Future of ‘theory’ in art and design education, Whitechapel Salon, 26th Sept

Salon#1: The Future of ‘Theory’ in Art and Design Education
Whitechapel Gallery, 77-82 Whitechapel High Street, London E1
Thursday 26 September 2013, 7pm – 9pm

Join Curator Kirsty Ogg, artist Uriel Orlow, and Head of Central Saint Martins Jeremy Till for the first in a new series of Whitechapel Salons debating the future of ‘theory’ in art and design education. Chaired by Marquard Smith.

Tickets £8/£6 concessions (£4 Members). Includes a glass of wine. Book your ticket here.

Co-organised by the IMCC and University for the Creative Arts

Materialities of Text: New Formations special issue

A new issue of the journal New Formations is out co-edited by the IMCC’s Sas Mays. Entitled ‘Materialities of Text: From the Codex to the Net’, the collection came out of an online conference hosted by the Institute’s ‘Archiving Cultures’ affiliate. Further information on the issue is available here. You can also download a copy of Sas’s introduction to the issue, co-authored with Nick Thoburn, for free at: http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/journals/newformations/pdfs/nf78 intro.pdf

Call for Contributions: ‘Visions of Contemporary Cuts’, forthcoming issue of Journal of Visual Culture

See: http://www.lanfrancoaceti.com/2013/09/visions-of-contemporary-cuts/

Fu Manchu in London, Friday 4th October 2013

Fu Manchu in London: Lao She, Limehouse and Yellow Peril in the Heart of Empire

Friday 4^th October 2013
University of Westminster, 115 New Cavendish Street, London W1W 6UW

We are pleased to announce a special one-day conference on the occasion of three inter-related events this autumn: the publication by Penguin Modern Classics of Lao She’s forgotten masterpiece of 1920s Chinese London, Mr Ma and Son, the launch at the Ovalhouse Theatre of Daniel York’s satiric play, The Fu Manchu Complex (dir. Justin Audibert), and, to mark the centenary of the first appearance of “the Yellow Peril incarnate in one man”, Lord of Strange Deaths: The Fiendish World of Sax Rohmer, a collection of essays edited by Phil Baker and Antony Clayton (Strange Attractor Press, 2013).

The day’s speakers will examine the contexts and enduring fascination of one of the world’s most notorious fictional villains, from the fin-de-siecle racial anxieties and obsessions that spawned Rohmer’s oeuvre to the skewed perceptions that have arisen around his pervasive influence. Of all the overseas Chinese who came to England during the inter-war years, Lao She was the only one to confront the popular Sinophobia endemic in British society directly. Mr Ma and Son: Two Chinese in London (Er Ma, 1929) portrays the pernicious effects of the media on the lives of Chinese people in London. Based on his own experiences in London and written principally for a Chinese readership, the novel gives us a rare, if not unique, picture of the social and commercial affairs of the shop-keepers, café proprietors, and seafarers, that made up the major part of London’s small Chinese community, then based in Limehouse in the East End. Daniel York’s play, The Fu Manchu Complex challenges the resonances of ‘Yellow Peril’ stereotypes for the 21^st century in a satirical pastiche of classic British cinema. Five East Asian actors ‘white up’ in the style of slapstick and Victorian music-hall comedy to play the traditional colonials in a murder mystery set in the East End.

Admission is free but please register by emailing Dr Anne Witchard at:
 anne@translatingchina.info

PROGRAMME

10.00AM – “Some Kind of Admiration or Respect”: Dr Fu Manchu as Hero
Phil Baker

10.45AM – The Case of the Yellow Peril Then and Now
Dr Ross Forman (University of Warwick)

11.30AM – 11.45AM – coffee

11.45AM – Fu Manchu, Orientalism and Arabophilia
Robert Irwin (SOAS /Times Literary Supplement)

12.30PM – 1.30PM – Lunch

1.30PM – Rohmer’s Odyssey
Antony Clayton

2.15PM – Mr Ma and Son: Limehouse and the Yellow Peril genre
Dr Julia Lovell (Birkbeck) in conversation with author Paul French

3.15PM – The Fu Manchu Complex
Daniel York and Justin Audibert will discuss their play, The Fu Manchu Complex, in production at the Ovalhouse Theatre in London.

The Fu Manchu Complex runs at the Ovalhouse, Kennington
1 – 19 October, Tues-Sat 7.45pm
BOOK / BOX OFFICE: 020 7582 7680

Call for Papers: Archives for the Future: An Art and Visual Culture Conference

Archives for the Future: An Art and Visual Culture Conference

Organised by Mnemoscape and supported by the IMCC.
Call for Papers: Deadline submission: 18 November 2013

Archives are becoming increasingly fetishized and (an)aestheticized in contemporary art practice and academic discourse. This conference comes out of a shared sense of frustration at this. In response, it intends to explore the present and futuristic potential embedded in the archive. Archives have generally been considered as conservative institutions aimed at preserving the past in the present – and so perpetuating the traditional structures of power. In contrast, we are interested in bringing to light the generative and creative side of the archive, what Derrida has defined as its ‘institutive’ power. How can archives be used to generate the ‘new’ and to convey possible alternatives to the present status quo? How can we turn archives from historical records into instruments of future planning and agencies of radical thinking? Is it possible to build an archive which works as an open space of imagination and a mean of projection into the future? Is it possible to archive the future to come and, at the same time, to remain open to the unpredictable and the unknown?

We invite submissions that are concerned with reinstating the archive as site of political confrontation, of action and intervention in the present, as well as as site of re-projection and re-imagination for the future. We are particularly interested in creating a dialogue between theory and practice and as such we welcome contributions from artists, thinkers and curators alike.

To submit a proposal please send an abstract (300-500 words), a CV, five key words and a short biographical note (100 words). Please send in a single Word document to: mnemoscape@gmail.com

For more information about the conference, please contact the conveners, Elisa Adami and Alessandra Ferrini at mnemoscape@gmail.com

Download the call for papers

Death, Aesthetics and Representation, Wednesday September 11 2013

The final event in the series Death and the Contemporary, ‘Death, Aesthetics and Representation’ will take place on Wednesday September 11 from 7:00pm to 8:30pm,  at The Photographers’ Gallery, 16 – 18 Ramillies St, London W1F 7LW, featuring contributions from a panel of keynote speakers including Professor Roger Luckhurst, Dr Timothy Secret, Audrey Linkman  and Briony Campbell.

‘Death, Aesthetics and Representation’ is hosted by Georgina Colby in collaboration with Anthony Luvera. Through plenary discussions with keynote writers, visual artists and theorists, ‘Death and the Contemporary’ seeks to explore issues surrounding the representation of death in contemporary culture.

The following links contain further information about ‘Death and the Contemporary’ and ticket sales for ‘Death, Aesthetics and Representation’. Tickets for the event are priced at £7 or £4 concession.
http://thephotographersgallery.org.uk/death-aesthetics-reoresentation
http://www.deathandthecontemporary.com/

The Science Fiction Politics of Urban Crisis article

A new article by David Cunningham and Alex Warwick has just appeared in the most excellent journal CITY, vol. 13, no. 4: ‘Unnoticed Apocalypse: The Science Fiction Politics of Urban Crisis’. The essay ranges over a number of contemporary texts from The Coming Insurrection to Rem Koolhaas’ Junkspace to the film District 9.

The nice people at Taylor & Francis Press are offering the first 50 people to make use of it free access to an eprint version from the following link: http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/AqbgvrWCkCSXg8XZEwgd/full

Visual Activism conference, March 14-16 2014, San Francisco

Call for Proposals: Visual Activism

The International Association of Visual Culture (IAVC) invites proposals for its third biennial conference in San Francisco, March 14-16, 2014.

The conference is centered on the concept of Visual Activism.  How can we better understand the relationships between visual culture and activist practices?  There are ways in which art can take the form of political/social activism and there are also ways in which activism takes specific, and sometimes surprising, visual forms that are not always aligned with or recognizable by art-world frameworks.  How can we engage in conversations about abstract or oblique visual activism, for instance as is demanded in conditions of extreme censorship?  How can we approach the complexity of governmental or commercial ‘visual activism’ to better address hegemonies of visual culture (for example, in advertising and the mass media)?  To what degree do forms of visual activism travel, and in what ways are they necessarily grounded in locally specific knowledge and geographically specific spaces?

Presentations should respond to these questions or related topics and may take the form of scholarly papers (20 minutes), artist talks (20 minutes), short performances (5 to 30 minutes), or lighting-round interventions (5 minutes).  Proposals should include a 400-word abstract, links to websites with additional publications or relevant images and information, and a CV. Please send proposals to edu@sfmoma.org (with ‘visual activism’ as the subject line) no later than October 1, 2013.

Please email edu@sfmoma.org to be added to the mailing list to receive updates about the conference such as registration, the calendar of events and participants.

For further information about the International Association of Visual Culture, or to join the IAVC, please click here.

Book launch and conference: Ali Smith: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, Sept 7th

We are pleased to announce the book launch of Monica Germana’s edited collection on Ali Smith, which is published this month by Bloomsbury (co-edited with Emily Horton). To mark the publication of the first volume of essays on this important contemporary author, Monica and Emily are organising a one-day conference on 7 September 2013. The conference will conclude with a talk by Ali Smith chaired by Dame Gillian Beer. The book launch will take place in conjunction with the talk at 11 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3RF at 5pm.

You are all warmly invited to the book launch and the following wine reception. Please note that, although the event will be free of charge, places are limited. Please email Emily on emilische@hotmail.com to reserve your place.

More information about the conference can be found on this dedicated website:
http://alismith21cf.wordpress.com/

If you wish to attend the whole conference, registration is open and available from this website:
http://onlinestore.rhul.ac.uk/browse/product.asp?compid=1&modid=1&catid=430

Citizen Curators exhibition, Photographers’ Gallery

‘#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

Artists’ films screening tonight, curated by 4fold, at Cody Dock, London E16

Four super current and recent MA Visual Culture students have established a new curatorial collective, 4fold , and their first public event is taking place tonight: a film screening beginning at 8pm. The programme will include a selection of artists’ films, documentaries, and archival material that explores social housing, public interaction and surveillance. It’ll takes place at Princess River, Cody Dock (11c South Crescent, London E16 4TL – map here), which is only five minutes walk from Star Lane Station (new DLR branch).

Both 4fold and Cody Dock really need your support, please feel free to attend. In this weather, it’ll be a fantastic evening for sure!

People Are Strange, student exhibition, July 17 2013

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A View from the Inside at Photo Monitor

Alexa Wright’s series A View from the Inside is the featured portfolio on Photo Monitor this month: http://www.photomonitor.co.uk/ – click on the image to get to the portfolio template.

Launch of new book: Monstrosity: The Human Monster in Visual Culture

We are delighted to announce the publication of a new book by the IMCC’s Alexa Wright, Monstrosity: The Human Monster in Visual Culture, from I.B. Tauris.

From the ‘Monster of Ravenna’ to the ‘Elephant Man’, Myra Hindley and Ted Bundy, the visualization of ‘real’, human monsters has always played a part in how society sees itself. But what is the function of a monster? Why do we need to embody and represent what is monstrous? This book investigates the appearance of the human monster in Western culture, both historically and in our contemporary society. It argues that images of real (rather than fictional) human monsters help us both to identify and to interrogate what constitutes normality; we construct what is acceptable in humanity by depicting what is not quite acceptable.

There will be a drinks reception to celebrate the launch of Monstrosity on Wednesday 26 June, from 6.30-8.30, in the café at Toynbee Studios, 28 Commercial Street, London E16AB. RSVP to Naomi French at: nfrench@ibtauris.com

Alexa Monstrosity Book Launch Invitation

Alex has also written a new piece for the IB Tauris blog. Read it here: http://theibtaurisblog.com/2013/06/25/facing-evil/

Iron Books: Poems of the Posthuman exhibition, Bethnal Green

Iron Books: Poems of the Posthuman
Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos

Exhibition from July 5 – 31, 2013
The Gasoline Rooms, 300 Clare Street, London E2 9HD

Thirty metal poems that trace, photographically and textually, the posthuman condition. The works originate in instagram, shot and written instantly without editing. They are here transported onto metal books that oscillate between the monumental and the fleeting.

Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos is Professor of Law and Theory at the University of Westminster and a member of the Advisory Board of the IMCC.

Carroll / Fletcher reading group: The Price of Sex, July 11

Thursday 11 July, 7:00-9:00pm
Carroll / Fletcher, 56-57 Eastcastle Street, London W1W 8EQ

Our friends at Carroll / Fletcher, round the corner from our IMCC base, have announced their next reading group, Chapter 4: The Price of Sex, led by artist Lora Hristova on Thursday 11 July.

Chapter 4 leads on from Chapter 3: The Dialectics of Sex, that took radical feminist Shulasmith Firestone’s pioneering 1970’s text as it’s starting point, generating a lively debate led by Stella Sandford. With a focus on what twenty-first century suffragettes would fight for now, Chapter 4 explores the sex industry and sexual politics.

The reading for Chapter 4: The Price of Sex is on Hristova’s Tumblr – www.lorahri-priceofsex.tumblr.com where she asks What is the price of sex? What (and who) are we willing to sacrifice in the name of pleasure? How often is the need for physical release actually a desire for control and is having sex a human right? The discussion aims to navigate the territory of the sex industry; from its everyday reflections in heterosexual life to the heated debate around the legalisation of prostitution and the dark corners of human trafficking.

Lora Hristova’s mixed media practice engages with gendered themes of identity and sexuality, exploring issues of gender inequality and representations of women in contemporary culture in reference to universal experiences of desire and shame, intimacy and anxiety and insecurities surrounding the body. Her recent work has investigated the sex industry, and the cultural, psychological and social impact of pornography. She recently discussed her research in an Artists’ Presentation for the Zabludowicz Invites exhibition.

Tickets £5.00 including refreshments.
To book go to carrollfletcher.eventbrite.com

Thomson & Craighead exhibition extended until July 13th

Thomson & Craighead’s Never Odd Or Even has been chosen as Show of the Week in Time Out, which, in a review awarding the exhibition five stars, remarks that this ‘mini-survey makes a strong case for the duo being two of our most forward-looking and underrated artists’. The show itself has been extended until Saturday 13 July, so there’s still a chance to visit before the gallery takes an extended summer break until the next exhibition in September.

Their first ever survey show, featuring seminal works such as ‘More Songs of Innocence and of Experience’ (2012), and ‘Time Machine in alphabetical order’ (2011), Never Odd or Even also includes a new work that grows day by day: ‘London Wall W1W’ (2013) is the artists’ physical manifestation of Tweets drawn from within a one-mile radius of Carroll / Fletcher, which are then turned into propaganda-style posters and adhered to the gallery wall. Keep up to date with the latest tweets from W1W on @CarrollFletcher and tclondonwall.tumblr.com.

From 7pm on Wednesday 10 July, the artists are repeating the popular tour of the show they gave in June. Bookings can be made at carrollfletcher.eventbrite.com.

Memory and Restitution, July 5-6: Programme Announced

Memory and Restitution
Friday 5 July, 9.30-6.30 and Saturday 6 July, 9.30-1.30, 2013,
The Boardroom, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B

Full programme at: www.memoryandrestitution.co.uk/programme/

Keynotes: Stef Craps (Ghent), Lyndsey Stonebridge (UEA) and Anna Reading (King’s College London)

Panels on: Restitution and Resistance; Landscapes of American Memory; The Natural History of Memory; Transcultural Memory After 9/11; Rethinking Restitution

Following recent attention to the “cosmopolitan” or “multidirectional” dimensions of memory, this colloquium foregrounds commemorative practices as global positioning systems that enable individuals and collectives to situate themselves (temporally and spatially, emotionally and intellectually, politically, and ethically) in relation to others. Interrogating the implicit hierarchies of life encoded in disparate forms of historical reckoning, the colloquium considers whether it is possible to imagine a universal model of restitution, or whether processes of redress are necessarily a product of the cultural and historical context in which they arise.

Organised by: Lucy Bond (Westminster), Rick Crownshaw (Goldsmiths) and Jessica Rapson (Goldsmiths)

Co-sponsored by the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture and Goldsmiths

Admission is free, but please reserve a place: info@memoryandrestitution.co.uk

Foreclosure conference, June 17-18 2013

FORECLOSURE
Brunel University & University of Westminster
1st Joint Researching the Arts/Social Sciences Conference for Research Students

The Pavilion, University of Westminster, 115 New Cavendish Street, London
June 17 & 18, 2013, 10:30-5pm

Keynote: Oren Ben-Dor, University of Southampton
‘Placial [in]justice: reflections on the wounded origin of political affectation’

Please join us at this two-day interdisciplinary conference Foreclosure that aims to bring together law, art and politics.  We understand foreclosure as the art of ordering and securing a common ground for the unfolding of a common experience; the exchange of affects and perspectives; and the performance of bodies and spaces. Art, Law and Politics habitually build walls around their concepts and practices. Foreclosure aims to encourage the exploration of practices and performances of law, art and politics through the prism of their shared operation; the investigation of the juncture between their disciplinary fences; and the unfolding of the fragility of their mechanisms. This is our aim: to dissect, dismantle and improve the operations of art, law and politics in order to locate cracks, produce apertures, and ride the lines of flight where new potentialities are generated.  The conference programme is attached.

Admission is free but places are limited. RSVP at foreclosuresconference@gmail.com

Call for Papers: The Mediated City

The Mediated City
Two multidisciplinary conferences examining “the city”… a virtual, filmic, social, political and physical construct.

The Mediated City examines the metropolis as a contested concept. It offers a platform for multiple and diverse examinations of the city. It aims to bring together people from diverse backgrounds to fragment, multiply and reconfigure our readings of the city; to offer multiple and conflicting discipline perspectives. The intention is to share views of the city as physical entity, online community, film set, photographic backdrop, geographical map, sociological case study, political metaphor, digital or video game etc.. – to examine it as a mediated and shared phenomenon.

London Conference
April 1-3 2014, Ravensbourne College

Los Angeles Conference
October 2014 (tbc), Woodbury University

London Conference deadlines
15 September 2013: abstracts / initial proposals

Possible Formats:
20 minute presentations
60 minute panel discussions on selected themes
Workshop collaborative sessions
Screenings / Q&As

For full details visit: http://architecturemps.com