TrAIN - Events

Transnational Correspondence

Mon, 06 Aug 2007 14:11:59 +0100

Dates:
Friday 14 September 2007, 10:00 to 15:00
Saturday 15 September 2007, 10:00 to 15:00

Tate Modern, Bankside, London

Speakers include: Moacir dos Anjos, independent curator based in Brazil; Michael Asbury, TrAIN; Oriana Baddeley, TrAIN; Guilherme Bueno, EBA-PPGAV, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro; Fernando Cocchiarali, Director, MAM-RJ - Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro; Gloria Ferreira, EBA-PPGAV; Deborah Cherry, TrAIN; Milton Machado, EBA-PPGAV; Toshio Watanabe, TrAIN; Paulo Venancio Filho, EBA-PPGAV; Isobel Whitelegg, Department of Art History &Theory, University of Essex; and Carlos Zilio, EBA-PPGAV.

Establishing a sustainable, dynamic field of knowledge regarding contemporary art from beyond Western Europe and the USA remains a persistent challenge. In response, Transnational Correspondence brings a group of Brazilian artists, writers and curators into dialogue with their UK contemporaries. Participants will consider how entwined national and international contexts are negotiated in producing, exhibiting and interpreting art.

With the support of Tate Modern, Camberwell College of Arts, Chelsea College of Art & Design and the Centre for Brazilian Studies, University of Oxford, this symposium forms part of our ongoing collaboration with EBA-PPGAV, the centre for post-graduate research at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. It coincides with the landmark Tate Modern exhibition Hélio Oiticica The Body of Colour and marks the launch of the TrAIN/EBA-PPGAV collaborative publication, Transnational Correspondence.

Dress and the African Diaspora: Tensions and Flows

Sun, 13 Jan 2008 09:37:55 +0000

Dates:
Friday 28 September 2007, 10:00 to 16:00
Saturday 29 September 2007, 10:00 to 16:00

Lecture Theatre, V&A Museum, London

This international symposium will consider the notion of the ’between’, that is, the tensions and flows of
ideas and historical or cultural activity that have influenced African diaspora dress, textiles, and beauty
regimes, and its associated wearers, producers and observers.

Speakers include: Professor Anitra Nettleton, Professor Leslie Rabine, Professor Susan Kaiser,
Dr Jessica Hemmings, Dr. Van Dyke Lewis, Elke aus dem Moore, Frances Ross, Kaat Debo, Tina Bini,
Christine Checinska, Dominique Heyse-Moore, Rochelle Rowe, Rose Sinclair.

This is a free event. For further information please contact TrAIN Senior Research Fellow, Carol Tulloch.

A Report of this event is posted on the Bulletin pages of this website.

Dividing Fashion?

Mon, 06 Aug 2007 12:06:49 +0100

Date:Tuesday 26 June 2007, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre, Chelsea College of Art & Design

Javier Gimeno Martínez will discuss how, following the federalization of Belgium in the 1990s, fashion changed from being a signifier of national identity to being one of regional identity.

Belgian fashion established a narrow connection to Belgian national identity in the 1980s, which demanded reconsideration as the country’s federalisation progressed. As a consequence of federalization, the Restructuring Plan of the Textile and Clothing Sector - which lay at the origins of the Belgian fashion boom - stopped abruptly in the early 1990s.

From that moment on, fashion lacked public funding and promotional apparatus. The force of production and creative talent was concentrated for the most part in Flanders; initially however the Flemish government did not seem interested in boosting Belgian fashion. In the end, the Flemish city of Antwerp incorporated fashion as its most celebrated creative industry.

Regional identities stemming from federalization invoke interruption and continuity simultaneously. On the one hand they legitimate their existence on the basis of a “useable past.” On the other, they justify federalization by emphasizing difference and therefore establishing a difficult relationship to their own recent history.

Encounters: The Politics and Poetics of Art and Migration

Mon, 06 Aug 2007 12:16:18 +0100

Date:

Lecture Theatre, Chelsea College of Art & Design

Diana Yeh’s research concerns four artists of Chinese descent, each based in Britain at different periods from the 1930s to the present day. Their migration histories also encompass locales in South Africa, Italy, China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, and their works circulate internationally.

Her lecture will focus on key points in the life and work of the artist Li Yuan-Chia. Born in 1929 in southern China, Li trained as an artist in Taiwan and subsequently moved to Italy and then England, where he ran the LYC Museum and Art Gallery for ten years.

Yeh’s research methods respond to boundaries between the arts and humanities and the social sciences (for example that between art history and migration studies). Adopting an anthropological approach, she seeks to navigate this binary paradigm, reconstructing intertwining histories of art and migration. The work in progress that she will present here emerges from the process
of excavating Li’s life and works - in collaboration with his surviving family, friends and fellow artists - during field research in London, Cumbria, Taipei and Cha Dong.

The Implications of Sustainability for Contemporary Art

Mon, 06 Aug 2007 12:38:11 +0100

Date:

Lecture Theatre, Chelsea College of Art & Design

The notion of sustainability has spread from the field of environmentalism to many other areas of human activity, including the spheres of art and culture. There is a growing understanding that radical change is required, if we are to find a way to ‘meet the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.’ For art, the implications are felt in the preference for sustainable forms, the critique of unsustainable art world structures, and the reassessment of art history from the point of view of our relationship to the natural world. It offers a challenge to the ingrained habit of producing objects and the relentless search for novelty in contemporary art.

What we are dealing with is no longer confined within the niche of earlier environmental art, which is associated with art acting as a vehicle to popularise environmental campaigns, or symbolic gestures to purify rivers through ritual, or to raise consciousness through art with a direct ecological message. In fact, the closeness to sustainability of much challenging contemporary art practice owes more to the legacy of 1970s conceptualism, and even primarily the non-market East European variety of conceptual art, than for example to Land Art. This presentation will therefore discuss the ways and extent to which a concern for sustainability has passed into the mainstream of contemporary art.

This will be examined through the work of international artists, including Adrian Paci, Heath Bunting, Beata Veszely and Ivan Ladislav Galeta, whose sustainable practice might be considered in terms of the contemporary avant garde.

Charles Esche - The Future of the Museum

Sun, 13 Jan 2008 07:19:59 +0000

Date:Thursday 29 June 2006, 17:00 to 19:00

Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design

At this event, Charles Esche will focus on the possibilities of change in the function and identity of the museum in a time of globalisation and entertainment culture. He will consider the nature of the contemporary public sphere and ask whether it is possible to re-imagine the museum as a site of discourse.

Gayatri Sinha

Sun, 13 Jan 2008 07:28:44 +0000

Date:Monday 30 October 2006, 17:00 to 19:00

Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design

Gayatri Sinha is a leading independent curator and art critic. She is based in New Delhi where she has authored a weekly column on art and visual culture for national newspaper The Hindu. Gayatri Sinha edited Expressions and Evocations: Contemporary Women Artists in India and Indian Art: An Overview, the seminal study of Indian art and its passage through modernism into post- modernism,. Exhibitions curated include ‘Cinema Still’ (2002: India Habitat Centre, New Delhi), and ‘Middle Age Spread’ (2004: National Museum, New Delhi).

Paul Domela - Engaging Art, People and Place

Sun, 13 Jan 2008 07:26:46 +0000

Date:Monday 20 November 2006, 17:00 to 19:00

Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design

Paul Domela will discuss his role as Deputy Chief Executive of the Liverpool Biennale, which this year has involved working with consultant curators Gerardo Mosquera (Cuba) and Manray Hsu (Taiwan), to realise the multivenue ‘International 06’ strand of the Biennial programme.

National Identity and Craft Industry: Takashi Ueda and Japanese leather paper

Fri, 10 Aug 2007 10:59:16 +0100

Date:

Japan House, London

An important export for Japan, Japanese leather paper was in high demand in Britain during the late 19th Century and attracted architects and designers including William Burges, Edward William Godwin and Christopher Dresser.

Yasuko Suga will introduce the history of the craft; she will discuss how - as used politically by both Japan and the West - it has been emphasised as both national and exotic in character.

Suga will also introduce the late twentieth century movement to revive Japanese leather paper’s original method of production. This movement was led by craftsman Takashi Ueda, whose work is the subject of the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation’s current exhibition Kinkarakami: Takashi Ueda and the art of Japanese leather paper.

The Many Faces of Frida Kahlo

Fri, 10 Aug 2007 11:25:34 +0100

Date:

Starr Auditorium, Tate Modern, Bankside, London

This international two day symposium addresses the Frida Kahlo phenomenon today, and its influence on different areas of late twentieth and early twenty-first century culture.

It explores Kahlo’s impact across a range of disciplines and audiences, including fine art, design, film, fashion and feminist and post-colonial cultural theory.

Speakers include Dawn Ades, Amalia Mesa-Bains, Gannit Ankori, Whitney Chadwick, Luis-Martin Lozano, Carlos Monsiváis and Laura Mulvey.

Convened by Oriana Baddeley (TrAIN) and Dominic Wilsdon (Tate) the symposium forms part of the public programme for the major Tate Modern retrospective ‘Frida Kahlo’.

The catalogue to this exhibition includes Oriana Baddeley’s essay ‘Reflecting on Kahlo: Mirrors, Masquerade and the Politics of Identification’, which addresses the changing nature of Kahlo’s reputation and impact since the publication of Baddeley’s early writing on this subject in 1991.

Guy Brett and Boris Gerrets, Dream Drivers

Sat, 12 Jan 2008 13:35:26 +0000

Date:Tuesday 23 October 2007, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre, Chelsea College of Art & Design

Guy Brett will introduce Boris Gerrets, an artist whose work he curated, and wrote about, for the 2002 exhibition ‘Mindfields’ (Kiasma, Helsinki, 2002).

The event will feature the first UK screening of Gerret’s short film Dream Drivers (Netherlands, 2006).

Dream Drivers is a portrait of the anonymous zone that lies between motorway, petrol station, carwash and car park. Impersonal observations - wheels, road markings, shadows behind windshields, cars flying past and security camera footage - alternate with short interviews and personal portraits of people in their cars and along the road. Meeting various motorists in the course of the film, the viewer also shares the viewpoint of a petrol station cashier, and a cleaner who changes car park bin bags. The final stop is a snack bar on wheels, parked in a rest area in the early morning, close to the sea.

After the screening, viewers will have an opportunity to discuss this film, and other work, with the artist.

Work-in-progress - Erika Arzt & Juan Linares

Wed, 16 Jan 2008 04:32:56 +0000

Date:Tuesday 04 December 2007, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre, Chelsea College of Art & Design

Erika Arzt (Austria) and Juan Linares (Spain) are developing a new project in South London as part of our first collaboration with Gasworks International Residency Programme. This Open Lecture will be an opportunity for the artists to discuss the development of their new work, and consider its relationship to their recent projects in Colombia and Madrid.

Throughout their residency, Arzt and Linares have been making appearances in and around Kennington Park Estate, conducting playful research about the uses of public space. Participants of varying ages have been airing their views in words and in sketches. These will feed into a fictional script for a performance in Kennington Park Estate Community Centre on Saturday 8 December.

Detanico Lain, after Utopia

Sat, 12 Jan 2008 13:36:24 +0000

Date:Tuesday 06 November 2007, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre, Chelsea College of Art & Design

Artists Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain represented Brazil at this year’s Venice Biennale and have worked collaboratively as Detanico Lain since the early 1990s.

Working continually at the interstice between fine art and graphic design, they have developed a practice based on the playful displacement of meaning. In an interweaving of form and content that makes full use of contemporary technologies of design and display, simple procedures produce powerful visual poetics and the subtle irony and irreverence of their work points to the complexity of the contemporary world.

A case in point is the 2004 work (The World) Justified, Left-Aligned, Centred, Right-Aligned, which suggestively submits the Mapa Mundi to the basic graphic manipulations of text editing.

At this Open Lecture the artists will present their work in conversation with TrAIN Research Fellow Michael Asbury. The lecture will be followed by the UK launch party for their forthcoming publication After Utopia.

Refracted Modernity

Sat, 12 Jan 2008 13:36:54 +0000

Date:Tuesday 20 November 2007, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre, Chelsea College of Art & Design

In the context of postcolonial studies Taiwan’s case is unique, on account of its experience of colonisation by a non-western country: Japan. Taiwan therefore adds different dimensions and complexities to current studies on colonialism in relation to modernity. TrAIN Senior Research Fellow Yuko Kikuchi will discuss the development of the publication and exhibition project ‘Refracted Modernity: Visual Culture and Identity in Colonial Taiwan’.

The lecture will be followed by the UK launch of Refracted Modernity, a collection of essays edited by Kikuchi, recently published by the University of Hawai’i Press.

Leon Wainwright - Artworks and the Transnational Caribbean

Sun, 13 Jan 2008 11:13:44 +0000

Date:Tuesday 12 February 2008, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre, Chelsea College of Art & Design

Between 2004 and 2005 Leon Wainwright completed long-term fieldwork on issues around art and agency in Trinidad, Guyana and other locations in the Caribbean. He is now working on two publications, one of which relates to an assembled community of artists in contemporary Britain, and the other - which will be the subject of this Open Lecture - concerning British and Caribbean relations in the visual arts. Shortly after his lecture at TrAIN, Wainwright will deliver a series of lectures for the Arts Research Center, University of California, Berkeley.

“How might artworks with Caribbean connections be understood in terms of the ‘Trojan nationalisms’ described by Arjun Appadurai, as forms that ‘actually contain transnational, subnational links and, more generally, nonnational identities and aspirations’? Focusing on the transmission of visual knowledge across colonial and post-colonial territories and national borders, this presentation will evaluate the importance of artworks for entwining histories of the Anglophone Caribbean and the former colonial metropole. Particular attention will be given to the artist Frank Bowling and his London-based years of the early 1960s, the question of remembering his relation to ‘Pop’, and imaginary as well as travelled routes of interconnection among various Atlantic locations.”

Lynda Morris - The Battle for Picasso's Mind

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 11:44:15 +0000

Date:Tuesday 29 January 2008, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre, Chelsea College of Art & Design

It is recognised that Picasso’s politically-engaged post-war paintings were subject to negative assessment by Western theorists including Greenberg and Berger. Lynda Morris’ ongoing research does not simply oppose this from a broadly defined Eastern European perspective. In investigating the reception of his work she has departed from four geographical points - North America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the USSR - engaging current research and writing within these different locales. This has formed a detailed investigation that brings into view a spectrum of critical, theoretical and political positions, including that of the artist himself. For this TrAIN Open Lecture Lynda Morris will present aspects of her current project, which concerns Picasso’s political engagement and its transnational repercussions:

“The Battle for Picasso’s Mind was the term used by Tom Brandon, when
interviewed by Frances Stoner Saunders in June 1994. Brandon was the CIA
agent who put together the International Organisations Division, IOD,
that funded dozens of cultural front organisations in Europe from 1948
until one assumes today. [ … ] Picasso was a member of the French Communist Party from 1944 until his death in 1973. He was the largest single contributor to the funding of
the CPF. His ‘Dove of Peace’ became the symbol of the Peace Movement
during the Cold War. He represented the freedom of the artist and he was
also a great history painter: not only ‘Guernica’ but also ‘The
Charnal House’, ‘Massacre in Korea’ and ‘War’ and ‘Peace’. His life and work encompassed many contradictions which help us to understand the period
1944 to 1989. Now, almost two decades after the fall of the Berlin
Wall, what is the understanding of Picasso, not only in Western Europe and
North America, but also in the former Warsaw Pact Countries of Eastern
Europe and the USSR?”

Moacir dos Anjos - Contradictory

Sun, 13 Jan 2008 11:13:03 +0000

Date:Tuesday 26 February 2008, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre, Chelsea College of Art & Design

Moacir dos Anjos curated the recent edition of ‘Panorama da Arte Brasileira’ ( Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, 2007) and, with Paulo Sérgio Duarte, has selected works for this year’s Brazil-focused section of ARCO Madrid. Both exhibitions are organised according to a focus on contemporary artistic production made inside the boundaries of a national space. Implicitly they are opposed to the gradual and irrevocable dilution of differences, to the suggestion that such creations no longer express the singular features of parts of a fractured and unequal world, but only enthusiastic adherence to a world characterized by a high degree of symbolic fluidity. As provoked by the present implications of producing a discourse on Brazilian contemporary art, he will examine the contradictory character of belonging and the affirmation of identity.

“The generations of Brazilian artists that have emerged in the 1990s and 2000s bear the stamp of an ambiguous form of belonging. On the one hand, there is a strong feeling of being part of an internal lineage that is selective and stretches back through time, and which supposedly provides Brazilian visual art with its distinctive character. On the other hand, at the very moment that this feeling has established itself, an equally coherent vision of the affinity for outside influences has emerged, which, as it is extends out horizontally in time, leads these artists to associate their artistic work with that put out during the same epoch in various places by other artists of the same generation. This unsettled relation to belonging spreads out and ends up having a significant impact on those producing contemporary art in Brazil.

Through the use of memories, materials and procedures firmly rooted in their real or imagined experience of a place of presumed origin - though rarely availing themselves of direct iconographic citations - visual artists from Brazil have been bestowing new meaning on ancient ways of living and of making and inscribed them in a sphere where they were previously rejected or relegated to a subordinate status. Affirming the identity that this accent establishes has a contradictory character. It condenses and exposes the ambiguities that the pervade recent Brazilian history. This character is not a metaphor for a provisional state of affairs, but a symbolic locution integral to the very conditions of life in contemporary Brazil, in which there appears to be no change in sight in the near future. "

Launch x 2 : Three Degrees of Separation / And Now China?

Sat, 01 Mar 2008 06:17:18 +0000

Date:Tuesday 11 March 2008, 17:30 to 20:30

Chelsea Futurespace, Hepworth Court, Grosvenor Waterside (off Ebury Bridge Road), London, SW1W 8QP

On Tuesday 11 March at 5.30pm, two new projects involving TrAIN PhD candidates - artists Voonpow Bartlett and Erika Tan - will be launched at Chelsea Futurespace.

Exhibition - Three Degrees of Separation
(Voonpow Bartlett; Neil Stewart; Erika Tan)

Publication - And Now China?
(Ed. Judy Freya Sibayan and Erika Tan)

If you would like to walk/bus to the venue, TrAIN is organising a Meeting Point:

5pm, Atterbury Street Reception,
Chelsea College of Art

To join please RSVP:
Isobel Whitelegg
[email protected]

From 5.30pm Professor Oriana Baddeley (TrAIN Research Centre) and Sonya Dyer (Chelsea Programme) will introduce the artists, and encourage an informal discussion of the relationship of these two projects to the critical interests of TrAIN. From 6pm the private view of Three Degrees of Separation will take place, and copies of And Now China? will be available for visitors.

Three Degrees of Separation,
Voonpow Bartlett, Neil Stewart, Erika Tan

Chelsea Futurespace, March 12- May 17 2008

In this exhibition three UK-based artists explore their own particular relationship to China. Through connections of the ancestral, the return, the journey, the philosophical and the everyday, the artists question in their own way what it means to ‘understand’ China - past, present and in the future. Accompanied by a colour catalogue containing work by the three artists.

And Now China?
Ctrl+P Journal of Contemporary Art

Special issue supported by The Chelsea Programme, Chelsea College of Art & Design

In an issue edited in anticipation of China Now, Britain’s ‘largest festival of Chinese arts’, Ctrl+P asks: what place is there for critical voices within current hegemonic interests in China and contemporary Chinese Art? Co-edited by Judy Freya Sibayan and Erika Tan, it includes texts by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Oscar Ho, Patrick D. Flores, Lee Weng Choy, Kelly Baum, Andrew Maerkle, Thomas J. Berghuis, David Cross, Neferti X. Tadiar & Jonathan Beller, Marian Pastor Roces, Lee Wen, Ken Lum, Katy Deepwell, Caroline Turner, Saskia Sassen, Eliza Tan, Neil Stewart and Sonya Dyer.

Judy Freya Sibayan

Sun, 13 Jan 2008 07:13:44 +0000

Date:Tuesday 27 March 2007, 14:00 to 16:00

Conference Room A, Innovation Centre, Central Saint Martins, Southampton Row

Award winning artist, writer and curator Judy Freya Sibayan is currently in the UK as a recipient (with TrAIN PhD candidate, Erika Tan) of the Visiting Arts Artist-to-Artist award. She will discuss projects including Scapular Gallery Nomad (1997-2002) the Museum of Mental Objects MoMo and Ctrl+P, a web-based journal for contemporary art that is currently participating in the Documenta 12 magazines project.

AAH 2008 - Location: The Museum, the Academy and the Studio

Sun, 13 Jan 2008 07:54:33 +0000

Dates:
Thursday 03 April 2008, 09:00 to 22:00
Friday 04 April 2008, 09:00 to 22:00

Tate Britain and Tate Modern

Location, the 34rd Annual Conference of the Association of Art Historians, will focus on the shifts - historical, modern and contemporary - in the location of the museum, the artist’s studio and the academy in relation to the concepts, values and practices of art history. Location is understood to embrace physical, geographical and virtual sites, social and political ideologies; values and aesthetics, academic and practice-led relationships. Deborah Cherry and Sutapa Biswas of TrAIN are convening a panel entitled Monuments and Memorials.

“Monuments and memorials are characteristic features of colonial and postcolonial cities, and they have long been located in urban as well as rural contexts. Often produced in the artist’s studio, widely studied in the academy, monuments and memorials frequently exist outside the purview of the museum. They come into being at precise locations, perhaps marking the unique site of a traumatic event or the longer historical moment of epistemic violence.  This session will ask what prompts the installation, re/location and destruction of monuments and memorials. What relation do they have to current artistic practice? How have their meanings been contested, as for example during decolonisation or profound political change?  We welcome papers from artists and from art historians and we aim to bring together differing approaches in research, drawing on the perspectives of the studio, the academy and the museum. Our focus will be on the trans-national, the inter-cultural and the post-colonial, on the contemporary as much as the historical, on practice alongside critical theory and art history, and on monuments and memorials in global settings outside the UK.”

The Whitechapel Files

Sun, 13 Jan 2008 10:19:07 +0000

Date:Tuesday 01 May 2007, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre, Chelsea College of Art & Design

Founded in 1901, the Whitechapel Gallery has hosted some of the most important artistic developments in national and world culture. Responsive to the cultural diversity of the community it served and the art scene worldwide, the gallery supported collaborations with Jewish writers and artists, artists from Asia, as well as artists from Europe and Latin America.

Nayia Yiakoumaki is pursuing a PhD in Visual Arts on the theme of institutional archives and their curatorial potential. As the Whitechapel Archive Research Curator, she is now involved in the development of a dedicated Archive Collection Gallery. At this TrAIN Open Lecture, Yiakoumaki will discuss the history of the Whitechapel in relation to the different visitor groups it attracted and referred to; this subject will complemented with reference to an archive based exhibition held at the Whitechapel last year: The Whitechapel Files.

Götz Diergarten - METROpolis

Tue, 15 Jan 2008 11:34:07 +0000

Date:Tuesday 30 January 2007, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre, Chelsea College of Art & Design

Photographer Götz Diergarten is currently in the UK as Künstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral Artist in Residence at TrAIN. The residency is supporting the research and development of a new European photography project entitled METROpolis. Diergarten will be discussing the development of this project, and the relevance of the Becher school to his training and practice.

Researched and developed with the support of the residency, Diergarten’s current project systematically explores the underground railway stations of 22 European capital cities. His photographs of these public yet anonymous spaces extract the unique from the banal; concentrating on colour and form, they expose and identify difference from country to country. The completed series will be exhibited on city billboards across Europe, and published as a book.

Photography & Bare Life

Sun, 13 Jan 2008 10:27:30 +0000

Date:Tuesday 05 December 2006, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre, Chelsea College of Art & Design

TJ Demos is currently working on the book-length study Migrations: Contemporary art in the age of globalization. This Open Lecture is concerned with an aspect of his present research in this area, the photographic representation of refugees considered in relation to Giorgio Agamben’s notion of bare life, of life stripped of political representation. The lecture will concentrate on the work of Algerian artist Yto Barrada and the Palestinian Ahlam Shibli. ‘What is bare life?’ is one of three leitmotifs proposed for the forthcoming Documenta 12.

Cinema and the Salvation of Whiteness

Sun, 13 Jan 2008 10:31:43 +0000

Date:Tuesday 06 June 2006, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre, Chelsea College of Art & Design

The range of films from the USA and the UK that have deliberately sought to take the violence of racism as their main focus is steadily increasing. In relation to the films that will be investigated within this lecture Raimi Gbadamosi is interested in understanding ‘mainstream’ violence and the way in which narratives ultimately allow (in fact demand) for identification with the main racist characters. Regardless of the position taken by the narrator, there is an attempt to exonerate the empowered prejudice of the white characters. As a consequence, Gbadamosi argues, film has become a place of confession with the violence of filmed characters acting as penance for collective guilt.

Espaço Aberto/Espaço Fechado

Sun, 13 Jan 2008 10:34:01 +0000

Date:Tuesday 28 February 2006, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre, Chelsea College of Art & Design

Curator Stephen Feeke discusses the exhibition Espaço Aberto/Espaço Fechado: Sites for sculpture in modern Brazil at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds (2006). This exhibition returns to the first São Paulo Bienal of 1951, and proceeds to the present day. It reveals how events have helped shape ideas about sculpture as well as how sculpture represents those events. It opens with the two award-winning sculptures from the first Bienal, which marked the beginnings of a period of optimism in Brazil, and reflected a growing interest in Modernism. Later works reflect the unofficial and temporary nature of work carried out under the censorship imposed during the country’s military dictatorship (1961-1985); taking advantage of the fact that sculpture, by its very nature, could readily be sited beyond the confines of the official museum or gallery, artists arranged ‘happenings’ and interventions in alternative venues and on the street. Sculptors working today retain this dynamism, supported by re-invigorated commercial galleries and buoyed by a return to democracy and prosperity. The exhibition’s title (open space/closed space) is taken from a contemporary photograph by Rubens Mano of the Niemeyer pavilion used for the Bienal since 1957. Unusually, Mano shows the pavilion empty and, as such, invokes the limitless potential of the unfilled site.

Carnival of Perception

Sun, 13 Jan 2008 10:46:17 +0000

Date:Thursday 11 November 2004, 17:15 to 19:00

Guy Brett discusses the background to ‘Carnival of Perception’, a collection of his essays recently published by Iniva. The essays reflect his involvement with the cross-cultural and experimental diversity of the London art scene since the 1960s - a context within which he developed a long-lasting relationship with key Latin American practitioners. Linked to individual studies, Carnival of Perception also includes writings on the nature of decorative art, on the figure of the angel in Latin American colonial painting, on art as sanctuary, and the question of British identity.

Isaac Julien’s Black Atlantic

Sun, 13 Jan 2008 11:05:13 +0000

Date:Friday 11 November 2005, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre, Chelsea College of Art & Design

Paul Gilroy’s 1993 Black Atlantic proposed a highly influential study of modernity as a form of double consciousness that has prompted a reconsideration of black art and literature as an essential facet of European modernism.

The shifting locations of Harlem/Manhattan in the 1920s and Hackney, London in 1989 in Isaac Julien’s ‘Looking for Langston’ is an important example of the transatlantic crossings and recrossings that constitute modernity’s double consciousness.

Gilroy’s analysis is based on a study of the numerous novels written by freed slaves and anti-slavery abolitionists that privileges the ship as a site of passage of the black diaspora. This allows him to convey a sense of locational identity in which the movement of ideas, styles and artistic and political influences is a prominent factor in the constitution of European and western modernity.

The aim of this lecture is to set out an analysis of ‘Looking for Langston’ as an example of locational identity that shuttles between different centres of the avant-garde and modernism that bring together the Surrealist space of fantasy with Harlem and Hackney. This reading draws on the invitation presented in Gilroy’s text to think of Julien’s art through the lens of location/space rather than the emphasis on the black body that has dominated the literature.

Annotating Art’s Histories

Sun, 13 Jan 2008 11:07:29 +0000

Date:Monday 16 January 2006, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre, Chelsea College of Art & Design

This lecture focuses on the editorial process behind the ‘Annotating Art’s Histories’ series published by inIVA and MIT Press.
Art History has been transformed over the past twenty years by the arrival of fresh questions about the creative dynamics of cultural difference in the visual arts. Examining interactions among non-western artists and artists from culturally diverse backgrounds alongside western art movements that have engaged with different cultures, the series of publications Annotating Art’s Histories breaks through the separate areas of study to build up an innovative and accessible understanding of key topics from 20th century art. Building on the insights of visual culture and post-colonial studies, the series moves beyond identity-based discourse to explore modern art history from 1890 to the 1980s as a shared narrative of art and culture now told from many different points of view.

Chila Burman

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 09:51:22 +0000

Date:Monday 25 February 2008, 16:00 to 18:00

Innovation Centre Conference Room, Central Saint Martins, Southampton Row site

Artist Chila Burman will speak about her recent work.

Sebastian Lopez

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 12:00:53 +0000

Date:Tuesday 03 June 2008, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre, Chelsea College of Art & Design

Sebastian Lopez, Director of Iniva, will speak about his vision for Iniva and work in curating. Iniva was established in 1994 to address an imbalance in the representation of culturally diverse artists, curators and writers. Iniva creates exhibitions, publications, digital projects, education and research projects, designed to bring the work of artists from culturally diverse backgrounds to the attention of the widest possible public. Anchored in the diversity of contemporary British culture and society, Iniva engages with culturally diverse practices and ideas, both local and global.

Ernesto Neto in conversation with Michael Asbury

Tue, 13 May 2008 12:00:21 +0100

Date:Friday 23 May 2008, 19:30 to 21:00

Purcell Room, The Hayward, Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, London SE1

Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto will talk about his work at the Hayward, London. The discussion will be moderated by Michael Asbury (TrAIN) and will address the current Hayward exhibition Psycho Buildings. Neto is amongst ten artists from around the world to be included in this exhibition; each was chosen for their tendency to create habitat-like structures and architectural spaces that are mental and perceptual as much as physical.

Artistic Exchange - Panel Discussion at the Photographer's Gallery London

Wed, 21 May 2008 03:08:35 +0100

Date:Tuesday 27 May 2008, 19:00 to 20:30

The Photographer's Gallery, 5 & 8 Great Newport Street, London WC2H

The Photographer’s Gallery is currently showing the exhibition Once More, With Feeling, Recent Photography from Colombia.

This panel discussion will invite consideration of a number of questions that have been raised in the process of organising the exhibition:

Is it useful to define an exhibition by its nationality?
Can cultural distance and proximity both be advantages in the curatorial process?

The panel members are Camilla Brown, Senior Curator of the Photographer’s Gallery, Juan Pablo Echeverri, one of the artists included in Once More, With Feeling and Mahmoud Khaled, currently Africa Beyond artist in residence at Gasworks London and InIVA.

The discussion will be chaired by Isobel Whitelegg, Research Officer, TrAIN.

Chris Wainwright (Head of College, CCW) in conversation with Venu Dhupa

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 11:56:21 +0000

Date:Tuesday 10 June 2008, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre, Chelsea College of Art & Design

Venu Dhupa and Chris Wainwright will discuss the role and responsibility of thematic enquiry within the art school - in relation to a broader field of policy, curating and commissioning.

Venu Dhupa is a Patron of the Asha Foundation and Minorities of Europe. She lead the development of a new Creative Innovation Unit at the South Bank Centre, and has held the posts of Director of Arts and Creativity for the British Council, Fellowship Director at NESTA, Chief Executive at the Nottingham Playhouse and Producer (Mobile Touring) at the Royal National Theatre.

In 1999 she was appointed as the inaugural Chair of the East Midlands Cultural Consortium by the Secretary of State at the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, a role she held until 2002. She has been awarded the prestigious Asian Woman of Achievement Award for her contribution to the Arts and Culture.

Bettina Pousttchi - The Hetley Suite

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 10:01:38 +0100

Date:Tuesday 19 August 2008, 18:00 to 20:30

Triangle Gallery, Chelsea College of Art & Design

TrAIN is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition in the UK by German-Iranian artist Bettina Pousttchi. The Berlin-based artist has recently spent six months in London as Künstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral artist-in-residence at TrAIN.

The exhibition will include The Hetley Suite, a new series of photographs developed during this residency, which will be shown in the context of earlier works exploring borders, perception and the production of knowledge.

The exhibition continues until 29th August.

Cildo Meireles

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 07:37:29 +0100

Date:Tuesday 21 October 2008, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre, Chelsea College of Art & Design

Discussion with the artist, Cildo Meireles, chaired by Michael Asbury, and with other participants including Guy Brett, co-curator of Meireles’ Tate Modern retrospective and Moacir dos Anjos, independent curator and contributor to its accompanying publication.

Part of the TrAIN Open series. All welcome.

Paul Goodwin

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 04:27:48 +0100

Date:Tuesday 04 November 2008, 17:15 to 19:30

Lecture Theatre, Chelsea College of Art & Design

Lecture by guest speaker, Paul Goodwin, Director of the Re-Visioning Black Urbanism project -based at the Centre for Urban and Community Research, Goldsmiths College, University of London.

Paradoxes of Black Urbanism
This lecture addresses themes explored in the Revisioning Black Urbanism Project at Goldsmiths College since 2006. ‘Black Urbanism’ seeks to
explore the way that multiple cultures of ‘blackness’ have shaped and are shaping contemporary urban life in the West. Drawing on elements of urban theory, cultural geography and architecture, the lecture will explore the paradoxical entanglements of globalisation, images and practices of ‘blackness’ (in urban protest movements, music and visual art practices) and shifting notions of what it means to be ‘urban’ in places like London, Paris and New Orleans since the 1990s.

Public Access: Recent Video from Cuba

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 10:15:58 +0000

Date:Tuesday 18 November 2008, 17:15 to 19:30

Lecture Theatre, Chelsea College of Art & Design

Cylena Simonds, independent curator and writer, will screen works by emerging artists based in Cuba, followed by a discussion of the current conditions of contemporary practice in Cuba, and how these are reflected in formal and conceptual aesthetic choices.

Mami Kataoka: Fragments of our time; New Japanese Contemporary Art

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 05:36:48 +0100

Date:Tuesday 02 December 2008, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre, Chelsea College of Art & Design

Globalisation and multiculturalism since the 1990s have created an unprecedented interest in contemporary Japanese art in the international world. The new images of contemporary Japanese culture have been widely disseminated with the introduction of new terms such as ‘cool Japan’, kawaii, anime and otaku, and artists who reflected these new images, such as Nara Yoshitomo and Murakami Takashi, have become internationally known. Meanwhile, young artists who were born after the 1970s have been turning away from these images and concentrating on smaller, fragmented, fragile, floating expressions that connect their works in an extremely loose manner. This lecture will illustrate the current trend of contemporary Japanese art since 2000 and discuss relevant social historical and generational issues.

Open Lecture by guest speaker Mami Kataoka, a curator who divides her time between two cities as international curator at the Hayward, London and senior curator at the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo.

Cildo Meireles Occasion (2005/2008)

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 07:36:54 +0100

Date:Tuesday 21 October 2008, 19:00 to 21:00

Rootstein Hopkins Parade Ground, Chelsea College of Art & Design

Occasion consists of two separate chambers, separated by mirrored glass. One chamber is empty and the other contains a bowl filled with banknotes. Visitors to this room are presented with the money - but at the same time are aware of three mirrored surfaces surrounding them and possibly concealing viewers. The title of the work comes from the Brazilian expression ‘a ocasião faz o ladrão’ (the occasion makes the thief). The behaviour of visitors to either part of the installation is conditioned by surveillance; this temporary construction will establish a relationship to one of the famous former occupants of its site: Millbank prison - which was itself built according to a panoptical design in order to offer its guards a view of every inmate.

Curated by Michael Asbury, TrAIN, University of the Arts London

In conjunction with the Cildo Meireles retrospective at Tate Modern

Chin-tao Wu in conversation

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 02:07:24 +0100

Date:Monday 27 October 2008, 17:30 to 19:00

Central Saint Martins, Southampton Row, Cochrane 203A (in the Research Office section)

Chin-tao Wu is one of the liveliest and brightest writers on contemporary art and its institutions. Following her first book, the acclaimed Privatising culture: corporate art intervention since the 1980s (Verso 2002 and numerous translations - ‘Buy this book’ Louise Bourgeois), she is now turning her attention to globalisation with ‘Worlds apart’, Third text, 21:6, 2007, and ‘Occupation by absence, preoccupation with presence’, Journal of visual culture, 6:3, 2007 and papers such as ‘Catwalks and artworks: showing and selling on the global stage’.

Chin-tao Wu is Research Fellow at the Academia Sinica in Taiwan.

Maria Pask in conversation ‘ Lost Horizon’

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 04:49:55 +0100

Date:Monday 08 December 2008, 17:30 to 19:00

Central Saint Martins, Southampton Row, Cochrane 203A (in the Research Office section)

The artist will introduce some of her recent projects and focus on the diverse range of interests that form the basis of her art. Maria Pask’s art takes place primarily in projects that focus on processes and include people from a wide variety of social groups. She will reflect on how subject matter becomes lost in a process-based performative practice of open formats and social interactions. On her work at Munster last year, see sculpture projects 07 on www.beautifulcity.de and for a range of projects see the link.

T J Demos on the Tate Triennial

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 10:59:06 +0000

Date:Monday 09 March 2009, 17:30 to 19:00

Central Saint Martins, Southampton Row, RLS 713 (Main Entrance)

T.J. Demos will be in conversation with Deborah Cherry; the discussion will address the Tate Triennial currently on at Tate Britain, and the way the exhibition corresponds to its conceptualization by Nicolas Bourriaud in relation to the his four framing categories: the altermodern, exile, travel, and borders.

James Swinson, John Cumming, Jane Madsen: ‘First Time Tragedy: Second Time Farce’

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 05:45:46 +0000

Date:Monday 24 November 2008, 16:00 to 18:30

Innovations Centre Conference Room, Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, Red Lion Square (ask for directions at the reception at IC)

First Time Tragedy Second Time Farce was co-directed/produced/written by John Cumming, Jane Madsen, James Swinson

It is 20 years since the Australian and British Governments decided to celebrate the Bicentennial of the European settlement of Australia. At the time, we collaborated as London and Melbourne based film-makers to produce a 75 minute essay documentary film critiquing the celebrations. We set out to give a profile to the Aboriginal opposition to the events and raise questions about colonial history and national identity.

Aboriginal activists were able to use the Bicentennial to draw worldwide attention to Aboriginal culture and politics. A review this year of the impact of the Bicentennial has coincided with recently elected Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s apologies to the stolen generations. With the renewed focus on Aboriginal politics, our film has been digitised and screened again in Australia.

Jane Madsen and James Swinson will present and discuss the film with Pratap Rughani and Prof. Deborah Cherry

Jane Madsen is a filmmaker, writer and Lecturer at Camberwell College of Arts and is currently studying for a PhD at the Bartlett with practice at the Slade.
Pratap Rughani is a documentary filmmaker, photographer and film and video artist and Course Director MA Documentary Research for Film and Television at the London College of Communications.
James Swinson is a film and video maker, writer and Lecturer at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design.
John Cumming (who unfortunately will not be with us) is a filmmaker and writer who Lectures at Deakin University Melbourne.

Peter Osborne - 'To Each Present its Own Prehistory: The Fiction of the Contemporary'

Thu, 12 Feb 2009 08:10:50 +0000

Date:Monday 16 February 2009, 17:30 to 19:00

Central Saint Martins, Red Lion Square 713

This talk is concerned, first, with the idea of ‘the contemporary’, and second, with the demands this idea imposes on art today, under the conditions of a tendentially global transnationalism. It will conclude with some reflections the convergence and mutual conditioning of historical transformations in the ontology of the artwork and the social relations of art space.

There are two texts suggested by Peter Osborne as an introduction to this lecture: ‘Time and the Artwork’ and ‘Non-places and the Spaces of Art’, digital copies can be requested on the Contact area of this website.

Erosion and Dissolution of the Object: Peruvian Art of the 1960s - Miguel Lopez

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 09:57:05 +0000

Date:Tuesday 13 January 2009, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre Chelsea College of Arts and Design

In collaboration with Emilio Tarazona, artist Miguel López López (Lima, 1983) has researched and curated a series of exhibitions retrieving ephemeral art practices in Peru of the 1960s/70s. López is now working towards a collectively curated exhibition investigating experimental and conceptual art practices under conditions set by military dictatorships and communist regimes in both Europe and Latin America.

For the TrAIN Open series, López will focus on experimental exhibitions of Peruvian art in the 1960s - and he aims to draw a wider discussion concerning experimental art in the political context of sixties Latin America.

The 28th Bienal de Sâo Paulo: a post-mortem discussion

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 12:01:21 +0000

Date:Tuesday 27 January 2009, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre Chelsea College of Arts and Design

Aiming to offer a platform for observation and reflection upon the culture and system of biennials within the international art circuit, the 28th Bienal de Sâo Paulo (Oct-Dec 2008) proposed a different format from previous editions.
After the event, Moacir dos Anjos, Michael Asbury, Elizabeth Araújo Lima and Isobel Whitelegg will each focus on different aspects of the edition that was titled ‘In Living Contact’ and colloquially termed the ‘Empty Bienal’. In turn, they will each review and raise for open discussion its curatorial concept, critical reception, and the unplanned intervention that marked its opening to the public.

Paradoxes of Black Urbanism - Paul Goodwin

Tue, 23 Dec 2008 05:45:30 +0000

Date:Tuesday 10 February 2009, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre Chelsea College of Arts and Design

This lecture addresses themes explored in the Revisioning Black Urbanism Project at Goldsmiths College since 2006. ‘Black Urbanism’ seeks to explore the way that multiple cultures of ‘blackness’ have shaped and are shaping contemporary urban life in the West. Drawing on elements of urban theory, cultural geography and architecture, the lecture will explore the paradoxical entanglements of globalisation, images and practices of ‘blackness’ (in urban protest movements, music and visual art practices) and shifting notions of what it means to be ‘urban’ in places like London, Paris and New Orleans since the 1990s.

Paul Goodwin is the Associate Research Fellow, at the Centre for Urban and Community Research, Goldsmiths College, University of London, and Curator of Cross Cultural Programmes, Tate Britain

Do you remember Olive Morris? the art of collective remembrance - Ana Laura Lopez de la Torre

Tue, 23 Dec 2008 05:50:36 +0000

Date:Tuesday 24 February 2009, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre Chelsea College of Arts and Design

Ana Laura Lopez will discuss her practice in the context of ongoing project entitled ‘Do You Remember Olive Morris?’. At the forefront of political struggles in the 1970s, Olive Morris was a member of the Brixton Black Panthers Movement and a founding member of several Black women’s organisations. Initiated by Ana Laura Lopez in 2006, the project is an investigation of Morris’ life and legacy,and is the result of a collaboration with community activist Liz Obi, together with a group of women meeting monthly as the ROC (Remembering Olive Collective).

Sensing the Urban in London, Tokyo and Other Global Cities: Six Themes and Tools

Tue, 03 Mar 2009 10:08:34 +0000

Date:Tuesday 10 March 2009, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre Chelsea College of Arts and Design

What makes up a truly exciting city and architecture? How might they truly stimulate us, in all our senses, from the intellectual to the instinctive, the visual to the sensual, the artistic to the analytical? This talk suggests six themes and tools by which we might investigate such concerns, and draws upon examples ranging from public monuments and art projects, to representations in film and architecture, to spatial activities such as skateboarding and urban picknicking.

Iain Borden is Head of the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, where he is Professor of Architecture and Urban Culture.

Cinthia Marcelle

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 17:39:56 +0000

Date:Friday 27 March 2009, 18:00 to 20:00

Foyer Space, Camberwell College of Arts, Peckham Road

Cinthia Marcelle is developing an installation for the Foyer Space as part of her TrAIN residency at Gasworks London. The recent video Buraco Negro (Black Hole) will be brought together with works made in situ, in an exhibition curated by TrAIN Research Fellow, Isobel Whitelegg.

A collaboration between Marcelle and cinema director Tiago Mata Machado, Buraco Negro tracks the movement of white powder across a black surface as it is displaced by exhalations of air. The off-camera sound - an intimate exchange of breaths - contrasts with patterns that resemble cosmological scale constellations. The interplay between concentration and distribution is a consistent motif in Marcelle’s work, and her interest in the force of simultaneous action is explored in an ongoing series entitled Unus Mundus. In this series she collects together individual things and people according to singular qualities, types, or behaviors, and orchestrates collective coincidences. These have included eight identical white vans driving around the same square, and seven similarly dressed couples kissing. These contrived accumulations reveal a density - an act that Marcelle refers to as ‘bringing the margins to the centre’. They are situations that are apparently absurd, but they also invite a speculative view of day-to-day life as a series of undiscovered coincidences - or simultaneous acts occurring in separate spaces, within one moment of time. Marcelle’s video work often conveys this imaginary perspective of a world viewed from above, allowing action to be read as image, and pointing to an inextricable link between the localized and the shared. A play between scale and association is continued in Marcelle’s occupation of physical spaces and her use of particular objects and colours. The two new works produced for this show address its location within a school of art. They use specific objects and materials to draw a connection from the experience accumulated by one place to a widely scattered world of learning - the anecdotes, things and encounters that circumscribe a shared sphere between play and profession.

Cinthia Marcelle

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 17:41:33 +0000

Date:Friday 24 April 2009, 09:00 to 18:00

Foyer Space, Camberwell College of Arts, Peckham Road

The interplay between concentration and distribution is a consistent motif in Marcelle’s work, and her interest in the force of simultaneous action is explored in an ongoing series entitled Unus Mundus. In this series she collects together individual things and people according to singular qualities, types, or behaviors, and orchestrates collective coincidences. These have included eight identical white vans driving around the same square, and seven similarly dressed couples kissing. These contrived accumulations reveal a density - an act that Marcelle refers to as ‘bringing the margins to the centre’. They are situations that are apparently absurd, but they also invite a speculative view of day-to-day life as a series of undiscovered coincidences - or simultaneous acts occurring in separate spaces, within one moment of time. Marcelle’s video work often conveys this imaginary perspective of a world viewed from above, allowing action to be read as image, and pointing to an inextricable link between the localized and the shared. A play between scale and association is continued in Marcelle’s occupation of physical spaces and her use of particular objects and colours. The two new works produced for this show address its location within a school of art. They use specific objects and materials to draw a connection from the experience accumulated by one place to a widely scattered world of learning - the anecdotes, things and encounters that circumscribe a shared sphere between play and profession.

Criteria of Beauty

Tue, 03 Feb 2009 10:15:47 +0000

Date:Thursday 05 February 2009, 19:00 to 21:00

Aqffin Gallery, 55 Commercial Street, London E1 6BD

Curated by Helena Capkova, Criteria of Beauty is an exhibition of work by Japanese artists who have practiced or studied in the UK. The artists were selected by a competition - in which they were asked to approach the “12 Criteria of Beauty” coined by Japanese art theoretician Sōetsu Yanagi in the 1920s, and create original works that might address the relevance of his statements in the context of 21st Century Britain. A closing party, with Japanese beer and snacks, will take place as part of First Thursdays, a series of late night openings in East London.

At Your Service

Wed, 04 Feb 2009 04:35:43 +0000

Date:Thursday 16 April 2009, 18:30 to 20:00

David Roberts Art Foundation, 111 Great Titchfield Street, London W1W 6RY

The David Roberts Art Foundation launches its Curators’ Series with the opening of At Your Service, a group exhibition organised by its first guest curator, Cylena Simonds.

Artists: Raul Ortega Ayala, Libia Castro and Ólafur Ólafsson, Sue Collis, Yara El Sherbini, David Ersser, Mauricio Guillen, Graham Hudson, Gayle Chong Kwon, Harold Offeh, Nada Prlja, Ana Prvacki, Manuela Ribadeneira, Paul Rooney.

At Your Service engages the dynamics of the service and hospitality industries, examining aspects such as building construction, cleaning and catering as a way of addressing concepts of belonging, patterns of migration and the less-than-distinct roles of host/guest and native/foreigner. The artworks investigate themes within service labour such as routine, invisibility and the mundane. Juxtaposed with these works are projects that explore the notion of contemporary art practice as a service to the public.

Exhibitions and The World At Large

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 07:17:07 +0000

Date:Friday 03 April 2009, 09:30 to 18:00

Tate Britain

Afterall and TrAIN present a public symposium at Tate Britain, London, examining the contemporary art exhibition in a global context.

The symposium will consider three case studies from 1989, a pivotal year for both art and politics:
‘Magiciens de la Terre’ at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, ‘The Other Story’ at the Hayward Gallery, London, and the third Bienal de La Habana.

The event will open with a keynote presentation by Sarat Maharaj and other speakers include Thomas Boutoux, Jean Fisher, Cuauhtémoc Medina and Gerardo Mosquera.

NB. This is a ticketed event (£20/£15 concessions); Online and telephone bookings can be made via Tate Ticketing.

Moacir dos Anjos

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 09:28:54 +0100

Date:Monday 27 April 2009, 17:30 to 19:00

Central Saint Martins, RLS 713 (Southampton Row entrance)

Deborah Cherry will be in Conversation with Moacir dos Anjos, TrAIN visiting research fellow.

Moacir dos Anjos will discuss his research and curatorial practice concerning the work of artists who, in different ways, question conventional ways of understanding the idea of belonging in an increasingly interrelated and conflictive world

Tapati Guha Thakurta

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 08:12:59 +0100

Date:Wednesday 22 April 2009, 13:30 to 16:30

Central Saint Martins RLS 712 (Southampton Row entrance)

Deborah Cherry will host a seminar with renowned art historian Tapati Guha Thakurta and other distinguished speakers.

Seeds of Change, a lecture by Maria Thereza Alves

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 08:19:28 +0100

Date:Tuesday 26 May 2009, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre Chelsea College of Arts and Design

The artist will present Seeds of Change, 2005, a project that deals with ‘ballast flora’, an area of botanical study that has been marginalised for bearing direct links with the slave trade.

A more detailed description on the subject taken from Frieze Magazine:

“Today modern cargo ships take on water as ballast to stabilize an unloaded vessel, but in previous eras of maritime trade sailing ships would use earth, stones or sand as ballast if their load of colonial goods was too light - material that could easily be discarded to free up the ship to pick up profitable slaves. Consequently over thousands of years tonnes of this filler material and its attendant seeds and organic matter from the new world was dumped ashore on arrival around the major port cities of Europe. For her ‘Seeds of Change’ projects in Marseille, Liverpool, Exeter, Bristol, Dunkirk and other sites - always where no previous studies of ballast flora have been undertaken - Alves sought the location of ballast spoil sites through old maps, port records and rumour, taken earth samples and endeavoured to germinate whatever archaic seeds have been lying dormant in the substrate. The resultant presentations have gathered the textual and photographic evidence - as well as the plants themselves - and often involved the collaboration of local residents.”

David Cerny - "Faking It for the Nation"

Fri, 08 May 2009 03:55:29 +0100

Date:Tuesday 19 May 2009, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre Chelsea College of Arts and Design

The rotating Presidency of the Council of the European Union offers the incumbent nation a platform from which to leverage its political, economic and cultural presence in the European Union. When the Czech Republic took over that office in January 2009 (notably as only the second Eastern European country to do so), Europe was given the chance to witness Czech art and artists on the transnational scene: the installation Entropa, produced by the Czech artist David Černý to commemorate the event, reached newspapers headlines all over Europe. The installation, which had supposedly been produced by 27 artists representing the 27 European countries, was, in fact, the work of a single artist. The work itself bravely addressed complex issues of European integration and cultural identity.

The hoax that unwrapped itself so elegantly before hundreds of millions of spectators originated from a part of Europe where such hoaxes have a long and culturally embedded history; quite often they have played a significant role in a nation’s development. The theme of non-existent authors and non-existent works were often seen to be the result of a type of humour that suggests that Czechs have an unusually prominent ability to laugh at themselves. As such, could the invention, the fabrication, of past and/or present cultural landmarks be assumed to constitute a facet of Czech cultural identity itself? In other words, could national identity be constituted by the acknowledged fact that it is based on falsification? And, if so, could this in fact constitute a more honest view of national identity? Such questions will be explored by Ewelina Warner, followed by a presentation by David Černý, who will speak about his installation Entropa, and his wider practice.

The lecture will be followed by drinks sponsored by the Czech Centre London

Tamiko O'Brien and Mark Dunhill

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 03:54:19 +0100

Date:Tuesday 12 May 2009, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre Chelsea College of Arts and Design

Mark Dunhill and Tamiko O’Brien will discuss their work and collaboration as artists.

Karolin Meunier

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 03:55:13 +0100

Date:Tuesday 02 June 2009, 17:15 to 19:00

Chelsea Lecture Theatre

TrAIN - Kuenstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral artist in residence Karolin Meunier will give a presentation of the work she has done during her residency at the University of the Arts London.

The New Archive Documenting Visual Art from Latin America.

Tue, 12 May 2009 05:46:02 +0100

Date:Thursday 14 May 2009, 14:00 to 19:00

Royal College of Art

TrAIN member Isobel Whitelegg, TrAIN visting fellow Moacir dos Anjos and TrAIN associate Guy Brett will present papers at this open seminar about Visual art in Latin America at the Royal College of Art. The title of Isobel’s paper is “Reading the archives of an unseen biennial: Sao Paulo 1973”. Guy will talk about: “Efficacy and Institution” and Moacir will discuss: “In the absence of anything else, the archive. Notes on the work of Rosangela Renno”.

The seminar will take place on Thursday 14 May from 2-7pm in lecture theatre 1.
The address of the RCA is Kensington Gore, SW7 2EU.

Please visit the Royal College of Art website for more details.

Fashioning Diasporas - International Conference

Tue, 12 May 2009 05:58:03 +0100

Dates:
Friday 15 May 2009, 10:30 to 18:00
Saturday 16 May 2009, 10:30 to 16:30

Friday 15 - Saturday 16 May 2009, Hochhauser Auditorium, Sackler Centre, V&A Museum

Friday 15 - Saturday 16 May 2009, Hochhauser Auditorium, Sackler Centre, Victoria & Albert Museum.

This major international conference brings together some of the most exciting thinkers on fashion, culture
and identity to explore the relationship of diaspora communities, objects and spaces to the processes of
clothing production and consumption in historical and contemporary world cultures. The conference is
part of the Arts and Humanities Research Council funded Fashioning Diaspora Space project.
£50 for two days, £25 for one day, concessions available

To book, call +44 (0)20 7942 2211

Bill Lundberg: Syntax of Illusion

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 09:14:48 +0100

Date:Wednesday 17 June 2009, 18:00 to 20:00

Central Saint Martins, Southampton Row, Bridge 303

Bill Lundberg has been one of the most consistent and imaginative artists using video and projection since the 1970s. He lived and worked in London for a period during that decade, a prominent figure in the British avant-garde, before moving to Austin Texas where he lives today. We are pleased and proud to be able to take advantage of Lundberg’s visit to London to invite him to give an illustrated talk about his work at Central St Martins on Wednesday 17th June. The event is free and open to all.

Bill Lundberg developed a form of ‘film-sculpture’ before such work was conveniently named and placed. He took the spectral quality of projection out of the darkened cinema to the ‘hard places’ of the substantial world, playing on a fascinating contradiction between the real and the illusory which brings a new experience of the notion of ‘presence’. His work Swimmer, which was recently acquired by the Blanton Museum in Austin for its permanent collection, was first shown at the ICA in London in 1975. Projected onto the floor in the vicinity of wall-hung paintings in the gallery, Swimmer creates, with great wit and economy of means, a confrontation between two spaces, art gallery and swimming pool; two media, water and film; and two orientations, the vertical (the viewer) and the horizontal (the swimmer). So elemental are these confrontations that one cannot easily decide if the swimmer in his rectangle of water is a metaphor of freedom or entrapment.

Working in both the United States and Brazil, Lundberg has used his technical experiments to explore subtle psychological possibilities, treating themes of isolation, vulnerability, relations with the other, and putative collectivities.

Bill Lundberg will be introduced by Guy Brett

Contact:
Guy Brett
[email protected]
tel: 020 267 3043
or
Eva Broer
[email protected]

MA Graduation Show

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 06:07:46 +0100

Date:Wednesday 15 July 2009, 09:00 to 17:00

House Gallery, Camberwell Church Street and Wilson Road, Camberwell College of Art

Exhibition of the graduation art work of the TrAIN MA students of 2008/09. 15 July till 20 July 2009.
Private view 14 July.

Wendelien van Oldenborgh | Lecture/Audience/Camera

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 12:21:46 +0000

Date:Wednesday 14 October 2009, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre - Chelsea College of Arts and Design

TrAIN Open’s Autumn programme begins with the first UK screening of Wendelein Van Oldenborgh’s Lecture/Audience/Camera, a 30-minute film produced - in a public process - via a series of three lectures.

It proposes the museum as a location, the lecturers as protagonists and the audience as part of the cast, and the lectures and surrounding dialogues form the basis for the script. Relations - between speaker and audience, audience and camera, camera and speaker, film and viewer - are addressed by both the lectures and the film itself.

With its title openly referring to Dan Graham’s Performer/Audience/Mirror, Van Oldenborgh’s film pays homage to this well-known inquiry into the cross relationships that exist in the production of knowledge and meaning in public situations, such as that of a performance or a lecture.

Followed by discussion between Wendelien van Oldenborgh and David Dibosa, (Wimbledon School of Art/Tate Encounters and a member of the film’s cast), chaired by Deborah Cherry, Associate Director, TrAIN.

'Caracas Centrifugal' - Jaime Gili

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 06:28:27 +0100

Date:Wednesday 21 October 2009, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre Chelsea College of Arts and Design

Jaime Gili will discuss the current context of the arts in Caracas, Venezuela. He will introduce the modernist legacy of artistic integration - developed by the work of Carlos Villanueva and epitomised by the city’s Central University - and the present political situation, the disappearance of museums and the growth of private initiatives. Points of focus will be spaces including Los Galpones art center, Jesus Fuenmayor, Oficina 1, Organización Nelson Garrido and La Carniceria; young art initiaves around the FIA art fair, including Desconfia and Jovenes con FIA; the work of individual arts in Venezuela including Suwon Lee, Luis Romero and Luis Salazar, and that of artists working abroad, including Alexander Apostol, Nayari Castillo, Hernandez Diez and Arturo Herrera.

The XXIV Bienal de Sao Paulo

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 06:34:13 +0100

Date:Thursday 22 October 2009, 18:30 to 20:00

Lecture Theatre Royal College of Arts

Paulo Herkenhoff will discuss his curatorship of the XXIV Bienal de Sao Paulo (1998). Herkenhoff used the influential twentieth century Brazilian cultural concept of Antropofagia (cannibalism) to set the parameters for this international exhibition - which is considered as a landmark in the history of biennales.

Introduced by Teresa Gleadowe. In collaboration with Afterall and Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art.

'Stronger are the Powers of the People' - Rodrigo Nunes

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 06:36:07 +0100

Date:Wednesday 18 November 2009, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre Chelsea College of Arts and Design

Philosopher Rodrigo Nunes will present the rarely screened films that were produced by the CPCs (Centres for Popular Culture) in Brazil between 1962 and 1979. He will discuss how the problems posed by this period were expressed in the aesthetic and political choices of filmmakers, and how this earlier intersection between poetics and popular education may be reactivated to inform current convergences between practice, politics and pedagogy.

'Stadium X' - Joanna Warsza

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 04:56:56 +0000

Date:Wednesday 02 December 2009, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre Chelsea College of Arts and Design

Joanna Warsza will discuss her curated series of live art projects The Finissage of Stadium X and the related reader Stadium X — A Place That Never Was. Both projects were inspired by the heterotopic logic of Warsaw’s 10th-Anniversary Stadium, and its long-standing (non-) presence in the middle of the city. Built in 1955 from the rubble of a war-devastated capital, in the early 1990s the stadium fell into ruin, being ‘revived’ by Vietnamese and Russian traders. Since then the Stadium and the open-air market surrounding it have become an Asian town, a primeval garden, a realm of discount shopping, a storehouse of biographies and urban legends, a spontaneous piece of Land-Art, or a work camp for archaeologists and botanists.

In collaboration with Critical Practice.

'Teresa Margolles and the Pathology of Everyday Death' - Professor Oriana Baddeley

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 09:36:38 +0100

Date:Wednesday 04 November 2009, 17:00 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre Chelsea College of Arts and Design

Professorial Platform

Many countries have been defined by stereotypes of cultural production of limited historical meaning but tenacious shelf life, and few more so than Mexico. The visual culture of Mexico has been laden with the weight of representational meaning since the first contact of Europe and the Americas in the fifteenth century. The flora and fauna of Mexico has been explained and described, its inhabitants recognisably characterised for both internal and external audiences. Definitions of national culture have ranged from simplistic stereotypes to complex attempts at reconciling the political tensions of a racially divided post-colonial society but the visual manifestations of these processes of definition draw on a shared heritage of symbolic representations.

For artists, Mexican identity has become a commodity to be packaged, sold and resold, containment of its meaning has applied a patent copyright that allows for the themed fast food restaurant or the decoration of European suburban homes in a ‘Mexican style’ purchased at the local superstore. A longstanding theme of this commodified Mexico, however, has been the association of ‘death’ and ‘Mexicanness’, from the fascination with Aztec deities through to the popularity of the ‘day of the dead’ phenomenon. For many audiences and curators alike death remains a keyword in the evocation of Mexican culture. In many ways the association of art and death is so accepted a signifier of ‘Mexicanness’ that for international audiences it has become a required characteristic of authentic cultural expression and geographically determined meaning. It can be seen in the popularity of José Guadalupe Posada’s skeletal caricatures on T-shirts and accessories, to the visions of barbarism underpinning a film such as Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto. In fact, obsession with the physicality of death and Mexico are frequently constructed as synonymous. Descending from the propagandist polemics of the Spanish conquest and given new impetus by the complex debates of post revolutionary Mexico, the role of death, and its imagery, has long been a constituent part of constructions of ‘Mexicanness’. A fascination with the forensics of death is not in itself an unusual focus of interest for such artists and curators but recently the work of Teresa Margolles has attracted the attention of an increasingly large audience. Her reputation has been growing since the 1990s, based on her work as a founder member of the Mexico City based collective SEMEFO (an acronym derived from Servicio Médico Forense /Forensic Medical Service). In recent years it has become established outside of Mexico and expanded from dedicated followers of her work to encompass a more general critical interest, with her intervention at the Venice Biennial 2009 receiving widescale critical acclaim. While deeply political, the themes of Margolles’ art grow out of her fascination with what she has called ‘the life of corpses’ , and the ways that even in death, social hierarchies and injustices remain. The materials that she uses in her art break taboos of realism even in the reality-addicted societies we inhabit and the re-use in her art of human remains, body parts and fluids contaminated with the ‘real’ processes of the afterlife, repel and frighten many, but nonetheless force her audiences to encounter those aspects of the passage of death usually hidden from conscious thought. This lecture will discuss the intersecting of traditions of cultural stereotype with the processes of contemporary cultural production and how this relates to the specifics of Mexico.

BLACK PIG FRIENDS SECRET WORKSHOP

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 07:42:37 +0100

Date:Tuesday 06 October 2009, 09:00 to 18:00

Rootstein Hopkins Parade Ground

Black Pig City art collective proposal is to involve 9 students of Chelsea College of Art & Design in a BPC one-off event and to collaborate with the artists in the construction of a site-specific installation, which will be the main attraction of the event, the Phenomenal Manifestation of the Black Pig.

This workshop will not be open to the public and will be structured as a secret initiation: as Masters of the Black Pig Friends Masonic lodge, the artists will personally instruct participants.

The workshop will last 10 days and will take place in a marquee installed in the Rootstein Hopkins Parade Ground. It will be planned in two different phases: firstly, work will be focused on the production of the installation (stagecraft tasks). In the second phase, the Masters will train students for the circus show one-off event performance (Action practice tasks). Everyday there will be a different stage of technical knowledge, until the Manifestation day, the circus show, when finally everything will be shown publicly. In this occasion the participants will perform the show together with the Masters and will also get the privilege of wearing the Masonic symbols.

The Limit - Laureana Toledo

Sun, 04 Oct 2009 08:21:37 +0100

Date:Thursday 29 October 2009, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre - Chelsea College of Arts and Design

Laureana Toledo introduces her fan documentary on The Limit - a (fictional) “Sheffield band from Mexico”. Followed by a conversation with curator Gavin Wade.

“As a response to the commission of doing a piece of art in Sheffield addressed to an imaginary spectator that hates art, I decided to put together a cover band that would only play covers from bands from Sheffield- Pulp, Def Leppard, Human League, ABC, Joe Cocker and the Arctic Monkeys. The line up would be a very simple one: drums, guitar, bass, and a singer who played a little electronic piano. The band is named after a cult club in Sheffield, where most of the original bands had played, and that shut its doors in 1992; its members are musicians from four of the most important groups from the Mexican rock scene- Bengala, Zoé, DiscoRuido and Café Tacvba.

Very few people in England know of these bands. People in Mexico know lots of Sheffield bands (and from Birmingham, and from Manchester, and from Bristol…). Disguised as a 30 minute fan documentary, and accompanied by the publication of an artist book disguised as a magazine, The Limit investigates how information and pop culture are digested, how colonialism is still activating our fantasies and expectations, and how the secondary role of women around rock bands is funnily reversed."

Roma Tearne - TIMELINES: Memory and Migration

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 06:11:48 +0100

Date:Monday 19 October 2009, 17:30 to 19:00

CSM room RLS 712 (Southampton Row entrance)

Professor Deborah Cherry will be in Conversation with artist Roma Tearne. The artist will show a film of her work and discuss her work afterwards.

Roma Tearne is a Sri Lankan born artist and novelist living and working in Britain. She trained as a painter, completing her MA at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford. For nearly twenty five years her work as a painter, installation artist, and filmmaker has dealt with the traces of history and memory within public and private spaces.
She became Leverhulme Artist in Residence at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford in 2002 and it was while working at the Ashmolean, as a response to public interest, that she began to write.
In 2006 she was awarded a three-year AHRC Fellowship, at Brookes University, Oxford where she worked on the relationship between narrative and memory in museums throughout Europe. Her third novel Brixton Beach is published by Harper Collins.

Pratap Rughani

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 11:05:24 +0000

Date:Monday 08 March 2010, 17:00 to 18:30

CSM - room RLS 712 (Southampton Row entrance)

Pratap Rughani explores the ‘documentary moment’ as a way of bridging worlds which has at heart inter-cultural communication. This TrAIN conversation includes an award-winning film, Playing Model Soldiers (Channel 4) followed by discussion.

The potential for documentary film to act as an arena in which people of radically different perspectives come into relation to each other is a compelling and under-explored area of documentary practice. Pratap is interested in examining and creating newer forms of inter-cultural documentary film that cultivate the kinds of pluralized spaces through which broader understandings can evolve. How subjectivity re-positions documentary claims to representation, reveals a matrix of stories rather than seeking single narrative closure.
Pratap Rughani’s documentary practice embraces a range of editorial, commissioning and exhibition environments. Much of his early work is in observational broadcast documentary modes, with twenty-five films for BBC 2 and Channel 4. More recent films explore the greater aesthetic freedoms of independent commissions for the British Council, or research-supported projects designed for exhibition in gallery spaces such as Modern Art Oxford. The dynamics of inter-cultural communication are central, conceiving documentary as a crucible in which people of radically different perspectives, cultures and politics come into relation, for example with the Truth & Reconciliation Commission of the new South Africa. He is Course Director of MA Documentary Film at London College of Communication, UAL.
The unique power of what might be called the ‘documentary charge’ and its relationship to ‘reality’ is a key research area.
How the ethics of production decisions are made visible and interrogated, including the relationship of ethics and aesthetics, for example in creating and analysing images in the aftermath of atrocity of trauma are an abiding interest.
Essential in any post-colonial context is the recovery of voices at the margins and understanding their centrality. Philosophically, Pratap is interested in how exposure of the conditions of production and subjectivities of documentary teams shapes the ‘observed’ event - configuring realities in these moments of ‘touch’.

The iconographies of identity: contemporary art and the mythologies of ‘Mexicanness’

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 10:03:21 +0000

Date:Thursday 11 February 2010, 18:30 to 21:00

Stevenson Lecture Theatre, British Museum

An evening lecture by Oriana Baddeley
Thursday 11 February, 18.30
Stevenson Lecture Theatre, British Museum

Oriana Baddeley, University of Arts London Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation, will look at the ways in which contemporary artists have chosen to address their Mexican heritage, including the conquest, independence and the revolution.
Related to the exhibition:
Revolution on paper: Mexican prints 1910-1960

Tickets can be bought via the British Museum website

Museums and Migration - a dialogue between David Dibosa and Seph Rodney

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 09:32:19 +0000

Date:Wednesday 27 January 2010, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre Chelsea College of Art & Design (Atterbury Street Entrance)

A conversation between two London-based scholars who each, in their current research, are focusing on the museographic experiences of migrant viewers.
What are the narratives generated by museums, particularly national museums? To whom are these narratives addressed? What forces inform the visits to museums by persons from migrant or diasporic backgrounds? In their respective projects, Dibosa and Rodney challenge conventional tools of audience analysis by paying close attention to the visitor’s voice and to the ways in which it is carried and heard.

Joanna Rajkowska

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 10:33:59 +0000

Date:Wednesday 10 February 2010, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre Chelsea College of Art & Design (Atterbury Street Entrance)

Critical Practice are currently collaborating with Kuba Szreder, a freelance curator from Warsaw, on an international series of events exploring the contested, and increasingly relevant topic of Being in Public or Publicness. As a second collaboration with TrAIN Open, Neil Cummings will introduce a presentation by artist Joanna Rajkowska.
In collaboration with Critical Practice

Diasporic Browning - Shirley Ann Tate

Mon, 04 Jan 2010 05:24:47 +0000

Date:Wednesday 10 March 2010, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre Chelsea College of Art & Design (Atterbury Street Entrance)

Shirley Ann Tate - author of “Black Beauty: Aesthetics, Stylization, Politics” and a member of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies at the University of Leeds - will discuss black beauty’s challenge to the iconicity of white beauty.
Introduced by Carol Tulloch (TrAIN).

Andrea Schlieker

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 06:58:47 +0000

Date:Monday 08 February 2010, 17:00 to 18:30

Room RLS 712 - Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design, Southampton Row

Professor Deborah Cherry will be in Conversation with Andrea Schlieker.

Andrea Schlieker is a freelance curator. Recent projects include the inaugural Folkestone Triennial Tales of Time and Space (2008), the British Art Show 6 (2005-06) and the Fourth Plinth Project in Trafalgar Square (Marc Quinn, 2004-05). She is currently working on the second Folkestone Triennial for 2011, is curatorial adviser and selector for the My City public art project in Turkey (2010), and a member of the Public Realm Commissioning Advisory Panel for the Olympic Park. She was a juror for the 2009 Turner Prize.

Global Exhibitions - Contemporary Art and the African Diaspora

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 04:56:48 +0000

Date:Friday 19 February 2010, 10:00 to 17:00

Tate Liverpool

This major international symposium will consider and reflect on recent developments in the globalisation of the contemporary art of Africa and its many diasporas. A number of key international exhibitions have highlighted the increased importance of artistic production by African and African diasporic artists to the evolving geography of global contemporary art. This symposium gathers artists, curators, art historians and cultural critics to discuss and unravel the complexities of presenting and exploring art of the African diaspora and situating it within debates around Modernism.

Key speakers include Shaheen Merali, curator of Black Atlantic: Travelling Cultures, Counter-Histories, Networked Identities, Berlin 2004; Sonia Boyce, artist in Black Skin/Bluecoat, The Bluecoat, Liverpool, 1985; and Carol Tulloch, Reader at TrAIN, Chelsea College of Art and Design, University of the Arts, London, and co-curator of Black British Style at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, 2004.

To book tickets please visit the Tate Liverpool website

Kuba Szreder - Archeologies of the the Public: insights into the Polish public sphere.

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 09:42:21 +0000

Date:Wednesday 24 February 2010, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre Chelsea College of Arts and Design

The lecture will be aimed at providing insights into the historical development and current shape of the public sphere in Poland. It will be an attempt to conduct an archaeological study of the Polish public sphere, its specific cultural, political and discursive context. It is necessary to engage into radical and dialectic dialog with the Eurocentric notion of the public sphere, to pose the question about how public life organizes itself outside of the historical experience of core capitalist countries.

Poland is an interesting case study for conducting this kind of archaeological investigation, as it is a semi-peripheral country that has for centuries been torn between modernization and underdevelopment. Its tradition of noble democracy, the fight for national independence, and the strong influence of the Catholic Church add to this. The Polish public sphere was constructed under totally different constraints then the ones described by the famous philosopher Jurgen Habermas in his book “The Structural Transformations of the Public Sphere”. Beyond the veil of superficial ideas about the public sphere lies a fascinating world of various ways of being in public, constituted through the course of history and shaped by people in numerous struggles, compromises, exchanges, discussions, all the while under certain economic and political pressures.

My lecture is a modest attempt to venture into these unknown realms of the public space. Rather than providing a closed and finished picture of the Polish public sphere - trapped in the solid grid of academic references - I’ll try to stitch a patchwork of insights into the mutating flux of public life. The lecture will consist of historical data, references to contemporary artistic experiments and my own curatorial practice. It is related to the ongoing research leading towards Parade: modes of assembly, forms of address, a public event organized together with Critical Practice, which will happen in Chelsea’s Parade Ground in the end of May 2010.

Afterlives of Monuments

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 06:43:53 +0000

Dates:
Thursday 29 April 2010, 10:00 to 21:00
Friday 30 April 2010, 10:00 to 18:00

Innovation Gallery, Central Saint Martins (entrance off Red Lion Square)

For more information or to reserve tickets please contact Eva Broer
[email protected]

Generously sponsored by the British Academy, the Nehru Centre, the University of the Arts London and TrAIN, this 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

Dr Noriko Onohara

Wed, 12 May 2010 04:56:47 +0100

Date:Wednesday 19 May 2010, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre Chelsea College of Art and Design

‘Japan as Fashion, Contemporary Reflections on ’Being Fashionable’

Dr Noriko Onohara is an associate professor at University of Hyogo, Japan, and a visiting research fellow at Victoria & Albert Museum, UK (2009 - 2010). She got Ph.D. in 2004 from Kyoto University with the dissertation entitled ‘Semiotic Studies of Fashion and Clothes’. Her forthcoming book focuses on the poetics of Vivienne Westwood, Gothic Lolita and underwear, and visual performance of Japanese girl pro-wrestlers.

Catherine de Zegher

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 09:38:23 +0000

Date:Wednesday 28 April 2010, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre Chelsea College of Arts and Design

TrAIN core member Michael Asbury will be in Conversation with Catherine de Zegher about the current exhibition at Camden Arts Centre of Italian/Brazilian artist Anna Maria Maiolino ‘Continuous’ (02/04/2010-30/05/2010)

The Afterlives of Monuments Evening Lecture and Reception

Tue, 23 Mar 2010 05:42:28 +0000

Date:Thursday 29 April 2010, 18:30 to 20:30

Lethaby Lecture Theatre, Central Saint Martins College of Art (Southampton Row entrance)

Professor Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta will give a lecture on The Sanchi Stupa in Colonial India
The Production and Reproduction of a Monument

The lecture starts at 6.30pm; the door opens at 6.00pm

£7.50 includes lecture and reception
Contact Eva Broer: [email protected]

Sandra Schaefer

Fri, 23 Apr 2010 11:19:48 +0100

Date:Wednesday 12 May 2010, 17:15 to 19:30

Lecture Theatre Chelsea College of Art and Design (Atterbury Street Entrance)

In the presentation TrAIN/Kuenstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral artist in residence Sandra Schäfer will discuss hers and Elfe Brandenburger’s film Passing the Rainbow. The film deals with performative strategies to undermine the rigid gender norms in Afghan society: on the level of cinematographic stagings, in political work and in everyday life. Life and character collide and overlap, as do playfulness and activism. The protagonists adjust the production of the film to their own conditions in order, within that framework, to participate in a public statement. They act as co-producers of the image, shaping the content of scenes and moving in and out of the role of director. Sandra Schäfer will show clips from the film and explain their working methods. Passing the Rainbow is part of an ongoing cooperation with theoricians, filmmakers, actresses and activists in Afghanistan, as well as Iran, Spain and Germany including installations, film festivals, books and exhibitions.

Artist Talk: Nihonga and the Recent Site-specific Works of Toshiyuki Higashi

Thu, 13 May 2010 05:17:23 +0100

Date:Wednesday 26 May 2010, 18:30 to 20:00

The Japan Foundation, London- 10-12 Russell Square, London, WC1B 5EH

Toshiyuki Higashi, one of Japan’s prominent masters of Nihonga (Japanese traditional painting style) will visit the Japan Foundation to explain the characteristics of this historical and unique style of art through a very special illustrated lecture, including discussion of the techniques and tools used. As well as explaining the Nihonga style, and practical techniques used, Mr Higashi will take time to talk about his recent major commissions, completing Nihonga works on the ceilings of Ryozen-ji Temple and Kensho-ji Temple, Tokushima and Soken-ji Temple, Tokyo. There will also be an explanation and DVD presentation of Mr Higashi’s current work producing Nihonga screen paintings.
Mr Higashi will be introduced at this event by Professor Toshio Watanabe, Chelsea College of Art & Design

Forgotten Japonisme The Taste for Japanese Art in Britain and the USA 1920s-1950s

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 10:43:53 +0100

Dates:
Friday 09 July 2010, 10:00 to 17:15
Saturday 10 July 2010, 10:00 to 17:15

International conference at the Sackler Centre, V&A Museum, London.

This conference with international renowned speakers from Japan, USA and UK will consider, among other questions, the received view of the West as the sole purveyor of modernity in art, Japanese inspiration within the development of modernism in the West, and the relationship between the taste for Chinese and Japanese art during this period. The boundaries of the notions of the West and also of Japonisme will be tested.

We are pleased to announce the keynote speaker for the Forgotten Japonisme conference will be Professor Shigemi Inaga of the International Research Center for Japanese Studies, Kyoto, Japan who is an expert on comparative literature and culture and on history of cultural exchange, including Japonisme. He is the author of a number of award-winning scholarly books.

Other speakers include:
Professor Stan Abe of Duke University, North Carolina, USA who specialises in Chinese art, theory and criticism. His research focuses particularly on Chinese Buddhist art, and the role of China and Japan in Early Rockefeller Collecting.
Author of Longfellow’s Tattoos: Tourism, Collecting, and Japan, Dr Christine Guth leads the Asian Specialism on the V&A/RCA MA History of Design Course.
Dr Angus Lockyer, Lecturer in the History of Japan and Chair of the Japan Research Centre at SOAS, University of London.
Dr Sarah Teasley, historian of Japanese design and tutor in the Departments of History of Design and Critical & Historical Studies at the RCA.

Members of the Forgotten Japonisme project:
Professor Toshio Watanabe, Principle Investigator
Dr Yuko Kikuchi, Co-investigator
Rebecca Salter, Co-investigator
Dr Julian Stair, Co-investigator
Professor Yasuko Suga, Tsuda University, Tokyo, External team member
Dr Sachiko Oguma, Guest Researcher, The National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, External team member
Dr Anna Basham, AHRC Research Fellow
Helena Capkova, AHRC PhD Research Student
Piotr Splawski, AHRC PhD Research Student

Pricing:
2 days at full price £40 (lunch not included)
1 day at full price £25 (lunch not included)
2 days concession* £15 (lunch not included)
1 day concession* £10 (lunch not included)

*Eligible are students, unemployed and 65+

Book tickets

For questions please contact [email protected]">Eva Broer

Programme

Friday 9 July 2010

Morning Chair: Professor Deborah Cherry, University of Amsterdam, Associate Director of TrAIN and Co-director of Critical Curating, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London.

10.00 - 10.20 Registration

10.20 - 10.30 Introduction by Professor Toshio Watanabe

10.30 - 11.15 Keynote speaker Professor Shigemi Inaga:
Question of Oriental Aesthetics: antithesis to Design?

11.15 - 11.30 Coffee

11.30 - 12.00 Rebecca Salter: ‘Object as Metaphor’ - anthropologist collector of Japanese artefacts, Frederick Starr

12.00 - 12.30 Dr Sachiko Oguma: The Distribution of Japanese Artefacts in the USA from 1900s to 1960s

12.30 - 13.00 Professor Stanley Abe:
A Modern Taste for Chinese and Japanese Art

13.00 - 14.30 Lunch

Afternoon Chair: Dr Nicole Coolidge Rousmaniere, Director of the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures (SISJAC)

14.30 - 15.00 Dr Julian Stair: Japanning the Sung: The Emergence and Impact of Japonisme in Interwar English Studio Ceramics

15.00 - 15.30 Dr Anna Basham: Wells Coates’ Modernist Japonisme: Dovetailing East and West in 1930s Britain

15.30 - 15.45 Tea

15.45 - 16.15 Helena Čapková: St. Luke’s International Hospital: a transnational project in the heart of modern Tokyo

16.15 - 16.45 Piotr Spławski: From Japonisme to a Paradigm Shift in American Art Education: Arthur Wesley Dow’s Educational Vision Becomes Paradigmatic

16.45 - 17.15 Dr Christine Guth:
The Forgotten Japonisme of Pearl Buck’s The Big Wave

17.15 Close

Saturday 10 July 2010

Chair: Professor Oriana Baddeley, Deputy Director of TrAIN and Associate Dean of Research CCW (Camberwell, Chelsea and Wimbledon), University of the Arts London.

10.00 - 10.20 Registration

10.20 - 10.30 Introduction by Professor Toshio Watanabe

10.30 - 11.00 Professor Yasuko Suga: Promotion of Modern Japonisme: national representation through ‘sangyô-kôgei’

11.00 - 11.30 Dr Yuko Kikuchi:
American Occupation and Cold War Japonisme: containment and mixed marriage in design and film

11.30 - 11.45 Coffee

11.45 - 12.15 Dr Sarah Teasley:
When is Toshiba not ‘Japanese design’? The postwar politics of design, craft and Japaneseness

12.15 - 12.45 Dr Angus Lockyer: Forgettable Japan? A refuge from the world on show, before and after the war

12.45 - 14.15 Lunch

14.15 - 14.45 Professor Toshio Watanabe: Transnational Identity of a Garden: Gardens of Manzanar Internment Camp, California and Queen Lili’uokalani Garden at Hilo, Hawai’i

14.45 - 15.00 Annotated Bibliography and Chronologies
Presentation by Dr Anna Basham

15.00 - 15.15 Tea

15.15 - 17.15 Panel discussion

17.15 Close

Screening "Passing the Rainbow"

Wed, 19 May 2010 06:10:29 +0100

Date:Sunday 23 May 2010, 19:00 to 21:00

no.w.here, London

On Sunday 27 May from 19:00 TrAIN/KSB artist in residence Sandra Schaefer will be showing her film “Passing the Rainbow” at no.w.here, First Floor, 316-318 Bethnal Green Road, London.

The film deals with performative strategies to undermine the rigid gender norms in Afghan society: on the level of cinematographic stagings, in political work and in everyday life. Life and character collide and overlap, as do playfulness and activism.

For more information please visit the no.w.here website

Dr Virginia Whiles, Dr Amna Malik & Niru Ratnam In Conversation | Chair: Sutapa Biswas |

Fri, 29 Oct 2010 11:29:13 +0100

Date:Wednesday 17 November 2010, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre Chelsea College of Art and Design (Atterbury Street entrance)

Dr Virginia Whiles is an Art Historian, critic and curator. She completed her Doctorate in Social Anthropology at S.O.A.S. (2007), the title of her thesis, Miniature Manoeuvres: Tradition and Subversion in Contemporary Pakistani Art. In 2010, her book, Art and Polemic in Pakistan: Cultural Politics and Tradition in Contemporary Miniature Painting, was published by I.B. Tauris, London. Virginia is an Associate Lecturer at Chelsea College of Art and Design, UAL, and a member of the Adjunct Faculty at Beacon House National University (B.N.U.) and the National College of Arts (NCA) in Lahore, Pakistan. Formerly Professor de Culture Generale at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, Rouen France (1980-1999), and 2001-2005, she curated 5 exhibitions of Pakistani miniature painting, in various countries: India, France, Switzerland and Japan (Fukuoka Asian Art Museum). Virginia Whiles is an art critic and contributor to Art Monthly, Art Forum, and Art in America.

Virginia’s book charts the movement of contemporary miniature painting in Lahore, Pakistan (which has been the foundation of Virginia’s research for over 10 years). It is presented through participant-observation of the practice, based on traditional apprenticeship, and inspired to re-invent itself through measures of appropriation and parody towards a critical chronicle of socio-political issues such as fundamentalism, violence against women, nuclear warfare, corruption and militarism. Within the context of post-colonial art education, the issues are those of the provenances of convention and the consequences of innovation, in other words its interaction with the art world is shown as a means of projecting the politics of a localised cultural conflict onto a screen of globalised proportions to investigate the ideological issues at stake: gender conflicts, indigenous and western aesthetics, cultural identity, market and globalisation, audiences, performative knowledge. The study looks specifically at the works of 9 artists through a fusion of art historical and anthropological perspectives.

This Open Lecture has been organised to coincide with an exhibition partly curated by Virginia:
Le Cabinet de Curiosites de Mlle Clouet
An ethnographic exhibition as homage to the life and work of Shelagh Cluett (1948-2007). The display in the vitrines of the old library at Chelsea College will be composed of objects from her collection and documentation of her travels in Asia which inspired her sculpture. A catalogue including her works and texts contributed by colleagues and friends will be edited by the curator: Virginia Whiles, co-curator and archivist: Johanna Garrad.

Dr Amna Malik is a Lecturer in Art History and Theory at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. She has published a number of articles and essays examining contemporary art practice from the perspective of diaspora, including: History in the Present, in Ghosting, The Role of the Archive Within Contemporary Artists’ Film and Video (2006); Patterning Memory: Ellen Gallagher’s “Ichthyosaurus” at the Freud Museum’, Wasafari (2006); and Migratory Aesthetics: (Dis)placing the Black Maternal Subject in Martina Attille’s Dreaming Rivers (1988), in Black British Aesthetics Today (Victoria Arana ed., Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007). She is currently working on two book projects. Migratory Aesthetics examining the movement of artistic practices in the works of diaspora artists who have disappeared from mainstream narratives of art history, and Proximity is a re-appraisal of aesthetics and politics in recent art practice.

Niru Ratnam is Director of the Aicon Gallery, London. He studied English Literature at Oxford University, and completed his Masters in Art History at the Courtauld Institute of Art. As Director of Aicon, curatorial projects include solo exhibitions by the artists Rasheed Araeen, Simon Tegala and Ashish Avikunthak, as well as group exhibitions including, A Missing History: “The Other Story” re-visited (2010), which re-appraised questions of amnesia within mainstream culture and critical art historical discourse, and Royale With Cheese (2010). Previously Director of STORE gallery (London), Ratnam worked with many artists including Margaret Salmon, Ryan Gander and Rosalind Nashashibi. Working for Arts Council England, he designed and delivered the Inspire programme - an important museum and gallery placement scheme for curators of colour. Niru Ratnam’s writing on art is published widely, and he has been a contributing writer and art critic for Art Review, Frieze, Art Monthly, Third Text, and the Observer Magazine.

Sutapa Biswas is an internationally recognised artist, and Reader at Chelsea College of Art and Design, CCW, UAL.

The Event will be recorded for broadcast purposes, by ONFM Radio 101.4

Rasheed Araeen: In conversation with Dr. Courtney J. Martin. Chair: Sutapa Biswas

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 06:29:51 +0100

Date:Thursday 14 October 2010, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre Chelsea College of Art and Design (Atterbury Street entrance)

Rasheed Araeen is a renowned artist, whose complex and often delicate works have contributed extensively to the context of practice and minimalist sculpture in Britain since 1965. Araeen’s works have been exhibited internationally, and solo shows have been hosted at Ikon Gallery (1987), the South London Gallery (1994), and the Serpentine Gallery (1996. In 2007, Tate acquisitioned and exhibited his works (Tate Britain), and in 2011, his works are to be included in Modern British Sculpture, curated by Penelope Curtis (director, Tate Britain), at the Royal Academy, London. Araeen is also founder of Third Text (established in 1987), a scholarly art journal dedicated to critical perspectives on art and visual culture, and a forum re-appraising Eurocentric perceptions of art historical analysis. He curated ‘The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post War Britain’, a highly controversial exhibition which opened at the Hayward Gallery in 1989, the same year the problematic exhibition Magiciens de la Terre curated by Jean-Hubert Martin was launched in Paris at the Centre Georges Pompidou and the Grande Halle at the Parc de la Villette. A solo exhibition of Araeen’s works Before and After Minimalism: 1959-74 is currently on exhibition at Aicon Gallery (London) from September 17th - October 23rd 2010, and coincides with his new publication Art Beyond Art, Ecoaesthetics: A Manifesto for the 21st Century.

Courtney J. Martin received her doctorate in the History of Art from Yale University. Her research and writings have engaged several disciplines including contemporary art, architecture, and 20th century British art. Currently, she is a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of Art department at the University of California at Berkely. Prior to this appointment, she was a fellow at the Getty Research Institute at Los Angeles (2008-2009) and, in 2997, a Henry Moore Institute Research Fellow. She also worked in the media, arts, and culture unit of the Ford Foundation in New York. She is author of lengthy essays on the work of many contemporary artists, such as Rasheed Araeen, Kadar Attia, Rina Banerjee, Leslie Hewitt, Wangeehi MUtu, Ed Ruscha and Yinka Shonibare. She has also written for Art Asia Pacific, Artforum.com, Art Papers, Contemporary, Flashart, Frieze, and NKA.

Sutapa Biswas is an artist, and Reader at Chelsea College of Art and Design, CCW, UAL.

»Are you recording?«

Tue, 06 Jul 2010 05:56:56 +0100

Date:Wednesday 21 July 2010, 17:00 to 20:00

Triangle Gallery, Chelsea College of Art and Design

Sandra Schäfer with Nacir Alqas, Elfe Brandenburger, Aiqela Rezaie, Saba Sahar and Diana Saqeb

Exhibition concept in collaboration with Lena Ziese

Private View July 21st, 17:00-20:00
July 22nd, 2010, 11:00-20:00

In the exhibition »Are you recording?« the artist Sandra Schäfer presents her collaborative film practice with the Berlin-based filmmaker Elfe Brandenburger and filmmakers and actresses in Kabul. Schäfer contextualizes this practice with a a text-image-collage, photographs from her serial Urban settings and other kinds too, and a selection of films that were produced in Afghanistan since 1990.

The film Passing the Rainbow, shot in Kabul by Sandra Schäfer and Elfe Brandenburger in 2007, deals with performative strategies that undermine the rigid gender norms in Afghan society: on the level of cinematographic stagings, in politics and in everyday life. Life and character collide and overlap, as do playfulness and activism. The production of the film is adjusted by the protoganists to meet their own conditions in order, within that framework, to make a public statement. They act as co-producers of the image, shaping the content of scenes and moving in and out of the role of director.

The film Passing the Rainbow will be presented in an installation together with three other films. Two of them were also made in 2007, during the so called ‘process of democratization’ after 2002: 25 Darsad (25 Percent) by Diana Saqeb and Nejat (The Rescue) by Saba Sahar. With the short film Sayeh (Shadow) by Nacir Alqas, from 1990, an arc will be traced through the short history of Afghan cinema. Nacir Alqas, who was able, after a two-year ban, to finally shoot Sayeh in Kabul in 1990, tells, in his film, the story of a war widow whose new husband refuses to accept her son from her first marriage. The seemingly documentary setting and the lead actress’s dramatic work recall the films of Italian neorealism. In 25 Darsad the filmmaker Diana Saqeb portrays, in a documentary style, the daily life of different women MP’s. She joins them both during their political work and private duties at home. The director Saba Sahar shot her film Nejat in the popular Pakistani ‘Lollywood-style’ with sophisticated martial arts scenes. This genre is particular popular amongst the male audience in Afghanistan. Saba Sahar plays the leading role of an undercover police woman. Like her protagonist, the director’s day job is with the police.

In her text-image-collage Sandra Schäfer reflects on the cinematic practices and the creative process behind Passing the Rainbow as well as the perception of Diana Saqeb’s film 25 Darsad in Kabul. The photos from the series Urban settings and other kinds too deal with the idea of setting reality as a stage. The pictures shown in this exhibition were taken in Kabul between 2002 and 2008. Schäfer’s selection reflects the conviction that it is impossible to convey a comprehensive image of a city. Rather the photos show how public and private spaces are inscribed with specific gestures.

In her artistic work, Sandra Schäfer has previously dealt with themes of representation of gender, urbanity and (post-) colonialism. She has been involved in different collaborative projects with filmmakers, activists and theoreticians. Schäfer has visited Kabul and Tehran frequently since November 2002 to do research with Elfe Brandenburger for the film Passing the Rainbow and the film festival Kabul/Teheran: 1979ff. In 2007 she co-curated the film festival SPLICE IN; on gender and politics in Afghanistan, its neighbors and Europe, which took place in Kassel, Berlin and Hamburg. In 2008 the festival continued in Kabul under the title SECOND TAKE, in cooperation with BASA-Film and Afghan Film in Kabul. Schäfer also co-edited Kabul/Teheran 1979ff: Filmlandschaften, Städte unter Stress und Migration (Film Landscapes, Cities under Stress and Migration), a metroZones book published in 2006 by b_books-Verlag in Berlin. In 2009 her book stagings. Kabul, Film & Production of Representation was published in the same publishing house. The mobile cinema screenings will travel to Barcelona and Madrid in autumn 2010. Sandra Schäfer is currently fellow artist with Künstlerschloss Balmoral/TrAIN at Chelsea College in London.
www.mazefilm.de

Thanks to Jochen Becker, Eva Broer, Gerard Choy, Geoff Forster, Emma Hedditch, Britta Lorch, Barbara Nicholls, Karin Rebbert, Rob Rankine, Duncan Smith, Lena Ziese.
This exhibition is supported by Künstlerschloss Balmoral, TrAIN and acava.

TrAIN Open Lecture - Examining Forgotten Japonisme: Process and outcome of a three-year research project’

Fri, 01 Oct 2010 07:38:04 +0100

Date:Wednesday 06 October 2010, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre, Chelsea College of Art and Design (Atterbury Street entrance)

Professor Toshio Watanabe |‘Examining Forgotten Japonisme: Process and outcome of a three-year research project’

In 2007 the TrAIN Research Centre was awarded a three-year research grant by the AHRC for the project ‘Forgotten Japonisme: Taste for Japanese Art in Britain and the USA 1920s - 1950s’. This project started with a question of what happened between the classic period of Japonisme (mid-19th to early 20th century) and what might be called high-tech Japonisme of 1960s and after. Our team identified already at the start that the Folk Crafts (Mingei) Movement and the Modernist Interior Design were two areas where a continuous impact could be discerned for the period of 1920s to 1950s. Were these exceptions or can we find other areas where Japanese art made an impact? If so, who were the bearers of this taste? Can we still call these phenomena as Japonisme? This talk will report back on the process and outcome of the project focusing on how our perceptions changed from our initial assumptions to what we concluded after a three-year investigation. Some case studies, such as Japanese gardens in the USA, will also be discussed.

Professor Toshio Watanabe
Studied at the Universities of Sophia (in Tokyo), Tokyo, London and Basel, where he completed his PhD. Director of the Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation (TrAIN). He is an art historian, studying mostly the period 1850-1950, and has worked in the field of transnational art involving Japan and other countries. Current research interests include modern Japanese garden in transnational context, historiography of Japanese art history and Japonisme. Publications include High Victorian Japonisme (1991. Winner of the Prize of the Society for the Study of Japonisme), Japan and Britain: An Aesthetic Dialogue 1850-1930 (1991, Japanese edition 1992, co-edited), and Ruskin in Japan 1890-1940: Nature for art, art for life, (1997, Winner of 1998 Japan Festival Prize and of 1999 Gesner Gold Award). Currently President of the Japan Art History Forum (USA), member of the Bureau of the International Committee of Art History (CIHA) and Chair of CIHA-UK Committee. He was also Chair of the Association of Art Historians (1998-2001) and member of the Tate Britain Council (2002-2005).

EDITH DERDYK | On her practice and her Site Specificities |

Tue, 02 Nov 2010 13:47:19 +0000

Date:Wednesday 03 November 2010, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre, Chelsea College of Art and Design (Atterbury Street entrance)

Brazilian artist Edith Derdyk’s work departs from drawing in order to explore other media such as installation, video, printmaking and art objects. Recently she has produced works that explore the interconnection between site-specific installations and the artist book.

Derdyk’s work has been exhibited widely. Since 1981, she has been exhibited in several important exhibitions in Brazil and abroad, including: ‘15 Brazilian Artists’ at the Museum of Modern Art, curated by Tadeu Chiarelli (current director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in São Paulo); ‘Weaving the Invisible’, curated by Agnaldo Farias (current curator 29th Bienal de São Paulo) at the Instituto Tomie Ohtake; ‘Shadows and Mirrors’ curated by Aracy Amaral at the Museum of Modern Art, all in Sao Paulo. Other exhibitions in Brazil include: Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio de Janeiro and Museu de Arte Contemporanea in Niterói.

Internationally she has exhibited at: the Lulea Biennial, and Balelatina in Basel in Switzerland; Across the Ocean, Oporto, Portugal; Langeline in Copenhagen, Denmark; Art Paris at the Grand Palais, France; Derdyk has had a solo show at Haim Chanim Gallery in New York; as well as work included in other exhibitions in México, Colombia, Peru, and Germany.

Edith Derdyk has been awarded several prizes and grants, including: Residency at Vermont Studio Center, USA in 1993; Artist-researcher grant at The Rockfeller Foundation, Bellagio Center, Italy 1999; Research Grant Fundação Vitae Brasil 2002; Artist of the Year Prize APCA (São Paulo Association of Art Critics) 2002; Photography Prize Porto Seguro 2004; Residency, The Banff Centre, Canada 2007.

She is the author of various books on drawing, including: Formas de Pensar o desenho (Ways of thinking about Drawing) 1988 and O desenho da Figura Humana (Drawing the Human Figure) 1989, both published by Scipione; Linha de Horizonte - por uma poética do ato criador (Horizon Line - for a poetics of the creative act), Escuta, 2001; Sewing Thread (Linha de Costura), C/Arte, 2010. She is the editor of: Disegno. Desenho. Desiginio, Senac, 2008.

Currently she lectures at the Instituto Tomie Ohtake in São Paulo.

This event is free and open to all

RSVP to TrAIN Administrator: [email protected]

TrAIN Open Lecture - Professor Joseph Heathcott

Mon, 22 Nov 2010 08:12:36 +0000

Date:Wednesday 01 December 2010, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre, Chelsea College of Art and Design (Atterbury Street entrance)

THE KNOWN CITY: VISUAL RHETORICS OF URBANISM IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Despite the uncanny nature of the city, we do everything we can to convince ourselves that we understand it. Nowhere is this more the case than in those professions dedicated to divining and prophesying the urban through the gentle arts of persuasion. This lecture examines a range of visual tropes deployed over the last century by architects, planners, social reformers, investors, and marketers to render the city known—and indeed knowable. Through maps, ideographs, diagrams, photographs, and trade films, we will trace the visual registration of powerful urban narratives that reveal the organization of an urban episteme. We will also review the emergence since the 1960s of a critical discourse of urbanism among artists and activists whose interventions, détournements, and insurgent geographies raise fundamental questions about what we can and cannot know of our cities.

Joseph Heathcott is the 2010-2011 U.S. Fulbright Distinguished Chair at the University of the Arts. He is an Associate Professor and Chair of Urban Studies at The New School in New York, where he teaches in Eugene Lang College and Parsons School of Design. His work considers the role of collective memory and creative expression as everyday civic practices that shape the metropolis over time. His work has appeared in a wide range of academic journals, magazines, newspapers, trade publications, blogs, and DIY ‘zines’. His most recent photography exhibit Post-Acropolis Metropolis was installed at the City Hall Gallery in Stuttgart, Germany. He has been awarded fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Erasmus Institute, the Mellon Foundation, and the Brown Center for the Humanities. Currently he serves on the Board of Directors of the Center for Urban Pedagogy In New York, and frequently gives his time to neighborhood groups and community organizations.

RSVP to TrAIN Administrator: [email protected]

Meeting Margins International Conference

Tue, 26 Oct 2010 06:57:35 +0100

Dates:
Saturday 04 December 2010, 10:00 to 18:00
Sunday 05 December 2010, 10:00 to 18:00

University of Essex

Meeting Margins International Conference Transnational Art in Latin America and Europe 1950-1978 University of Essex, Colchester, United Kingdom 4th-5th December 2010

Visit the Meeting Margins website for programme details and registration.

The two day event is convened by Professor Valerie Fraser and Dr María Iñigo Clavo of the Department of Art History and Theory at the University of Essex, and Dr Michael Asbury and Dr Isobel Whitelegg of TrAIN, the Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation at the University of the Arts London, and is part of the 3-year Meeting Margins research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). The conference is also supported by the British Academy the UK’s National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Addressing central themes of the Meeting Margins project, panels will focus on relationships between art and political activism in Latin America and Europe 1950-1978, the history of key exhibitions in Latin America (the São Paulo Bienal, Tucumán Arde) and their relationship to local and transnational political contexts during this period, and the popularisation of scientific thought and its impact on artistic exchanges between Latin America and Europe.

Speakers
Suzana Vaz (UAL/TrAIN)
German Alfonso Adaid (UAL/TrAIN)
Sergio Martins (University College London)
Aquiles Pantaleão (UAL/London College of Communication)
Fernando Davis (Universidad Nacional de La Plata)
Fernanda Nogueira (Researcher, translator and literary critic)
Zanna Gilbert (Tate/University of Essex)
Olga Fernandez (Royal College of Art/Universidad Autónoma de Madrid/Universidad Nebrija, Madrid) Eduardo Grüner (Universidad de Buenos Aires)
Jaime Vindel (Universidad de León)
Miguel López (Art Historian and Independent Curator)
Oriana Baddeley (TrAIN/UAL)
Valerie Fraser (University of Essex) María Iñigo Clavo (University of Essex)
Michael Asbury (TrAIN/UAL)
Isobel Whitelegg (TrAIN/UAL)

Additional Contributions
Pablo La Fuente (Afterall)
Almir Mavignier
Andrea Giunta
Taína Caragol
Dawn Ades

Email Ian Dudley for further details: [email protected]
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Meeting Margins Conferência Internacional Arte Transnacional na América Latina e Europa 1950-1978 Universidade de Essex, Colchester, Reino Unido
4-5 Dezembro 2010

Programa e inscrições

O evento de dois dias é convocado pelo professor Valerie Fraser e Dr María Iñigo Clavo do Departamento de História da Arte e Teoria da Universidade de Essex, e Dr Michael Asbury e Dr Isobel Whitelegg de TrAIN, o Centro de Investigação em Arte Transnacional, Identidade e Nação na Universidade de Artes Londres, e faz parte do projeto de pesquisa de 3 anos Meeting Margins financiada pelo Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). A conferência também é suportado pelo British Academy, o acamdemy nacional do Reino Unido para a Academia de Ciências Humanas e Sociais.

Abordar temas centrais do projeto Meeting Margins, painéis incidirá sobre as relações entre arte e ativismo político na América Latina e Europa 1950-1978, a história das exposições importantes na América Latina (a Bienal de São Paulo, Tucumán Arde) e sua relação com locais e transnacionais de contextos políticos durante este período e a popularização do pensamento científico e seu impacto no intercâmbios artísticos entre a América Latina e Europa.

Oradores
Suzana Vaz (UAL/TrAIN)
German Alfonso Adaid (UAL/TrAIN)
Sergio Martins (University College London)
Aquiles Pantaleão (UAL/London College of Communication)
Fernando Davis (Universidad Nacional de La Plata)
Fernanda Nogueira (Researcher, translator and literary critic)
Zanna Gilbert (Tate/University of Essex)
Olga Fernandez (Royal College of Art/Universidad Autónoma de Madrid/Universidad Nebrija, Madrid) Eduardo Grüner (Universidad de Buenos Aires)
Jaime Vindel (Universidad de León) Miguel López (Art Historian and Independent Curator)
Oriana Baddeley (TrAIN/UAL)
Valerie Fraser (University of Essex) María Iñigo Clavo (University of Essex)
Michael Asbury (TrAIN/UAL)
Isobel Whitelegg (TrAIN/UAL)

Contribuições Adicionais
Pablo La Fuente (Afterall)
Almir Mavignier
Andrea Giunta
Taína Caragol
Dawn Ades

E-mail Ian Dudley para mais detalhes: [email protected]

Meeting Margins Conferencia Internacional Arte Transnacional en América Latina y Europa 1950-1978 Universidad de Essex, Colchester, Reino Unido
4-5 Diciembre 2010

Programa y inscripción

El evento de dos días ha sido convocado por la Profesora Valerie Fraser y la Dr. María Iñigo Clavo del Departamento de Historia y Teoría del Arte de la Universidad de Essex, y el Dr. Michael Asbury y la Dr. Isobel Whitelegg pertenecientes a TrAIN, Research Centre of Transnational Art, Identity and Nation que pertenece a la University of the Arts London. La conferencia hace parte del proyecto de investigación Meeting Margins, el cual ha tenido una duración de tres años y ha sido financiado por el Arts and Humanities Research Council (ARHC). La conferencia también ha sido financiada por la British Academy y el UK’s National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Abordando los temas centrales del proyecto de Meeting Margins, diferentes paneles se centraran en las relaciones entre arte y activismo político en América Latina y Europa 1950-1978, la historia de exposiciones fundamentales en América Latina (Bienal de Sao Paolo, Tucumán Arde) y su relación con el contexto local y transnacional durante este periodo, al igual que la popularización del pensamiento científico y su impacto en el intercambo entre América Latina y Europa.

Participantes
Suzana Vaz (UAL/TrAIN)
German Alfonso Adaid (UAL/TrAIN)
Sergio Martins (University College London)
Aquiles Pantaleão (UAL/London College of Communication)
Fernando Davis (Universidad Nacional de La Plata)
Fernanda Nogueira (Researcher, translator and literary critic)
Zanna Gilbert (Tate/University of Essex)
Olga Fernandez (Royal College of Art/Universidad Autónoma de Madrid/Universidad Nebrija, Madrid) Eduardo Grüner (Universidad de Buenos Aires)
Jaime Vindel (Universidad de León)
Miguel López (Art Historian and Independent Curator)
Oriana Baddeley (TrAIN/UAL)
Valerie Fraser (University of Essex)
María Iñigo Clavo (University of Essex)
Michael Asbury (TrAIN/UAL)
Isobel Whitelegg (TrAIN/UAL)

Contribuciones Adicionales
Pablo La Fuente (Afterall)
Andrea Giunta
Taína Caragol
Dawn Ades

No dude en contactarme, Ian Dudley, si necesita más detalles: [email protected]

TrAIN Associate Project: Photography Forum

Mon, 25 Oct 2010 11:32:51 +0100

Date:Friday 05 November 2010, 10:00 to 16:00

Chelsea College of Art and Design

Photography Forum: Photographic Portraiture - Transgressive and Transformative Potentials
5 November 2010, 10:00-18:00, Chelsea Green Room

This one-day photography forum explores the debates connected with photographic identities in the light of transnational, transcultural and transgender politics. At the same time, the forum sets out to challenge all too formative expectations of the interplay between depicted sitter, photographer and image in relation to the various perceptions of its respective viewers. During the day, we will engage in discursive approaches to images of human nature today - that is to say: after the ‘post-human’ and the supposed ‘death of portraiture’. Additionally, this forum aims at establishing common ground among early and mid-career researchers within UAL with a view to possible future research collaborations.

The forum will take the form of an informal ‘round table’ discussion with two panels: ´Re-Thinking Identities of Photographic Portraiture´ in the morning, and ´Trans-Portraiture: Nation, Gender, Culture´ in the afternoon. Presentations - by both artists and theoreticians - will vary in style including theoretical, practice-led, performative and audio-visual investigations into the subject matter. Papers will be pre-circulated, so the invited speakers will not only present their research but also respond to one of the other presentations.

Speakers include:
Jon Cairns, Senior Lecturer (BA Fine Art, CSM)
Beverley Carruthers, Course Director (BA Photography, LCC)
Bruno Ceschel, Associate Lecturer (BA Photography, LCC)
Steve Cross, Course Director (BA Media and Cultural Studies, LCC)
Daphne Plessner, Course Director (BA Book Arts, LCC)
Dr Jonathan Wright, Senior Lecturer (Media and Cultural Studies, LCC)

Chairs:
Prof Oriana Baddeley, Deputy Director at TrAIN
Prof Elizabeth Edwards, Senior Research Fellow at PARC

Conveners:
Dr Sara Davidmann, AHRC Research Fellow, LCC
Dr Wiebke Leister, Associate Director PARC

For more information about the TAP initiative, visit the TAP page.

East Meets West: Fashion Crosses Continents

Tue, 19 Oct 2010 08:47:07 +0100

Date:Thursday 25 November 2010, 19:30 to 22:00

The Barbican: Cinema 2

An illuminating look at the enormous impact that Japanese aesthetics has had on western fashion and culture - and vice versa. Panel discussion with Barbara Vinken, author of Fashion-Zeitgeist!, scholar Nicolas Cambridge, Brooke Hodge , Director of Exhibitions and Publications, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and Toshio Watanabe , Director of TrAIN.

Visit the Barbican website for more details and to book tickets.

TrAIN Open Lecture: Laura Mulvey in conversation with Griselda Pollock. Chair: Sutapa Biswas

Mon, 10 Jan 2011 10:27:45 +0000

Date:Wednesday 26 January 2011, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre - Chelsea College of Art and Design, SW1P 4JU (Atterbury Street entrance)

This event is free and open to all

This event is part of the TrAIN Open Lectures Series and is the fourth in a series of talks organised by Sutapa Biswas at CCW for the graduate programme. The event is in collaboration with the research group, Subjectivities and Feminisms (UAL), and is also generously supported by Film and Video Umbrella (London) and OnFM Radio 101.4.

This event is free and open to all
There will be a post-lecture reception in the Red Room

Laura Mulvey and Griselda Pollock are both eminent feminist scholars, who have through their works, transformed the ways in which we engage with, and understand visual practices. It is over 30 years since Riddles of the Sphinx, Mulvey’s film collaboration with Peter Wollen (1977) was made. This unique event will explore the historical relevance and impact internationally, of feminist film practices on visual culture.

Laura Mulvey is Professor of Film and Media Studies at Birkbeck College, University of London. Mulvey’s essay, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, written in 1973 and published in 1975 in the influential British film theory journal Screen, was one of the first major writings that helped shift the orientation of film theory towards a psychoanalytic framework. Influenced by the theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, Mulvey’s writings examined the intersection of film theory, psychoanalysis, and feminism. This seminal work later appeared in a collection of her essays entitled Visual and Other Pleasures. Mulvey is also author of: Visual and Other Pleasures (Macmillan 1989; second edition 2009), Fetishism and Curiosity (British Film Institute 1996), Citizen Kane (in the BFI Classics series 1996) and Death Twenty-four Times a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (Reaktion Books 2006). She has made six films in collaboration with Peter Wollen including Frida Kahlo and Tina Modotti (Arts Council 1980), and Disgraced Monuments made with artist/film-maker Mark Lewis (Channel 4, 1994).

Griselda Pollock is Professor of Social and Critical Histories of Art at the University of Leeds. She a prominent art historian and cultural analyst, and a world-renowned scholar of international, post-colonial feminist studies in the visual arts. She is best known for her theoretical and methodological innovation, combined with deeply engaged readings of historical and contemporary art, film and cultural theory. Since 1977, Pollock has been one of the most influential scholars of modern, avant-garde art, postmodern art, and contemporary art. She is also a major influence in feminist theory, feminist art history and gender studies. Pollock studied Modern History at Oxford and History of European Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art. Her many publications include: Old Mistresses; Women, Art and Ideology, London Routledge & Kegan (Griselda Pollock with Rozsika Parker), 1981; Aesthetics. Politics. Ethics Julia Kristeva 1966-96, Special Issue Guest Edited parallax, no. 8, 1998; Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity and the Histories of Art, London Routledge and New York Methuen, 1987; The Sacred and the Feminine, edited by Griselda Pollock and Victoria Turvey-Sauron. London I.B. Tauris, 2008.

Sutapa Biswas is an artist, and Reader at Chelsea College of Art and Design, CCW, UAL.

The Event will be recorded for broadcast purposes, by ONFM Radio 101.4

RSVP to TrAIN Administrator: [email protected]

‘Room for Drawing’: Mary Doyle & Kate MacFarlane in Conversation with Deborah Cherry

Wed, 09 Nov 2011 16:02:56 +0000

Date:Monday 07 February 2011, 17:00 to 19:00

Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, Southampton Row - RLS 714

This event is free and open to all but places are limited so please RSVP to book your place, by emailing [email protected]

The Drawing Room is the only public, non-profit, gallery in the UK and Europe dedicated to the investigation and presentation of international contemporary drawing. Mary Doyle and Kate Macfarlane, Co-Founders and Co-Directors of the Drawing Room will give a presentation about the rationale for establishing the Drawing Room, illustrated by a selection of Drawing Room projects since 2002.

Mary Doyle has worked in the visual art sector for over 20 years. As Senior Curator at the Contemporary Art Society she developed nineteen specialised contemporary art collections for fifteen museums and galleries throughout England, from 1995-2005. She worked with curators on curatorial development programmes and collection schemes at the CAS since 1993. Prior to this, she worked at Arts Council National Touring Exhibitions, the British Council and several commercial galleries in London.

Kate MacFarlane studied art history and education at Cambridge University (1979-83). Between 1983-4 she worked on a voluntary and freelance basis at Whitechapel Art Gallery. Between 1984-5 she initiated and ran an education programme for Riverside Studios, London. She was Exhibitions Organiser for Riverside Studios exhibition programme 1985-9 and was appointed Director of the programme in 1989. She co-founded The Drawing Room in 2000 and since that time has co-devised the organisation’s vision and programme. She has been responsible for the delivery of its projects on a full-time basis since January 2004 and has edited publications produced by The Drawing Room.

This event is free and open to all

RSVP to [email protected]

Visit The Drawing Room website.

TrAIN Conversation: Christopher Kul-Want and Dean Kenning in conversation with Deborah Cherry

Thu, 10 Feb 2011 08:06:55 +0000

Date:Monday 21 February 2011, 17:00 to 19:00

Innovation Centre, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, Southampton Row

Dean Kenning will be in conversation with Christopher Kul-Want about his recently published book, ‘Philosophers on Art, From Kant to the Postmodernists, A Critical Reader’. The book brings together twenty five texts on art written by twenty philosophers, drawing on Continental philosophy and aesthetics, the Marxist intellectual tradition and psychoanalytic theory. In talking about the book’s choice of texts and their thematics, the discussion will consider philosophy’s attempts to provide an ontology of art.

Christopher Kul-Want is a widely published writer in art history and theory, and is editor of ‘Philosophers on Art, From Kant to the Postmodernists, A Critical Reader’ (Columbia University press, 2010). He is course director of the Masters in Research in Art Theory and Philosophy at Central St Martins, a course starting in 2011.

Dr Dean Kenning is an artist and a writer. Solo exhibitions include Commonism at Five Years (2010) and The Dulwich Horror: HP Lovecraft and the Crisis in British Housing at Space Station Sixty-Five (2007). He has published in Third Text, Art Review and Modern Painters, and writes regularly for Art Monthly. He teaches on the BA and MA Fine Art at Central St Martins, and is Research Fellow in Contemporary Art at Kingston University, where he has designed and edited Centre for Useless Splendour - A Book. Current projects include Reclaim the Mural as part of The Work in Progress art group, at Whitechapel Gallery. [Faculty of Art, Design & Architecture, Kingston University, Kingston upon Thames, Surrey KT1 1LQ]

This event is free and open to all, and places will be allocated on a ‘first come, first served’ basis

Gabriel Orozco: Mobile Work | Briony Fer, Professor of Art & History. Introduced by Professor Oriana Baddeley |

Fri, 25 Mar 2011 07:43:49 +0000

Date:Wednesday 09 March 2011, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre - Chelsea College of Art and Design, SW1P 4JU (Atterbury Street entrance)

This event is free and open to all but places are limited so please RSVP to book your place, by emailing [email protected]

To coincide with the Tate Modern exhibition of the Mexican artist, Gabriel Orozco (Wednesday 19 January-Monday 11 April 2011), Briony Fer will discuss this artist’s work and debate key issues around the themes of the transnational with Oriana Baddeley.

Briony Fer is Professor of History of Art at University College London. She has published extensively on 20th century and contemporary art. Key publications include her books; On Abstract Art (2000), and The Infinite Line (2004), both published by Yale University Press. She has written on many contemporary artists, including Gabriel Orozco, Roni Horn, Vija Celmins, Ed Ruscha, Rachel Whiteread, and David Batchelor. Much of her research has focused on the work of the American sculptor Eva Hesse, writing for the 2002 retrospective of the artist, curated by Elisabeth Sussman, at SFMOMA in 2002.

Professor Oriana Baddeley is Deputy Director of TrAIN and Associate Dean of Research for CCW.

Other forthcoming lectures are:

23rd March: Julian Stallabrass in Conversation with Sutapa Biswas.

18th May: Michael McMillan, ‘The Kitchen: Memory and Food Cultures’, Introduced by Carol Tulloch.

1st June: TBA.

Professor Julian Stallabrass in Conversation with Iain Boal | Chaired by Sutapa Biswas |

Fri, 25 Mar 2011 07:44:11 +0000

Date:Wednesday 23 March 2011, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre - Chelsea College of Art and Design, SW1P 4JU (Atterbury Street entrance)

This event is free and open to all but places are limited so please RSVP to book your place, by emailing [email protected]

In 2005, Retort’s book, Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War, raised an intense debate about the entanglement of war, terror, spectacle and the economy in the period since the September 11 attacks. Since its publication, there have been many new developments affecting the issues discussed in the book, from the innovations of the Obama administration to Wikileaks and the rise of Web 2.0. In this unique event, Iain Boal, one of the Retort authors, and Julian Stallabrass, will discuss these developments in the context of ongoing war and intensive spectacle.

Julian Stallabrass is a writer, curator, photographer and lecturer. He is Professor in art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art, and is the author of Art Incorporated, Oxford University Press 2004, Internet Art: The Online Clash Between Culture and Commerce, Tate Publishing, London 2003; Paris Pictured, Royal Academy of Arts, London 2002; High Art Lite: British Art in the 1990s, Verso, London 1999 and Gargantua: Manufactured Mass Culture, Verso, London 1996; he is the co-editor of Ground Control: Tecnology and Utopia, Black Dog Publishing, London 1997, Occupational Hazard: Critical Writing on Recent British Art, Black Dog Publishing, London 1998, and Locus Solus: Technology, Identity and Site in Contemporary Art, Black Dog Publishing, London 1999. He has written art criticism regularly for publications including Tate, Art Monthly and the New Statesman. He is an editorial board member of Art History, New Left Review and Third Text. He curated the 2008 Brighton Photo Biennial, ‘Memory of Fire: Images of War and the War of Images’.

Iain Boal
is a social historian of science and technics, affiliated with the University of California at Berkeley and Santa Cruz. He is currently a Fellow at the Institute of Humanities at Birkbeck. He is associated with Retort, a group of writers, artisans, artists and teachers based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He co-edited Resisting the Virtual Life: The Culture and Politics of Information (City Lights, 1995) and was one of the authors of Retort’s Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (Verso, 2006). He collaborated on Retort’s installation at the 2nd Seville Biennial, “To Offend Our Enemies”, in 2006/7. He is co-editor of the forthcoming West of Eden: Communes, Commoning and Utopia in Northern California (PM Press). In 2005/6 he was a Guggenheim Fellow in Science and Technology, and his brief and heretical history of the bicycle, The Green Machine, will be published by Notting Hill Editions in the spring of 2011.

The Event will be recorded for broadcast purposes, by ONFM Radio 101.4

Other forthcoming lectures are:

18th May: Michael McMillan, ‘The Kitchen: Memory and Food Cultures’, Introduced by Carol Tulloch.

1st June: TBA.

Karen Knorr | Chaired by Sutapa Biswas |

Fri, 18 Feb 2011 07:00:51 +0000

Date:Wednesday 23 February 2011, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre - Chelsea College of Art and Design, SW1P 4JU (Atterbury Street entrance)

This event is free and open to all but places are strictly limited so please RSVP to book your place, by emailing [email protected]

This event is part of the TrAIN Open Lectures Series and is the fifth in a series of talks organised by Sutapa Biswas at CCW for the graduate programme. The event is in collaboration with the research group, Subjectivities and Feminisms (UAL), and is also generously supported by Film and Video Umbrella (London) and OnFM Radio 101.4.

Karen Knorr is an established artist and Professor of Photography at the University for the Creative Arts. She grew up in Puerto Rico in the 1960’s and has been based in England since 1976. Originally part of the same photographic movement as Sunil Gupta, Mitra Tabrizian, Olivier Richon and Mark Lewis, Karen Knorr has transitioned from her earlier documentary style to one defined by the imaginary. With works recently exhibited in Elles@ Centre Pompidou, this London-based artist is certainly no stranger to the museum space, but it is this very space upon which she fixes her artistic gaze. Photographing arts institutions with one eye trained on the fantastic, Knorr transforms what can often be forbidding, inaccessible, and static into something playful and unexpected (not to mention slightly mischievous). In her recent exhibition titled, Fables, at Musée Carnavalet, Knorr showed her recent series of large format photographs of the museum wherein, all manner of woodland fauna roaming the deluxe apartments of the Musée were pictured; pigeons flutter manically around flawless blue satin, and squirrels climb over 18th-century armoires. In this particular series, Knorr was inspired by the fables written by Aesop and La Fontaine, but in picturing this animal transgression of such a sanctified cultural institution, she is also asks visitors to reconfigure their relationship to the space of the museum itself - to re-invent and re-imagine it. Most recently, in the works India Song, exhibited at Tasveer Arts (Bangalore), New Delhi and traveling to Kolkata and Mumbai, Knorr considers the animal life and the cultural heritage of North India referencing, in particular, the Pancha Tantra and the intricate detail of Mughal painting. India Song, incorporates a rich visual aesthetic found in South Asia and in Puerto Rico, to explore complex questions of caste, femininity, and myth in contemporary India.

At this Event, Knorr will address the context of this body of work India Song, with reference to a narrative and allegorical impulse in photography that arose as responses to debates regarding the politics of representation in Britain in the 1980s.

Karen Knorr’s work, is represented by James Hyman Gallery (London), and Filles du Calvaire Gallery (Paris), where this work will feature in October and November 2011.

Sutapa Biswas is an artist, and Reader at Chelsea College of Art and Design, CCW, UAL.

The Event will be recorded for broadcast purposes, by ONFM Radio 101.4

RSVP to TrAIN Administrator: [email protected]

Other forthcoming lectures are:
9th March: Briony Fer, ‘Gabriel Orozco: Mobile Work’, Introduced by Oriana Baddeley.

23rd March: Julian Stallabrass in Conversation with Sutapa Biswas.

4th May: Alexandra Handal, Introduced by Oriana Baddeley.

18th May: Michael McMillan, ‘The Kitchen: Memory and Food Cultures’, Introduced by Carol Tulloch.

1st June: TBA.

TrAIN Open Lecture: Michael McMillan | Introduced by Carol Tulloch | THE KITCHEN: MEMORY AND FOOD CULTURES |

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 06:29:58 +0100

Date:Wednesday 18 May 2011, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre - Chelsea College of Art and Design, SW1P 4JU (Atterbury Street entrance)

This event is free and open to all but places are limited so please RSVP to book your place, by emailing [email protected]

The kitchen in the domestic interior is where cooking and sometimes eating is done and sometimes the informal social centre of the home. Embodied in the material culture of the migrant kitchen of Caribbean families are memories of dishes, tastes, cooking techniques, methods and shopping practices have been constructed and enacted as part of a Black British food culture. The dialectics of how this cultural boundary was constructed includes the entertainment and the containment of cultural difference in terms of cultural diversity, but also a resistance to a hegemonic English food culture.

But the emergence of a Caribbean food culture in the UK also maps the inter-generational shifts and negotiations in terms of how the second generation Black British young person identified with or disavowed the food culture of their parents. And food, dishes, tastes, cooking methods and eating habits could be a source of tension between parents wanting to give their children rice and peas and their children wanting fish and chips for instance.

Childhood experiences of food culture have a significant impact on us as adults in shaping our food identities and our earliest memories can be triggered by touch, taste and smell. Consequently, the relationship between food and identity is also contextually mediated by the interplay of sensory, emotional and cognitive experiences.

Michael McMillan is a writer, playwright, and artist-curator of Vincentian migrant parentage. Recent plays include: a new translation of Bertolt Brecht’s The Good Person of Sezuan set in Jamaica 1980 (2010), Babel Junction (2006) & Master Juba (2006).

His critically acclaimed installation/exhibition The West Indian Front Room (Geffrye Museum 2005-06) led to the BBC4 documentary Tales from the Front Room, and interactive website www.thefrontroom.org.uk/, as well as international commissions in Holland and the Caribbean. His recent publication is The Front Room: Migrant Aesthetics in the Home (Black Dog Publishing 2009).

Other installations/exhibitions include: The Beauty Shop (198 Contemporary Arts & Learning 2008) and he was lead designer/co-curator of The Southall Story (South Bank Centre 2010). He is Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at the London College of Communication (University of the Arts, London) and was recently awarded a practice based Doctor of Arts from Middlesex University.

Other forthcoming lectures are:

1st June: Stefanie Kettel, Balmoral Artist in Residence.

TrAIN Open Lecture: Stefanie Kettel, Balmoral Artist in Residence 'Anywhere is Somewhere Else'| Introduced by Toshio Watanabe |

Mon, 16 May 2011 10:29:57 +0100

Date:Wednesday 01 June 2011, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre - Chelsea College of Art and Design, SW1P 4JU (Atterbury Street entrance)

This event is free and open to all but places are limited so please RSVP to book your place, by emailing [email protected]

Anywhere is Somewhere Else

Stefanie Kettel is a 2011 Artist in Residence with the TrAIN and the Kunstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral exchange programme. During her residency with TrAIN (January-June 2011) Stefanie Kettel designed a new series of paintings and collages. She also introduced a new facet to her work by creating a short film. In her lecture she will show her work and explain her working methods.
Stefanie studied Fine Arts at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main with Hermann Nitsch and Simon Starling. She lives and works in Frankfurt am Main.

Kettel’s paintings begin as a computer-generated collage/design, which is then artistically transferred on to canvas. The resulting motifs and structures take on a new, individual, and unique, form. Images from newspapers, magazines, advertisements of different contexts and decades, as well as the artist’s own photographs serve as templates.

Through her portrayal of nature, Kettel creates an entirely different world with a disturbing and mysterious ambience. It is the ‘nowhereness’ of the setting that allows the scenes to appear so unusual and eerie. She allows the existence of a world where dream and reality seem to be careening. Clean lines and constructive nesting exemplify the conditions and the aesthetics of our time and are therefore in contrast with the ornamental, organic forms of natural environmental surroundings. The works question our interaction with the environment, the mutual relations of our internal and exterior feelings; that influences us on both sides.

Stefanie Kettel plays with the memory of stories without representing reality. Her works convey total peace in their timeless moment, a remembrance of photo albums that flashes up briefly and than fades. Psychological, social and cultural references are reflected in the works. The hybrid structures that can be studied in the artist’s works correspond to the hybrid culture in which we live today.

This event is free and open to all but places are limited so please RSVP to book your place, by emailing [email protected]

CCW DESIGN LECTURE SERIES in collaboration with TrAIN Research Centre: Dr Yuko Kikuchi ‘Toward a Transnational Framework for Design History: American design intervention in Japan during the Occupation and Cold War’

Tue, 01 Feb 2011 09:58:09 +0000

Date:Monday 07 February 2011, 18:00 to 19:30

Lecture Theatre - Chelsea College of Art and Design, SW1P 4JU (Atterbury Street entrance)

This is a new lecture series on Monday evenings. The series is created as part of the design courses at CCW in conjunction with TrAIN, primarily for graduate students who are studying Design and Design History across CCW. Lectures will address critical issues and research methodologies that are currently being debated in the field of Design. Speakers will be invited widely from design historians, theorists and practitioners.

This event is free and open to all

Design history and study in the 21st century is experiencing transition that sees a shifting of its scope from the Anglocentric to the global. In this current, East Asia has been recognised as a unigonorable other centre of modern design development. The current agenda of design history and study is focused on how we can engage this discipline’s methodological and critical approach with non-Anglophone studies, while accumulating empirical data of indigenous development in these areas. By addressing this design history agenda, my presentation aims to demonstrate one approach by which we can link up national and transnational design development. It will focus on American design intervention in Asia, in particular Japan during the Occupation and Cold War period, and examine how the development of modern design in East Asia is entwined with the North American interest in Asia. I will discuss the changing image and taste for Japanese craft design through the American intervention in Japanese craft design for export from the Occupation period through to American designer Russel Wright’s project; secondly, I will discuss the idea of ‘Asian Modern’ and its relation with American design identity; and finally, I will look at Hollywood films as a disseminating agent for popularizing American taste for Japan and Japanese craft design.

Dr Yuko Kikuchi is Reader in the History of Art and Design at TrAIN (Research Centre for Transnational Art Identity and Nation), University of the Arts London. She is also an editorial member of Journal of Design History. Her works include Mingei Theory and Japanese Modernisation: Cultural Nationalism and ‘Oriental Orientalism’ (London: RoutlegeCurzon, 2004), Refracted Modernity: Visual Culture and Identity in Colonial Taiwan (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007), and co-author with Toshio Watanabe, Ruskin in Japan 1890-1940: Nature for Art, Art for Life (Tokyo: Cogito, 1997). She is currently working on a book about Russel Wright and American intervention in Asian design during the Cold War, and is organising publications and conferences as part of a joint international project ‘Oriental Modernity: Modern Design Development in East Asia, 1920-1990’.

Other forthcoming lectures are:

7 March - Carol Tulloch (TrAIN-UAL/V&A)

21 March - Tomoko Azumi (Designer, t.n.a. design studio)

28 March - Saif Osmani (Spatial designer/artist/architecture curator)

Email Kate Pelling, [email protected] with any questions.

Inti Guerrero : Flavio de Carvalho and his City for the Naked Man

Fri, 04 Feb 2011 09:43:24 +0000

Date:Wednesday 09 February 2011, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre, Chelsea College of Art & Design

In 1930 artist and architect Flavio de Carvalho (1899-1973), known to be the enfant terrible of Brazil’s avant-garde, proposed to build a new city in the tropics that would have no god, property, nor marriage.

He envisioned an urban scenario for a ‘naked mankind’ that would have stripped itself from its cultural body, or in his words, a man without ‘scholastic taboos, free for reasoning and thinking’ in order to begin a painstaking process of wonderment, change and self-transformation.

De Carvalho’s utopia was set to be a constellation of centres and laboratories; the city’s ‘Laboratory of erotica’, was thought of as a place where ‘the naked man would select his own erotic forms, […] where he could orient his energy toward any direction, without repression; where he would fulfil his desires, discover new desires.’

By understanding the experience of sexuality as a kind of libido without a predetermined perspective, that is, without a predetermined constructed desire, but as a continuous rhizomatic experience, which would bifurcate according to the individual’s subjectivity, Flavio de Carvalho, by 1930 seemed to propose an architectural ‘blueprint’ which sought to dissolve any socio-cultural fixation regarding people’s sexuality and corporality.

In 2010, curator, Inti Guerrero, created a group exhibition titled ‘The City of the Naked Man’ at the Museum of Modern Art of Sao Paulo, which embarked on a curatorial translation of Flavio de Carvalho’s aforementioned transgressive spirit. .

The exhibition included: works by international contemporary artists; documentation of a 1956 street performance by Flavio de Carvalho, where he cross-dressed to a tropical male fashion he’d designed; and other cultural artefacts and manifestations related to the subject, such as visual and musical material of Brazil’s rock-glam singer Ney Matogrosso. Guerrero will first give an art historical background to the practice of De Carvalho, and share the curatorial grammar he built up in order to touch upon other key subtexts within ‘Brazilian culture’ such as the Antropofagia avant-garde, the construction of Brasilia and the counter-culture movement of Tropicalia.

This event is free and open to all

Places limited, RSVP to [email protected]

CCW DESIGN LECTURE SERIES in collaboration with TrAIN Research Centre: Carol Tulloch

Fri, 18 Feb 2011 06:51:40 +0000

Date:Monday 07 March 2011, 18:00 to 19:30

Lecture Theatre - Chelsea College of Art and Design, SW1P 4JU (Atterbury Street entrance)

This event is free and open to all

Other forthcoming lectures are:

21 March - Tomoko Azumi (Designer, t.n.a. design studio)

28 March - Saif Osmani (Spatial designer/artist/architecture curator)

CCW DESIGN LECTURE SERIES in collaboration with TrAIN Research Centre: Tomoko Azumi (Designer, t.n.a. design studio)

Fri, 18 Feb 2011 06:53:18 +0000

Date:Monday 21 March 2011, 18:00 to 19:30

Lecture Theatre - Chelsea College of Art and Design, SW1P 4JU (Atterbury Street entrance)

This event is free and open to all

Other forthcoming lectures are:

28 March - Saif Osmani (Spatial designer/artist/architecture curator)

CCW DESIGN LECTURE SERIES in collaboration with TrAIN Research Centre: Saif Osmani (Spatial designer/artist/architecture curator)

Fri, 25 Mar 2011 08:21:35 +0000

Date:Monday 28 March 2011, 18:00 to 19:30

Lecture Theatre - Chelsea College of Art and Design, SW1P 4JU (Atterbury Street entrance)

This event is free and open to all

Bamboo spans a third of the globe, coming into the architectural limelight every 7 or so years. Recent bamboo structures include ROEWU Architecture’s house at i-lan, Taiwan (2008), Simon Velez’s pavilion, the Nomadic Museum in Mexico City (2009) and Doug and Mike Starn’s growing installation ‘Big Bambu’ on top of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (ended October 2010). These newer constructions appear to enquire and often jar against the material’s innate cultural attachment, with bamboo increasingly being placed alongside other wood samples, a mere decoration on a building’s envelope; moving further away from centuries of art, craft and architectural discourse existing in the southern hemisphere.
This lecture will begin by with the parallel modernist design movements which took place in Asia, Europe and America, in particular the cultural reforms inside Japan around the time of World War II, where in a bid to constitute its own kind of Orientalism, bamboo became a tool in Japan’s cultural imperialism towards governing the wider East Asian identity. Around the same time South Asian countries entered a time of partition and displacement with decades of politically problematic regimes, still prevalent today in current day Pakistan and Bangladesh. With an increase in activity from non-government organisations, foreign agendas and agencies began influencing aspects of national ideology, with the vernacular shifting further towards bamboo being viewed as the ‘native’ or ‘poor’ people’s material.

The changing spatial configuration of the village compound in Bangladesh will be investigated as well as the histories of a bamboo ‘psyche’, propagated by Titu Mir (1782-1831), the rebel peasant leader who built the notorious Bamboo Fort against the zamindars and colonialists, alongside more recent examples of Mohammed Yunus’s Grameen Bank Foundation, where in an attempt to build homes for the ‘ultra poor’, the scheme has brought bamboo closer to realising its short comings and superiority over its perceived counterpart, concrete.

Saif will also be speaking about an international art and design platform called Baasher Ghor or Bamboo House (in Bengali), aiming to draw stronger parallels along cross-cultural lines and arts disciplines, open debate and discussion on current discourse concerning the use of Bamboo. With a clear footing in the UK, the project consists of a month-long exhibition, publication, a residency, international workshops and talks bringing contemporary issues of sustainability, ethical practice, ethnicity, nationhood, theory of neo-colonialism, neo-traditionalism and ‘native’ disciplines to the forefront, in order to offer solutions and facilitate problem-solving through a collaborative process of shared understanding and active involvement on the field. Baasher Ghor has received over 25 respondents from across 4 continents, ranging from artists, sound artists, designers, architects, poets and oral historians.

Saif Osmani is a Spatial Designer/ Visual artist/ Architecture Curator. He has over 5 years experience working on a variety of architectural, landscape and urban design schemes in and around London from social housing, theatres to community spaces. He is visiting tutor at Canterbury University for the Creative Arts and a former Chelsea alumni.

This event is free and open to all

TrAIN Conversation: 'Lumps, Bumps, and Other Things That Are Art' - Sumakshi Singh in Conversation with Deborah Cherry

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 06:23:00 +0100

Date:Monday 23 May 2011, 17:15 to 19:00

Red Lion Square, Room 713 (RLS713), Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, Southampton Row

This event is free and open to all but places are limited so please RSVP to book your place, by emailing [email protected]

Sumakshi Singh’s work traverses lines between Metaphor, Reality and Illusion and ranges from plays on space-time theories to cultural, historic and physical critiques of place, manifested in performance, installation, painting and animation. Singh’s work uses disconcerting phenomenological encounters to ask questions about permanence and transience, object and image, fact and illusion, mapping and displacement, perception and knowledge, here and there. The artist will present a range of work from her extensive practice: from appropriating subtle microcosmic activity, to mapping perceptual objects in spaces and interacting with them as if they were real.

Sumakshi Singh is an artist and an educator who has taught for several years at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). She has mentored residencies for and lectured at several institutions including Oxford University, Columbia University, The Chicago Humanities Festival and the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Her work has been presented in gallery and museum exhibitions worldwide, including The Museum of Contemporary Art (Lyon, France), Mattress Factory Museum of Contemporary Art (Pittsburgh, USA), Van Harrison Gallery (New York, USA), Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago, USA) and Kashya Hildebrand Galerie, (Zurich, SW). She was awarded a Zegna Grant (Italy) in 2009, an Illinois Arts Council award in 2007 (in recognition of outstanding work and commitment within the arts) and Richard H. Driehaus Foundation Award in 2005 (to support and encourage excellence, artistry, focus, direction, maturity, and originality in the visual arts). Her shows have been reviewed by Younger Than Jesus - the New Museum Catalogue, the Village Voice, Chicago tribune and Indian Express among other journals and papers. Artist residencies include Mac Dowell Colony (USA), Djerassi Foundation (USA), Fondazione Pistolleto (Italy), Camargo Foundation (France) and Skowhegan (USA).She was a finalist for the Rijksakademie in 2006. Singh received an MFA from SAIC and a BFA from Maharaja Sayajiro University (Baroda, India).

To learn more about Sumakshi, visit her website.

This event is free and open to all but places are limited so please RSVP to book your place, by emailing [email protected]

Tracey Emin Study Day

Thu, 02 Jun 2011 07:59:22 +0100

Date:Monday 13 June 2011, 09:30 to 14:30

Southbank Centre

Tracey Emin is one of Britain’s most celebrated contemporary artists. This study day at Southbank, organised in collaboration with TrAIN Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity, and Nation, explores various aspects of Tracey Emin’s work. Speakers include Dr Alev Adil (Head of Department of Communications & Creative Arts at University of Greenwich), Professor Mark Durden (University of Wales, Newport), Dr Camilla Jalving (curator at Arken Museum of Modern Art, Denmark), Dr Alexandra Kokoli (Gray’s School of Art) and Professor Gill Perry (The Open University) among others.

Tickets are £5, click here for more details.

TrAIN collaboration with Fundacion Magnolia | The influence of Arte Povera on Contemporary Latin American Art

Tue, 08 May 2012 11:23:16 +0100

Date:Friday 10 June 2011, 17:00 to 20:00

Card Room (A115) Chelsea College of Art and Design

A round table discussion
The influence of Arte Povera on Contemporary Latin American Art
Explored through discussion between Chilean artist Catarina Bauer, Mexican Artist Alejandro Almanza Pereda, and CCW/TrAIN Reader in the Theory and History of Art, Dr Michael Asbury

Introduced by Sara Angel Guerrero-Rippberger
Moderated by Caroline Menezes & Marina Kurikhina

Card Room (A115), Atterbury Street Entrance Chelsea College of Art & Design
16 John Islip Street
London
SW1P 4JU

This event is free and open to all but has limited availability
RSVP to [email protected]

www.fundacionmagnolia.org

Travelling Lines: Drawing as an Itinerant Practice

Tue, 20 Aug 2013 16:48:32 +0100

Dates:
Thursday 22 September 2011, 17:00 to 20:00
Friday 23 September 2011, 09:00 to 17:45

The Drawing Rooms/Chelsea College of Art & Design

Buy your tickets online here.

Travelling Lines brings together scholars, artists, curators and collectors to create an international forum to consider three key themes: itinerant modes of drawing by Latin America based artists that prioritise investigation and exploration; how the nomadic practices of artists necessitate conceptual and low-key strategies associated with drawing, an especially portable medium; and how itinerant and other modes of drawing circulate within the transnational circuits of the globalised art world. Focusing on one medium, speakers address how visual languages participate in, depend on, and travel across local as well as global territories.

The conference is organised by TrAIN in collaboration with the Drawing Room. It coincides with the exhibition at the Drawing Room entitled The Peripatetic School: Itinerant drawing from Latin America, curated by Tanya Barson, international curator, Tate Modern. Artists whose work is in the exhibition are among the speakers. The exhibition includes art by Brigida Baltar, Jose Tony Cruz, Andre Komatsu, Mateo López, Jorge Macchi, Gilda Mantilla and Raimond Chaves, Nicolas Paris, and Ishmael Randall Weeks.

22 September, 5 - 8pm, Drawing Room, 12 Rich Estate, Crimscott Street, London SE1 5TE
- Tanya Barson: a curator’s tour of the exhibition
- Christian Rattemeyer: curating, collecting and displaying drawing
- Debate: Christian Rattemeyer, Kate Brindley, Candida Gertler, Joanne Harwood, and Catherine Petitgas discuss the curating and collecting of drawing, examining the contexts of the museum, the independent gallery, university collections, the international biennale, and the private collection.

23 September, 9am - 5.45pm, Lecture Theatre, Chelsea College of Art and Design, John Islip Street, London, SW1P 4JU
- Key-note lecture by Moacir dos Anjos
- Ellen Gallagher in conversation with Tanya Barson
- Artists’ conversations with Brigida Baltar, Tony Cruz, Andre Komatsu, Mateo Lopez, Gilda Mantilla & Raimond Chaves, Nicolas Paris and Ishmael Randall Weeks
- Debates with Tanya Barson, Pablo León de la Barra, Catherine Lampert, Katharine Stout, Grant Watson and Isobel Whitelegg

Booking:
Buy your tickets online here.

Send any queries to TrAIN’s Administrator, Ellie ([email protected]).

Prices:
Day 1 Concession (Student/UAL or Drawing Room Staff): £5
Day 1 Full Price: £7
Day 2 Concession: £8
Day 2 Full Price: £10
Day 1 and 2 Concession: £11
Day 1 and 2 Full Price: £15

The Exhibition
For the exhibition, visit The Drawing Room website.

Drawing Room, London: 22 September - 13 November 2011
Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (mima), Middlesbrough: 24 November - 4 March 2012.

Tanya Barson with Oriana Baddeley - Itinerant drawing from Latin America

Christian Rattemeyer - Collecting and exhibiting drawing

TrAIN Open Lecture - José Roca - ESSAYS IN GEOPOETICS: THE NOTION OF TERRITORY CRITICALLY REDEFINED FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF ARTISTIC PRACTICE

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 13:03:52 +0100

Date:Wednesday 19 October 2011, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre - Chelsea College of Art and Design, SW1P 4JU (Atterbury Street entrance)

TrAIN Open Lecture - José Roca - ESSAYS IN GEOPOETICS: THE NOTION OF TERRITORY CRITICALLY REDEFINED FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF ARTISTIC PRACTICE

This event is free and open to all but places are limited so please RSVP to the TrAIN Administrator, Ellie ([email protected]).

José Roca (Barranquilla, 1962) is a Colombian curator working out of Bogotá and Philadelphia. For a decade he managed the arts program at the Banco de la República in Bogotá, establishing it as one of the most respected institutions in the Latin American circuit. Roca was a co-curator of the I Poly/graphic Triennial in San Juan, Puerto Rico (2004); the 27th Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil (2006); the Encuentro de Medellín MDE07 (2007); and of the Bienal de Arte Paiz in Guatemala (2010), and was the Artistic Director of Philagrafika 2010, Philadelphia’s international Triennial celebrating print in contemporary art, among many other exhibitions and events. Roca served on the awards jury for the 52nd Venice Biennial (2007). He is currently chief curator of the 8 Bienal do Mercosul, scheduled to open in September 2011 in Porto Alegre, Brazil.
Click here for more details.

Essays on Geopoetics: the 8 Mercosul Biennial
The curatorial project for the 8th iteration of the Mercosul biennial, which takes place in Porto Alegre, Brazil, departed from simple questions: is it possible to conceive a large art biennial in which the model is not primarily exhibitionary? Can or should a biennial create or consolidate local infrastructure? Who is the real public for a third-world biennial? Using the notion of nation both as a thematic framework and as a strategy for curatorial action, the project aimed to answer through seven distinct components. Reflecting on territory and its critical redefinition from an artistic viewpoint, the 8th Biennial wanted to show alternatives to the conventional idea of nation and discuss activist cartographies, the relationships between political and geographical conditions, routes of circulation and exchange of symbolic capital, citizenship in non-urban areas, the political status of fictional nations and the relationship between art, travel and colonisation.
Click here for more details.

Upcoming Open Lectures
Wednesday 2nd November - Jonathan Harris - The Utopian Globalists: Artists of Worldwide Revolution 1919-2009.
Wednesday 16th November - Sabeth Buchmann - Economies of Gender: about the relation of art, architecture, and media culture in Dorit Margreiter’s work
Wednesday 30th November - Sophie O’Brien and Michael Asbury - Lygia Pape: Magnetised Space at the Serpentine Gallery
Wednesday 25th January (co-hosted with Graduate School) - Dr Ethel Brooks, Fullbright Visiting Distinguished Chair (in partnership with the Tate Gallery)
Wednesday 8th February - Guy Brett and Chris Dercon - Remembering Hélio Oiticica’s 1992 Retrospective
Wednesday 7th March - Jacopo Scriveli - Just the Walking: drifting as artistic practice from the ’60s until today
Wednesday 25th April - Speaker(s) TBC
Wednesday 9th May - Speaker(s) TBC
Wednesday 23rd May - Speaker(s) TBC
Wednesday 6th June - Luis Camnitzer - Title TBC

This event is free and open to all but places are limited so please RSVP to the TrAIN Administrator, Ellie ([email protected]).

TrAIN Open Lecture - Jonathan Harris - The Utopian Globalists: Artists of Worldwide Revolution 1919-2009.

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 13:05:37 +0100

Date:Wednesday 02 November 2011, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre - Chelsea College of Art and Design, SW1P 4JU (Atterbury Street entrance)

TrAIN Open Lecture - Jonathan Harris - The Utopian Globalists: Artists of Worldwide Revolution 1919-2009

This event is free and open to all but places are limited so please RSVP to the TrAIN Administrator, Ellie ([email protected]).

Jonathan Harris has a BA in Art History from the University of Sussex and a PhD from what is now Middlesex University. He has taught at Leeds, Keele, and Liverpool universities, and lectured widely around the world, especially in the US, Australia and Europe. He is Professor in Global Art & Design Studies, and Director of the Winchester Centre for Global Futures in Art Design and Media, at Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton. His most recent publication is ‘Globalization and Contemporary Art’ (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), and he is author or editor of more than a dozen other books. The ‘Utopian Globalists: Artists of Worldwide Revolution, 1919-2009’ is due from Wiley-Blackwell in 2012.

This lecture considers a less traced lineage in twentieth century art: artists and groups of artists who explicitly set out ‘utopian global’ and globalizing themes and values in their work, attempting to align themselves with both organized and diffuse movements for radical social change in the world, in the wake of the Russian Revolution and then the turbulent waters of the Cold War. The lecture will set out both the theoretical-historical parameters of this narrative - stretching from Tatlin and the Constructivists to Christo and Jeanne-Claude in the 1990s - as well as sketch in some of the detail forming the material and ideal values of the artists upon which the book is focussed.

Upcoming Open Lectures
Wednesday 16th November - Sabeth Buchmann - Economies of Gender: about the relation of art, architecture, and media culture in Dorit Margreiter’s work
Wednesday 30th November - Sophie O’Brien and Michael Asbury - Lygia Pape: Magnetised Space at the Serpentine Gallery
Wednesday 25th January (co-hosted with Graduate School) - Dr Ethel Brooks, Fullbright Visiting Distinguished Chair (in partnership with the Tate Gallery)
Wednesday 8th February - Guy Brett and Chris Dercon - Remembering Hélio Oiticica’s 1992 Retrospective
Wednesday 7th March - Jacopo Scriveli - Just the Walking: drifting as artistic practice from the ’60s until today
Wednesday 25th April - Speaker(s) TBC
Wednesday 9th May - Speaker(s) TBC
Wednesday 23rd May - Speaker(s) TBC
Wednesday 6th June - Luis Camnitzer - Title TBC

TrAIN Open Lecture - Sabeth Buchmann - Economies of Gender: about the relation of art, architecture, and media culture in Dorit Margreiter's work

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 18:18:39 +0000

Date:Wednesday 16 November 2011, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre - Chelsea College of Art and Design, SW1P 4JU (Atterbury Street entrance)

TrAIN Open Lecture - Sabeth Buchmann - Economies of Gender: about the relation of art, architecture, and media culture in Dorit Margreiter’s work

This event is free and open to all but places are limited so please RSVP to the TrAIN Administrator, Ellie ([email protected]).

Sabeth Buchmann is an Art historian and critic in Berlin/ Vienna, Professor of the History of Modern and Postmodern Art at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. Her recent publications include Denken gegen das Denken. Produktion - Technologie - Subjektivität bei Sol LeWitt, Yvonne Rainer und Hélio Oiticica (2006), Art After Conceptual Art (ed. with Alexander Alberro, 2006), Film Avantgarde Biopolitik (ed. with Helmut Draxler and Stephan Geene, 2009). She is co-editor of PoLyPen - a book series on art criticism, aesthetics and political theory (b_books, Berlin), as well as a regular contributor to art magazines, catalogues and anthologies.

The political upheavals of 1989 not only redrew the political map of Europe; they also lent new force to a process comprised under the umbrella term ‘globalization’. This shift left its mark on the era’s discourses about cultural, economic, and social conditions of art production - conditions which let post- and neo-conceptual artists rediscover those models of art practice which reflect themselves as part of processes of urbanisation and mediatisation. The claim to produce artistic knowledge about and aesthetic perception of the changing social nature of real and symbolic spaces let artists like Dorit Margreiter and others, who started their career in the early nineties, show particular interest in those aspects of architecture and modern media culture that attest to the interwovenness of (retro-)avant-gardist utopias with ruling value systems. This lecture will discuss Margreiter’s aesthetic and epistomological readings of the shifting gender relations as a constitutive part of and contradiction to existing art historical narrations.

Upcoming Open Lectures
Wednesday 30th November - Sophie O’Brien and Michael Asbury - Lygia Pape: Magnetised Space
Wednesday 25th January (co-hosted with Graduate School) - Dr Ethel Brooks, Fullbright Visiting Distinguished Chair (in partnership with the Tate Gallery)
Wednesday 8th February - Guy Brett and Chris Dercon - Remembering Hélio Oiticica’s 1992 Retrospective
Wednesday 7th March - Jacopo Scriveli - Just the Walking: drifting as artistic practice from the ’60s until today
Wednesday 25th April - Speaker(s) TBC
Wednesday 9th May - Speaker(s) TBC
Wednesday 23rd May - Speaker(s) TBC
Wednesday 6th June - Luis Camnitzer - Title TBC

TrAIN Open Lecture - Sophie O’Brien and Michael Asbury - Lygia Pape: Magnetised Space

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 11:30:28 +0000

Date:Wednesday 30 November 2011, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre - Chelsea College of Art and Design, SW1P 4JU (Atterbury Street entrance)

TrAIN Open Lecture - Sophie O’Brien and Michael Asbury - LYGIA PAPE: MAGNETISED SPACE

This event is free and open to all but places are limited so please RSVP to the TrAIN Administrator, Nick ([email protected]).

In light of the forthcoming exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery “Lygia Pape: Magnetized Space” (7 December 2011 - 19 February 2012) curator Sophie O’Brien and Michael Asbury discuss the work of the Brazilian artist, from her early concrete and neo-concrete experiments during the 1950s to the radicalisation of artistic practices that Pape undertook together with her colleagues Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark.

Sophie O’Brien is an Exhibitions Curator at the Serpentine Gallery. Previously, she has worked as a Curator for Contemporary and British Art at Tate Britain, Co-curator & Exhibitions Manager for the Australian Pavilion at Venice Biennale, Head of Exhibitions at the Sydney Biennale, Curator at Artspace Sydney and curated an annual Australian festival of international contemporary art from 1999 - 2001.

Michael Asbury is a Reader in the history and theory of art at CCW-UAL and a member of the TrAIN research centre.

Upcoming Open Lectures
Wednesday 25th January (co-hosted with Graduate School) - Dr Ethel Brooks, Fullbright Visiting Distinguished Chair (in partnership with the Tate Gallery)
Wednesday 8th February - Guy Brett and Chris Dercon - Remembering Hélio Oiticica’s 1992 Retrospective
Wednesday 7th March - Jacopo Scriveli - Just the Walking: drifting as artistic practice from the ’60s until today
Wednesday 25th April - Speaker(s) TBC
Wednesday 9th May - Speaker(s) TBC
Wednesday 23rd May - Speaker(s) TBC
Wednesday 6th June - Luis Camnitzer - Title TBC

TrAIN & CCW Graduate School Open Lecture | Dr Ethel Brooks | Digging Through the Rubble: Romani Women's Holocaust Testimony and What it Tells us about History

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 14:31:48 +0000

Date:Wednesday 25 January 2012, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre - Chelsea College of Art and Design, SW1P 4JU (Atterbury Street entrance)

TrAIN & CCW Graduate School Open Lecture | Dr Ethel Brooks |

Fullbright Visiting Distinguished Chair (in partnership with the Tate Gallery)

Digging Through the Rubble: Romani Women’s Holocaust Testimony and What it Tells us about History

How can we “see” a visual archive of genocide? What are the possibilities -and limits—of testimonial narratives and oral histories as they circulate visually? Is there a possibility for a counter-narrative that tells us something new, on the one hand, and disrupts hegemonic representations of the Holocaust, on the other?

This paper is part of a larger project that is attempting to excavate a longue-duree Romani history of the city. In it, I will focus on Romani women’s testimony found in the Visual History Archive of the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education to explore that which is often left untold in what Walter Benjamin has described as the “rubble-heap” that lies at the feet of the “Angel of History.” Through an attention to testimony and the witness’s refusals, disputes, contention with interviewers expectations and questions, how do we -as viewers, and perhaps consumers, of testimony— take up the claims, the quest for recognition and the potential for disruption of our accepted understandings that are the challenges of the production and circulation of testimony?

This event is free and open to all but places are limited so please RSVP to the TrAIN Administrator, Nick ([email protected]).

Upcoming Open Lectures
Wednesday 8th February - Guy Brett and Chris Dercon - Remembering Hélio Oiticica’s 1992 Retrospective
Wednesday 7th March - Jacopo Crivelli - Just the Walking: drifting as artistic practice from the ’60s until today
Wednesday 25th April - Speaker(s) TBC
Wednesday 9th May - Speaker(s) TBC
Wednesday 23rd May - Speaker(s) TBC
Wednesday 6th June - Luis Camnitzer - Title TBC

TrAIN Open Lecture - Guy Brett and Chris Dercon - Remembering Hélio Oiticica’s 1992 Retrospective

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 09:20:56 +0000

Date:Wednesday 08 February 2012, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre - Chelsea College of Art and Design, SW1P 4JU (Atterbury Street entrance)

PLACES ARE GOING FAST! MAKE SURE YOU RESERVE YOUR SEAT NOW!

In 1992 a major retrospective exhibition of the work of Hélio Oiticica was organised collaboratively by a team of scholars, curators and artists in partnership with Projeto Hélio Oiticica, the Witte de With, centre for contemporary art in Rotterdam and Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris. The exhibition would travel for the following two years around major institutions in Europe and the United States and can be said to have significantly contributed towards the posthumous international recognition that the artist now holds.

Chris Dercon, director of Witte de With at the time and current Director of Tate Modern together with Guy Brett, independent scholar, curator and organiser of Oiticica’s Whitechapel ‘Experience’ in 1969, will discuss their personal involvement in the curation of Oiticica’s 1992 retrospective and reflect how, over the last 20 years, international perceptions on the artist have developed.

The event will be chaired by Michael Asbury who has written extensively on Oiticica and Brazilian modern and contemporary art and whose PhD (UAL 2003) is entitled Hélio Oiticica: politics and ambivalence in Brazilian modern art.

This event is free and open to all but places are limited so please RSVP to the TrAIN Administrator,
Nick Tatchell: [email protected]).

TrAIN Open Lecture - Speaker(s) TBC

These events are free and open to all but places are limited so please RSVP to the TrAIN Administrator, Nick ([email protected]).

Upcoming Open Lectures
Thursday 1st March - ‘Contested Sites/Sights’ Research Student-led Conference.
Wednesday 7th March - Jacopo Scriveli - Just the Walking: drifting as artistic practice from the ’60s until today
Wednesday 25th April - Speaker(s) TBC
Wednesday 9th May - Speaker(s) TBC
Wednesday 23rd May - Speaker(s) TBC
Wednesday 6th June - Luis Camnitzer - Title TBC

TrAIN Open Lecture - Jacopo Crivelli - Just the Walking: drifting as artistic practice from the '60s until today

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 16:18:22 +0000

Date:Wednesday 07 March 2012, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre - Chelsea College of Art and Design, SW1P 4JU (Atterbury Street entrance)

TrAIN Open Lecture - Jacopo Crivelli - Just the Walking: drifting as artistic practice from the ’60s until today

This event is free and open to all but places are limited so please RSVP to the TrAIN Administrator, Nick ([email protected]).

Jacopo Crivelli Visconti is an Italian critic and curator, based in São Paulo. As curator of the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo, he was responsible for the Brazilian Pavilion in the 52a Biennale di Venezia (Italy, 2007), among other exhibitions. Recent projects as an independent curator of contemporary art include: Pinta Art Fair (curator of the ‘Solo Projects’ section), New York, USA (2011); Sismógrafo, Palácio das Artes, Belo Horizonte, BR (2011); Ponto de equilíbrio, Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo, BR (2010); Feijão com arroz, Museo Municipal, Guayaquil, Equador, and Trendy, Miami, USA (2010); Zilvinas Kempinas, Galeria Leme, São Paulo, BR (2010); Arco Solo Projects, Madrid, Spain (2009 and 2010); Luz ao Sul, Convento del Carmen, Valencia, Spain (2007). His texts and essays appeared on several contemporary art, architecture and design magazines, such as Ars, ArteIn, Interni and Casabella (Italy), Art Monthly (UK), Bien’Art (Brazil), ArteContexto, Dardo, Bajo Rendimiento and Atlântica (Spain), Arte al día (Argentina / USA), Art Nexus (Colombia/USA) in addition to exhibition catalogues and artists’ monographs.

Since the end of the 1960s, the act of drifting, walking or strolling gradually established itself as a complex and fascinating artistic practice, which, in the course of the last four decades, underwent significant changes, thus maintaining its basic premises. The emphasis on the physical act, instead than on the creation of an object; the (utopian) will to turn that very act into the beginning of a transformation of both the artistic milieu and society as a whole; the contradictory nature of the photographic or video documentation that often results from the action; the recreation of a space for narrative in contemporary art: these are some of the issues, intrinsically related to the idea of the drifting, that will be touched upon in this lecture.

Upcoming Open Lectures
Wednesday 25th April - Speaker(s) TBC
Wednesday 9th May - Speaker(s) TBC
Wednesday 23rd May - Speaker(s) TBC
Wednesday 6th June - Luis Camnitzer - Title TBC

TrAIN Open Lecture | Leah Gordon and Nadine Zeidler | Ghetto Biennale

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 16:48:34 +0000

Date:Wednesday 09 May 2012, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre - Chelsea College of Art and Design, SW1P 4JU (Atterbury Street entrance)

TrAIN Open Lecture | Leah Gordon and Nadine Zeidler | Ghetto Biennale

The second edition of the Ghetto Biennale took place in November 2011 in Haiti. It was hosted once again by the Atis-Rezistans, the Sculptors of Grand Rue, who work and live in the slums of the red-zone in Port-au-Prince. This is referred to as, a Salon des Refusés for the 21st century, and it is an ambitious instance of marginalized artists seizing the initiative. They are asking the question ‘what happens when first world art rubs up against third world art. Does it bleed?’. That these artists have achieved visibility in the art world is due to their ability to take the structures that had excluded them, and deploy their strategies for their own ends. The Ghetto Biennale has, over its 2 installations, brought their work to the world’s attention without big budgets and big name artists.

UK based curator Leah Gordon, who pioneered the Biennale with the artists, and Nadine Zeidler, Assistant Curator at Nottingham Contemporary, discuss the Biennale, its impact, as well as different curatorial approaches and exhibitions featuring the work of Atis-Rezistans like the upcoming exhibitions of Haitian art at Nottingham Contemporary in 2012.
Leah Gordon’s film about Atis-Rezistans shot in 2008 will also be shown.

Leah Gordon Biography

Leah Gordon is a photographer, film-maker and curator and has produced a considerable body of work on the representational boundaries between art, religion, anthropology, post-colonialism and folk history. In 2006 she commissioned the Grand Rue Sculptors from Haiti to make ‘Freedom Sculpture’, a permanent exhibit for the International Museum of Slavery in Liverpool. Leah organized and co-curated the Ghetto Biennale in Port-au-Prince in 2009 and 2011. Her photography book ‘Kanaval: Vodou, Politics and Revolution on the Streets of Haiti’ was published in June 2010. Her photographic work registers Haiti’s juncture between its history, its cosmology and the present. Gordon is represented by Riflemaker Gallery, London.

Nadine Zeidler Biography

Nadine Zeidler is a curator and writer based in the UK and Berlin. She has been Assistant Curator at Nottingham Contemporary since 2010 where she was in charge of the exhibitions Jean Genet, DAAR, and where she currently works on the upcoming exhibition of Haitian Art. She is curating a group exhibition addressing concepts of thingness, animism and the agency of objects at Kraupa-Tuskany Gallery in Berlin in June 2012 including works of Grand Rue artists. At Kunstverein Munich and as a freelance curator she worked with artists like Allora & Calzadilla, Lutz Bacher, Duncan Campbell, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Latifa Echakhch, Liam Gillick, Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda, Franz Erhard Walther and Akram Zaatari amongst others. Her writing has been published in exhibition catalogues, Frieze and Mousse.

This event is free and open to all but places are limited so please RSVP to the TrAIN Administrator, Nick([email protected]).

Upcoming Open Lectures
Wednesday 23rd May - Speaker(s) TBC
Wednesday 6th June - Luis Camnitzer - Infography versus Geography

TrAIN Artist Exhibition/Private View | Anywhere is somewhere else | Stefanie Kettel |

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 08:35:07 +0100

Dates:
Tuesday 16 August 2011, 17:00 to 20:00
Wednesday 17 August 2011, 10:00 to 17:00
Thursday 18 August 2011, 10:00 to 17:00
Friday 19 August 2011, 10:00 to 17:00
Monday 22 August 2011, 10:00 to 17:00
Tuesday 23 August 2011, 10:00 to 17:00

The Old Reception Foyer Space, Wimbledon College of Art, Merton Hall Road, London, SW19 3QA.

On 16th August Wimbledon College of Art played host to the private view of work by the German painter, Stefanie Kettel. Do go and see the exhibition before it closes.

Kettel is the 2011 Artist in Residence with TrAIN (Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation) and the Kunstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral exchange programme.

In Kettel’s paintings and collages, the genre of landscape painting is employed. She plays with the memory of stories without representing reality… The works question our interaction with the environment, the mutual relations of our internal and external feelings; that influences us on both sides.

Opening Hours:
Wednesday 17th - Tuesday 23rd August 2011, 10am - 5pm
(closed Saturday and Sunday)

Venue:
Old Reception Foyer Space, Wimbledon College of Art
Merton Hall Road, London SW19 3QA

TrAIN/Japan Foundation Open Lecture | Bye Bye Kitty!!! - Beyond kitsch, kawaii and otaku in Japanese Contemporary Art: An illustrated talk by David Elliott

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 16:18:41 +0100

Date:Monday 17 October 2011, 18:20 to 20:00

The Banqueting Hall (Chelsea College of Art and Design), 16 John Islip Street, London, SW1P 4JU

This event is free to attend but booking is essential. To reserve a place, please email your name and the title of the event you would like to attend to [email protected].

Kitsch, otaku (“geek”) and kawaii (cuteness, sometimes super-girly hyper-cuteness) - are all stereotypes frequently attributed to contemporary Japanese culture. It is true to say that Japanese society often embraces such images of itself, and some Japanese artists, such as Takashi Murakami and Kaikai Kiki, respond to, or exploit, these trends, making them even more widespread. Yet is this the whole story? Does this kind of work actually represent the most significant and powerful art being made in Japan today?

David Elliott, founding director of the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, who spent five years in Japan, thinks not. He sees an intensely reflective, self-critical, controversial, even political, spirit within contemporary Japanese art that is less easy to appreciate than the stereotypes but more rewarding to grasp. It was this which led him to curate the successful exhibition Bye, Bye Kitty!!! - Between Heaven and Hell in Contemporary Japanese Art held at the Japan Society in New York earlier this year. This fascinating exhibition concentrated on diverse work by talented young and middle generation Japanese artists, many of whom have not yet been well enough represented on the international art scene.

In this talk, David Elliott will offer an overview of this exhibition and the artists he chose for it, mapping them in the social context of modern and contemporary Japan. Complementing his talk will be a discussion with sociologist and Japanese contemporary art specialist Adrian Favell. Together they will further explore how significant the exhibition is today, reflecting on Japanese aesthetics, social realities and global reactions.

This event is free to attend but booking is essential. To reserve a place, please email your name and the title of the event you would like to attend to [email protected].

The Japan Foundation London, 10-12 Russell Square, London, WC1B 5EH www.jpf.org.uk

TrAIN Open Lecture | Luis Camnitzer | Infography versus Geography

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 14:30:32 +0000

Date:Wednesday 06 June 2012, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre - Chelsea College of Art and Design, SW1P 4JU (Atterbury Street entrance)

TrAIN Open Lecture | Luis Camnitzer |Infography versus Geography

Infography versus Geography explores the redrawing of the world in terms of informational communities instead of territorial groups and the impact on artistic thinking were the setting of informational problems takes priority over the territorial appearance of the manufactured object.

This event is free and open to all but places are limited so please RSVP to the TrAIN Administrator, Nick ([email protected]).

Luis Camnitzer is an Uruguayan artist born in Germany, 1937. He immigrated to Uruguay when one year old and lives in U.S.A. since 1964. He is a Professor Emeritus of Art, State University of New York, College at Old Westbury. He graduated in sculpture from the Escuela de Bellas Artes, Universidad de la República, Uruguay, and studied architecture at the same university. He received a Guggenheim fellowship for printmaking in 1961 and for visual arts in 1982. In 1965 he was declared Honorary Member of the Academy in Florence. In 1988 he represented Uruguay in the Biennial of Venice. In 1998 he received the “Latin American Art Critic of the Year” award from the Argentine Association of Art Critics and in 2002, the Konex Mercosur Award in the visual arts for Uruguay and in 2011 the Frank Jewitt Mather Award of the College Art Association and the Printer Emeritus Award of the SGCI. In 2012 he is awarded the Skowhegan Medal. He participated in the Liverpool Biennial in 1999 and in 2003, in the Whitney Biennial of 2000 and Documenta 11 in 2003. His work is in the collections of over thirty museums, among them Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum, New York; Whitney Museum, New York; Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Sao Paulo; Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires and the Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo de Costa Rica. He is presently the Pedagogical Advisor for the Cisneros Foundation in New York.
He is the author of: New Art of Cuba, University of Texas Press, 1994/2004; Arte y Enseñanza: La ética del poder, Casa de América, Madrid, 2000, Didactics of Liberation: Conceptualist Art in Latin America, University of Texas Press, 2007, and On Art, Artists, Latin America and Other Utopias, University of Texas Press, 2010.

Ope Lori Exhibition | Eye Have the Power | Monday 14th November - Saturday 19th November 2011

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 17:01:28 +0100

Dates:
Monday 14 November 2011, 18:30 to 21:00
Tuesday 15 November 2011, 11:00 to 18:00
Wednesday 16 November 2011, 11:00 to 18:00
Thursday 17 November 2011, 11:00 to 18:00
Friday 18 November 2011, 11:00 to 18:00
Saturday 19 November 2011, 11:00 to 18:00

WAC Gallery 14 Baylis Road, Waterloo, London SE1 7AA

Monday 14th November, Private view and wine reception 6.30 - 9pm

Performance on opening night 6.30- 7.30pm

WAC gallery is delighted to present Eye Have The Power, an exhibition of video, performance and photographic works by Ope Lori a London based conceptual artist. From witty re-presentations of lesbian narratives, fairy tale cartoons, music videos and other images, Lori’s collection of works question stereotypes and representations of black and white female bodies in juxtaposition to one another.

As part of her PhD research here at Chelsea College of Art and Design, London, Lori exhibits: ‘Who’s The Fairest of Them All?’ a five screen monitor piece exploring the power relations between black and white female bodies, and how gender roles are negotiated between inter-racial female couples. “How do we assign gender to race? Or ‘racialise’ gender? More specifically, what signs of visual difference in terms of skin colour, blackness or whiteness, do we associate masculinity or femininity, either in lesbian couples or non-lesbian relations in fictive and non-fictive scenarios?” Lori suggests that the ideological implications underlying such tasks are a main focus of this collection of work. “What pool of ‘knowledge’ learnt or ‘inherited’ do we draw upon to make such informed choices?”

She questions long-standing myths, stereotypes and representations of the black and white dynamic in images, and draws upon the 1913 American psychologist Margaret Otis’s scientific report: ‘A Perversion Not Commonly Noted’, on lesbianism in girls reform schools and institutions. The study published in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology US, stated that, in all-girl institutions “love-making between the white and colored girls” had taken place. The girls incorporated racial difference into courtship rituals: “One white girl…admitted that the colored girl she loved seemed the man, and thought it was so in the case of the others … The difference in color, in this case, takes the place of difference in sex” (Margaret Otis: 1913) Although, this report was written at the turn of the 20th century, the tropes of stereotypical meanings, fixed views of inter-racial female dynamics are re-visited by Lori, through critiquing the lens of lesbian films such as: ‘She Must Be Seeing Things’, ‘The L Word’ series, Hollywood movie ‘The Women’, all to list a few.

In the video ‘Deracination’ Lori’s didactic critique of current British black music videos, an industry where black female bodies are no longer needed is expressed. Lori questions structures of power, which black male artists promote in their songs, as they omit the use of the black women in favour of white female bodies.

“I wanted to highlight this and so I drew upon one of my own memories from childhood where at around the age of seven, I remembered after watching ‘Snow White’ for the first time, going into my bathroom and applying white talcum powder on my face and arms, only to be scolded by my Father when he saw me. The messages from children’s cartoons such as ‘Snow White’, show that whiteness or lightness was something I should aspire to if I wanted to look beautiful, but this came at a cost. It was a feminine ideal perpetuated by western ideology and a history of sexist- racist hierarchies”.
Shantal James writes:
‘Lori’s works seeks to unravel paradigms through the visual juxtapositions of the black female form against the white female form. The observer is almost brutally forced to see the conflicts in femininity/sexuality and blackness and the power struggle between gender roles and race. Her black female forms fight for centrality in the compositions, pedestalled, naked, gazed at, played with, negotiated… There is a encapsulating humanity and frankness in Lori’s pieces.’

For more information, request pictures, interviews, please contact: Ope Lori
Email: [email protected]

TrAIN Conversation | Françoise Dupré and Rita Keegan in conversation with Deborah Cherry| BRIXTON CALLING! |

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 12:40:53 +0000

Date:Monday 14 November 2011, 17:00 to 19:00

The Card Room (A115), Chelsea College of Art & Design, 16 John Islip St, London, SW1P 4JU

This event is free and open to all but places are limited so please RSVP to the TrAIN Administrator, Ellie ([email protected]).

Françoise Dupré and Rita Keegan will talk about their current exhibition Brixton Calling! at 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning (28 October-21 December 2011). The exhibition is the final stage of the Brixton Calling! project (March-December 2011), an 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. The project is a collaboration between 198 and BACA, the Brixton Artists Collective Archives group, constituted of Teri Bullen, Guy Burch, Françoise Dupré, Rita Keegan, Stefan Szczelkun.

For the talk Dupré and Keegan will talk about and reflect on their curatorial and archiving activities for Brixton Calling! and discuss Brixton Art Gallery’s relevance and legacy.

Francoise Dupré is an artist and a part-time senior lecturer in Fine Art at Birmingham City University, School of Art where she contributes to BCU Centre for Fine Art Research through her practice-led research project here and there (an ethical collaborative-participatory model of art in the public sphere). In 1983 she co-founded the Brixton Art Gallery and Women’s Work. Her recent solo exhibition autre mers (other seas) was at the Women’s Library, London Metropolitan University.

Rita Keegan is an artist who contributed to the growth of Black Art in the UK. She taught at New Media and Digital Diversity at Goldsmiths. In 1983 she co-founded the Brixton Art Gallery, Women’s Work and Black Women In View. In 1985 she co-curated Mirror Reflecting Darkly, the Gallery’s first Black women artists exhibition. She went on to co-organize other Black women artists shows and the Women’s Art Library’s archive of Black women artists.

Upcoming Events
Wednesday 16th November - Sabeth Buchmann - Economies of Gender: about the relation of art, architecture, and media culture in Dorit Margreiter’s work
Wednesday 30th November - Sophie O’Brien and Michael Asbury - Lygia Pape: Magnetised Space at the Serpentine Gallery
Wednesday 25th January (co-hosted with Graduate School) - Dr Ethel Brooks, Fullbright Visiting Distinguished Chair (in partnership with the Tate Gallery)
Wednesday 8th February - Guy Brett and Chris Dercon - Remembering Hélio Oiticica’s 1992 Retrospective
Wednesday 7th March - Jacopo Scriveli - Just the Walking: drifting as artistic practice from the ’60s until today
Wednesday 25th April - Speaker(s) TBC
Wednesday 9th May - Speaker(s) TBC
Wednesday 23rd May - Speaker(s) TBC
Wednesday 6th June - Luis Camnitzer - Title TBC

TrAIN & CCW Graduate School | Contested Sites/Sights Research Conference |

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 16:00:47 +0000

Date:Thursday 01 March 2012, 09:30 to 18:01

Banqueting Hall and Red Room, Chelsea College of Art and Design

Conference Date: March 1st 2012, 9.30am-18:00pm

Banqueting Hall and Red Room

’Contested Sites/Sights’ is the theme of this Student-led research conference sponsored by the Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity, and Nation (TrAIN).

“[If we think of place] as formed out of social interrelations at all scales, then one view of a place is as a particular articulation of those relations, a particular moment in those networks of social relations and understandings.”

Doreen Massey, ‘Space, Place, Gender’ (1994)

Using Massey as a platform for the open call, ‘Contested Sites/Sights’ invited contributions from PhD students whose research is concerned by equivocal territories “where consensus cannot be reached’. Particularity, subjectivity, as well as embodiment, are viewed as key elements of such territories in terms of how these are viewed or interpreted. Hence the choice of the binomial Sites/Sights, which can be approached either as two separate working categories or as a conceptual interplay which is dependent on both terms.

Through their chosen practice and theory based PhD’s this small, yet significant group of Doctoral Candidates at University of the Arts, London and TrAIN, will exchange ideas and practices, with a selected number of PhD students from other UK Universities.

Contested Sites/Sights will bring together research projects, which challenge dominant ways of perceiving identities and bodies, spaces and places as well as questioning visual representations of these. Presentation modes will vary and will include alongside slide presentations also visual and performed dialogues, a market stall and a site-specific sound piece - promising a creative exchange of ideas.

Keynote Speaker: Eyal Sivan, documentary film-maker and theoretician. Reader (Associate Professor) in media production and co-leading the MA program in film, video and new media at the school of Arts and Digital Industries (ADI), at the university of east London. Panels Chaired by TrAIN Research centre academic staff

This event is free and open to all but places are limited so please RSVP to the TrAIN Administrator, Nick ([email protected]).

Programme

9.30 Registration (Refreshments provided)

9.55 Introduction

10.00 Eyal Sivan Keynote Speaker including Q & A (Documentary film-maker and Reader, Associate Professor,University of East London)

10.50
Caroline Rabourdin - To be read from left to right, to be heard from right to left: Reversal Phenomenon, Language and Disorientation (Chelsea College of Art & Design, UAL, Part-time PhD)

Julie Marsh - Towards the Construction of a Moving Theory of Site(London College of Communication, UAL, Part-time PhD)

Idit Nathan - Walk on the Art Side - Seven Walks in a Holy City - Exploring a Contested Landscape Through Play
(Central St Martinʼs College of Art and Design, UAL, Part-time PhD)

11.50 Panel Discussion

12.05 Break
From 12.15 - 7pm ‘Silent Zone/Site and Sound’ - An ongoing live, site specific sound work in the Silent Zone of the Old Chelsea Library, (accessed off the main library in Block C) performed by Tansy Spinks, a p/t PhD student based in Sound Research group CRiSAP at LCC.

12.25
Ope Lori - The Black Female Body as a Contested Site
(Chelsea College of Art & Design, UAL, Full-time PhD)

Maria Kheiirkhah and Elizabeth Manchester - Hair about the Woman
(Chelsea College of Art & Design, UAL, Full-time/Part-time PhD, both respectively)

13.05 Panel discussion

13.15 Lunch break

14:05
Nina Vollenbröker - “Experienced Locations” - The Borderlands of the Nineteenth- Century American West as Sites of Rootedness and Belonging
(Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, Full-time, AHRC Funded PhD)

Corinne Silva - Imported Landscapes: Using Photography and Installation to
Instigate a Visual Dialogue Between Southern Europe and Northern Africa
(London College of communication, UAL, Full-time, PhD)

Pamela Kember - Residual Spaces
(Chelsea College of Art & Design, UAL, Full-time PhD)

Madeline Yale - Trafficking Photographs in the UAE - Problematising Perceptions
Of Identity and Belonging(Chelsea College of Art & Design, UAL, PhD)

15.25 Panel discussion

15.45 Break

16.05
Kathy O’Brien - The Impact of Government-led Arts Based Interventions in Southwark 1985-2012
(London College of Fashion, UAL, Part-time PhD)

Valerie Diggle - Belonging /Ownership: Constructions of Private vs.Public Spheres(University College Falmouth, Part-time PhD)

Eray Çayli - Performed Narratives and Architectural Memorialization in Contested Sites: The Case of the Madımak Hotel and the 18th Annual Commemoration of the Sivas Massacre
(Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, MPhil/PhD)

Katy Bienart and Rebecca Bienart - The Darling Salt Pans and Produce Company
(Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, Part-time, PhD)

17.20 Panel Discussion

17.35 Closing and wine reception

Click here to visit Eyal Sivan’s Website Eyal Sivan’s website

CCW DESIGN LECTURE SERIES in collaboration with TrAIN Research Centre | Toshino Iguchi | ‘Avant-garde Design and “Metabolism” in the 1960s Japan’ |

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 09:48:11 +0000

Date:Friday 09 March 2012, 17:00 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre - Chelsea College of Art and Design

Friday 9th March 2012 17:00
Lecture Theatre - Chelsea College of Art and Design
16 John Islip Street
London
SW1P 4JU
(Atterbury Street entrance)

This event is free and open to all.
No Need to RSVP

The avant-garde movement in Architecture and Design called ‘Metabolism’ emerged in postwar Japan. It was at the World Design Conference (WoDeCo) in Tokyo in 1960 that a group of young architects and designers made an official declaration with their statement ‘METABOLISM/1960-The Proposals for a New Urbanism’. This Metabolist group proposed their ideas for a future city such as ‘Marine City’, ‘Tower-shaped Community’, ‘Mobile House’ and ‘Wall City’. They also presented the idea of a ‘triangular structure’ for the relationship between design and human beings that connects three elements at each vertex: nature; a human being; and society. This talk will revisit the idea of Metabolism, and discuss how we can re-evaluate it now after a half century has passed. It will also revisit the WoDeCo which addressed the theme ‘Our Century: The Total Image’, and assess what this conference brought to the designers at that time. Finally, the talk would like to extend the discussion to where this discussion on Metabolism might take us, and in what way this movement helps us to explore new ideas.

Dr. Toshino IGUCHI is a professor at Saitama University in the Faculty of Liberal Art and is Chair of the Design History Workshop Japan. Her research focuses on modernism and avant-garde art and design in Central Eastern Europe and Japan. Dr. Iguchi’s publications include Hungarian Avant-garde ‘MA’ and Moholy-Nagy (Tokyo: Sairyū-sha, 2000), Avant-garde Manifest: Central and East Europe Modernism (Tokyo: Sangen-sha, 2005) and Moholy-Nagy: Visual Experiments (Tokyo: Kokusho Kankō-kai, 2011). Recently, she has also curated the Exhibition: Moholy-Nagy in Motion which was held at Kanagawa Prefectural Museum, National Museum of Modern Art Kyoto and Kawamura Museum in 2011.

Iraq: How, Where, For Whom?

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 16:25:12 +0100

Date:Friday 20 April 2012, 11:00 to 18:00

The Mosaic Rooms

Hanaa’ Malallah &kennardphillips

20th April - 8th June
Tues-Sat 11am-6pm, FREE
Artists’ Talk: 12th May, 12pm
Special Sunday Opening: 27th 12pm-5pm

Iraq: How, Where, For Whom? is the first collaborative exhibition between Iraqi artist Hanaa’ Malallah and UK duo kennardphillipps, who share a critical and reflective view of the occupation/invasion of Iraq. The exhibition features large-scale collages, installations, photomontage pieces and sculptures.

Malallah’s work uses burnt canvas, cloths, wire, found objects and paint to create violently abstract yet sensuous pieces. Using what the artist refers to as her ‘ruins technique’, her work not only testifies to the destruction of Iraq, but also to the transformative potential of destruction. The exhibition features many new works by the artist, exhibited here for the first time.

kennardphillipps’ work manipulates and subverts press material on the Iraq War and subsequent occupation to create opposing images and narratives. The works featured range from those that directly adapt media imagery for immediate impact, to those that require the viewer to make a closer, more critical inspection.

In both artistic approaches, questions are raised over the claims that the invasion of Iraq brought freedom and a better future to its people. But the artists also interrogate and subvert the powerful tools of modern mass media, posing questions about democracy and the representation of conflict, inviting us to become more rigorous and engaged spectators.

To accompany this exhibition we launch a new series of occasional talks at The Mosaic Rooms, WHAT PURPOSE FREE SPEECH WHEN NO ONE LISTENS? The talks will reflect on the nature and meaning of democracy both in the context of the Arab world as well as of our own political culture in the UK and the West.

TrAIN Open Lecture | Political Issue in Art | Hanaa' Malallah & kennardphillips

Thu, 03 May 2012 13:22:56 +0100

Date:Wednesday 23 May 2012, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre - Chelsea COllege of Art and Design

TrAIN Open Lecture | Political Issue in Art | A TrAIN Open Lecture by Iraqi Artist Hanaa’ Malallah and UK Duo Peter Kennard and Cat Phillips.

TrAIN Research Centre Open Lecture Series presents
Political Issue in Art; a talk by Hanaa’ Malallah & kennardphillips
who are currently exhibiting Iraq: How, Where, For Whom? at
Qattan Foundation/Mosaic Rooms.

The talk will be introduced by Dr. Mo Throp and there will be a
Q&A session afterwards.

“First of all, I would like to point out this; I am not a political artist, but
I am somehow political, because of my identity as an Iraqi, how I lived for
35 years under war and I have been
completely saturated by destruction and ruination of wars. I left Baghdad
in November 2006, so, all my practice has emerged over a thirty five year
period, in which my education and art practice have intertwined with
experience of the Iran-Iraq war, the first Gulf War, the sanction regime and
the 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation, then on top of that now I
am in exile! So, from this experience there is political issue in my
artwork. Briefly, I am political artist by destiny! Comparison with
Kennardphillips, who are completely political by choice.”
Hanaa’ Malallah

This event is free and open to all but places are limited so please RSVP to the TrAIN Administrator, Nick ([email protected]).

Upcoming Open Lectures
Wednesday 6th June - Luis Camnitzer Infogrpahy versus Geography

Katharina Dubno | TrAIN/KSB Resident Artist Exhibition 2012 | What the Water Gave Me | 19th - 27th September

Fri, 31 Aug 2012 12:50:54 +0100

Date:Wednesday 19 September 2012, 18:00 to 21:00

The Triangle

TrAIN/KSB (Künstlerhaus Schloß Balmoral) Resident Artist 2012 | Katharina Dubno Exhibition | WHAT THE WATER GAVE ME

TrAIN/KSB are pleased to announce that between 19th and 28th of September 2012 The Triangle Space at Chelsea College of Art and Design shall exhibit the work of Katharina Dubno, TrAIN/Künstlerhaus Schloß Balmoral Resident Artist 2012.

WHAT THE WATER GAVE ME

Rivers of water run down my London apartment window and again make me want to flee London. This anonymous, hectic place, where superficiality, consumption and stress determine the everyday life, where people hardly have time for a private life and thus no time to share and socialise .
I want to be off to the shore, sit by the water, recover, calm down and think.
And finally, this is where I find what I seeked! People with time, open mindedness, and a great sense of solidarity. A life in accordance with the rhythm of nature, full of creativity, the freedom and space for using imagination and expression of ideas- All that without the ‘benefit‘ of external rules and regulations.
These people live in a houseboat community - families, singles, couples, retired people and students. I get the chance to become part of their lifes. We work, cook, sing and talk, we do the kids homeworks, we fix the boat‘s leaks, do gardening, meet up for Yoga, barbeques and parties.

Even though rivers of water run down my houseboat window, I’m happy and I highly appreciate, what the water gave me.

A RIOT OF OUR OWN | 11th - 23rd September 2012 | Galerija Makina, Pula

Wed, 05 Sep 2012 10:07:47 +0100

Date:Tuesday 11 September 2012, 10:00 to 18:00

Galerija Makina, Pula

The exhibition is part of “TU SMO” 3 (We Are Here 3) an international multimedia event organised by The Museum of Contemporary Art Istria.

The exhibition ‘A Riot Of Our Own’ looks at the Rock Against Racism (RAR) Movement of 1976 to1981, through 41 photographs by Syd Shelton. The exhibition was originally shown at CHELSEAspace London, in 2008. It was the idea of the artist Lara Ritosa-Roberts to show ‘A Riot of Our Own’ in Croatia and she secured Galerija Makina as the venue.

Syd was a RAR (London) committee member and key graphic designer of its associated material such as, the paper Temporary Hoarding. He photographed performers such as ‘The Clash’, Elvis Costello’, ‘Misty n Roots’ and ‘The Specials’, members of the audience at RAR gigs across England and carnivals as in the history making RAR Carnival 1 at Victoria Park, London in 1978 and demonstrations as in another defining moment the ‘Anti National Front Demonstration’, Lewisham, London in 1977. Syd also took contextual social and cultural images that informed the politics of the movement across England and Ireland.

Between 1976 and 1981 RAR confronted racist ideology, particularly that of the far-right organisation the National Front, in the streets, parks, town halls and pavilions across Britain. Syd’s photographs provide another aspect of that historical moment. Through this tangent, ‘A Riot of our Own’ revisits the energy of RAR, the creative entanglement of black and white musicians, designers, writers, actors, performers and supporters who produced effective counter-narratives to whiteness as superior and blackness as alienated. His photographs remind us that RAR was a particular treatise on belonging in Britain.

RAR did not have an official photographer. Syd has produced the largest collection of images on the movement. This unique repository of a pivotal period in Britain illustrates how difference was championed and helped to define Britain’s character. Syd says of his photographs of this period that:

‘Photography for me has always been an autobiographical tool, a sort of staccato visual diary. The pictures, which I made between 1976 and 1981, were largely uncommissioned and therefore free of commercial considerations. I also used my photography during that period as a graphic argument, enabling me to be a subjective witness of the period which could, hopefully, contribute to social change … I was surprised how many negatives are in the archive that document my involvement with RAR and its hinterland. High-resolution scanning and archival inkjet printing techniques have liberated these photographs from the studio filing cabinet.’

‘A Riot of Our Own’ is curated by Carol Tulloch. The curatorial narrative of the show has been inspired by the concept of ‘self-archiving’- an exploration of one’s own history through a re-acquaintance with, and re-assemblage of, the objects held in a personal archive. Syd’s archival photographs remind us of the social tempo in Britain during the life of Rock Against Racism and a defining moment for Syd Shelton.

Syd Shelton is a British photographer and graphic designer based in Hove, where he has his company ‘graphicsi’. He has worked in Europe, Australia and the United States. Syd co-edited, and was art director of, a series of photographic books 24 Hours in Los Angeles (1984), the award winning Day in the Life of London (1984) and Ireland: A Week in the Life of a Nation (1986). Currently his work can be seen in the exhibition ‘Words, Sound and Power: Reggae Changed My Life’ at The British Music Experience: Britain’s Museum of Popular Music, O2 Arena, London (24 July-22 October 2012). Additionally, Syd contributed to The Photographer’s Gallery major exhibition ‘The World in London’ which was displayed at three venues: Victoria Park; Park House, 453 - 497 Oxford Street; and The Wall, The Photographers’ Gallery, London.

Carol Tulloch is Reader in Visual, Material and Diaspora Studies at the CCW Graduate School, and is a member of the Transnational Arts, Identity and Nation Research Centre (TrAIN), both at the University of the Arts, London. Carol is also the TrAIN/V&A Fellow at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A).

The illustrated publication ‘A Riot of Our Own’ accompanies the exhibition. Edited by Carol Tulloch with a foreword by Mark Sealy, Director of Autograph ABP.

‘A Riot of Our Own’ at Galerija Makina is a collaborative project between TrAIN and Galerija Makina.

Paulo Bruscky: A Trajectory

Thu, 27 Sep 2012 15:38:07 +0100

Date:Wednesday 10 October 2012, 17:00 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre, Chelsea College of Art & Design

Paulo Bruscky: A Trajectory
A talk with Paulo Bruscky, Moacir dos Anjos and Michael Asbury

On October 10, Paulo Bruscky will participate of a roundtable with Michael Asbury (TrAIN) and Moacir dos Anjos (curator of the 29th São Paulo Biennial) to discuss his artistic trajectory, spanning from his involvement with mail art during the Brazilian military regime (1964 -1984), his collaboration with Daniel Santiago, and his participation in the international Fluxus movement. Characterized by a constant experimentation with media and textuality, the practice of Bruscky is a written record composed of its own idiosyncratic signs, neither registered by mass custom nor by cultural objectification. Rather, his body of work represents one of the greatest expansions of extended writing in Brazilian and international art. The insidiousness of mail art in the time of dictatorship, performances and interventions within the city of Recife and abroad, as well as the semiotic black market of information; these are some of the issues that will be touched upon in this lecture.

About Paulo Bruscky

Paulo Bruscky was born in 1949 in Recife, where he lives and works. He featured in the 16th, 20th, 26th, and 29th editions of the Bienal de São Paulo (1981, 1989, 2004, 2010); the 10th Havana Biennial, Cuba (2009), among other biennials, as well as group shows such as the San Juan Poly/Graphic Triennial, Puerto Rico (2012); Sistemas, Acciones y Procesos, at the Fundación Proa, in Buenos Aires, Argentina (2011); Cine a Contracorriente, at Centro de Cultura Contemporánea de Barcelona, Spain (2010); and Panorama dos Panoramas, at the Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, Brazil (2008). Recent solo shows include: Arte Correio, at Centro Cultural dos Correios, in Recife (2011); Paulo Bruscky - Uma obra sem original, at the Museu de Arte da Pampulha, in Belo Horizonte (2010); and Poiesis - Contexto e Limiar, at Galeria Nara Roesler, in São Paulo (2009), all in Brazil. His works are included in the collections of: Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom; Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo and Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paulo, both in Brazil; Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Spain; Museum of Modern Art in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, among others.

Gregor Neuerer: Freud and English Council Estates

Thu, 27 Sep 2012 16:15:18 +0100

Date:Wednesday 05 December 2012, 17:00 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre, Chelsea College of Art & Design

Gregor Neuerer
Freud and English Council Estates

Gregor Neuerer is an artist whose work with existing architectural settings and realities is based on his understanding of the built environment as a media, similar to a photograph or film. In this sense a building is not only seen as a structure that directs and controls but also as a platform that makes our understanding of a place visible. Photography and drawing are hereby used as mediums which explore site-related conditions and at the same time construct new and fictive understandings of place.

Rasoul Nejadmehr: Education, Science and Truth

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 15:33:50 +0100

Date:Wednesday 21 November 2012, 17:00 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre

What is the main problem of contemporary education? Rasoul Nejadmehr argues that the cardinal problem with education is that it does not have an adequate notion of truth underpinning it. Thinkers mainly tend to veer towards two poles - absolutism and relativism. While a one-sided tendency toward absolutism leads to reified categories of thought and alienation, a tendency toward relativism leads to lack of universality and nihilism. Education, Science and Truthsuggests a way out by bridging not only divides between and within analytical and continental philosophy but also those of modernism and postmodernism. By using a range of issues, disciplines and literature, Nejadmehr formulates a new version of the concept of objectivity based on the inclusion of multiple perspectives, including ones from art, philosophy and marginalized groups.

Globalisation on Speed: Capital, Culture, Cinema and China

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 09:59:42 +0000

Date:Wednesday 16 January 2013, 17:15 to 19:00

Camberwell College of Arts, Lecture Theatre

Prof. David Li will link the role of “visual culture” to
globalisation’s manufacture of ephemerality. He will
argue for a counter narrative against the production of
spectacle, to imagine a visual culture that might
enable an aesthetics not of sensorial consumption
but contemplation and preservation, so as to bring
the growth of economy back to the root of ecological
sanity, OIKAS, in Greek etymology.

TrAIN Research Centre in collaboration with CCW Graduate School
welcome Professor David Li as the 2013 Fulbright Distinguished Chair.

TrAIN Open Lecture | New Contemporaries: Now and Then

Wed, 09 Jan 2013 11:31:22 +0000

Date:Wednesday 30 January 2013, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre

New Contemporaries is the leading UK organisation supporting emergent art practice from British Art Schools.

Rebecca Heald, Director, New Contemporaries, gives a brief history of the organisation discussing the important role it has played in 20th century British art since 1949.

Questions addressed will include: what has been and what is now the role of programmes for emerging art? How have they changed? How many of these changes relate to the question of the international?

Television Delivers People | Mark Godfrey

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 14:54:02 +0000

Date:Wednesday 13 February 2013, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre

Focusing on Richard Hamilton’s use of appropriated imagery from television, Tate Modern curator and art historian Mark Godfrey investigates how the pioneer of Pop Art later reflected on contemporaneous political events - ranging from the Civil Rights movement, Northern Ireland, the Thatcher era to the Gulf War - in works such as: Kent State 1970, The citizen, 1982, Treatment Room, 1983 and War Games 1992.

Unfolding An Institution, Finding Inhotim

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 09:46:08 +0000

Date:Wednesday 27 February 2013, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre

Inhotim is a collection and an art institution specifically conceived upon the notion of site specificity and specific siting of art works and projects. Situated in the Brazilian countryside, 60 kilometres from the city of Belo Horizonte, Inhotim has found international recognition as a case-study for how local context can transcend into new museum standards, and how artists from all over the world do push the understanding of a place beyond geography towards states of awareness and engagement. The lecture will explore some examples of artists such as Carlos Garaicoa, Cildo Meireles, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Doris Salcedo, Doug Aitken, Helio Oiticica, Marilá Dardot, Matthew Barney and Rirkrit Tiravanija, amongst others.

TrAIN Open Lecture | Klara Kemp Welch | Anti-Happenings / Anti-Poliitcs. Experimental Art in Late Socialist Central Europe.

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 11:37:13 +0000

Date:Wednesday 13 March 2013, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre

This paper traces the passage from a commitment to artistic ‘autonomy’ among unofficial artists of the late 1950s and early 1960s to the development of experimental practices which enabled artists to address the problem of isolation and to explore new forms of ‘contact’ in the 1970s and 80s. Drawing new parallels between experimental artistic practices in the central European soviet satellite countries and the writings of prominent central European dissidents, the paper explores the interplay of the cultural, social, and political fields in the decades preceding the events of 1989.

Curating Beyond the Canon? Paul Goodwin in conversation with Dr.David Dibosa

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 18:36:12 +0100

Date:Wednesday 24 April 2013, 17:15 to 19:00

Lecture Theatre

Curator, urbanist and lecturer Paul Goodwin will discuss his recent curatorial projects. Presenting an overview of some his recent exhibitions, he will address how his curatorial concerns have been working within and against traditional canons of art history and museology, engaging the contested terrains of post-colonialism, critical urban theory and socially engaged public practices.

The discussion will take place in conversation with cultural critic Dr David Dibosa co-author of Post-Critical Museology (Routlege 2013).

"Re-Contested Sites/Sights" Research Conference

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 10:00:16 +0100

Date:Wednesday 08 May 2013, 09:30 to 18:00

Lecture Theatre

TrAIN & CCW Graduate School | Re-Contested Sites/Sights Research Conference

Multidisciplinary Research Conference at Chelsea College of Art & Design

Supported by the Transnational Art, Identity, & Nation Research Centre (TrAIN), CCW Graduate School, University of the Arts London

Conference Date: May 8th 2013, 9:30 18:00
Venue: Banqueting Hall and Red Room,
Chelsea College of Art and Design

’Re-Contested Sites/Sights’ is the theme of UAL’s second Doctoral student-led research conference sponsored by the Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity, and Nation (TrAIN).
The conference will bring together research projects which challenge dominant ways of perceiving identities and bodies, spaces and places as well as questioning their visual representations. Last years keynote speaker, documentary film-maker Eyal Sivan, urged us to ‘re-vision’ these spaces, through acts of appropriation and re-appropriation. These presentations of various modes, from a range of disciplines, will continue to challenge these spaces in what promises to be a day full of creative exchanges of ideas and practices, between Doctoral candidates at the University of the Arts, London and TrAIN, with a selected number of PhD students from other UK Universities.

Keynote Speaker: T.J. Demos is critic and Reader in the Department of Art History, University College London. He writes widely on modern and contemporary art and politics under globalization, and is the author, most recently, of The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary During Global Crisis (Duke University Press, 2013), and Return to the Postcolony: Spectres of Colonialism in Contemporary Art (Sternberg, 2013). In 2007, he published The Exiles of Marcel Duchamp (MIT Press, 2007). He also recently guest edited a special issue of Third Text (no. 120, 2013) on the subject of “Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology.”

Raphael Jay Adjani | Towards a Deep Ecology of Art, Technology and Being

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 13:22:35 +0000
Date:Wednesday 22 May 2013, 17:15 to 19:00
Lecture Theatre
In this talk artist and academic Raphael Jay Adjani, discusses the concept of ‘relational being’, a core idea in deep ecology, as well as in other branches of science, certain philosophic thinking, as well in diverse practices in art, architecture and design.

Raphael has been exploring this concept and related ideas, such as notions of ‘zero’, ‘void’, space-time’ and ‘emptiness’, through his art practice as well as in academic publication.

His has been an inter-disciplinary research, drawing on a history of ideas that span different historical periods, cultures, and academic fields of enquiry.

In this talk he will show two of his film works that engage with relational being.

TrAIN Open Lecture | NEOCONCRETISM and the Problem of the Painting's Other Side

Tue, 28 May 2013 16:13:23 +0100
Date:Wednesday 05 June 2013, 17:15 to 19:00
Lecture Theatre
“I destroy the fixed plane which has a reverse side, and I rebuild it loose in the space without a support or reverse side“.

Lygia Clark , 1960.

Neoconcretism in general has initiated a move away from the fixed plane of the painting which has a hidden other side.
The talk by Professor Gregor Stemmrich (Freie Berlin University) will focus on this move, but will start with investigating its preconditions. Since “concrete art“ as a concept was formulated by European artists, yet nothing like Neoconcretism has emerged in European art, the conditions of the reception, discussion and transformation of „concrete art“ in Brasil have to be clarified. Instead of isolating Neoconcrete art by focussing solely on it, thoughout the talk developments in European and US-American art will be related to it, in order to give different perspectives on the problem of the painting’s other side. This raises the question of how to deal art historically with Neoconcrete art, which will be discussed at the end of the talk.

TrAIN Open Lecture | Michael Asbury | Hélio Oiticica: ‘What I do is Music’

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 15:17:52 +0100
Date:Wednesday 07 November 2012, 17:15 to 19:00
Lecture Theatre
Hélio Oiticica: ‘What I do is Music’

Presentation by Michael Asbury

Towards the end of his life, Hélio Oiticica’s critical reassessment of his own creative and intellectual trajectory would articulate both popular and erudite cultural references, ranging from his experiences in the 1960s (the Penetrables, Parangolés and Tropicália), to new ideas and projects developed during the course of 1970s. Often recurring themes would arise from conversations with friends such as the poets Haroldo and Augusto de Campos, his admiration for experimental film makers (from Jack Smith to the Brazilian Marginal film-makers) and his enthusiasm for Rock music (The Rolling Stones and Jimmy Hendrix in particular).
One such conjunction of diverse cultural vectors would inform his somewhat mysterious claim ‘What I do is Music’.
This presentation will speculate on what the artist might have meant by such a statement through an exploration of interconnections between music, film, theatre, poetry and art.

Dr Michael Asbury is Reader in the Theory and History of Art at UAL and a founding member of TrAIN. He has written extensively on modern and contemporary art, was a contributor to Oiticica in London published by Tate and edited by Guy Brett and Luciano Figueiredo, as well as Helio Oiticica: Fios Soltos published by Perspectiva and edited by Paula Braga (both 2007). His PhD (UAL 2003) is entitled Hélio Oiticica: Politics and Ambivalence in 20th Century Brazillian Art.

Tattoo City: The First Three Chapters

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 11:21:57 +0000
Date:Friday 30 November 2012, 13:00 to 18:00
Castlefield Gallery, 2 Hewitt Street, Manchester, M15 4GB, (behind Deansgate train station)
Exhibition: Tattoo City: The First Three Chapters
Artist: Samson Kambalu and guests featuring Lee Appelby, Peter Beard, Joseph Beuys, Jochem Hendricks, Sigrid Holmwood, Kevin Hunt, San Keller, Sam Mukumba, Hardeep Pandhal, Nicolas Pople, Rei Kakiuchi and Poppy Whatmore

Preview & Book Launch: Thurs 29 Nov 2012, 6-8pm
Exhibition Dates: 30 Nov 2012 to 27 Jan 2013
Talk: Tuesday Talk at Whitworth Art Gallery, 11am

Venue: Castlefield Gallery, 2 Hewitt Street, Manchester, M15 4GB, (behind Deansgate train station)
Tel: 0161 832 8034
Web: www.castlefieldgallery.co.uk
Opening Times: Wed to Sun 1pm - 6p
Admission: FREE. The gallery is fully accessible
For further information, images or to arrange interviews, please contact: Clarissa Corfe, Curator [email protected] or Jennifer Dean, Communications Coordinator [email protected]. T: +44 (0) 161 832 8034.

Ten Years After: Reflections on the Invasion of Iraq

Mon, 10 Dec 2012 10:03:13 +0000
Dates:
Tuesday 12 February 2013, 18:00 to 20:00
Monday 11 February 2013, 11:00 to 19:00
Wednesday 13 February 2013, 11:00 to 19:00
Thursday 14 February 2013, 11:00 to 19:00
Wednesday 15 February 2012, 11:00 to 19:00
The Triangle Space
AN EXHIBITION OF WORKS BY HANAA MALALLAH, KENNARDPHILLIPS AND MO THROP

Ten Years After: Reflections of the Invasion of
Iraq is an exhibition of works by Hanaa Malallah,
kennardphillips and Mo Throp exploring the
consequences of the decision by Western
politicians to invade Iraq in the belief that they held
Weapons of Mass Destruction. How can we view
this act ten years on?

Exhibition: 11:00am-7:00pm,11th-15th February 2013
Triangle Space, Chelsea College of Art & Design
16 John Islip Street, London SW1P 4JU

Private View: 6:00pm Tuesday 12th February 2013

Gallery talk by the artists in the Triangle Space
at 2:00pm on Thursday 14th February 2013

Dreaming through -on & into the exotic

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 16:09:47 +0100
Date:Thursday 04 April 2013, 11:00 to 17:00
@198 Contemporary Arts & Learning 198 Railton Road, London SE24 0JT
Private View: 4th of April 19.00 - 21.00

Exhibition Dates: 4th of April - 18th of May

Opening times: Mon. - Fri. 11:00 - 17:00

In the show Dreaming through -on & into the exotic paula roush and maria lusitano present a mixed media collage salon, which explores travel and collage as interlinked cultural feminine practices in its relationship to contemporary art.

Through their multilayered visual essays and publications, paula and maria revisit narratives, which combine historical archive and speculative fiction into the study of the modernist collage- novel.

The main subjects of these works range from Mary Delany’s invention of botanical collage (Flora Delanica, 1772-1782), to Max Ernst’s collage novel Une Semaine de Bonté (A Week of Goodness, 1934) and Valentine Penrose’ poem-collage Dons des Feminines (Gifts of the Feminine, 1951).

This journey makes visible ways in which collage creates spaces that facilitate experiments with botanical taxonomies as metaphors for gender and sexuality and also a critique of the domestic setting conveyed through escapist dreams and travel to exotic locations.

These works were developed in residency at Stockwell Studios (former Annie McCall’s hospital) and are a tribute to the artist’s community that built the studios’ wild life garden, a constant source of inspiration.

paula roush & maria lusitano have collaborated since 2009 and their work has been exhibited internationally. Their work is among collections such as the National Art Library, the artists’ books collection in the Victoria & Albert Museum and The bookRoom, the artists’ books collection at the University for the Creative Arts.

roush and lusitano were born in Portugal and currently live and work in London

LOOKING IN Photographic Portraits by Maud Sulter and Chan-Hyo Bae

Mon, 01 Jul 2013 11:29:01 +0100
Date:Tuesday 09 July 2013, 18:30 to 08:30
Ben Uri Gallery and Museum
This is the first in a series of exhibitions at Ben Uri to explore themes of identity and migration
within contemporary art. The exhibition pairs photographic work by two artists whose interests
are very different but who both choose costume and staged photography to re-present the sitter and to
challenge the viewer’s perception and prejudices about race, gender and history.

RSVP to [email protected]

TrAIN Open Lecture

Tue, 20 Aug 2013 14:30:23 +0100
Date:Wednesday 09 October 2013, 17:15 to 19:00
Lecture Theatre
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 Directory area of this website.

Professor Jennifer Doyle | The Spectacle of Sexuality: An Olympic Problem

Wed, 28 Aug 2013 12:08:49 +0100
Date:Wednesday 23 October 2013, 17:15 to 19:00
Camberwell College of Art and Design | Lecture Theatre
Professor Jennifer Doyle | The Spectacle of Sexuality: An Olympic Problem

The 2014 Winter Olympics are set to be staged in Sochi, Russia within a context of aggressive, state-sponsored homophobia. Drawing inspiration from John Carlos and Tommie Smith’s black power salute from the medal stands at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, activists wonder what a political intervention might look like for the LGBITQ community.

This lecture will introduce the audience to the work of artists who have been thinking about the question of sexuality and sports. Their work helps us to understand that where queer and feminist politics are concerned, no similar gesture is possible: that, instead, the queer feminist gesture forces a shift in the optic through which we look at the sport spectacle such that it is the ordinary gesture rather than the extraordinary one that becomes the vehicle for consciousness raising.

Jennifer Doyle is blogging about her research subject at The Sport Spectacle

TrAIN Research Centre and CCW Graduate School welcome Professor Jennifer Doyle to UAL as Fulbright Distinguished Chair.

RSVP: Nick Tatchell - [email protected]

Mira Schendel: A Conversation with Curator Tanya Barson & Dr. Michael Asbury

Thu, 24 Oct 2013 15:02:58 +0100
Date:Wednesday 06 November 2013, 18:00 to 19:45
Lecture Theatre
Mira Schendel, her work and the current Retrospective at Tate Modern
Tanya Barson in conversation with Michael Asbury

Schendel was born in Zurich in 1919, but following her parents separation, moved early on in life to Milan with her mother. Of Jewish origin, she fled to Bulgaria in 1941 in order to escape the onslaught of fascism. She arrived in Porto Alegre the most Southern state of Brazil in 1949 when she began making art, later moving to São Paulo in 1953.
Her work evades art historical paradigms and challenges our understanding of the development of avant-garde practices in Brazil from mid-20th century onwards. As an artist she emerged at a moment in which the abstract and constructivist-oriented avant-gardes were thriving in Brazil and despite establishing friendships and intellectual relationships with many of the principle protagonists within these strands, such as the art critic Mario Schenberg, the poet Haroldo de Campos and the philosopher Vilen Flusser she never adhered to any particular movement.
This conversation will focus on the premises behind the curatorial project for her current retrospective exhibition at Tate Modern as a means of asserting the international significance that Mira Schendel clearly deserves.

Tanya Barson is Curator of International Art at Tate Modern. She is co-curator of the forthcoming Mira Schendel retrospective exhibition organised by Tate Modern and the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Brazil. She has curated exhibitions including Frida Kahlo, Tate Modern (2005), Inverting the Map: Latin American Art from the Tate Collection, Tate Liverpool (2006), Oiticica in London, Tate Modern (2007), Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic, Tate Liverpool (2010) and The Peripatetic School: Itinerant Drawing from Latin America, the Drawing Room, London (2011).

Michael Asbury is a British/Brazilian art historian, critic and curator. He is a Reader and Deputy Director of the Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation (TrAIN) at the University of the Arts London (UAL). He has curated and written extensively on Brazilian modern and contemporary art.

Talk & Book Launch | Hélio Oiticica and Neville D’almeida’s Block-Experiments in Cosmococa - Program in Process

Tue, 19 Nov 2013 15:48:51 +0000
Date:Wednesday 20 November 2013, 18:00 to 20:00
Lecture Theatre
During his stay in New York, and together with film-maker Neville D’Almeida, Oiticica conceived a series of nine environments, each incorporating slide projections, soundtracks, cocane powder drawings and instructions for visitors which they entitled ‘Cosmococa’.

Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz discusses his recent publication (published by Afterall’s One Work Series), co-authored with Sabeth Buckmann, on the effect that the 1970s New York underground scene and Brazilian avant-garde cinema had on Oiticica and D’Almeida’s collaborative Cosmococa project. Drawing together the influence of concrete poetry and the writings of Marshall McLuhan, Henri Bergson and others, the book presents a rich analysis of the work and its experimentation with duration, its blurring of formats and languages and its modes of spectatorship.

A Book launch will follow the presentation.

Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz is a writer, translator and cultural theorist based in Berlin. He is currently working on a doctoral thesis on Hélio Oiticica’s unpublished writings, tape and film recordings. Amongst his recent projects is ‘The Potosi Principle / Pricipio Potosi’, an exhibition that took place in 2010 at the Museo Nacional de Arte Terina Sofia in Madrid, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin and Museo Nacional de Arte and museo Nacional de Etnografia y Folklore in La Paz (curated with Alice Creischer and Andreas Siekmann, also co-editors of the accompanying catalogue). His writing has been published in edited volumes including Art and the Critique of Ideology After 1989 (ed. With Eva Birkenstock, Jens Kastner and Ruth Sonderegger, 2013).

The Art of Hyperbole: Meschac Gaba’s Museum of Contemporary African Art

Thu, 24 Oct 2013 15:11:40 +0100
Date:Wednesday 04 December 2013, 17:15 to 19:00
Lecture Theatre
The mixed-media installation, Museum of Contemporary African Art, by Beninese artist, Meschac Gaba, was one of the biggest single purchases of contemporary African Art made by Tate. It was placed on display at Tate Modern earlier in 2013. The work has excited reactions with Jonathan Jones in the Guardian regaling it as “a powerful, surrealistic, anti-museum”, questioning the place of contemporary African Art in today’s metropolitan museum spaces. Is Gaba’s work the apt way of responding to the conditions surrounding the market in contemporary African Art? Or, on the contrary, are Gaba’s hyperbolic gestures just another example of an empty aesthetic?

In this discussion, artist Samson Kambalu, curator Paul Goodwin and author Lara Pawson join a debate chaired by Dr. David Dibosa.

TrAIN Open Lecture

Tue, 20 Aug 2013 14:41:52 +0100
Date:Wednesday 15 January 2014, 17:15 to 19:00
Lecture Theatre
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 Directory area of this website.

TrAIN Open Lecture | Motohiro Koizumi | Collaborative Art Projects

Mon, 27 Jan 2014 12:15:29 +0000
Date:Wednesday 12 February 2014, 18:00 to 19:45
Lecture Theatre
Collaborative Art Projects in Japanese International Art Exhibitions and its Social Implications

This lecture investigates how the expansion of these ‘collaborative’ art projects throughout regional communities should be perceived under the diversity of ‘community’ in the context of the trends of globalization. Specifically, on the basis of field research, Koizumi attempts to examine ‘collaborative’ art projects in terms of their significance and issues they present in urban and regional communities.

Koizumi is an associate professor in Cultural Policy and Management at National Tottori University (2011-), a CLIC fellow at Osaka University (2011-), and also, actively engaging in teaching courses for Arts Management and Cultural Industries at International Christian University (2012-).

To book please click here

Screening: La Javanaise + Q&A with Director Wendelien van Oldenborgh

Mon, 27 Jan 2014 12:14:51 +0000
Date:Wednesday 26 February 2014, 18:00 to 19:45
Lecture Theatre
Fashion, culture, museums and identity make a potent mix in the recent film, La Javanaise, by Dutch artist Wendelien van Oldenborgh. Interweaving memory and imagination, history and desire, the film addresses the involvement of big business and European textile giants in the continent’s colonial past as well as its legacies. Van Oldenborgh’s screenwork draws on a range of strategies, working with sound and camera-work, to explore themes such as disconnection and ‘fleeting movement’. In La Javanaise, Van Oldenborgh works against the backdrop of Amsterdam’s Tropenmuseum, working with fashion models and academics to animate the critical concerns that she shares with many lens-based practitioners.

In this evening of a screening of La Javanaise a Director’s Q&A will take place, alongside a discussion with Professor Deborah Cherry and Dr. David Dibosa, who appears in the film.

The Rhythm of Action: Rock Against Racism

Mon, 03 Mar 2014 18:39:17 +0000
Date:Wednesday 12 March 2014, 18:00 to 19:45
Lecture Theatre
Mark Sealy MBE Director of Autograph ABP, Syd Shelton and Professor Carol Tulloch are collaborating on a book about the Rock Against Racism (RAR) Movement, 1976-1981, when black and white people came together to address the escalating rise of racism in Britain through gigs, demonstrations and carnivals, graphic design and personal styles. Shelton was a committee member of RAR (London). He photographed many of its events and the contextual narratives that informed RAR. Shelton was also one of the graphic designers of the movement. His work during this period is the basis of the book that will be published by Autograph ABP.

Mira Schendel Conference

Tue, 20 Aug 2013 16:52:06 +0100
Date:Friday 16 November 2012, 09:30 to 18:00
Tate Modern

Scat: Sound and Collaboration

Thu, 22 Aug 2013 16:31:54 +0100
Date:Wednesday 05 June 2013, 09:00 to 18:30
Iniva - Rivington Place
Scat: Sound and Collaboration

05 Jun - 27 Jul 2013
Scat:Sound and Collaboration is an exhibition by Sonia Boyce which explores the significance of sound in art. Presented by Iniva across all the public spaces of Rivington Place, Scat brings together two immersive video works for the first time along with artefacts from the Devotional Collection, Boyce’s archive of CDs cassettes, vinyl records and other ephemera.

Looking In: An Evening of Conversation Exploring Identity and Contempory Photography

Fri, 06 Sep 2013 14:13:39 +0100
Date:Tuesday 17 September 2013, 19:00 to 21:00
Ben Uri, 108a Boundary Road (off Abbey Road)
Looking In: An Evening of Conversation Exploring Identity and Contempory Photography. Part of the Ben Uri ‘Talking Art’ Series

Tuesday 17th September
7.00 - 9.00 pm

Join us for an evening of discussion chaired by Deborah Cherry, Deputy Research Centre Director of the Transnational Art, Identity and Nation Centre, London College of Communication, and Katy Barron, Curator of Contemporary Art, Ben Uri. Contemporary photographers including Marcia Michael, Jason Evans and Professor Dr Tom Hunter, Professor in Photography Research, London College of Communication will discuss their practice in relation to the themes of the current exhibition of works by artists Maud Sulter and Chan-Hyo Bae
Looking In: An Evening of Conversation Exploring Identity and Contempory Photography

Entry is free, but booking is
required as seating is limited
RSVP: [email protected]
0207 604 3991
Ben Uri, 108a Boundary Road (off Abbey Road)
London, NW8 0RH
www.benuri.org.uk

at

Bridging the Divide: developing and applying design methodologies for cross-disciplinary practice

Mon, 17 Feb 2014 11:30:41 +0000
Date:Saturday 15 March 2014, 09:30 to 18:00
Lecture Theatre, Central Saint Martins (UAL)
Bridging the Divide: developing and applying design methodologies for cross-disciplinary practice
Workshop Call for Participants

Date: Saturday 15th March 2014
Time: 9.30 - 18.00
Location: Lecture Theatre, Central Saint Martins, Kings Cross

We would like to invite 25 participants for a one-day research symposium and workshop on cross-cultural collaboration. The symposium is organised around the exhibition The Craft of Ubuntu: An Exploration of Collaboration through Making, which is being shown in Cape Town and London as part of the World Design Capital 2014 official programme.

The speakers include guests from WDC2014 Cape Town: Professor Mugendi M’Rithaa (Cape Peninsula University of Technology), Andile Dyalvane (South African ceramicist ), Dr Katherine Ladd (University of Brighton), Dr Kirsten Scott (RCA), Simon Maidment (Kingston University), Sarah Rhodes (CSM) and John Ballyn (Independent Design Consultant).

Whilst the morning presentations will be on cross-disciplinary practice in an African context, the focus of the day is on wider cross-cultural collaboration in art and design research. The discourse will centre on:
- The success, and importantly, failure of such partnerships;
- The politics of working together;
- Negotiating collaboration across disciplinary and cultural borders;
- What might future collaborations look like?

If you would like to attend, please send an email to Sarah Rhodes: [email protected] The deadline for applications is Friday 21st February - we look forward to hearing from you.

You can follow the Bridging the Divide symposium on Twitter (@craftofubuntu) #bridgingthedivide #WDC682 or via the website: www.thecraftofubuntu.com

Meet the Chairs of Black Art & Design

Fri, 28 Mar 2014 10:36:27 +0000
Date:Wednesday 23 April 2014, 17:30 to 19:30
Green Room, Chelsea College Arts
Come and meet UAL’s newly appointed Chairs in Black Art and Design at a special social evening at Chelsea College of Arts. Professors Sonia Boyce and Paul Goodwin will be hosting an informal meet ‘n greet event in the Green Room at Chelsea to give the public, students and staff of UAL an opportunity to meet and chat with them face to face about their exciting new role and projects. Refreshments will be provided.

Apt Art: On the walls, en plein air and beyond the fence

Thu, 08 May 2014 13:53:21 +0100
Date:Friday 23 May 2014, 18:30 to 20:00
Room KX C303. Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, Granary Building, 1 Granary Square, London N1C 4AA
Join us on Friday 23 May 2014 for ‘Apt Art: On the walls, en plein air and beyond the fence’, a personal account by Vadim Zakharov.

The Apt Art project first took form as a show in the Moscow apartment of artist Nikita Alekseev in 1982. Developing the Soviet tradition of clandestine apartment exhibitions of the 1970s, Apt Art shows presented multiple installations made by artists in situ from ephemeral materials. It had an energy that was redoubled by the intimate setting, later spilling out into exhibitions on the outskirts of Moscow for ‘Apt Art en Plein Air’ and ‘Apt Art Beyond the Fence’, before being forced to end its activities in 1984. Vadim Zakharov will discuss his experiences of participating in Apt Art, while sharing images from his personal archive. Offering insight into the artistic scene in Soviet Russia in the 1980s, his talk will also reflect on the issues around making art public at the time.

Maria Christoforatou: Dislocated

Fri, 09 May 2014 13:58:57 +0100
Date:Thursday 15 May 2014, 18:00 to 20:00
The Gallery @ Idea Store Whitechapel, 321 Whitechapel Road, London, E1 1BU
The Gallery @ Idea Store Whitechapel invites you to Maria Christoforatou’s first solo show in London.
Open to public 16 May - 15 June 2014

Dislocated consists of a series of work in collage on paper (2012-2014). Her work examines the emotional effects of displacement in relation to notions of ‘home’ as a place of refuge and departure, and the ways in which the art practice can expose forced displacement, and produce feelings of fear, pain and loss. Christoforatou’s family experienced the loss of a home through two house fires. She states: “In both instances, I was overcome by feelings of helplessness, disorientation, a pining for my lost belongings, and a deep sadness. The sense of loss of routine and structure was also devastating. These were my first encounters with physical and psychological displacement and came to shape my subsequent experiences of dislocation as I moved from Greece to the UK.”

A process of destroying and recreating remnants, fragments and debris time and again is at the core of Christoforatou’s practice. She manipulates motifs relating to the physical construction of the house in order to explore the concept of home as fragile and impermanent. By focusing on the physicality, her work reveals a strong impact that the home can have on the orientation of ‘body/self’, and this may be destroyed when ‘home’ is no longer welcoming or reachable. According to Amelia Jones, ‘body/self’ is about the ‘relation to the self, the world, the other: all are constituted through a reversibility of seeing and being seen, perceiving and being perceived and these entail reciprocity and contingency for the subject(s) The body/self is simultaneously both subject and object’. In this way, Christoforatou’s practice is more focused on the relationship between the structure of a dwelling and the body that occupies it, and how this influences one’s subjectivity.

Her photographs and found images are photocopied in black and white to degrade the quality of the image, and used to enhance a sense of erasure and absence. The process of photocopying photographs twice removes the final image from the original object, accentuating the absence for the viewer. Christoforatou often uses images of Victorian and Tudor houses as she is drawn not only to their shapes, but the fact that they hold memories and histories now lost. She also exploits images of machineries used in construction work. These materials are used because they are instantly recognisable as mediums that capture time and harbour memories. The viewer’s ability to distinguish between the real and the imagined are manipulated through constructed images. Her collages focus on denying the visitor a sense of security that one often seeks from a home. As images of unattainable reconstruction, the collages enable Christoforatou to represent her own sense of dislocation, and the understanding that reconstruction can never bring back what is lost. In this sense, collage is the most appropriate method to re-make displacement in her practice, since this delicate process lets her feel the vulnerability of home, and the flexibility to create multiple forms.

For further information and images please contact Rugina Mukid, [email protected]

www.mariachris.com

1920-45 Inter-Asia Design Assimilation: Translations, Differentiations and Transmission

Wed, 14 May 2014 12:55:35 +0100
Date:Friday 30 May 2014, 09:30 to 17:30
Design Museum, London
1920-45 Inter-Asia Design Assimilation: Translations, Differentiations and Transmission is a one-day conference derived from the AHRC awarded project (2012-4), Translating and Writing Modern Design Histories in East Asia for the Global World, led by Dr Yuko Kikuchi (University of the Arts London) and Dr Wessie Ling (Northumbria University), examining inter-East Asia cultural dynamics in three regions, China, Japan, Korea, in three design activities, graphics, product/craft, fashion. Speakers include regional experts, from Japan and Korea, as well as UK scholars in the field. Held in the Design Museum (London), the conference investigates transnational flows, modernities and cross-cultural dynamics in East Asian designs in the early 20th century. We welcome design historians, curators, design postgraduates and scholars in the regions and fields to participate in the conference. Event is opened to the public. Reservation is highly recommended.

Chila Kumari Burman in conversation with Professor Deborah Cherry

Mon, 13 Oct 2014 15:33:16 +0100
Date:Wednesday 15 October 2014, 17:30 to 19:00
Chelsea College of Art, Lecture Theatre
17:30pm -19.00pm
Wednesday 15th October 2014
Lecture Theatre Chelsea College of Arts Atterbury Steet, London,
SW1P 4JU
www.transnational.org.uk

Born in Liverpool to a Hindu-Punjabi family, Chila Kumari Burman was educated at Leeds Polytechnic (BA Hons, 1st Class) and undertook postgraduate studies at the Slade School of Fine Art. She now lives and works in London, and exhibits both locally and internationally. Her work is held in a number of private and public collections including the Tate, Wellcome Trust, Victoria and Albert Museum, British Council and the Devi Foundation in New Delhi.

Burman will be speaking about her current practice in print, collage and mixed media, and how she utilises the physicality and pleasures of visual materials. This is most recently found in Bindi Girls - a series of female figuresmeticulously handcrafted and embellished with bindis, crystals and gems.
She will discuss her journey from her working class roots to her position in the art world today. Her new e-book “Shakti, Sexuality and Bindi Girls” by Rina Arya is available now, published by n. paradoxa international feminist arts journal.

Ingrid Pollard

Mon, 13 Oct 2014 15:40:41 +0100
Date:Wednesday 19 November 2014, 17:00 to 19:00
London College of Communication
17:00pm -19.00pm
Wednesday 19th November 2014
London College of Communication Elephant and Castle
London
SE1 6SB
Room: WG14

Photographic artist Ingrid Pollard will present recent work which examines landscape in the construction of heritage and belonging.
Ingrid Pollard has attained an international reputation for her photographic series questioning social constructions such as Britishness and racial difference. While investigating race, ethnicity and public spaces she has developed a body of work juxtaposing landscape and portraiture which provide a context for issues of migration, family and home.
Coming from a community arts background, she has in the past also documented the work of actors, dancers, writers and theatre companies. Her training in film and video narrative plays an important role in her work as does the materiality of photographic process within image-making.
Her work is held in numerous collections including the Victoria & Albert Museum, Tate and Arts Council England.

This event is organised by TrAIN (UAL Research Centre on transnational, identity and nation) in collaboration with the Photography and the Contemporary imaginary Research Hub and LCC Graduate School.
Drinks reception follows.

Faces of Insurgents: Visualizing The Taliban Through Judith Butler’s Ethics and Jacques Rancière’s Dissensus

Mon, 13 Oct 2014 15:49:10 +0100
Date:Wednesday 12 November 2014, 16:30 to 19:00
London College of Communication
LCC Street Lecture Theatre
Wednesday, November 12, 2014 16:30
Dr. Jenifer Chao

Abstract:
This paper juxtaposes Judith Butler’s consideration of wartime visuality with Jacques Rancière’s thoughts on the politics of aesthetics to analyze a collection of studio photographs featuring Taliban soldiers. Known simply as Taliban, the compilation consists of 49 photographs that capture these fighters through studio photography practices that contrast with the visual coordinates of insurgency and warfare commonly portraying them in popular Western media. This deviating visualization propels two ongoing debates in photography concerning its own function and efficacy: first, the ethical force of the medium at the scenes of war and violent conflicts, as discussed by Butler; and second, the status of photography vis-à-vis art which has emerged out of Rancière’s broader critique of critical art. I argue that while these Taliban images might encourage a compassionate visuality informed by Butler’s notions of precarity and grievability, this potential instrumentalization is problematized by Rancière’s aesthetic dissensus, which facilitates a viewing that actually obfuscates legibility and disrupts meaning. As a result, these photographs contest a visual regime that seeks lucidity for the terrorist-enemy by provoking a more perplexing and enigmatic visual encounter with the Taliban.

Jenifer Chao is a visiting post-doctoral researcher at the Photographic History Research Centre at De Montfort University, Leicester. She received her PhD in 2013 from the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis at University of Amsterdam. She also holds a MA in English Literature (cum laude) from University of Amsterdam and a BA in International Studies from University of Washington, Seattle. Before returning to academia to pursue her post-graduate degrees, she worked for many years as a foreign correspondent in Amsterdam for the international news agency The Associated Press.

Carol Mavor: Auerlian Sadism - Turning the Fairy Tale’s Golden Key

Tue, 25 Nov 2014 16:01:33 +0000
Date:Wednesday 10 December 2014, 17:00 to 19:00
Main Lecture Theatre, London College of Communication, Elephant and Castle London SE1 6SB
Aurelia (Latin for golden) sounds like oralia (Michael Moon’s made up word for the double consumption of the eyes and the mouth). Midas wished for everything that he touched to turn to gold, but the outcome was disastrous. He found that he could not eat (gold). The fairy tale and related myths and fables, often turn on gold.

This lecture looks at four golden tales: Ovid’s ‘Midas’; Aesop’s ‘Killing the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg’; Grimm’s’ ‘The Golden Key’; and Tim Krabbé’s ‘The Golden Egg’. In all, to eat gold (from metaphorically consuming it to literally swallowing it) turns sadistic. In 1994, the artist Janine Antoni made a pair of brooches (the artist’s nipples cast in 18k rose gold) called Tender Buttons: on the front side is the promise of ‘golden’ milk for sucking; on the back side are painful pins for sadistic attachment. Sadism demands a story (Laura Mulvey) and the golden fairy tale delivers it with ‘a tone licked clean’ (James Merrill).

Professor Carol Mavor is the author of five books. The first four were published by Duke University Press: Reading Boyishly: Roland Barthes, J. M. Barrie, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Marcel Proust, and D. W. Winnicott (2007), Becoming: The Photographs of Clementina, Viscountess, Hawarden (1999) Pleasures Taken: Performances of Sexuality and Loss in Victorian Photographs (1995) and Black and Blue: The Bruising Passion of Camera Lucida, La Jetée, Sans soleil and Hiroshima mon amour (2012). In 2008, Grayson Perry named Reading Boyishly as his ‘Book of the Year’. Mavor’s Blue Mythologies: A Study of the Colour was published by Reaktion Books in 2013 (translated into Turkish 2014, Chinese, 2015). Her newest book, Aurelia: Art and Literature Through the Eyes and Mouth of the Fairy, is forthcoming from Reaktion in 2015. In 2010-2011, Mavor was the Northrop Frye Chair in Literary Theory at the University of Toronto.

Recently, Mavor has co-produced, with artist Megan Powell, a thirty-nine minute moving image portrait funded by Arts Council, England entitled FULL. The film premiered at Stills Gallery (Edinburgh) in October 2014 and will be screened in the new Grand Hall at The Whitworth Art Gallery (Manchester) on 26 February 2015. Currently, Mavor is hard at work on fairy tales and a novel entitled Like a Lake.

TrAIN Open Lecture by Bojana Piškur: ‘Museum of the Workers’

Mon, 16 Feb 2015 17:52:42 +0000
Date:Wednesday 18 February 2015, 17:30 to 19:30
C202, Central Saint Martins, 1 Granary Square, Kings Cross, London N1C 4AA
This event is now fully booked, however if you would like to attend please contact Alice Clark on [email protected] to go onto the waiting list.

The focus for this talk will be socialist museums, looking at case studies in the former Yugoslavia and also, for instance, in Chile - specifically the Museum of Solidarity associated with Salvador Allende. I will touch upon working-class or proletarian culture, such as the Proletkult of the early 1920s in Russia and the writings of its main protagonist Alexander Bogdanov. The main importance of the Proletkult was the idea that the struggle on the cultural front was of equal importance to the struggle on economic and political fronts. According to their ‘doctrine’ the proletariat should, in order to emancipate itself from the culture of the ruling class, create its own culture. All these ideas had a far-reaching influence in other socialist countries after the second world war.

Socialist Yugoslavia in the 1950s adopted an economic and political system based on self-management and it was one of the core members of the non-aligned movement. Subsequently these circumstances had a strong impact on Yugoslavia’s cultural politics as well. The emphasis was placed on the educative function of culture rather than on artistic functions, and museums were encouraged to address the entire working population ¬- that is, the spheres of economy, education and culture were transferred to the people themselves. One of the main museological tasks was to make a bridge between museums and workers ¬- which sometimes meant literally bringing art to the factories. Educational or didactic exhibitions were mounted with the intention of actively engaging workers in culture-making. In other words: art museums and their contents were opened to the workers with the purpose of rethinking the museum’s role in the new socialist society.

In 1972 an important event was organised under the auspices of UNESCO, a seminar in Santiago - capital of a socialist and non-aligned Chile - debating a new type of museum, one that would link cultural rehabilitation with political emancipation. This museum would follow social and cultural changes closely and be socially progressive without being ideologically restricted by any political representation. An example, observed from today’s perspective, might be the Museum of Solidarity, as already mentioned. While inaugurating this institution in May 1972, Salvador Allende, seemed to understand the new museological vocation of the era, announcing: ‘This is not just a museum anymore. This is a museum of the workers!’

After the 1990s the humanist ideas of socialism, socialist cultural policies and the topic of non-alignment seemed to become obsolete and were widely forgotten; however, in recent years there has been a renewed interest in these issues. The following questions arise: What progressive socialist cultural policies, museum models and directions - as well as their emancipatory utopias - could be applied to the new models of museum of today? What are the elements, traditions, references from those past experiences that can be extracted or recuperated in times of neoliberal capitalism in the sphere of culture? And most importantly: how do we actually translate these ideas into praxis?

Bojana Piškur is a curator at the Moderna galerija in Ljubljana. Her focus of professional interest is on political issues as they relate to or are manifested in the field of art, with special emphasis on the region of the former Yugoslavia and Latin America. She has researched topics such as ‘post avant-gardes in former Yugoslavia’, ‘absent archives’, ‘radical education’, ‘new kinds of institutionality’, ‘politics of curating’, ‘relationships between art forms and politics of resistance’ and ‘politics of affect’, always in relation to the wider social and political environment. She was a member of Radical Education Collective between 2006 and 2014.

Said Adrus: Without an Empire Symposium

Mon, 01 Dec 2014 17:06:51 +0000
Date:Wednesday 03 December 2014, 13:30 to 17:30
Lecture Theatre Chelsea College of Arts 16 John Islip St London SW1P 4JU
Exploring themes of commemoration, mourning, the absence of ruins and ghosting the archive, Said Adrus’s Lost Pavilion project forms the basis for his exhibition Without An Empire - Ghosts Within at the 198 CAL in Hern Hill, curated by Maria M. Kheirkhah. Adrus’ video installation and photographic series comes amidst a backdrop of activities commemorating the first world war and highlights the contributions and presence of Indian Muslim, Sikh and Hindu soldiers and officers, reflecting on ideas relating to Diaspora, especially South Asian Diaspora, in its broader context.

This symposium gathers renowned artists, curators and cultural critics to discuss this important project within the wider context of the artist’s practice which encompasses a wide range of media and materials as well as important engagements with some of the most radical and critical art practices of recent times.

“In Lost Pavilion the collective impulse of the Black Arts movement of the 1980s continues in his attention to the collective contribution of Indian soldiers of diverse ethnic and religious constituencies, marked by the presence of these graves of Muslim soldiers that implies the absence of others who fought alongside them.”
Excerpt from Sites- Sights of memory and mourning By Amna Malik

Speakers include:
Dr. Amna Malik, art historian and senior lecturer, Slade School of Fine Art, University College London; Ashwani Sharma, Principal Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies, University of East London and co-editor of Darkmatter Journal; Keith Piper, artist and Associate Professor in Fine Art and Digital Media, Middlesex University London, Said Adrus, artist and Maria M. Kheirkhah artist and curator (TrAIN Research Centre, University of Arts London). This event is chaired by Professor Paul Goodwin, TrAIN research centre, UAL.

This event is free but please RSVP in advance to [email protected]

Performance Matters 2: Daniel Baker and Delaine Le Bas

Tue, 16 Dec 2014 15:01:43 +0000
Date:Wednesday 14 January 2015, 17:30 to 19:30
Main Lecture Theatre Chelsea College of Art 16 John Islip Street, London SW1P 4JU
Image: Daniel Bake and Delaine Le Bas by Karl Grady

Romani culture is marked by a history of critical performance and performativity. Romani survival in Europe, over the course of a millennium, has been contingent upon the adoption and practice of a number of performance strategies, including oral history, storytelling, music, dance and theatre, as well as upon everyday narratives that perform intelligible Romani identities for both the community itself and for non-Roma. What is the relationship between Romani performance, Romani iterations of performativity and hegemonic knowledge production? What are the slippages amongst these practices? What is the potential in these slippages and iterations for different forms of agency, especially in light of the current violence confronting Romani subjects across Europe?

Daniel Baker is a Romani Gypsy. An artist, curator and theorist, he holds a PhD on the subject of Gypsy aesthetics from the Royal College of Art, London. Baker acted as exhibitor and advisor to the first and second Roma Pavilions; “Paradise Lost” and “Call the Witness” at the 52nd and 54th Venice Biennales respectively. Baker’s art and writing examines the role of art in the enactment of social agency. Recent publications include “We Roma: A Critical Reader in Contemporary art” 2013 and “Ex Libris” 2009. Baker’s work is exhibited internationally. His work can be found in collections across Europe, America, and Asia. Former Chair of the Gypsy Council (2006-9), Baker currently lives and works in London

Delaine Le Bas is an English Romani Gypsy. Delaine’s artistic practice is across media including performance. Delaine studied Fashion and Textiles at St Martins. She was advisor and exhibitor in the First Roma Pavilion Paradise Lost at 52nd Venice Biennale. Delaines ongoing project Witch Hunt, a multi media installation that includes sound, film and performance commissioned in 2009 still continues to tour and was included in Roundtable Gwangju Biennale South Korea. Most recent projects include To Gypsyland co-curated by Barby Asante and commissioned by 198 Contemporary Arts & Learning and Grace In Thy Sight a PH1 Artists Residency where the Le Bas family were in residence on The Eye Of York in York in a caravan for month. Both of these projects will be available as publications in the near future. Delaine recently returned from Zimbabwe working on Basket Case II which will be exhibited at National Gallery Harare and will continue onto National Gallery Bullawayo Zimbabwe. Delaine lives and works in various locations across Europe and the U.K.

Daniel Baker and Delaine Le Bas are part of an AHRC funded network Performing Romani Identities: Strategy and Critique with CCW Professor Jane Collins and Dr. Ethel Brooks Rutgers University, USA, Tate-TrAIN Transnational Fellow. Daniel and Delaine will present their own work and discuss the aims of the network project which travels to four cities in Europe from January 2015.

TrAIN Open Lecture by Martina Köppel-Yang: Advance through Retreat

Tue, 10 Feb 2015 15:11:24 +0000
Date:Tuesday 17 February 2015, 17:30 to 19:00
Main Lecture Theatre Chelsea College of Art 16 John Islip Street, London SW1P 4JU
For nearly two decades, traditional Chinese culture and traditional media has been a subject within the field of contemporary Chinese art. Numerous biennials and exhibitions on the topic—for example, the project for the first Chinese Pavilion at the ‘Venice Biennial in 2003’, and most recently ‘Ink Art: Past as Present in Contemporary China’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Dec. 2013)— indicate the existence of a tendency that is gaining ever greater importance, a tendency which shows the apparent need to rediscover and revaluate Chinese traditional culture. Up to the present day, the subject is mostly discussed under aspects of technique, media, aesthetics and values associated with traditional Chinese literati culture. The subject is tackled either to reaffirm a Chinese cultural identity or to revisit the East/West dichotomy, a specter haunting Chinese cultural theory and critique since the mid-19th century. Yet, there are other crucial facets to traditional Chinese culture that have been vital for contemporary Chinese culture since its emergence in the late 1970s. These artistic positions use tradition to develop autonomous languages uttering positions of resistance to overall assimilating tendencies. Here the retreat into tradition is employed as an efficient strategy facing a specific historical moment.

Martina Köppel-Yang is an independent scholar and curator with a Ph.D in East Asian Art History from the University of Heidelberg. She has curated and co-curated numerous exhibitions and written extensively on the subject of contemporary Chinese Art. Publications include: Semiotic Warfare - The Chinese Avant-garde 1979 - 1989, a Semiotic Analysis, Hong Kong: timezone 8, 2003.

This free event is a collaboration between the TrAIN Research Centre at The University of the Arts and Tate Research Centre: Asia Pacific.

Cultural Threads: Transnational Textiles Today

Thu, 15 Jan 2015 12:09:43 +0000
Date:Saturday 07 February 2015, 10:00 to 16:30
Central Saint Martins 1 Granary Square, Kings Cross, London N1C 4AA
A day-long symposium about contemporary textile practices and multiple
cultural influences to mark the launch of Cultural Threads (Bloomsbury: 2015).

Speakers:

Christine Checinska
Godfried Donkor
Françoisé Dupre
Helen Jennings
Toril Johannessen
Jasleen Kaur
Sarat Maharaj
Sarah Rhodes & Julie Ryder

The event is free and open to the public. Booking is essential:
[email protected]

TrAIN Open Lecture by Monica Juneja: Modernity’s invention of Art - the travails of a migrant concept

Thu, 05 Mar 2015 16:23:18 +0000
Date:Wednesday 18 March 2015, 17:30 to 19:00
Main Lecture Theatre, Chelsea College of Arts, 16 John Islip Street London, SW1P 4JU
This event is open to staff, students and the public.

Booking is essential, to book please go to:

http://ow.ly/JYdUQ

Violent conflagrations over images that have regularly erupted across the globe remind us of the power of pictures to act, to move and to hurt. They point to the often slippery distinction between a “work of art” and a “religious image”, urging us to examine the terms in which the notion of “art” as a globally migrant taxonomic category and a component of cultural identity in different regions of the world was constituted.

This talk takes as its starting point a heated public controversy triggered by the portrayals of Hindu goddesses and an anthropomorphic map of India as an unclothed female by the Indian modernist painter M.F. Husain.

It will reflect on a history of multi-textured relationships with images that have produced structures of intimacy between the viewer and the religious image, which then accounts for the power of certain images to hurt.

Censorship, controversy and conflagrations surrounding images - be it cartoons of the Prophet, or the work of Ai Wei-wei or the paintings of M.F. Husain - though each a product of specific local and regional constellations - have all erupted as a result of a new divide across the globe that separates those who share an access to authoritative knowledge about the values of “art” and those who do not.

Monica Juneja holds the Chair of Global Art History at the Cluster of Excellence “Asia and Europe in a Global Context”, University of Heidelberg. She has been Professor at the University of Delhi and held visiting professorial positions at the Universities of Hannover, Vienna, the Emory University, Atlanta and Zurich.

TrAIN Open Lecture by Mizuki Takahashi Overwriting Gendered Bodies: A Practice with Chikako Yamashiro and Meiro Koizumi

Mon, 20 Apr 2015 19:20:37 +0100
Date:Wednesday 13 May 2015, 17:30 to 19:30
Main Lecture Theatre Chelsea College of Arts 16 John Islip Street London SW1P 4JU
13 May 2015 5.30-7.00pm

Main Lecture Theatre
Chelsea College of Arts
16 John Islip Street
London SW1P 4JU

Ethnicity, nationality, sexuality and social class are our default body settings. While these attributes are rooted in our behaviour and perspective, there still exists free space to customize them through experiences in both public and private domains such as the family, office and school.

In this lecture Takahashi will talk about her recent practice with two Japanese contemporary artists - Chikako Yamashiro (b.1976, based in Okinawa) and Meiro Koizumi (b.1976, based in Kanagawa). Their works reveal a strong interest in the body as “topos” in which identity is constructed through the memory of war, stereotypical Japanese masculinity images and the political tension between the Japanese government and Okinawa.

With the video works by Yamashiro and Koizumi, their continuing struggle to overwrite our respective gendered bodies through sharing individual experiences, idea and historical memories will be presented.

Mizuki Takahashi is a senior curator at Contemporary Art Center, Art Tower Mito and she is currently based in London as a visiting researcher in Central Saint Martins. Takahashi has realized cross-disciplinary exhibitions addressing various contemporary cultures from manga, architecture, performance, film, music and visual art. Her curated exhibitions in and outside Japan include “Eight Days : Beuys in Japan” (Art Tower Mito, 2009, partly toured to Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, 2011) , “Quiet Attentions: Departure from Women” (Art Tower Mito, 2011), and “Tadasu Takamine’s Cool Japan”.

TrAIN Open Lecture By Hou Hanru ‘Open Museum Open City’

Mon, 11 May 2015 20:50:47 +0100
Date:Wednesday 20 May 2015, 17:30 to 19:00
Room C202 Central Saint Martins 1 Granary Square King’s Cross London N1C 4AA
20 May 2015 - 17:30 to 19:00

TrAIN Open Lecture By Hou Hanru
‘Open Museum Open City’

Room C202
Central Saint Martins
1 Granary Square King’s Cross London
N1C 4AA

Hou Hanru will address how the museum might be developed into a new public sphere for our times. With reference to some of his recent projects as Artistic Director of MAXXI in Rome, he will ask how “experimental” and “radical” practice may be continued beyond the market. Facing the global trend to “fetishise” art production, how might the museum become a new life context for creation, public participation and community building? And how can a museum programme respond to the geopolitical changes of today? In tackling these and related questions Hou Hanru will explore the ‘exhibition-event-museum-city’ as a transnational space.

Hou Hanru is a prolific writer and curator based in Rome, Paris and San Francisco. He is currently the Artistic Director of MAXXI (National Museum for 21st Century Art and National Museum of Architecture) in Rome. In the last 25 years he has curated and co-curated around 100 exhibitions, notably contributing to biennials and triennials in, for instance, Johannesburg (1997), Shanghai (2000), Gwangju (2002), Venice (French Pavilion 1999, Zone of Urgency 2003, Chinese Pavilion 2007), Guanghzhou (2005), Tirana (2005), Istanbul (2007), Lyon (2009) and Auckland (2013). His books include Hou Hanru (Utopia@Asialink and School of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne, 2014), Paradigm Shifts, Walter and McBean Galleries Exhibitions and Public Programs, San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI, 2011) and On the Mid-Ground (English version by Timezone 8, Hong Kong, 2002; Chinese version by Gold Wall Press, Beijing, 2013).

Image credit: MAXXI, Rome

This event is bookable: http://events.arts.ac.uk/event/2015/5/20/TrAIN-Open-Lecture-Open-Museum-Open-City/

Please contact [email protected] for any questions.

TrAIN Open Lecture by Peter Osborne Existential Urgency: Contemporaneity, Biennials and Social Form

Fri, 05 Jun 2015 18:44:59 +0100
Date:Wednesday 17 June 2015, 17:30 to 19:00
Main Lecture Theatre, Chelsea College of Arts, 16 John Islip Street, London SW1P 4JU
What happens to the form of the biennial when biennials become part of a world system of art institutions, subject to the historical temporality of a global contemporaneity?

What happens when the periodic rhythms of national narratives of biennial exhibitions are overcoded by a serial sequence of international biennials - competing for contemporaneity - seemingly without end?

This lecture approaches these questions via a consideration of the debate about the transitional symbolic significance of the 1989 Third Havana Biennale.

Peter Osborne is Professor of Modern European Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University London, and an editor of the journal ‘Radical Philosophy’.

This is a free lecture open to the public. To book your place: http://ow.ly/NSCVo

A research talk by Yve Lomax: Photographs, Writing

Wed, 18 Mar 2015 12:12:05 +0000
Date:Wednesday 11 March 2015, 16:30 to 17:30
Street Lecture Theatre, London College of Communication, Elephant & Castle.
The Photography and the Contemporary Imaginary Research Hub at LCC is pleased to announce a research talk by Yve Lomax.

This talk took place on 11 March 15.

’Within this talk I will give example of my writing and, in so doing, say something about photographic images. There will be examples that embrace what I can only call the ‘art’ of writing. There will also be examples of me toing and froing as, in writing, I enter into conversation with myself. And finally there will be ideas regarding the example itself and how, if only for a moment, a photographic image can be considered as that.’

Yve Lomax is a visual artist and writer. She is author of Pure Means: Writing, Photographs and an Insurrection of Being (2013), Passionate Being: Language, Singularity and Perseverance (2010), Sounding the Event: Escapades in Dialogue and Matters of Art, Nature and Time (2005) and Writing the Image: An Adventure with Art and Theory (2000). She is currently Senior Research Tutor for Photography and Fine Art at the Royal College of Art. She is also a director of and commissioning editor for the Common Intellectual series of Copy Press.

This event is organized in association with TrAIN, the UAL research centre for transnational art identity and nation.

All are welcome to this talk.

Please direct enquiries to: [email protected]

PANEL: PERFORMANCE AS PROCESS, HISTORIES AND TRACES OF A SHIFTING FIELD

Mon, 16 Mar 2015 11:55:07 +0000
Date:Monday 16 March 2015, 18:00 to 20:00
Chelsea College of Art Lecture Theatre
Monday, 16 March 2015
18:00-20:00
Chelsea College of Art Lecture Theatre

RSVP essential: [email protected]

A panel discussion with RoseLee Goldberg (Founding director of Performa), Catherine Wood (Curator of Contemporary Art & Performance, Tate), Charles Aubin (Curator, Performa), Lois Keidan (Founding director of LADA) and Lawrence Lek (artist).
Chaired by: Jo Melvin (Senior lecturer of Fine Art Theory at Chelsea College of Art).

Performance is increasingly disseminated and consumed as secondary material in a world that is highly mediated by and interpreted through digital mediums. What are the differences, concerns and procedures that underscore our relationship with live art when the viewer is removed from the physical space of the performer? What is at stake in documenting and archiving the ephemeral moment of a live action?

During the discussion, Lawrence Lek, one of Delfina Foundation’s UK associate artists, will create a digital environment in the form of a virtual conversation.

This event is part of Performance as Process.

In partnership with:
TrAIN

With support from:
Arts Council England

For details please see: http://delfinafoundation.com/whats-on/panel-performance-as-process-histories-and-traces-of-a-shifting-field

Behind the Brushstroke Talk and Workshop

Wed, 11 Mar 2015 18:39:12 +0000
Date:Thursday 12 March 2015, 17:30 to 19:30
Lecture Theatre, Camberwell College of Arts, Wilson Road, London, SE5 8LU
12 Mar 2015
17:30 to 19:30

Lecture Theatre,
Camberwell College of Arts
Wilson Road
London
SE5 8LU

A talk by artist Masahiro Suda, curator of the Camberwell Space exhibition Behind the Brushstroke, followed by a calligraphy demonstration by Houran Yokoyama.

Masahiro Suda is a painter, working in Nagoya, Japan, and is currently Professor of Nagoya University of Arts. His work has been widely exhibited in Tokyo, Nagoya, London, Cologne, Berlin, Vilnius, Bangkok and Beijing. He worked and researched in London for the academic year 2008 - 09, at the Research Centre for Transnational Art Identity Nation (TrAIN), University of the Arts London.

Houran Yokoyama was born into a family of calligraphers and learnt the art of traditional Japanese calligraphy from an early age. As he grew interested in contemporary art, he began to explore his artistic expression through performance, with the aim of blending calligraphy with contemporary art.

This event is supported by TrAIN (The University of the Arts London Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation) and University of the Arts London Postgraduate Community.

To book your place: http://events.arts.ac.uk/event/2015/3/12/Behind-the-Brushstroke-Talk-and-Workshop/

PUKIJAM Jennifer Allen aka Quilla Constance - Deconstructing identities - An afternoon symposium

Tue, 24 Mar 2015 16:05:44 +0000
Date:Monday 20 April 2015, 13:00 to 17:30
The Banqueting Hall, Chelsea College of Arts, 16 John Islip Street, London SW1P 4JU
Deconstructing Identities - An afternoon symposium @ UAL Chelsea College of Arts, 16 John Islip Street, London SW1P 4JU
Supported by TrAIN

Bringing artists and academics together, creating a critical platform to highlight issues raised within the work of Jennifer Allen aka Quilla Constance.

Speakers include Dr Mo Throp, Dr Ope Lori, Kirsten Cooke, Jennifer Allen and Maria Kheirkhah, chaired by Professor Toshio Watanabe.

This event is free but places are limited - RSVP essential. Call 44(0)207 978 8309 or email [email protected]

This symposium is part of:
PUKIJAM
Jennifer Allen aka Quilla Constance

Curated by Maria M. Kheirkhah
198 Contemporary Arts and Learning
26th March - 8th May 2015

198 Contemporary Arts and Learning is delighted to present ‘PUKIJAM’, an exhibition of videos, photographs, paintings and sculptural costumes by artist Jennifer Allen aka Quilla Constance (QC). QC’s multidisciplinary works transform the gallery at 198 CAL into a space where notions of cultural authenticity and taboo are challenged via a series of unexpected visual and aural combinations.

Quilla Constance, QC, is a satirical punk persona created, performed and deployed by Allen in order to locate a point of agency within the hegemonic framework of white phallocentric order.

As QC, Allen stages and virally inserts her artistic practice within pop culture, traversing music venues, forging protests and entering art galleries in order to emulate and critique the operations of these cultural zones. Here QC offers a raw and fresh frame through which Allen examines the construction of black female identities within contemporary British media culture.

Allen’s newly commissioned video piece, ‘PUKIJAM’ simultaneously deconstructs and reinforces notions of meaning and identity via a dystopian Golliwog Cakewalk. The performance is accompanied and interrupted by a montage of erotic media images, figurative objects and Allen’s mutant scat vocal set against a relentless electronic throb.
Other video works include ‘Happy Christmas Mom & Dad’ a transgressive piece which sees Allen allegedly perform a seductive dance as a gift for her parents on Christmas day, and ‘VJAZZLED’, a satire on the Essex lady garden beautification trend of Vajazzling.
The exhibition continues with vibrant sculptural costumes adorning large, exotic, acrylic on canvas abstractions. These conspire with the video works, inviting the viewer into a dialogue through which notions of cultural authenticity and the production of meaning are visibly contested.
Exhibition Events
Thursday 26th March 2015 | Private view | 6-9pm

Friday 27th March | Artist-led Karaoke workshop for young people | creative responses to works by Jennifer Allen aka Quilla Constance.

Friday 17th April | Performance | join us for an evening of performance by Jennifer Allen aka Quilla Constance. Brixton Village | 7-8 pm |Places are limited - RSVP essential.
Call: 44(0)207 978 8309 or email [email protected]

Sunday 19th April | Performance| Join us for an afternoon of performance by Jennifer Allen aka Quilla Constance 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning | 2-4 pm.

Monday 20th April | Deconstructing identities| An afternoon symposium @ UAL Chelsea College of Arts, 16 John Islip Street, London SW1P 4JU; bringing artists and academics together, creating a critical platform to highlight issues raised within the work of Jennifer Allen aka Quilla Constance. Speakers include Dr Mo Throp, Dr Ope Lori, Kirsten Cooke, Jennifer Allen and Maria Kheirkhah, chaired by Professor Toshio Watanabe| 1-5.30pm. This event is free but places are limited - RSVP essential. Call 44(0)207 978 8309 or email [email protected]

Saturday 25th April | Artist & curator’s Talk and tour | 2-4 pm.

Japan’s True Love of Nature: Ecologies of Hope

Wed, 16 Sep 2015 11:18:32 +0100
Date:Friday 24 April 2015, 18:00 to 19:00
Weston Room, Cathedral Hostry, Norwich NR1 4DH
Tokyo Futures, 1868-2020 | UK-Japan lecture series | 6 pm | 24 April 2015

Professor Julia Adeney Thomas
University of Notre Dame
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University

Venue: Weston Room, Cathedral Hostry, Norwich NR1 4DH

Admission Free | All Welcome | Booking essential

About the Lecture:

The talks are intended to be accessible to those with no prior knowledge of Japanese history.

Japan has been called the “toxic archipelago” and its pollution cases such as Minamata have drawn international attention. More recently, the meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear power plant added yet another chapter to the tale of environmental degradation. But Japanese history also provides an alternative story of ecologically sound ways of living. This talk considers not Japan’s famed literary and aesthetic celebrations of nature, but its legacy of environmentally sustainable economic and political practices. These alternative social patterns show that until very recently Japan was on its way to being a vibrantly productive, healthful, modern society without resorting to the industrial excesses that pollute its islands today. Scaling population to match natural resources, using building techniques that conserved wood, eating healthy diets that did not strip the soil of nutrients, solving production problems with energy-saving technologies, and marketing human excrement to create clean cities and farm fertilizer were among the techniques used in the past. With these ecologically sound and economically productive approaches, Japan was able to meet the onslaught of Western Imperialism and maintain national sovereignty in the Meiji Period (1868-1912). But it was also during the Meiji period that Japan began to change its approach, pursuing some of the least environmentally sensitive techniques in its repertoire and adopting Western ones as well. For a while, this strategy worked. While Chinese economic development sank in comparison with European growth in the nineteenth century, the Japanese economy grew. In short, China diverged, but Japan paralleled and ultimately converged with the West, but with all the dire consequences of adapting the West’s non-ecologically sound practices. Today, Japan stands at a crossroad just as in the Meiji period. It can either continue in the thrall of the economic models of infinite growth that blight our finite planet or it can embrace a new leadership role, treating its declining population, legacy of frugal habits, and renown appreciation for natural beauty as assets in defining a sustainable economy in the age of the Anthropocene. The older history, if resuscitated, can provide hope not only for Japan but for the world.

About the Speaker

Julia Adeney Thomas investigates concepts of nature in Japanese political ideology, the impact of the climate crisis on historiography, and photography as a political practice. Her book, Reconfiguring Modernity: Concepts of Nature in Japanese Political Ideology, (published in Japanese as Kindai no saikochiku) received the John K. Fairbank Prize from the American Historical Association in 2002 and her essay on wartime memory in Japan, “Photography, National Identity, and the ‘Cataract of Times:’ Wartime Images and the Case of Japan” in the American Historical Review received the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians’ Best Article of the Year Award in 1999. She has also published two co-edited collections, Rethinking Historical Distance and Japan at Nature’s Edge: The Environmental Context of a Global Power as well as numerous essays. Her work has received support from the Mellon Foundation, the Japan Foundation, the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS), Mombusho, NEH, SSRC, and the ACLS. Educated at Princeton, Oxford, and the University of Chicago, she now teaches history at the University of Notre Dame. She has held visiting positions at Bielefeld University, the University of Bristol, Heidelberg, Michigan, and Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study. Currently she is at Harvard University at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Exhibition: Maud Sulter - Passion

Mon, 06 Apr 2015 22:52:10 +0100
Date:Saturday 25 April 2015, 10:00 to 17:00
Street Level Photoworks Trongate 103, Glasgow G1 5HD
25th April - 21st June

Maud Sulter (1960-2008) was an award-winning artist and writer, curator and gallerist of Ghanaian and Scottish heritage who lived and worked in Britain. In the 1990s she exhibited widely and internationally in solo shows and group exhibitions, representing Britain at the Johannesburg Biennale of 1995. Today, her work is to be found in numerous private and public collections, including the Scottish Parliament, the Arts Council Collection, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the British Council Collection, the Scottish National Galleries, several regional UK galleries, and the National Portrait Gallery by whom she was commissioned in 2001 to photograph leading children’s writers.

Sulter’s significance lies in her pioneering innovation of photographic forms that interrogated the visual representation of black women. This sustained visual inquiry was pursued not through the more familiar routes of documentary or reportage. Sulter critically engaged with the western canon, the histories of art, photography and modernism to challenge the past and remake the future. Putting black women centrally within the frame, she often focusing on lost or neglected figures, as in her sustained series of image-making with Jeanne Duval in mind. Distinctive to her work is a preoccupation with movements between Africa and Europe over the past six centuries and more, the longevity and complexities of African diasporas in Europe.

Sulter won critical praise for her bold, experimental and exquisitely produced works with their sensual splendour and inventive image construction. Her later self-portraits were applauded for their beauty, sensuality, confidence and ability to dramatise a situation.

This exhibition is an Autograph ABP / Street Level Photoworks partnership, in association with TrAIN (Transnational Art and Nation) and is the outcome of a curatorial research project by Deborah Cherry, Professor of Art History at the University of the Arts London, and Deputy Director of TrAIN, and artist and curator Ajamu, funded by Arts Council England.

Exhibition: Maud Sulter - About Face

Mon, 06 Apr 2015 22:34:35 +0100
Date:Friday 17 April 2015, 10:00 to 17:00
Hillhead Library, 348 Byres Road, Glasgow, G12 8AP
17th April - 28th June

About Face is an exhibition of 10 large format Polaroid portraits by Maud Sulter, originally commissioned by the Scottish Poetry Library in 2002. It is a fabulous capsule collection of significant Scottish poets at the beginning of the new century.

When the Oil Runs Out, People Will Need Horses

Thu, 11 Jun 2015 11:27:48 +0100
Date:Thursday 25 June 2015, 11:00 to 18:30
Autograph ABP, Rivington Place, London EC2A 3BA
A day of Romani Performance, Strategy and Critique

11am and 12pm - The ‘Romani Triangle’
A walking tour by Professor Ethel Brooks of Rutgers University USA, with the Kakka Collective

Meet outside Autograph ABP, Rivington Place, London EC2A 3BA

Tours last approximately 45 minutes

2.30 - 6.30 pm - Performing Romani Identities: Strategy and Critique
An international seminar presenting the findings of the PRISaC Network

Project Space 2, Autograph ABP, Rivington Place, London EC2A 3BA

For further details and tickets please go ton: https://eventbrite.co.uk/event/17135916989/

Between Imperial Capital and World City: The Tourist’s Tokyo a Century Ago

Wed, 16 Sep 2015 11:15:52 +0100
Date:Wednesday 14 October 2015, 18:15 to 21:00
Brunei Gallery Lecture Theatre, SOAS, University of London | Russell Square | WC1H 0XG
Between Imperial Capital and World

Tokyo Futures, 1868-2020 UK-Japan lecture series

Venue: Brunei Gallery Lecture Theatre, SOAS, University of London | Russell Square | WC1H 0XG
6:15 - 9 PM | 14 October 2015

About the Lecture:

In anticipation of the 2020 Olympics to be held in Tokyo, the city is busily making preparations to play host to visitors from around the world. The present campaign to enhance Tokyo’s appeal for foreign tourists provides a fitting opportunity to review what kind of a tourist destination Tokyo was in generations past. It also happens that 2020 will mark the centenary of Meiji Shrine, which has been one of the city’s most popular sites to visit since its completion in 1920.

This lecture will explore how Tokyo appeared to tourists a century ago. Tokyo at the time was the capital of a young colonial empire. Tokyo tourism thus targeted visitors from the colonies as well as from overseas. Japan in 1920 strove to display Tokyo’s position as an imperial capital with the same energy Japan today seeks to demonstrate to the world Tokyo’s present status as a cosmopolitan world city.
About the Speaker

Jordan Sand is Associate Professor of Japanese History and Culture at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. He teaches modern Japanese history and other topics in East Asian history, as well as urban history and the world history of food. He has a doctorate in history from Columbia University and an MA in architecture history from the University of Tokyo. His research and writing has focused on architecture, urbanism, material culture and the history of everyday life. House and Home in Modern Japan (Harvard, 2004) explores the ways that westernizing reformers reinvented Japanese domestic space and family life during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His most recent book, Tokyo Vernacular: Common Spaces, Local Histories, Found Objects (University of California Press, 2013), analyzes problems of history and memory in the postindustrial city. He has also examined the comparative history of urban fires and firefighting, the modernization and globalization of Japanese food (including sushi, miso, and MSG), and the history of furniture and interiors, and topics in the study of heritage and museums. He is presently working on a study of manifestations of colonialism in physical forms ranging from bodily comportment to urban planning.

From 2009 through 2011, he served as Chair of Georgetown’s Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. During the academic year 2012-13, he was a visiting professor at the University of Tokyo Graduate School for Interdisciplinary Information Studies, where he taught a seminar on approaches to the modern city.

This lecture is free to attend. Registration is required:

http://sainsbury-institute.org/news-events/tokyo-futures-20151014/

About the Lecture Series:

From the middle of the nineteenth century, Japan, like the rest of the world, was shaken by the transformations that followed its encounter with industry and empire. The country entered a new era, named after the Meiji emperor, and embarked on an ambitious programme of modernization, centred on Tokyo, its new capital.

The UK-Japan Lecture Series, consisting of six lectures held in the UK and Japan, will explore the upheaval, as it played out in the people’s understanding and experience of art, nature and the city. How did these come together in shaping the new capital? How did the Meiji experience leave its mark on city and country in the twentieth century? And how might we draw on this history as we head towards the second Tokyo Olympics in 2020?

The talks are intended to be accessible to those with no prior knowledge of Japanese history.
Admission is free and all are welcome. Booking essential. To book your seat, please follow the link below or email the Sainsbury Institute.

About the lecture series:

‘Nature’

24 April 2015 | Cathedral Hostry, Norwich | Professor Julia Adeney Thomas (University of Notre Dame)

30 May 2015 | Meiji Jingu, Tokyo | Professor Inaga Shigemi (International Research Centre for Japanese
Studies)

‘City’

14 October 2015 | Brunei Gallery Lecture Theatre, SOAS, London | Professor Jordan Sand (Georgetown University)

31 October 2015 | Japanese Nursing Association Hall, Tokyo | Professor Kuroishi Izumi ( Aoyama Gakuin Univeristy)

‘Art’

12 February 2016 | British Museum, London | Dr Sarah Teasley ( Royal College of Art)

19 March 2016 | Kyoto University of Arts and Design, Gaien Campus, Tokyo | Professor Watanabe Toshio (Research Centre for Transnational Art,
Identity and Nation, University of the Arts London)

The UK-Japan Lecture Series is supported by the Toshiba International Foundation and the Japan Foundation

Daniel Senise: Rhetoric of Painting

Tue, 06 Oct 2015 11:46:55 +0100
Date:Wednesday 14 October 2015, 18:30 to 20:00
Main Lecture Theatre, Chelsea College of Art 16 John Islip Street, London SW1P 4JU
Daniel Senise is one of the key artists from Brazil’s ‘80s generation’ having participated in the now historic ‘Como Vai Voce Geração 80’ (How are you 80s Generation) exhibition at the Visual Arts School Parque Lage in Rio de Janeiro in 1984. The question about what constitutes the nature of painting within the field of contemporary art has remained at the core of his creative enquiries. In his most recent exhibition for example he questioned the assumed limits of painting through site-specific installations that interact with the architectural structure of the gallery. Architecture is indeed a recurring theme within his work, as are memory, the trace and the readymade. In this Open Lecture, art historian Michael Asbury will explore some of these threads within Senise’s work as a means of initiating a round-table discussion between the artist, UAL Prof. Stephen Farthing and curator Moacir dos Anjos.

Moacir dos Anjos coordinates the exhibition program Politics of Art at Fundação Joaquim Nabuco in Recife, Brazil. He served as director of the Museum of Modern Art, Aloisio Magalhães (MAMAM) in Recife from 2001 to 2006. He was curator of the Brazilian pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011, of the 29th São Paulo Biennial in 2010, and the 30th Panorama of Brazilian Art, at the Museum of Modern Art in São Paulo in 2007, and co-curator of the 6th Mercosul Biennial in Porto Alegre in 2007.

Michael Asbury, is a Reader in the History and Theory of Art at UAL.

Stephen Farthing, is an artist and the Rootstein Hopkins Professor of Drawing at UAL

Daniel Senise has participated in many biennials, including the Biennial of São Paulo in 1985, 1989, 1998 and 2010, the Biennial de La Habana in 1986, and the Venice Biennale in 1990, amongst others. His work has been exhibited widely, including at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) and Museu de Arte Moderna (MAM) also in São Paulo, Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, MOMA in New York, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Sofía Imber in Caracas, and at the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, Germany.

TrAIN Open Lecture: Vong Phaophanit and Claire Oboussier

Thu, 30 Jun 2016 15:04:54 +0100
Date:Wednesday 11 November 2015, 17:00 to 19:30
Main Lecture Theatre, Chelsea College of Art 16 John Islip Street London SW1P 4JU
This event will be chaired by TrAIN Member and UAL Chair of Black Art and Design, Professor Sonia Boyce.

Vong Phaophanit (b.1961 Laos) and Claire Oboussier (b.1963 London) have worked collaboratively for over 25 years alongside their respective studio practices. Their collective work, encompassing large-scale installations and sculptural works, films, books, and socially engaged public commissions, explores issues of language, memory, deterritorialisation and forms of meaning making that exceed national, cultural and social borders. In 1993 Phaophanit was nominated for the Turner Prize and in 1994 was awarded the DAAD fellowship in Berlin where the duo subsequently relocated. During their time in Berlin, Phaophanit and Oboussier produced ‘Atopia’ (Berliner Künstlerprogramm DAAD, 2003) in response to the transitioning cultural, political and physical landscape of the city. In 2004 they created the video work ‘All that’s solid melts into air (Karl Marx)’ (collection of the TATE), part of ‘The Quiet in the Land’, a pioneering transnational arts project in Luang Prabang, Lao PDR. The work explores the precariousness of language and memory and the role they have in constructing both national and personal identities and engages with the “instability and ephemerality of meaning, it’s fluctuation across time and languages” *

Phaophanit and Oboussier have produced a number of groundbreaking public commissions including ‘Outhouse’ (2004) for Liverpool Housing Action Trust, a sculptural glass ‘abode’ sited within a public park for the collective use of local residents. In 2008 they were selected for the Channel 4 Big Art Project for which they proposed ‘Northern Light’ - a suspended architectural work for North Belfast, ‘a ‘third space’ beyond polarised territories’, again conceived for the collective use of local communities. Other key works in public space include neon installations such as ‘Topography of Dreams’ (2007), Curzon Street Station, Birmingham, ‘Light Curtain’ for Hull Truck Theatre (2009), ‘Light of Day’ (2010) for the Neo-Natal Baby Unit at St Georges Hospital in London and ‘Coronium’ (2011) for Kilden, the New Performing Arts Centre in Kristiansand, Norway. In 2012, as part of the cultural Olympiad, they were commissioned to make ‘Light Veils’, a permanent laser installation for Weymouth Seafront and a legacy work for the town.

Phaophanit and Oboussier completed ‘Mute Meadow’ in 2011 on the banks of the River Foyle in Derry~Londonderry, Northern Ireland - a major socially engaged public work commissioned as part of the ‘post-conflict’ re-imagining of the city. In 2015 they installed ‘Dream House’, a public sculpture commission for downtown Toronto that explores diasporic notions of home and belonging. Their most recent project ‘IT IS AS IF’ (2015), is an immersive video installation produced at Block 336 in Brixton. Funded by the Wellcome Trust, this work is an experimental collaboration between the artists and surgeon Professor Roger Kneebone (Imperial College, London), investigating the unspoken languages of medical surgery and extending their commitment to engaged practice, inter-diciplinary dialogue and their interest in non-narrative, trans-cultural forms of meaning.

In addition to their work within the public realm Phaophanit and Oboussier have exhibited at venues such as Tate Britain, Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, National Gallery of Canada, Ottowa, IMMA, Dublin, Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid, Iziko National Gallery, Cape Town, South Africa, the Shanghai Biennale, International Short Film Festival Oberhausen and Void Gallery, Derry~Londonderry.

In this lecture, Phaophanit and Oboussier will be discussing their recent exibition, IT IS AS IF, at Block 336 (May-June 2015), supported by The Wellcome Trust. Together, with Professor of Sugery at Imperial College, Roger Kneebone, they have been investigating the connections between art practice and the techniques and discourses of medical surgery.

Together they have been investigating the connections between art practice and the techniques and discourses of medical surgery. Kneebone’s interest is in how new robotic technologies are replacing the embodied knowledge of surgeons and surgical craft and part of his work involves the archiving of these dying skills before they are lost forever. His research also explores the unspoken languages of surgery as they are constructed and performed amongst the wider surgical team and how the importance of the surgical team has often been neglected in favour of a myth of the lone heroic surgeon.

Through IT IS AS IF Phaophanit and Oboussier enter the landscape of memory in search of unmapped territories. Held within the skeleton of a sinewy timber labyrinth, two films draw upon the artists’ own memoryscapes and guide us through the uncharted post-conflict zones of Laos, the eddies and flows of the Mekong, the Thames and the system of arteries that make up Europe’s ‘great’ rivers. As we navigate the installation, within a clearing we are met with an uncanny sequence of precise and tender gestures: the surgeon’s hands de territorialised, the absent body. Cut flesh, opened, held, sutured - the operated and traumatised body reveals the strangeness of our innermost selves and the uncertainty of our futures.

IT IS AS IF explores embodied memory within a conceptual and phenomenological framework that invites the viewer to become lost within its network of passages and discover a new sense of place, time and meaning.

Phaophanit and Oboussier have exhibited previously at venues such as Tate Britain, Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, National Gallery of Canada, Ottowa, IMMA, Dublin, Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid, the Shanghai Biennale, and the Void Gallery, Derry~Londonderry.

See the video here:

https://youtu.be/3uA8ZhuucBI

TrAIN in collaboration with CCW Graduate School Year of Resilience Presents, Open Lecture: Kader Attia - The Repair Chaired by Paul Goodwin

Tue, 01 Dec 2015 16:34:08 +0000
Date:Wednesday 09 December 2015, 17:30 to 19:30
Main Lecture Theatre, Chelsea College of Arts
Image courtesy of Lehmann Maupin

Kader Attia (b. 1970, France), grew up in both Algeria and the suburbs of Paris, and uses this experience of living as a part of two cultures as a starting point to develop a dynamic practice that reflects on aesthetics and ethics of different cultures. He takes a poetic and symbolic approach to exploring the wide-ranging repercussions of Western modern cultural hegemony and colonialism on non-Western cultures, investigating identity politics of historical and colonial eras, from Tradition to Modernity, in the light of our globalized world, of which he creates a genealogy.

For several years, his research has focused on the concept of Repair, as a constant in Human Nature, of which the modern Western Mind and the traditional extra-Occidental Thought have always had an opposite vision. From Culture to Nature, from gender to architecture, from science to philosophy, any system of life is an infinite process of repair.

Recent exhibitions include “The Injuries are Here” a solo show at the Musée Cantonal des Beaux Arts de Lausanne, “Culture, Another Nature Repaired”, a solo show at the Middelheim Museum, Antwerp, ‘Contre Nature’, a solo show at the Beirut Art Center, ‘Continuum of Repair: The Light of Jacob’s Ladder’, a solo show at Whitechapel Gallery, London, ‘Repair. 5 Acts’, a solo show at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, ‘Construire, Déconstruire, Reconstruire: Le Corps Utopique’, a solo show at Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Biennale of Dakar, dOCUMENTA(13) in Kassel, ‘Performing Histories (1)’ at MoMA, New York, and ‘Contested Terrains’, Tate Modern, London.

The Borders of Globalization: Gendered Art Practices in the Age of Capital

Thu, 07 Jan 2016 11:34:25 +0000
Date:Wednesday 13 January 2016, 17:30 to 19:30
Main Lecture Theatre, Chelsea College of Art 16 John Islip Street London SW1P 4JU
Contemporary art is embedded within the very structures that characterise globalization - from the transnational circulation of artworks as commodities to the cross-cultural exchange of images, objects and ideas. Contemporary artists traverse the same routes as empowered, metropolitan elites and the economic migrants left in their wake, and, arguably, the territories described by these global circuits are always, already gendered. The specificity of women’s encounters with globalization thus tend to be marginalised, or subsumed within, masculine-normative accounts in the literature.This paper will explore the diverse ways in which women’s art practices offer spaces of resistance and reflection to the dominant modes of understanding and communication in the age of globalization.

Professor Price is a reader in the History of Art at the University of Bristol, author of a number of publications on German art in the 20thC and aspects of contemporary diasporic art, including Women, the arts and globalization co-edited with Marsha Meskimmon and published in 2013. She is Research Lead for the Transnational Modernisms Research Cluster at Bristol and General Series Editor of the Peter Lang book series Transnational Cultures. She is currently working on several exhibition projects relating to her research in gender and German modernism.

Dr Gen Adachi: The Unbearable Lightness of Being Naked: Modern Asian Pornography - Chaired by Professor Toshio Watanabe

Thu, 30 Jun 2016 15:25:23 +0100
Date:Wednesday 10 February 2016, 17:30 to 19:30
Main Lecture Theatre, Chelsea College of Art, 16 John Islip Street, London SW1P 4JU
Art and pornography have been closely related in certain periods, and both have contributed to the evolution of visual culture in Modern Asia from the late-19th to mid-20th century. While contemporary and pre-modern pornography have been attracting attention, the modern history has been almost forgotten. In fact, it might have been considered worthless by many today. However, is it really so? Images of the naked body which lost the eroticism and radicalism of their time change into an existence showing human nature and political conditions. Moreover, in history there is important evidence of how desire and oppression have behaved on the battlefields of World War II.

Dr Gen Adachi is an art historian and critic specializing in the history of art and cartoons of Modern Japan. Adachi completed his Ph.D. at Tokyo University of the Arts in 2008. From 2010 to 2013, he was a Post-doctoral fellow of Japan Society for Promotion of Science. Currently he is a visiting fellow at the Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation (TrAIN), University of the Arts London, supported by a grant from the Japanese Government Overseas Study Program for Artists. His book Zen’ei no Idenshi (Memes of the Japanese Avant-garde: From Anarchism to Postwar Art), was published by Brücke in 2012.

You can watch the video of this talk, here:

https://youtu.be/8cqMKu8OT7M

TrAIN Open Lecture: Professor Victoria Walsh: Curatorial and Artistic Research in an Age of Migrations, Chaired by Paul Goodwin

Thu, 17 Mar 2016 10:26:44 +0000
Date:Wednesday 16 March 2016, 18:00 to 20:00
Main Lecture Theatre, Chelsea College of Arts, 16 John Islip Street, London SW1P 4JU

CANCELLED***

In June this year a major new iconic building and extension to Tate Modern will open to the public increasing the existing space of the museum by 60%. But as Tate Modern 2 opens up new vistas of the world’s leading financial centre, and digital technology mediates everyday experience, what kind of interface does the museum offer between artist and artwork, artwork and audience, object and networked image? What can curators and artists bring to the encounter in the art museum in the 21st century, or is the art museum the new heritage industry? Drawing on three collaborative research projects with curators, artists and theorists the talk will offer a series of reflections about the role curatorial and artistic research can play as the analogue museum encounters the distributed politics and networked culture of the present.

Professor Victoria Walsh is Head of the Curating Contemporary Art programme at the Royal College of Art (RCA), London, where she is Professor of Art History and Curating. Before moving to the RCA she was Head of Public Programmes at Tate Britain. In this role she secured Tate’s first major national research funded project ‘Tate Encounters’ (2007-2010) which led to the publication Post Critical Museology: Theory and Practice in the Art Museum (Dewdney, Dibosa & Walsh. Routledge, 2013). Building on the findings of this project focused on the art museum in the global city and the impact of migration and technology on audiences and urban visual culture, she went on to lead two further collaborative research projects , ‘Cultural Value and the Digital’ (Tate), and ‘Transfigurations’. Funded as part of the major EU research programme ‘Museums in an Age of Migrations’, and working with curator Paul Goodwin (Train), Transfigurations considered new models and practices of curatorial and artistic research working with artists Kader Attia, Camille Henrot, Lawrence Abu-Hamdan, and Leo Asemota and partner institutions MACBA, Bétonsalon, Stedelijk Museum, and Whitechapel Gallery.

Exhibition Histories Talks: Lubaina Himid

Wed, 24 Feb 2016 16:09:29 +0000
Date:Thursday 03 March 2016, 19:00 to 20:30
Whitechapel Gallery, London
On 3 March 2016 artist and curator Lubaina Himid will be in conversation with curator, researcher and TrAIN Director, Paul Goodwin to discuss ‘The Thin Black Line’, which took place at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London in 1985, and some of her related exhibition projects from the same period. ‘The Thin Black Line’ was one of a series of exhibitions curated by Himid during the 1980s that brought a new generation of Black female artists to the fore, and both challenged and transformed then-dominant practices of exhibition-making.

Exhibition Histories Talks: Lubaina Himid
Thursday 3 March 2016, 19:00-20:30

Whitechapel Gallery
77-82 Whitechapel High Street  
London
 E1 7QX

Tickets: £9.50 (Concessions £7.50).

To purchase tickets visit the Whitechapel Gallery website:

http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/events/exhibition-histories-lubaina-himid/

This event is a collaboration with TrAIN - and the Whitechapel Gallery, London. It is part of the Exhibition Histories research and publication project, developed by Afterall and published in association with the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College.

The Exhibition Histories series is distributed by Koenig Books, London.

Professor Charlotte Townsend-Gault - Lalakenis: First Nations Art? Dangerous Assembly?

Mon, 07 Mar 2016 14:40:25 +0000
Date:Wednesday 11 May 2016, 18:00 to 20:00
Main Lecture Theatre, Chelsea College of Art, 16 John Islip Street, London SW1P 4JU
Awalakenis, a journey across Canada by members of the Kwakwaka’wakw and Haida nations, was the latest attempt to shame and un-mask the role of the government in controlling the lives and constraining the cultures of First Nations people in Canada. Lalakenis, an exhibition un the Belkin Art Gallery at the University of British Columbia, assembled the masks and copper shields carried on the journey with gifts received along the way, including belongings associated with diverse cosmologies. What are the hazards, definitional and other, in assembling powerful possessions, masks, rattles, medicine bundles - the traces, material and immaterial, of distinct cultural practices - and making claims for doing so that blur the line between performance art and cultural performance?

Charlotte Townsend-Gault, currently Professor in the Department of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory, and Faculty Associate, Department of Anthropology, University of British Columbia, has published extensively on contemporary Indigenous art and culture of North America. In the early 1970s she worked at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, recording and writing about the conceptual art practice with which the college was associated. She organised a year-long series of seminars on Art and Anthropology at the ICA (1973-4). She holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from University College London. Amongst exhibitions curated Land, Spirit, Power: First Nations Art at the National Gallery of Canada (1992), Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun: Born to Live and Die on your Coloialist Reservations (1995), and Backstory: Nuu-chah-nulth Ceremonial Curtains and the Work of Ki-ke-in (2010). She has been teaching Indigenous art histories at UBC since 1995. In 2015 the Canada Prize in the Humanities was awarded, by the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, to Native Art of the Northwest Coast: A History of Changing Ideas, co-edited with Jenifer Kramer and Ki-ke-in.

Passion: Maud Sulter Exhibtion at Impressions Gallery, Bradford

Wed, 23 Mar 2016 14:22:47 +0000
Date:Friday 01 April 2016, 10:00 to 17:00
Impressions Gallery Centenary Square Bradford BD1 1SD
Maud Sulter
01st Apr - 04th Jun 2016
Impressions Gallery, Bradford

Passion presents the multi-layered work of Maud Sulter (1960—2008), a photographic artist, poet, and curator of Scottish-Ghanaian descent. In her short but influential career, Sulter reinvented the visual imagery of black women and highlighted the long-standing connections between Africa and Europe. This is the first time a major survey of Sulter’s work has been shown outside Scotland.

Sulter declared that she wanted ‘to put black women back in the centre of the frame’. She consistently sought to bring to light histories of those women - real or imagined - whose contribution to culture had been erased. Zabat (1989) is a series of large-scale colour portraits depicting contemporary black women in the guise of the ancient Muses. Sulter’s powerful image of Terpsichore, the Muse of dance and lyric poetry, overturns the conventions of 18th century portraiture, presenting a black woman wearing the elaborate white wig associated with the slave-owning class. Hysteria (1991) was partly inspired by 19th century African American sculptor Edmonia Lewis, and tells the story of a black woman artist who came to Europe seeking fame and fortune, but disappeared without trace.

As an award-winning poet, Sulter interwove words, poems, and texts into her visual work, and was frequently inspired by literature. In Les Bijoux (2002), she plays a character inspired by 19th century Frenchwoman Jeanne Duval, the so-called ‘Black Venus’ who inspired Baudelaire’s poetry. In this series of bold self-portraits, the viewer is confronted by multiple images of Sulter dressed in elegant gowns, with jewels gleaming at her throat.

Sulter passionately believed in the long-intertwined histories of Africa and Europe, contesting the notion that the black presence in the UK was a recent arrival. Her photomontage Twa Blak Wimmin (1997) was inspired by historical accounts of ‘Blak Margaret’ and ‘Blak Elene’ who were feted at the court of King James IV of Scotland in the early 16th century. Syrcas (1993), a major work that was chosen to represent Britain at the first Johannesburg Biennale, combines vintage postcards of Alpine landscapes, illustrations from publications on African art, and images of European art and photography. Ostensibly pages from a scrapbook made by ‘Helga’, a fictitious girl of Cameroonian descent whose parents are killed in the Third Reich, Syrcas links the horrors of African slavery with the European persecution of minorities in the 1930s and 1940s. This is the first time in over 20 years that these 16 large-scale images will be shown in their entirety as a set.

Passion is a Street Level Photoworks/Autograph ABP partnership in association with TrAIN

Maud Sulter (1960-2008) was an award-winning artist and writer, curator and gallerist of Ghanain and Scottish heritage who lived and worked in Britain. She exhibited widely and was selected by The British Council to represent Britain at Africus, the Johannesburg Biennale of 1995. Her art has been acquired by numerous private and public collections, including the Scottish Parliament, the Arts Council Collection, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the British Council Collection, the National Galleries of Scotland, the National Portrait Gallery in London, and those collections who have loaned work for this show. She wrote several collections of poetry, and edited a pioneering collection of writings and images, Passion: Discourses on Blackwomen’s Creativity. This was published by the imprint she founded, Urban Fox Press, ‘a revolutionary new press for the more radical 90s’. She was active in the Black feminist and lesbian movements, often inspired by African-American activists, artists and writers. She curated nearly 20 exhibitions, and set up a gallery, Rich Women of Zurich in London’s Clerkenwell.

TrAIN Open Lecture: Professor Stephen Farthing - Plains Indian Drawing: A Sense of Place and Space

Mon, 18 Apr 2016 15:08:52 +0100
Date:Wednesday 27 April 2016, 18:00 to 20:30
Lecture Theatre B, London College of Communication, Elephant and Castle, London SE1 6SB
Please note that this event will take place at London College of Communication.

6.00 - 7.30 - Lecture
7.30 - 8.30 - Launch of Thematic Strand

Chaired by Dr Pratap Rughani.

The story starts with a very short description of the beginnings of Plains Indian narrative drawing on rock and hide. It then explores the notion of “place” as a driving force behind autobiography, it goes on to present the historical context that frames late nineteenth century Plains drawing on paper. It then concludes with a set of examples of what are popularly known as “Ledger Drawings”. Using the drawings of Sitting Bull and Four Horns, Farthing explains what these images “may” tell us about the Plains Draftsman’s sense of both space and place.

Professor Stephen Farthing is the Rootstein Hopkins Chair of Drawing at University of the Arts London, a Royal Academician where he is Honorary Curator of the Collections. He is an Emeritus Fellow of St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford. He studied painting at Central Saint Martins (then St Martins School of Fine Art) and the Royal College of Art. His paintings represented Britain at the Sao Paulo Biennale in 1989, leading to many further solo shows around the world. His most recent one person show’s include Titian’s Ghosts, National Trust, Ham House, London 2014 and The Back Story was staged in November 2010 at the Royal Academy of Arts.

His recent publications include: Derek Jarman, the sketchbooks, Thames and Hudson, 2013 and Art: the whole story, Thames & Hudson, London, 2010.

—

Join TrAIN for the Launch of Thematic Strand: Transnational Indigeneity

This term TrAIN embarks on a radical new focus: the resilience of indigenous art and culture. The resilience of indigenous art and its foundational significance in global culture continues to inspire and insist on the retelling of narratives of practice through First Nation and indigenous art and practices that explore indigeneity.

TrAIN wants to develop a contribution to this conversation and offer a dynamic ‘intellectual home’ to help explore the meanings of Transnational Art, Identity and Nation as it unfolds in ‘First Nation’ contexts. How is ‘Nation’ refracted and newly inscribed in these cultural worlds? - worlds where resilience, survival and renewal - for example in First Nation America - is a triumph over Europeans’ attempted genocide of First Nation peoples and cultures.

TrAIN Open Lecture: Alex Farquharson - Curating Crossings Chaired by Professor Paul Goodwin

Thu, 19 May 2016 13:48:10 +0100
Date:Wednesday 08 June 2016, 18:00 to 20:30
Red Room, Chelsea College of Art
Alex Farquharson, Director of Tate Britain, will present on approaches to curating that cross knowledges, geographies, histories and identities from the vantage point of contemporary art.

Contemporary art is here understood as a privileged, performative site for transdisciplinary enquiry. He will illustrate his presentation with references to exhibitions he curated and co-curated at Nottingham Contemporary (where he was Director until 2015), on ideas such as the imaginary of the ocean deep; the art, religion and political history of Haiti; the figure of Jean Genet; and art and ecology in the Americas; as well as exhibitions curated at the institution by artists themselves, including Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Mark Leckey and Glenn Ligon.

Alex Farquharson took up the position of Director, Tate Britain in late autumn 2015. Prior to joining Tate, Alex was Director of Nottingham Contemporary. Under his leadership (since 2007), Nottingham Contemporary became one of the leading visual arts institutions in the UK. Its programme has been known for unusual pairings of solo exhibitions as well as imaginative group exhibitions, many of which combine historic, modern and contemporary art. It also has a strong emphasis on debate, education and participation.

Alex co-curated Glenn Ligon: Encounters and Collisions, shown recently at Nottingham Contemporary and at Tate Liverpool, and curated If Everybody had an Ocean at Tate St Ives and CAPC Bordeaux, and Aquatopia: the Imaginary of the Ocean Deep at Nottingham Contemporary and Tate St Ives. British artists he has worked with on solo exhibitions include Pablo Bronstein, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, Jeremy Deller, David Hockney, Gary Hume, Mark Leckey, Richard Long, Gustav Metzger, Bridget Riley, Simon Starling, John Virtue and Gillian Wearing. He curated British Art Show 6 in 2005-6 with Andrea Schlieker.

He was on the selection committee for the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2009 (Steve McQueen), the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize in 2011, and Paul Hamlyn Foundation - Awards for Artists in 2012. He is an independent writer and critic contributing to arts publications including Frieze, Artforum and Art Monthly. His publications include Isa Genzken (Phaidon), Thomas Demand (Prada Foundation), Sean Landers (Kunsthalle Zurich), and Richard Wright (Dundee Contemporary Arts), and he has also frequently written on curating. He was a visiting Tutor and Research Fellow, Curating Contemporary Art MA at the Royal College of Art, London (2001-2007). Presently he sits on the Arts Council Collection’s Acquisitions Committee, the Board of Raven Row, and Curatorial Advisory Committee of Harley Gallery/Portland Collection, Welbeck.

Alex studied English and Fine Art at the University of Exeter (1988-1991) followed by a Masters in Arts Criticism at City University, London (1992-1993). He began his career in mid 1990s at Spacex in Exeter, where he became Head of Exhibitions, then joined the shortlived Centre for Visual Arts in Cardiff has Head of Exhibitions in 1999.

Please book your free tickets here:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/train-open-lecture-alex-farquharson-curating-crossings-tickets-25567322550?utm_campaign=new_event_email&utm_medium=email&utm_source=eb_email&utm_term=viewmyevent_button

Curating The International Diaspora

Wed, 08 Mar 2017 11:48:34 +0000
Date:Thursday 16 June 2016, 18:30 to 20:00
Red Room, Chelsea College of Art
TrAIN Special Event In Partnership With ICF International Curators Forum

CURATING THE INTERNATIONAL DIASPORA

Date & Time: 6:30 - 8pm 16th June 2016
Place: UAL University Of The Arts, Chelsea
Red Room, Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London (UAL)
16 John Islip Street, London, SW1P 4JU

Participants: David A Bailey, Bonaventure Ndikung, Jelle Bouwhuis, Elvira Dyangani Osei, Melanie Keen and Paul Goodwin.

Curating The International Diaspora is a panel discussion that will investigate how emergent cultural diasporas have impacted the curatorship of contemporary visual arts specifically, and how new models of contemporary curating have developed as a consequence of these effects. The discussion will demonstrate how curatorial practice has been radically transformed by the diasporas of people, intellectuals, artists, and cultural workers.

More than any other field of enquiry, contemporary art curatorship has felt the impact of diasporas. Since the late 1980s, contemporary curating has moved from being primarily associated with museum and exhibition display to a practice understood as the organization, framing and circulation of ideas around global cultural production, its mediation and its dissemination. During this time, the world has experienced an increased movement of languages, cultures and identities. For intellectual and cultural diasporas from diverse origins and disciplines, a new kind of curatorial practice has attempted to represent these changes by creating what Ute Meta Bauer has called ‘a space of refuge - an in-between space of transition and of diasporic passage’ for cultural workers across the world.

During the past two decades there has not only been a proliferation of large-scale global exhibitions, but an exponential rise in trans-national curatorial projects taking diaspora as both their main focus and dominant theme. Since 1989, all large-scale global exhibitions in some way or another, from the first truly global exhibition ‘Les Magiciens de la Terre’ (1989) to Documenta 11 (2002), to the 11th International Istanbul Bienal (2009) have all engaged with and contributed to a widening of the issues as to how to present diverse cultural diasporas, and how their accompanying new networks of cultural co-operation have contributed to post-colonial models of curatorial practice that have explored beyond previously-established Western centres of artistic production.

About The Participants:
David A Bailey is Director of ICF and a UAL Visiting Professor.

Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung is Artistic Director, SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin and Curator-at-Large, Documenta 14.

Jelle Bouwhuis is Curator, Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.

Elvira Dyangani Ose is Curator Göteborg International Biennial and Lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Melanie Keen is Director of Iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts)

Paul Goodwin is a curator and Director of TrAIN, University of the Arts London.

About TrAIN: The University of the Arts Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation is a forum for historical, theoretical and practice-based research in architecture, art, communication, craft and design. http://www.transnational.org.uk

About ICF: International Curators Forum: ICF is one of the world’s leading arts agency working towards improved professional development opportunities for curators and artists. ICF is intended to be an open peer to peer network and arena to connect ideas that have migrated across the world with professional developments that are increasingly global, but particular in their impact. http://www.internationalcuratorsforum.org

TrAIN Research Student Forum Special Event: Prof Keiko Takeda (University of Tokyo): Dumb Type - Dialogues on Identity: “Coming Out” in the Performance Art Piece S/N (1994)

Mon, 13 Jun 2016 16:38:07 +0100
Date:Wednesday 22 June 2016, 18:00 to 20:00
Red Room, Chelsea College of Art
This lecture is curated by TrAIN PhD Student, Hiroki Yamamoto.

Dumb Type, founded in Kyoto in 1987, is one of the most internationally recognised Japanese performance art collectives. While Dumb Type is well known for their stylish and highly aesthetic work, this talk focuses instead on the politics of their artwork, particularly in the performance piece S/N. S/N is part of the larger S/N project, a multimedia presentation that includes a CD, a seminar show, and installations. Characterised by hybridity and decentralization, the performance’s elements are juxtaposed on stage, including texts, moving bodies, synthesized music, lighting, performers’ dialogue, and the projection of moving images.

S/N was created after the group’s leader Teiji Furuhashi (1960-1995) informed his close friends about his HIV-positive status in October 1992. The piece premiered in 1994 at the Adelaide Festival in Australia. Much attention has been paid to this performance piece and some critics have noted an element of political orientation or social criticism in S/N.

The objectives of this presentation are twofold. First, Prof Takeda will present how S/N problematized the issues of “coming out” and functions as a medium to present performers’ “coming out” through a performance piece in the context of the creative process. “Coming out” has historically been an effective strategy for social change because, by insisting on their presence in society, minorities were able to alter the meaning of the category to which they had been assigned. Nevertheless, this disclosure entails risk because it inevitably forces the attachment of identity to a fixed category. However, S/N problematizes the power of “subjection” and celebrates flexibility or undecidability of identity.

Second, Prof Takeda will demonstrate how the presentation of identities in S/N avoids the problems of constructivism. Constructivism was very fashionable in Japan in the 1990s as a framework that could supposedly overcome identity politics and that celebrated flexibility or undecidability of identity. However, it also entails “dis-communication” between “minorities” and “majorities,” performers and spectators in performance art.

Keiko Takeda, PhD is a Project Assistant Professor of Interfaculty in Information Studies at the University of Tokyo. She received her PhD from Ochanomizu University in 2013 and is now working on her first book about Teiji Furuhashi and the performance art piece S/N.

She runs “The Forum on Art of Society,” a platform on which people from various fields can discuss the current stream of Japanese art related to society, including socially engaged art and art projects.

Professor Martin Evans: Paris, London, Global Cultures: A Tale of Two Post-Colonial Cities since 1962

Tue, 04 Oct 2016 15:53:47 +0100
Date:Wednesday 12 October 2016, 18:00 to 20:00
Main Lecture Theatre, Chelsea College of Art, 16 John Islip Street, London SW1P 4JU
Chaired by Professor Carol Tulloch.

This talk will be divided into two parts. The first part will consider the French National Immigration Museum in Paris which was opened in 2007. The Museum is housed in the art deco pavilion from the 1931 Colonial Exhibition and the talk will explore the tensions that arise from this fact, in particular that of presenting the history of migration to France within a building that cannot be separated from France’s colonial past. It will also examine how and why the Museum has solicited hostility not just form the right but also a left that see the Museum as too dangerously Anglo-Saxon in the way it talks about migrant communities. The second part will outline an Exhibition (Paris-London - Two Global Cities) that Prof Evans is curating for the Museum in October 2018 that will consider how Paris and London have been transformed by global migration since the end of empire. In considering music, literature, poetry, theatre, painting photography and film the Exhibition he will explore how the Exhibition is opening up new comparative research conversations between the two cities.

Martin Evans is Professor of Modern History at Sussex University whose work explores issues of memory, colonialism and post-colonialism. He is the co-author (with John Phillips) of Algeria: Anger of the Dispossessed (Yale University Press, 2007) and the author of Algeria: France’s Undeclared War (Oxford University Press, 2012).

Book your free ticket here:

tinyurl.com/j73pam5

Tokyo Futures, 1868-2020: City of Symbiosis?

Wed, 28 Sep 2016 10:43:57 +0100
Date:Saturday 22 October 2016, 13:00 to 16:00
Meiji Jingu Sanshuden 1-1 Yoyogi Kamizono-cho, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo
In 2020 Tokyo will host the Olympics. Japan is looking at the Olympics not merely as an international sports festival but also as a process which will help her to assess how the Japanese nation and its role in the world will be reshaped in future.
Between 2015 and 2016, we delivered a series of six lectures in Japan and the UK on the themes of ‘nature’, ‘city’ and ‘art’ in order to reflect on the history of Tokyo and consider its future, using the Meiji period, which marks the starting point of modern Japan, as a temporal framework and the Meiji Jingu, which was constructed as the symbol of the period, as a physical framework. The concepts of nature, city and arts were all fundamental in the modernization of Meiji Japan and played an important role in the formation of Japanese national identity. This symposium will consider the outcome of the first stage lectures by linking the three elements together to debate whether Tokyo could become a city of symbiosis.

Keynote lecture 1
‘The Adaptable City: Designing for Uncertainty’
Professor Jeremy Till, Head of Central Saint Martins and Pro-Vice-Chancellor of University of the Arts London

Keynote lecture 2
‘Tokyo Futures: Symbiosis between Low and High’
Professor Ken Tadashi Oshima, University of Washington

Panel Discussion
‘City of Festivity: Tokyo 2020’
Discussants:
Professor Izumi Kuroishi, Aoyama Gakuin University
Kohei Nawa, Artist and Associate Professor, Kyoto University of the Arts and Design

Chair:
Professor Toshio Watanabe, TrAIN, University of the Arts London and Sainsbury Institute, University of East Anglia

MC:
Dr Yoshio Imaizumi, Senior Research Fellow, Meiji Jingu Intercultural Research Institute

The lectures and discussion will be simultaneously interpreted into Japanese and English.

This symposium is co-organised by the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures, the Meiji Jingu Intercultural Research Institute, and TrAIN, University of the Arts London with Aoyama Gakuin University, and supported by the Toshiba International Foundation.
http://sainsbury-institute.org/
http://www.meijijingu.or.jp/english/miri/about/index.html
http://www.arts.ac.uk/research/ual-research-centres/train/
http://www.aoyama.ac.jp/en/
http://www.toshiba.co.jp/about/tifo/eng/

Professor Carol Tulloch at the Fashion Museum Bath for her talk 'Twilight Talk - the Birth of Cool'

Tue, 11 Oct 2016 11:08:19 +0100
Date:
Fashion Museum, Bath
A special talk to celebrate Black History Month 2016. Professor Carol Tulloch will showcase and share stories and images of black fashion and style in Britain, drawing on the research for her recent book ‘The Birth of Cool’. “This obsession with dressing well is almost part of the DNA in the black community”, noted Tulloch in a recent interview and this talk at the Fashion Museum will explore those thoughts further.

Professor Robert Storr: Cosmopolitan Consciousness in an Increasingly Tribalised World: Making Art and Exhibitions after Brexit and in Spite of Trump, Le Pen, Putin and...

Wed, 26 Oct 2016 13:30:36 +0100
Date:Wednesday 23 November 2016, 18:00 to 20:00
Main Lecture Theatre, Chelsea College of Art, 16 John Islip Street, London SW1P 4JU
This lecture will be given by Robert Storr, formerly Dean (2006-2016) and currently Professor of Painting at the Yale School of Art.

In 2007, Storr was the first American Commissioner of the Venice Biennale. His extensive career also spans work as a curator in the 1990s at the Museum
of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York as well as writing, public speaking and establishing the reputation of modern and contemporary artists such as Gerhard Richter, Max Beckmann and Robert Ryman. He has been described as a vital link between the museum world and academia.

Please book your tickets using the link below.

TrAIN Open Lecture: Professor Arnold Aronson - From Riverbeds to Projections: The Ephemeral Stage

Mon, 03 Apr 2017 11:48:33 +0100
Date:Wednesday 15 March 2017, 18:00 to 19:30
Location: Main Lecture Theatre, Chelsea College of Art, 16 John Islip Street, London SW1P 4JU
Chaired by Professor Jane Collins.

Classical performances in China and Japan and elsewhere in the world were often presented in liminal spaces such as dry riverbeds -places that were non-existent at certain times of the year. In more modern times, design was created or supplemented by projection.

Today, projection mapping, live video feeds, and other digital technologies are challenging the historical presence of the stage. We are in a new era of the ephemeral or disappearing stage. This lecture will examine this phenomenon and explore how present practice relates to historical performance.

Arnold Aronson is a professor of theatre at Columbia University in New York. He is co-editor of the journal Theatre and Performance Design and the forthcoming book, The Routledge Companion to Scenography. His most recent book is Ming Cho Lee: A Life in Design.

This TrAIN event is linked to the ACTS RE-ACTS Performance Laboratory at Wimbledon College of Art 20th February -17th March.

Please get your free tickets below:

TrAIN Open Lecture: Dr Djurdja Bartlett - The Ethnic, The Cosmopolitan, The Modernist: Russian and Parisian Fashions in the Early Twentieth-Century

Mon, 15 May 2017 17:03:41 +0100
Date:Wednesday 14 December 2016, 18:00 to 19:30
Main Lecture Theatre, Chelsea College of Art, 16 John Islip Street, London SW1P 4JU
The lecture addresses the relationship between the ethnic, the cosmopolitan and the modernist arts in the cultural landscape of early twentieth century Europe, investigating the meanings and practices of these categories in the field of fashion.

The lecture focuses on the activities of Russian fashion designer Nadezhda Lamanova, Russian artist Nataliia Goncharova, and French fashion designer Paul Poiret in relation to his 1911 visit to Russia. Relying on a reading of Russian pre-1917 arts and applied arts journals, picture weeklies, women’s magazines, and contemporary memoirs, the lecture contextualizes Lamanova’s and Poiret’s fashion designs, and Goncharova’s art within the contemporary Russian and European modernist arts and applied arts movements, observing their activities through their varied engagement with the ethnic and the cosmopolitan.

Dr. Djurdja Bartlett is Reader in Histories and Cultures of Fashion at the London College of Fashion, UAL. She is author of FashionEast: The Spectre that Haunted Socialism (MIT Press, 2010) and editor of the volume on East Europe, Russia and the Caucasus in the Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion (2010). Bartlett’s forthcoming monograph European Fashion Histories: Style, Society and Politics, 1912-2012 (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017) has been funded by the AHRC Fellowship grant.

TrAIN will be hosting drinks and nibbles in the Green Room after the event.

TrAIN Open Lecture: Dr Azadeh Fatehrad - Photography, Desire and Resistance in the Lives of Women, Following the 1979 Revolution in Iran

Wed, 08 Mar 2017 12:03:52 +0000
Date:Wednesday 18 January 2017, 18:00 to 19:30
Main Lecture Theatre, Chelsea College of Art, 16 John Islip Street, London SW1P 4JU
In the history of Iran, the female body has been a site of enforcement twice in the last century, specifically with the Act of Unveiling which happened during the last monarchy in 1936 and, in contrast, the Act of Covering brought about by the Islamic Republic in 1979 in post-revolutionary Iran. The feminist movement in Iran however is not concerned with tradition versus modernity; indeed, modernity and tradition complement each other. The movement follows a fluid and yet permanent structure since early 20th century. In ‘Photography, Desire and Resistance in the Lives of Women, Following the 1979 Revolution in Iran’, Fatehrad is looking at the object of repression (the veil) in the history of Iran through a perspective of ‘indirection’, i.e. from a particular position of fascination and envy, She is suggesting a dimension of beauty and desire. Even though for her Western readers it might be more comfortable were to follow the familiar discourse of condemning the hijab and standing defiantly against the compulsory dress code, but the specific aim of Fatehrad’s research is to explore the affective and imaginary dimensions of the acts of covering and uncovering. The constant duality, constant barrier, and notion of individuality are featured in her ongoing practice- based research.

Dr. Azadeh Fatehrad (b.1981, Tehran) is an artist and curator based in London. Her research engages with the feminist history of Iran from 1909 to the present. Her projects explore still and moving image archives investigating the ways in which the feminist movement has been expanded among urban middle class women in her home country of Iran. Fatehrad’s research, artistic and curatorial practice are intertwined around a process of gathering information and generating new imagery in response to archival material she discovers. Fatehrad has made extensive use of archival material including those held at the Weltkulturen Museum, Frankfurt am Main; the International Institute of Social History (IISH), Amsterdam; and the Institute for Iranian Contemporary Historical Studies (IICHS), Tehran. This allowed her to develop new insights into Iran’s Women’s Movement and devise a related series of public programmes including exhibitions, conferences and workshops.

As part of her research, Fatehrad has curated a series of public programmes, symposiums and exhibitions, including the recent exhibition, ‘Hengameh Golestan: Witness 1979’ at The SHOWROOM London, as well as ‘The Feminist Historiography’ at IASPIS, Stockholm. She has presented academic papers at a variety of conferences and symposiums, such as ‘The Neo-traditionalist: Representation of women in post-revolutionary Iran’, Moderna Museet, Stockholm; ‘Communal Social and Inter-Political Stage of Curatorial Practice’, Sharjah Art Foundation, UAE; ‘Moving Pictures and Photoplays: New Perspectives in Silent Cinema’ at the University of York; and ‘Challenging Gender, Embracing Intersectionality’ at Kingston University, London . Fatehrad has exhibited her work internationally in London, Vancouver, New York and Tehran.

MA Documentary Film & TrAIN Research Centre Study/ Research Day: Visiting Artist and Filmmaker David Chung Chaired by Dr Pratap Rughani

Wed, 25 Jan 2017 15:43:58 +0000
Date:Wednesday 01 February 2017, 11:00 to 17:00
MLG 06, London College of Communication, Elephant & Castle London SE1 6SB
In 1937, Stalin began a campaign of massive ethnic cleansing and forcibly deported everyone of Korean origin living in the coastal provinces of the Far East Russia near the border of North Korea to the unsettled steppe country of Central Asia 3700 miles away. This story of 180,000 Koreans who became political pawns during the Great Terror is the central focus of this film.

Koryo Saram (the Soviet Korean phrase for Korean person) tells the harrowing saga of survival in the open steppe country and the sweep of Soviet history through the eyes of these deported Koreans, who were designated by Stalin as an “unreliable people” and enemies of the state. Through recently uncovered archival footage and new interviews, the film follows the deportees’ history of integrating into the Soviet system while working under punishing conditions in Kazakhstan, a country which became a concentration camp of exiled people from throughout the Soviet Union.

Today, in the context of Kazakhstan’s recent emergence as a rapidly modernizing, independent state, the story of the Kazakhstani-Koreans situated within this ethnically diverse country has resonance with the experience of many Americans and how they have assimilated to form new cultures in our world of increasingly displaced people.

David Chung is a visual artist and filmmaker. His work has been shown at a number of venues including a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the National Gallery of Art in Washington. His film Koryo Saram won the Best Documentary Film Award from the National Film Board of Canada.

11.00 - Welcome & Introduction to Prof. Chung
11.30 - Screening of “Koryo Saram” - 60 minutes
13.00 - Break
14.00 - ‘Homelands of the Imaginary’
14.45 - Screening of ‘Turtle Boat Head’ and Discussion
17.00 - End

Plesase get your free tickets here:
tinyurl.com/hy7qtqd

TrAIN Open Lecture: Historiographies of the Contemporary: Modes of Translation in and from Conceptual Art - Dr Michael Asbury with Response to Paper by Dr Fabrizio Poltronieri

Wed, 08 Mar 2017 10:58:25 +0000
Date:Wednesday 15 February 2017, 18:00 to 19:30
Main Lecture Theatre, Chelsea College of Art, 16 John Islip Street, London SW1P 4JU
This lecture launches this year’s activities of the Contemporary Art and Latin America thematic strand at TrAIN. These include the ‘Historiographies of the Contemporary’ reading group for PhD students and the Latin America and Contemporary Art study group, where invited scholars share their research with their peers.

This lecture draws on historiography and theories of translation departing from the following question:
If contemporary art is ‘post conceptual art’, as is often asserted, how should we account for current practices that emerged from art
historical genealogies outside that paradigm?

The question problematises terminologies such as ‘conceptualisms’ and the broader notion of ‘global art’, in order to identify how such
terminology arose, how to understand the contradictions they invoke and how art historical narratives may respond to such findings.

The presentation will be followed by a response by Dr Fabrizo Poltronieri in order to open a debate.

Dr Michael Asbury is a Reader in the theory and history of art and a founding member of TrAIN, based at Chelsea College of Arts, UAL.

An international authority on Brazilian modern and contemporary art, his work ranges from scholarly art historical studies, art criticism and
curation.

Dr Fabrizio Poltronieri is a Reader in Creative Technologies at the Institute of Creative Technologies, Media School, De Montfort University, Leicester.

You can watch the film here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRU5XEswaQg&feature=youtu.be

TrAIN Special Event: Ibrahim Mahama In Conversation at Chelsea College of Arts in Collaboration with White Cube

Tue, 14 Feb 2017 15:15:54 +0000
Date:Monday 27 February 2017, 19:00 to 20:30
The Banqueting Hall, Henry Moore Courtyard Chelsea College of Arts London SW1P 4JU (entrance on Atterbury Street)
Prior to the opening of his first UK solo exhibition ‘Fragments’ at White Cube Bermondsey, Ibrahim Mahama joins Professor Paul Goodwin, Director of TrAIN Research Centre, in conversation at Chelsea College of Arts.

This talk is a collaboration between White Cube and The Centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation (TrAIN) at The University of the Arts London; a cross-disciplinary forum for historical, theoretical and practice-based research in art and design.

The talk will be followed by a Q&A.

The Banqueting Hall
Henry Moore Courtyard
Chelsea College of Arts
London
SW1P 4JU
(entrance on Atterbury Street)
Nearest tube: Pimlico

Doors open: 6.30pm

Talk commences: 7pm

To book tickets, please email [email protected] or call +44 (0) 207 036 1539

Tickets are free but limited to a maximum of four per person. Please book early to avoid disappointment.

Inside the White Cube | Fragments
Preview: Tuesday 28 February, 6-8pm
1 March - 13 April 2017

TrAIN Open Lecture: Professor Hiroshi Onishi - Media Art as a Medium - Chaired by Dr Yuko Kikuchi

Mon, 27 Feb 2017 17:19:19 +0000
Date:Wednesday 03 May 2017, 18:00 to 19:30
Main Lecture Theatre, Chelsea College of Art, 16 John Islip Street, London SW1P 4JU
Professor Onishi conducts research on Japanese ideas of nature, humanity and religion and explores the ways they can be relevant to contemporary art. In this lecture Prof Onishi will discuss questions of transnationalism and scale being explored in the ‘Utsuwa (Receptacle) Utsushi (Reproduction/Copy)’ project to be organised in London and Oxford in 2018.

Hiroshi Onishi is an inter-media Artist and a Professor at the Department of Information Design, Kyoto University of Art and Design. He is also a member of ASIFA-JAPAN and MONO-sophy (monogaku) /Sense-Value Study Group.

TrAIN Recommends: Defining a Post-Soviet Aesthetic in Fashion with Dr Djurdja Bartlett

Wed, 08 Mar 2017 12:16:45 +0000
Date:Wednesday 22 March 2017, 18:30 to 20:30
ICA, London
22 March
6:30PM
ICA

Fashion historian and TrAIN Member, Djurdja Bartlett (London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London) presents a panel discussion featuring Moscow-based designers Asiya Bareeva and Artur Lomakin, photographer Turkina Faso and London-based writer and curator Anastasiia Fedorova.

The seamless assimilation of Soviet iconography and 1990s Russian streetwear into high-end fashion collections seen in London, Paris and Milan is a defining phenomenon of recent years. Termed ‘the post-Soviet aesthetic’ by the style press, when consumed by moneyed westerners these designs raise critical questions with regard to the ethics of class tourism and cultural revivalism. Perhaps wittingly-so, there is now a move by the likes of designer Gosha Rubchinskiy to eschew the well-worn western catwalks in favour of drawing the fashion set to Russia itself.

Presenting designers working and showing in Russia and a Russian photographer working world-wide, the panel explores the current climate for making and the interests of new generation of designers and artists that grew up in the shadow of the Soviet era, seeking to define what a ‘post-Soviet aesthetic’ might truly be.

Drawing inspiration from the grey anonymity of Moscow’s suburbs, stylist-turned designer Artur Lomakin’s signature heavy-knit sweaters and knitted balaclavas are representative of deliberately minimalist aesthetic. In contrast, Asiya Bareeva is known for her romantically-layered garments and accessories, preferring an abundance of prints and collaging of clashing materials. Photographer Turkina Faso is re-shaping the classic editorial, presenting personal documentary stories that explore how the experience of adolescence has changed in her native Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union.

Supported by Russian Talks Circle.

Get tickets here:

https://www.ica.org.uk/whats-on/defining-post-soviet-aesthetic-fashion

TrAIN Open: Unpacking Blackness - An Open Conversation with Ash Sharma and Paul Goodwin

Mon, 10 Apr 2017 13:13:27 +0100
Date:Wednesday 12 April 2017, 18:00 to 20:00
Main Lecture Theatre, Chelsea College of Art, 16 John Islip Street, London SW1P 4JA
This event is an invitation to the audience to join in an open discussion about the politics, culture and aesthetics of ‘blackness’ today in a transnational context. How is blackness being (re)defined in the 21st century in relation to ongoing and urgent questions of state violence, mass migration, fluid gender and sexual identities and renewed calls for politicised aesthetics? What are the implications and problematics of the debates around blackness for contemporary art and culture? Two important researchers in the fields of contemporary art, media and cultural studies - Paul Goodwin and Ash Sharma - invite the audience to engage in a debate after short presentations of their ongoing research on this question.

Ashwani Sharma is a Principal Lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of East London (UEL), and a member of the Centre for Cultural Studies Research at UEL. He teaches, researches and has published in the areas of race, postcolonialism, visual, urban, digital and popular culture. He is completing a book on race and contemporary visual culture, and is an editor of Dis-Orienting Rhythms: The Politics of the New Asian Dance Music. Ash is the founding co-editor of the journal darkmatter www.darkmatter101.org, where he has edited numerous issues including on ‘Post-Racial Imaginaries’ and ‘The Wire.’ He is a member of the Black Study Group (London).

Paul Goodwin is a professor of Contemporary Art and Urbanism at UAL and the Director of TrAIN.

TrAIN Open Lecture - Professor Jane M. Gaines: The ‘Arab Spring’: How Online Activism Challenges Documentary and Media

Tue, 23 May 2017 11:11:45 +0100
Date:Wednesday 31 May 2017, 17:30 to 19:30
MLG 06, London College of Communication, Elephant and Castle, London SE1 6SB
Chaired by Pratap Rughani

‘Arab Spring’ online activism is a test case for pressing theoretical issues that face the subfield of documentary studies: the relocation of activism from the streets to the internet and back again; the ascendance of capture and connection over recording; the loss of bodily experiential and perceptual parameters; the new evidentiary status of Big Data; the Arab World’s challenge to Western assumptions about technological progress.

Jane M. Gaines, Professor of Film, Columbia University; co-founder conference on Visible Evidence: Strategies and Practices in Documentary; co-editor, Collecting Visible Evidence as well as work on piracy, intellectual property, silent era motion picture history, philosophy of history.

There will be drinks and nibbles after this event.

TrAIN Recommends: Jessica Ogden: Still Private View and Exhibition

Tue, 23 May 2017 14:04:34 +0100
Date:Thursday 25 May 2017, 18:30 to 20:30
31-33 Church Street Marylebone London NW8 8ES
Curated by Professor Carol Tulloch

The exhibition is an autobiographical display based on a ‘curatorial conversation’ between the artist and designer Jessica Ogden and Professor Carol Tulloch.

Ogden was born and raised in Jamaica. She studied art in the America and England where she established her fashion label, Jessica Ogden, in 1993. Since 2006 Ogden has worked with fashion house A.P.C. in Paris. In 2015 Ogden returned to live and practice in Jamaica.

Featuring a selection of objects from her archive of designs and contextual resource collection, Jessica Ogden: Still will reflect on her practice, as well as familial and cultural influences, to present a new understanding of her work. The exhibition space, a vacant shop in Church Street, Marylebone, will also be a working studio hosting weekly workshops where, for example, Ogden will encourage local residents to explore their making skills to produce a community piece that narrates local and personal histories.

Please see more about the event, here:

http://events.arts.ac.uk/event/2017/5/26/Jessica-Ogden-Still/

TrAIN Recommends: Transnationalism and it's Limits: Mobility and Contemporaneity in Thai Art

Tue, 23 May 2017 14:15:31 +0100
Date:Thursday 22 June 2017, 16:00 to 18:00
Tate Modern Bankside London SE1 9TG
TrAIN Member Lucy Steeds is chairing a panel discussion at this event.

In this seminar, David Teh gives artistic mobility a discrete history with reference to the contemporary art of Thailand, a nation on edge after decades of sovereign insecurity, economic boom and bust, and constitutional meltdown. While Thai artists reflect these tribulations in their work, since the 1990s many have downplayed their identity and become conspicuously mobile. What can their excursions tell us about the transnationalism of contemporary art? Their mobility allows them to dodge local limitations, but it also recalls a much older spatial imaginary, a worldliness that is no symptom of art’s globalisation but a condition of its possibility.

Teh’s paper is followed by a response from May Adadol Ingawanij. The subsequent panel discussion is chaired by Lucy Steeds.

Biographies

May Adadol Ingawanij is a moving image theorist and curator. She is currently writing a book titled Animistic Cinema: Moving Image Performance and Ritual in Thailand. Her publications include Long Walk to Life: the Films of Lav Diaz (2015); Animism and the Performative Realist Cinema of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, (2013). May’s curatorial projects include Lav Diaz Journeys (London, 2017), and Attachments and Unknowns (Phnom Penh, 2017). She teaches at CREAM, University of Westminster.

Lucy Steeds is Reader in Art Theory and Exhibition Histories at Central Saint Martins (CSM), University of the Arts London (UAL). She is Senior Research Fellow for Afterall at CSM - leading on the Exhibition Histories strand - and she teaches on the MRes Art: Exhibition Studies course. Her recent books include The Curatorial Conundrum (co-edited with Paul O’Neill and Mick Wilson), MIT Press, 2016; and Exhibition (for the Documents of Contemporary Art series), Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press, 2014.

David Teh is a curator and researcher based at the National University of Singapore. His essays have appeared in Afterall Journal, Third Text, ARTMargins and Theory, Culture and Society, and his book Thai Art: Currencies of the Contemporary was published this year by MIT Press. His most recent curatorial project, Misfits: Pages from a loose-leaf modernity, is showing at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin until 3 July.

Tate Research Centre: Asia has been established with generous support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. In association with Afterall, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London.

TrAIN Recommends: Fashion & Politics: Historical & Contemporary Perspectives

Tue, 13 Jun 2017 11:32:14 +0100
Date:Friday 07 July 2017, 09:00 to 17:00
Rootstein Hopkins East Space, LCF, 20 John Princes Street, London, W1G 0BJ
Conference Fashion & Politics: Historical & Contemporary Perspectives

A conference to launch the LCF Transnational Fashion Research Hub.

Convener: TrAIN Member, Dr Djurdja Bartlett, LCF, UAL

This conference addresses the interaction between fashion and politics as presented in a variety of historical and current formats, from public and personal archives to printed fashion magazines, political dailies and illustrated magazines, feature films, social media and advertising.

Keynote speakers:

Professor Rhonda Garelick, New York University, University of Nebraska-Lincoln:
Blow-Up: Fashion in the Age of Terrorism

Professor Angela McRobbie, Goldsmiths University of London, UK
The Emerging political economy of fashion: Micro-enterprises in London, Berlin and Milan

Professor Barbara Vinken, the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU), Munich, Germany
Republicanism against Fashion as an Oriental Tyranny in the Heart of the West

Speakers:

Dr Serkan Delice, LCF, UAL
Fashion and its Refugees: production, consumption and subjectivity in the age of neoliberal authoritarianism

Dr Jin Li Lim, Independent Scholar:
Crimes of Fashion: Politics and fashion in China’s Cultural Revolution

Gabi Scardi, Independent Art Curator, Milan, Italy:
The Uniform, the Subject, the Power

Professor Carlotta Sorba, University of Padova, Italy:
Revolutionary Fashion: patriotic bodies in 1848 Italy

Dr Vlad Strukov, University of Leeds, UK:
Streetwear versus Screenwear: Global visibility of Gosha Rubchinskiy’s proletarian styles

Dr Tony Sullivan, LCF, UAL
Brands, Class and Politics

TrAIN Member, Professor Carol Tulloch, Chelsea, UAL
Style Activism: the making of a political activist self

Dr Jane Tynan, CSM, UAL:
The popularity of the keffiyeh: when fashion appropriates military objects

Lunch and coffee will be provided on the day. Please note details are subject to change - check back for updates. Please note we are unable to offer refunds for this conference.

TrAIN Recommends: Lois Norman - She is Juiced at Tate Britian

Tue, 13 Jun 2017 13:50:16 +0100
Date:Saturday 24 June 2017, 17:00 to 18:30
Tate Britian
Watch the premiere of Lois Norman’s creative documentary

See the premiere screening of Lois Norman’s creative documentary, revealing the work of Female-identified LGBTQI+ Artists: Jo Hay, TrAIN Post-Doc Ope Lori, Peta Lily and Sarah Jane Moon. There is a post screening Q&A with the director and artists - join us for a squeeze!

The use of different acronyms and language with reference to identity throughout this text express the personal wishes of each individual or group listed in the programme for the ‘Queer & Now’ festival.