: New Studies from Around the World (2011), and the forthcoming volume The Thing about Museums: Objects and Experience, Representation and Contestation.

Hosted by ur friends in the Contemporary China Centre. All welcome. Participants from outside the University of Westminster please register in advance with Dr Derek Hird at d.hird@westminster.ac.uk