2007-08-03T15:54:02-05:00

Led by TrAIN Director Professor Toshio Watanabe, Forgotten Japonisme is a major three year research project funded by the AHRC. Between October 2007 and October 2010, this project will explore a previously neglected period in the study of Western attitudes towards Japanese art: from the 1920s to the 1950s. By examining a broad range of visual culture – including architecture, craft, design, garden design, painting, print-making and sculpture – and also focusing on individual case studies, those involved in the project seek to achieve a new understanding of transnational interactions between Japan, Britain and the USA. Within existing studies of the taste for Japanese art in the West, two distinct periods have come to prominence. These are the period from the mid 19th century to the early 20th century, when Japanese art made a strong impact on Western culture, and the period from the 1960s to the present, particularly after the 1964 Tokyo Olympics – when a new image of Japanese visual culture emerged with the Tokaido bullet train, Kenzo Tange’s daring buildings and Yusaku Kamekura’s clean and bold posters. What happened in between these periods however has never been systematically investigated, and there is a tacit understanding that a taste for Japanese art was impossible during the Second World War. This 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. Case studies will include the work of Wells Coates, William Staite Murray, Isamu Noguchi, Russel Wright, Frederick Starr and Mark Tobey; the early 20th century woodcut revival in Britain, and Japanese gardens in Ireland, the UK and the USA. Wider strands of investigation will include a consideration of any continuity between classic 19th century Japonisme and the image of hi-tech modern Japan, and an examination of how the taste for Japanese art affected the development of modernism. The research team will include a further three core members of the Research Centre: Dr Yuko Kikuchi, Rebecca Salter and Dr Julian Stair. They are joined by two external experts, from Japan and the USA, AHRC Research Fellow Dr Anna Basham, and AHRC Research Student Piotr Splawski. During the course of the project, three themed workshops and a conference will allow additional external experts to contribute. 17

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Forgotten Japonisme

2009-03-02T05:35:05-06:00

2007-08-06T13:10:48-05:00

The TrAIN Open series is a forum for invited speakers to present exhibition, publication, and research projects in the form of lectures, discussions and screenings. Taking place at fortnightly intervals on Wednesday evenings during the academic term, the series is open to the public, as well as staff and students across the University of the Arts London. Since its inception leading practitioners have continued to contribute to the series and it has become an opportunity to establish lasting dialogue with those who share an interest in transnational art. Guest speakers to date are listed in the <a href="/people" title="Link to Directory page">Directory</a> area of this website. 20

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TrAIN Open Series

2009-09-22T06:41:34-05:00

2007-08-06T13:11:28-05:00

What makes a transnational practice or perspective in art or curating? TrAIN Conversations are informal conversations with invited artists and curators, followed by round-table discussions with the participants. Speakers have included Gayatri Sinha, curator and critical writer on art, based in New Delhi, Paul Domela, curator of the Liverpool Biennale, Ingrid Pollard, photographer based in London, Judy Freya Sibayan, artist and curator based in Manila, Charles Esche, curator and Director of the Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven; and Jonathan Martin, filmmaker based in London. TrAIN conversations are organised and chaired by Deborah Cherry, and they are held on Mondays during term time at the Southampton Row site of Central Saint Martins. 21

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TrAIN Conversations

2008-01-13T07:31:14-06:00

2007-08-06T13:12:22-05:00

International residencies raise specific questions for individual artists, and wider issues regarding how both local and international contexts are negotiated in practice. Each year, TrAIN collaborates with Gasworks International Residency Programme to offer a fully funded three month practice-based research fellowship for an artist not based in the UK. The residency offers an opportunity for the artist to join the studio environment offered by Gasworks, while also participating in research seminars and discussions at the TrAIN Research Centre, and developing work for an exhibition at the Foyer Space of Camberwell College of Arts. Cinthia Marcelle is currently living and working in South East London as the second TrAIN/Gasworks artist in residence. She will develop a new installation for the Foyer Space at Camberwell College of Arts, which will open to the public on Friday 27th March 2009. Our first resident artists for this collaboration were Erika Arzt and Juan Linares. 22

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TrAIN/Gasworks Artists' Residency

2009-02-03T09:34:24-06:00

2008-01-15T09:40:41-06:00

TrAIN and the Kunstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral collaborate on a Artist-in-Residence exchange programme. Founded in 1995, the Kunstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral is an established centre for international artists-in-residence, with studios and facilities for research and exhibition. It is situated close to Bad Ems, an ancient spa town in the German Rhineland. KSB funded Artists-in-Residence at TrAIN to date are Gotz Diergarten (2006-07), Bettina Pousttchi (2007-08), Karolin Meunier (2008/-09) and Sandra Schaefer (2009/10) TrAIN Artists-in-Residence at the Kunstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral are nominated to apply by members of staff at UAL and selected by jury. Playing a decisive role in this process is consideration of how an artists work relates to the transnational production and reception of artistic practices and their histories, and how the research and development proposed would relate to the specific context and particular location offered by the Kunstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral. The first artist to be selected as TrAIN Artist-in-Residence at KSB (2006-07) was Sigune Hamann. Details, criteria and deadlines for future competitions will be announced via the TrAIN Bulletin. 23

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TrAIN-KSB Residency Exchange

2010-01-25T05:06:28-06:00

2008-10-14T03:51:03-05:00

Meeting Margins – Transnational Art in Europe & Latin America 1950-1978. A new approach to the study of art from Latin America that questions the role traditionally ascribed to New York as the dominant force in modern art in the post-war years. Focusing on artistic encounters between Europe and Latin America, as well as on intra-Latin American exchanges. It will explore contacts between individual artists and critics, the movements, groups and institutions and wider geopolitical and cultural contexts that supported and provoked them, and the forms of artistic practice that these transnational exchanges generated. The project includes an international graduate research forum at the University of Texas at Austin (2009) and a public conference in the UK (2010). Research from the project will be published as a volume of essays, with contributions from Europe, Latin America and the USA, edited by Michael Asbury (TrAIN) Valerie Fraser (Essex) and Isobel Whitelegg (TrAIN). 24

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Meeting Margins

2009-11-27T09:40:26-06:00

2009-02-02T10:09:37-06:00

Tap is a new initiative, its aim is to identify relevant research across the University of the Arts London and support its development. TrAIN allocates seed funding and in-kind support to up to five projects each year. The successful applicants for the first round of Tap funding were Mark Dunhill & Tamiko O’Brien (CSM/Wimbledon); Emily Druiff, Director, Peckham Space (Camberwell); Gavin Fernandes (LCF); Claudia Wegener (Camberwell) and Carey Young (LCC). For more information about their funded projects: click through the names to the right. 25

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TrAIN Associate Projects

2009-02-03T04:09:58-06:00

2009-11-26T05:23:51-06:00

The Afterlives of Monuments The British Academy has awarded TrAIN a grant for a major international conference to be held at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design from 28-30 April. The conference brings together leading scholars from South Asia, Europe and North America to debate the status and survivals of key markers in the colonial and post-colonial histories and spaces of South Asia. It also offers 2 international studentships for graduate researchers based in South Asia to attend the conference. The conference will address how monuments have been reinvented and transformed for a succession of presents, for changing audiences and diverse communities. As one of our participants identifies, ‘the memorial can only survive through reinvention’. The conference is particularly timely. Current events as well as the reassessment of past histories are putting pressure on historic and recent monuments; relocated replicas are highly controversial. Architecture, sculpture, popular culture – monuments are multi-dimensional and multi-media, and speakers are from anthropology, art history, media studies, architecture, the museum world, and contemporary artistic practice. The period considered is from 1850s to the present. Viewing monuments as performative and richly subject to change and contestation, the conference will interrogate the prevailing ‘memory model’, which connects monuments and memorials primarily to memory. The larger purpose is to scrutinise the vast diversity of monuments (and conceptions of monuments) in South Asia in the past and the present, and to test whether and to what extent South Asian examples demand not only a challenge to western paradigms but the creation of new conceptual models and theories. The programme has three strands. The first explores the after-lives of monuments, considering how, where, when and why monuments were remodelled, reused, re-sited, remade, destroyed or abandoned to accommodate changing political and social climates. A second strand reflects on materiality. Whereas colonial monuments were often fabricated in enduring materials and sited at critical junctures of the colonial city, the sub-continent has long fostered a lively culture of ephemeral and temporary monuments, constructed in fragile materials and making inventive interventions into local spaces. The third investigates the emergence and afterlives of counter-monuments in the sub-continent’s contested political, cultural and religious histories. Keynote lectures by Tapati Guha-Thakurta (Professor of History, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta) and Zeynep Celik (Distinguished Professor of Architectural History, New Jersey Institute of Technology) will be accompanied by papers and presentations by Dr Hilal Ahmed, Centre for Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi; Dr Tracy Anderson, University of Sussex; Sutapa Biswas University of the Arts London; Adam Hardy, Welsh School of Architecture; Dr Sudeep Dasgupta, University of Amsterdam; Sona Datta, Curator South Asia, The British Museum, London; Dr Clare Harris, School of Anthropology and Curator for Asian Collections, Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford; Dr Raminder Kaur Kahlon, University of Sussex; Partha Mitter (Professor Emeritus, University of Sussex and Fellow Wolfson College Oxford); Dr Saloni Mathur, UCLA; Pratap Rughani, University of the Arts London; and Gayatri Sinha, curator and critic, New Delhi. The conference also offers 2 international studentships for graduate researchers based in South Asia to attend the conference. 26

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Afterlives of Monuments

2009-11-27T09:45:26-06:00