Bulletin
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Announcement
Two New TrAIN Readers
In this year’s University of the Arts London promotion round, the TrAIN Research Centre had two successes. TrAIN Senior Research Fellows, Dr Michael Asbury and Dr Yuko Kikuchi, were each promoted to Reader. Last year another core member, Sutapa Biswas, was promoted to Reader, and TrAIN has now three Readers, all promoted while they were at TrAIN. Both Michael and Yuko completed their doctorate at the University (previously the London Institute), became post-doc Research Fellows and now Readers. Congratulations to both Michael and Yuko!
Tuesday 13 May, 2008
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Introduction
Bettina Pousttchi at TrAIN
Bettina Pousttchi has recently arrived in London as the second Kunstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral Artist-in-Residence at TrAIN. Pousttchi will be in the UK for six months between January and June 2008, where she will research and develop new work, in her studio at ACAVA London and via participation in TrAIN research seminars and events. The German-Iranian artist studied philosophy, art and film theory in Cologne before attending the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf (studying with Gerhard Merz and Rosemarie Trockel) and the Whitney Independent Studio Programme. She lives in Berlin, where her work is represented by the Buchmann Galerie.
Pousttchi works in large-format photography and video installation. Her most recent series of work is a sequence of twelve photographs collectively titled Parachutes and based on photographs Pousttchi took during a flight practice in Berlin.
The helicopters, plans and parachutists in these images are only schematically visible, appearing as diminuative flying objects hurled against reworked and overdrawn skyscapes. The series addresses the assertion of state authority over territory, and continues an interest in non-places that is evident in photographic series such as Take Off (2005) and the video installation Landing (2006).
Wednesday 16 January, 2008
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Update
LOCATION: the Museum, the Academy and the Studio
Deborah Cherry and Sutapa Biswas of TrAIN are convening a panel entitled Monuments and Memorials for LOCATION: the Museum, the Academy and the Studiothe Association of Art Historians Annual Conference, to be held this year at Tate Britain and Tate Modern, London, 2-4 April 2008.
The booking deadline for conference tickets is 22 February 2008 Please visit the AAH website for details.
Wednesday 16 January, 2008
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Announcement
Would you like to participate in an artistic experience?
Ricardo Basbaum’s project for documenta 12 has arrived at TrAIN. would you like to participate in an artistic experience? starts with the offering of a painted steel object (125×80 x 18 cm) to be taken home by the participant (individual, group or collective) who will have a certain period of time to realize an artistic experience with it. Twenty new objects were produced for documenta. Ten of them circulate in Brazil and Latin America, nine in Europe and one in Africa. One has recently arrived at the TrAIN Research Centre.
During the time they are in the possession of the object, it is up to the participants to make decisions: what kind of experience will be enacted, where the object will be taken, how it will be useful. The participants send feedback in the form of texts, images, videos or objects, and the documents are displayed in a website developed for the project. Each participant has access to editing tools, which will permit them to upload the documentation themselves. For the duration of documenta 12, results also feed into a sculptural-architectonic installation developed for the exhibition.
For enquiries about the object currently at TrAIN (and requests from individuals or groups within UAL who are interested in participating) use the Contact area.
Ricardo Basbaum is in the TrAIN Directory.
Wednesday 16 January, 2008
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Update
TrAIN/Gasworks Residency 2007
Erika Arzt and Juan Linares completed the first TrAIN/Gasworks Residency in December 2007. One of the aims of this collaboration is to explore the type of practice specific to international residencies, and Arzt and Linares’ work focused this interest in a constructive direction.
The artists work collaboratively, and are motivated by the question of how it is possible to ‘get in touch, relate to or influence a place or context’. They have answered this question in various ways previously, though site-specific projects carried out within various city-districts including Napoles, Cali; La Bachillera, Seville; Orcasitas (a housing estate on the periphery of Madrid) and Calaf, a small village in Catalonia close to the edges of Barcelona.
The artists both research and infiltrate available channels – such as community organisations, regeneration schemes and initiatives – and proceed from their own informal interventions. In Calaf, for example, they borrowed the colour schemes and guidelines for the redevelopment of the town centre, and used them to carry out voluntary, unplanned but necessary restoration and repairs in the homes of those living on the margins.
Rather than working towards a projected outcome, the artists design unpredictable, open-ended systems of working. Their projects develop over different durations and often intermittently, according to the possibilities offered by funding and collaboration.
The project Tension Orcasitas for example, was initiated in 2006 and is still ongoing. It began with their discovery of a controversial community debate over whether or not to remove a set of potentially hazardous pylons and powerlines in Orcasitas, Madrid. Some citizens demanded that they should be removed completely; others wanted their preservation as a symbolic expression of the identity and history of this peripheral post-war planned neighbourhood. The artists proposed that one line should be dismantled into its component parts, to be reconfigured in any possible way as imagined by the residents. These were interpreted as drawings by the artists, and translated into plans with the help of an architect. Following the injection of further funding, residents will now vote to choose one plan to be realized as a real structure in 2008.
At Gasworks, the residency project developed both from their observation of the area closest to their studio, and from conversations with Gasworks Education and Outreach Co-ordinator Anna Vass. Over the course of their time spent in London, they developed a relationship with residents of the nearby Kennington Park Estate, both via liaising with community associations and management groups, and via informal encounters with residents and passersby. The artists gathered comments about the use of various communal spaces within the estate, recorded from ad hoc encounters and by using simple devices – such as the Surrealist ‘exquisite corpse’ game – to collectively assemble words and images. This process was then used to produce a script, soundtrack and set for a performance held at the estate’s community centre at the end of the residency.
While in the UK, Arzt and Linares gained an insight into how inclusive and participatory practice is perceived, and promoted, within the both the spheres of institutional policy, and the field of artistic practice. They contributed to this debate within TrAIN research seminars and with Anna Vass were invited to speak and lead workshops at the 2007 engage international conference. Entitled When Art and Context leads to Meaning the conference was concerned with issues of locality, culture and the context in which art is found, addressing the notion of local and international, as well as asking a question pertinent to the artists’ research interests – what is a ‘meaningful encounter’?.
Read more about Erika Arzt & Juan Linares in the TrAIN Directory.
Wednesday 16 January, 2008
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Update
Sigune Hamann - TrAIN Artist-in-Residence at the Kunstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral
Artist Sigune Hamann has now completed a new set of work researched and developed as TrAIN Artist-in-Residence at the Kunstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral, Bad Ems, Germany.
Hamann was born in Frankfurt am Main and studied in Berlin before moving permanently to the UK in 1990. One of the aims of her residency was to explore the contradictory mix of familiarity and strangeness that now characterises her relationship to Germany. The resulting project is made up of three elements; each of these – in common with other work by the artist – explores the space between the still and the moving image.
Her photographs of the river Lahn capture reflections on the surface of the water, with buildings, landscapes and sky presented as upside-down mirror images. The movement of the water creates distortions and abstractions. These images are at once, Hamann notes, “photographic, realistic and – even though they are not digitally manipulated – distorted. They “make visible something that is there but is not normally recognised“
A series of photographs and videos was produced from the vantage points provided by the many tourist boats that traverse the middle Rhine Valley. As a passenger, Hamann recorded the panning movement of the passing landscape. In the resulting videoloops, the picturesque landscape is remisnicent of a 19th century diorama; it appears as if being pulled mechnically behind a group of camera equipped tourists.
Since 1999 Hamann has developed the process and concept of taking photographic film-strips in an attempt to capture the dynamics of environments and their changes in time. A whole roll of film is exposed in a photographic camera in one continuous rewinding movement. This action captures the trajectories of bodies, objects and lights in motion, to produce an expansive image. In Bad Ems she used this technique to record the movement of the cable trains going up and down the mountains, as reflected in the dynamic view of the forest landscape from each train. The resulting images are complete film-strips that resemble forest panoramas.
A selection of these works was exhibited at the Kunstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral in November 2007. Sigune Hamann is now preparing for a solo exhibition at the Gallery of Photography, Dublin (March 2008).
A biography of Sigune Hamann is in the TrAIN Directory.
Tuesday 15 January, 2008
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Opportunity
TrAIN/Schloss Balmoral Research Student Residencies
In collaboration with Künstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral Germany, TrAIN is offering a four-week student artist-in-residence award. The award includes a private studio and accommodation at the Künstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral. Founded in 1995, this is an established centre for international artists-in-residence, situated close to Bad Ems, an ancient spa town in the German Rhineland.
The TrAIN-Schloss Balmoral Residency will culminate in an Open Studio, and aims to offer a supportive environment with opportunities for discussion and development. It is open to applications from practice-based students currently enrolled for a research degree in any UAL College. Dates for the residency are 11th March – 8th April 2008. The deadline is Friday 18th January 2008.
For further information and an application form please use the Contact area of this website.
Tuesday 01 January, 2008
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Report
Tensions & Flows - DADN Symposium at the V&A, London 28-29 September 2007
The 22 contributors to the symposium came from, or represented, different parts of the African diaspora, including Kwala-Zulu Natal (South Africa) Dakar and Saint Louis du Sénégal (Senegal) Bamako (Mali), Bahia (Brazil), Belgium, Britain, the Democratic Republic of Congo, France, Germany, Jamaica, Trinidad, Switzerland and the United States. They were theorists, curators, stylists, fashion designers, historians, established academics, fashion industry specialists and Ph.D candidates.
In a detailed report of the symposium, Christopher Breward (V&A) noted that the contributors demonstrated eloquently both the interdisciplinary nature of the subject, and the recovery of agency. He congratulated Carol Tulloch and all those involved for having ‘pulled the subject out of the shadows within dress history to emerge as a vibrant established field in its own right’.
Traditions, modernity and authenticity were thrown into question throughout, particularly in terms of studies on various parts of Africa. Papers provided complex alternatives to a closed history and closed sense of African dress and textiles. Speakers drew attention to the coexistence of traditional dress and different forms of modernity (Anitra Nettleton, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg); noted a need for more detailed histories of diasporic forms (John Picton, SOAS); and outlined the way people move in and out from the centre to the periphery, and back again, a more reflexive understanding of diasporic movement (Leslie Rabine, University of California at Davis).
Papers on the issue of place and performance encouraged the need to think across boundaries and disciplines, and revealed an interest in models of identity constructed by the archive, emphasizing its importance in this field of study, as well as its fragility. This focus continued within papers on the role of museums and galleries, which addressed the representation of African diaspora dress in archives and exhibition culture. Nicola Stylianou (TrAIN) discussed the lack of objects in the V&A in relation to the museum’s imperial history – an instance ‘where the museum acts as a block rather than a conduit for the flow of diasporic articles’; the Couture Communes workshop project (Kunstlerhaus Stuttgart, 2006) was cited as a model that enabled critical thinking about African diaspora dress and production.
Styling, photography, fashion installations and textile design were discussed as new directions for thinking about the different forms of contemporary expression of dress and the black self. Christopher Breward (V&A) discussed the notion of doubling, a continual negotiation that is part of the diasporic experience and one that is particularly marked through dress. This emphasis was continued through Van Dyk Lewis’ (Cornell, New York) discussion of the trauma of black fashion.
Summing up the symposium, Breward noted that the use of terms such as ‘blockage, reversal, looping back and knotting have been about stopping flows’. This then is a reminder that ‘the movement of people, the movement of objects, and the movement of ideas are not always so fluid, and not always so unimpeded’. To this end, all the papers demonstrated ‘the benefits of both grounded, focused studies and theoretically informed reflexiveness’ and showed ‘how work in this field needs to be inventive in its sources and show courage in its consideration of the politics of power and identity’. He petitioned that future work think about comparative aspects – how far can the experiences and artifacts of one diaspora be conflated or contrasted with those of another? How do the they fit in with a much broader histories of migration and exchange?
Tuesday 13 November, 2007
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Update
TrAIN Residency at Gasworks London
As part of our first collaboration with Gasworks International Residency Programme, TrAIN is delighted to welcome Erika Arzt (Austria) and Juan Linares (Spain) as resident artists. Between 3rd October 2007 and 19th December 2007, they will develop a new project in London, contributing to, and benefiting from, both Gasworks studios and the research culture at TrAIN and the University of the Arts London.
Through project based work, Erika Arzt and Juan Linares work collaboratively and responsively, exploring the inclusion of communities in the development of their projects, which in turn take the form of temporal spaces and site specific works. The artists work to consult local interests and concerns in the development of their projects, offering up authorship and direct decision making to dialogue and communication.
The artists will discuss the development of their work at the TrAIN Open Lecture on 4th December 2007. Please consult the diary on this site for more details.
Tuesday 18 September, 2007
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Announcement
TrAIN secures major AHRC Research Grant
TrAIN Director Professor Toshio Watanabe has secured AHRC funding for UAL to host a major three year research project.
Commencing in September 2007, ‘Forgotten Japonisme’ will explore a previously neglected period in the study of Western attitudes towards Japanese art: from the 1920s to the 1950s. There is a tacit understanding that a taste for Japanese art was impossible during the Second World War. The project aims to provide evidence that this was not the case, and will investigate both negative and positive attitudes towards Japanese art from the 1920s to the 1950s.
The research team will include a further three core members of the Research Centre: Dr Yuko Kikuchi, Rebecca Salter and Dr Julian Stair. They will be joined by two external experts, from Japan and the USA, and a newly appointed AHRC Research Fellow and Research Student. During the course of the project, three themed workshops and a conference will allow additional external experts to contribute.
Tuesday 18 September, 2007
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