Capital

Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks. The time during which the worker works is the time during which the capitalist consumes the labour-power he has bought from him.

The global banking collapse of 2008 exposed the failures of a deregulated economic system run entirely for private financial gain. Despite the market crash, investors kept the fortunes conjured out of speculative bubbles and bankers kept their remuneration packages and bonuses, whilst governments agreed to pay the bill with huge transfusions of public money. Since then, the rich have grown richer, sucking up ever-larger proportions of wealth, gorging on luxury, whilst working people have been subjected to joblessness, the removal of social provision and benefits, and attacks on wages and working conditions. In the UK the ruling class dullards have used the bank bailouts and the recession not to curb market excesses, but as an opportunity to shrink the welfare state and the public sector, privatising control over areas of our collective lives from housing to health to education. Wealth spurts up towards a bloated mediocrity, while the majority are increasingly proletarianised in order to make the country ‘competitive’; and the media, when they are not celebrating the ruthless spirit of enterprising halfwits, comment on how Dickensian it is all looking, what with all the homelessness and dispossession. As food banks multiply and quaint relics of Victorian charity attempt to mop up the aftermath of frenzied assaults against the poor and sick and most vulnerable, many people, in their effort to understand our collective submission to capital’s relentless intensification, have been led back to the most far reaching analysis and critique of our system of political economy, Marx’ Capital.

Marx takes us beyond both the moral and technocratic complaints that capitalism is an unfair and unstable system in need of reform and regulation, to show that in its very lifeblood, capitalism is a practice of accumulation based on robbery and exploitation backed by compulsion and force. It is a class relation which cannot ultimately be ameliorated but which must be overthrown through collective struggle. The work in this exhibition is an attempt to visualise the moments of this vast, homogenising abstraction that dominates our lives today, as described by Marx in Capital Volume One.

The show has grown out of a regular Marx reading group meeting at the Royal Festival Hall, one of the last vestiges of post-war free public space in London.

Andrew Cooper, Enda Deburka, Dean Kenning, John Russell – Capital

xero, kline & coma
258 Hackney Road
London E2 7SJ
http://www.xero-kline-coma.com

Private view: Wednesday May 1st 19:00 – 21:00
Exhibition runs: 4.5.13 – 26.5.13, Sat. – Sun. 12:00 – 18:00

Who’s Afraid of the Public?

Symposium at ICA, London organised by the Research Platform for Curatorial and Cross-disciplinary Cultural Studies at the University of Reading and Postgraduate Programme in Curating, Zürich, Practice-Based Doctoral Programme.

4 May 2013
£12 / £10 concessions / £8 ICA Members / £5 Student Members

Despite all the yearning for new publics and the attempts to include ever wider and more diverse audiences, one has to suspect that these are mere gestures of inclusion driven by the desire to produce visitor numbers than constituting a public.

If participation is the new spectacle, as Diedrich Diedrichsen once provocatively stated, how are we then to go beyond the given proliferation of art communication, mediation and education? When participation has both become an apt strategy of governmentality falling in place with the discourse of the fear of the public and is constantly generated by communicating via social media and its constant flow of information and relations at a fast pace, what are then the potentials to open up a new discourse on what public and participation in its constitution means in the 21st century?

This symposium explores the social, cultural and political challenges surrounding public participation in relation to social media and examines the strategies and experiments that engage audiences within different rhythms and reflections in the public arena.

Speaker Schedule

11.30am – 12.15pm
Simon Sheik, Curator and Programme Director of the MFA Curating at Goldsmiths, University of London

12.15pm – 1pm
Marie Luise Angerer, Professor at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne

1pm – 1.30pm
Lunch

1.30pm – 2.15pm
Sergio Edelsztein, Director of the Centre for Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv and Curator of the Israel Pavillion at the Venice Biennial 2013

2.15pm – 3pm
Aria Spinelli, critic/curator based in Milan

3pm – 3.45pm
Jeanne Van Heeswijk, artist, Netherlands

3.45pm – 4.15pm
Break

4.15pm – 5.30pm
Film Screening curated by John Canciani, Director of Winterthur Short Film Festival. Full details of the programme are available here. The Film Screening is included in the symposium, but if you’d like to attend the Screening only, tickets are available to purchase below.

Concept:

Elke Krasny (moderator)
Curator, Senior Lecturer at The Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, currently working on her PhD at the Research Platform for Curatorial and Cross-disciplinary Cultural Studies at the University of Reading.

Dorothee Richter
Curator and head of postgraduate programme in curating Zürich,; director with Susanne Clausen of the Research Platform for Curatorial and Cross-disciplinary Cultural Studies at the University of Reading and Postgraduate Programme in Curating, Zürich, Practice-Based Doctoral Programme.

Silvia Simoncelli
Lecturer at postgraduate programme in curating, Zürich.

‘Who’s Afraid of the Public?’ – Film Screening

This is Alaska (2009), courtesy Theo Tsappos, Svenska Filminstitutet

The film programme forms a part of ‘Who’s Afraid of the Public?’, a symposium exploring the social, cultural and political challenges surrounding public participation in relation to social media, examining the strategies and experiments that engage audiences within different rhythms and reflections in the public arena. The programme is curated by John Caviani (Artistic Director Internationale Kurzfilmtage Winterthur, Switzerland) comprising of seven short films that investigate aspects of the public and the public space.Developed in collaboration with University of Reading and in association with University of the Arts Zurich. The programme seeks to engage with these issues within the context of cinema exploring the relationship between audience, film and screen creating a unique collective audience experience.

4 May 2013
£5 / Free to ICA Members

Films include:

Play
Christoph Giradet , Matthias Müller, Germany 2003, 7 mins
Audiences in movies. In Play, the onscreen action can only be seen reflected in the facial expressions and gestures of the audience. In sequences of analogous reactions, individual behavior condenses into collective behavior. The event is transferred from the stage to the hall; audience members become the actors in an unpredictable drama.

Crni Film – Black Film
Želimir Žilnik, Jugoslavia 1971, 14 mins
One night, Žilnik picks up a group of homeless men from the streets of Novi Sad and takes them home. While they enjoy themselves in his home, the filmmaker tries to “solve the problem of the homeless”, bringing along a film camera as a witness. He speaks to social workers, ordinary people and policemen. They all close their eyes in the face of the problem.

This is Alaska
Mårten Nilsson, Gunilla Heilborn, Sweden 2009, 11 mins
A group of people have moved to Alaska, searching for a higher level of freedom.

Bradley Manning Had Secrets
Adam Butcher, United Kingdom, 6 mins
The story of Bradley Manning, not as a Wikileaks ‘hacktivist’, but as a young American soldier simultaneously going through a crisis-of-conscious and a crisis-of-identity. Animated in a rotoscoped pixel-art style and using dialogue from Bradley’s online conversations, the film explores issues of personal and political secrets, digital identity and alienation.

Dogs Are Said To See Things (Dizem que os caes veem coisas)
Guto Parente, Brasil 2012, 14 mins
An omen, a shred of time. Suddenly the huge-bellied man jumps into the pool, holding a glass of whisky.

Untitled (Zimbabwean Queen of Rave)
Dan Halter, Zimbabwe 2005, 4 mins
In 1991 Rozalla’s single Everybody’s Free (To Feel Good) was released. The film expresses a personal reality and the cultural gap between white and black that I was experiencing.

Be Loved (Geliebt)
Jan Soldat, Germany 2010, 16 mins
Life’s all about two things: firstly, being loved, and secondly not being alone. But what happens when people aren’t enough, or when they’re too much? Be Loved (Geliebt) is not a film about the pros and cons of emotional and sexual relationships with animals, but a film about the relationship between humans and animals, poised somewhere between love and dependence.

The full symposium programme can be seen here.

Rubens at Reading

We are delighted to host a symposium to celebrate the conservation of three drawings in the University collection, including an original Rubens. The drawings have been restored by expert conservator, Elizabeth Sobczynski, as a result of the generous support of collector and Reading alumnus Nigel Pilkington.

The collecting , copying and the role of drawing will be discussed by a number of speakers including Professor Paul Joannides , University of Cambridge, Professor Jeremy Wood, University of Nottingham, and Professor Clare Robertson, and Dr Simon Lee , University of Reading.

There will be an opportunity to see the Rubens and other drawings in the university collection and also drawings in the collection of Nigel Pilkington.

Wednesday 8 May 2013, 2.00pm – 6.00pm
Museum of English Rural Life, University of Reading

Programme:

2.00pm Professor Anna Gruetzner Robins Welcome and Introduction

2:15pm Professor Jeremy Wood ‘Rubens, portraiture and the early collecting of drawings’

3:15pm Dr Simon Lee ‘ Learning from ‘Homer’- Delacroix’s Studies after Rubens’

3:45pm Tea – Viewing of drawings, Elizabeth Sobczynski will speak about their conservation.

4.30pm Professor Paul Joannides ‘A Little More Daniele da Volterra and the Orsini Chapel

5.00pm Professor Clare Robertson (TBC)

5.30pm Reception

Admission is free. To register please contact: events@reading.ac.uk 0118 378 4313

Beckett at Reading 2013

 

Celebrating 25 years of the Beckett International Foundation
Organised by the Departments of English, Art and Film & Theatre

4-7 April 2013
The Minghella Building
University of Reading

In 1988, with the support of Samuel Beckett, James Knowlson established the Beckett International Foundation as a charitable trust. The Foundation’s objective is to promote the work of Samuel Beckett and to look after the Beckett Collection at the University of Reading, which originated in the Samuel Beckett Exhibition of 1971 and is now the most extensive collection of Beckett materials in the world. To celebrate 25 years of the Foundation, we are excited to announce that we are hosting an academic conference with established and emerging scholars. There will also be an exhibition marking the 60th anniversary of the premiere of En attendant Godot and film screenings. The highlight of our evening programme is a reading of Beckett’s poetry and prose by Barry McGovern, world renowned for his interpretations of Samuel Beckett’s work. We look forward to welcoming old and new friends and colleagues to mark this anniversary.

Registration for the event is via the University of Reading online store. On this site you will be able to register for the entire conference (four days) or for individual days, as well as for the conference dinner on Saturday evening. Attendance to the Friday evening event, ’Barry McGovern reads Beckett’s poetry and prose’, is included in the full delegate fee as well as the Friday day fee. Reduced rates are available for students and unwaged delegates, and are marked with (R) on the online registration site.

» Download the preliminary programme (PDF)
» Register via the University of Reading online store
» Download travel directions and maps (PDF)
» Download the list of recommended hotels (PDF)

For queries, please contact Dr Mark Nixon

Support for local people to do a PhD

The University is offering bursaries to cover the cost of home/EU fees for local people who wish to begin their PhD at the University on either a part-time or full-time basis.  Candidates must normally live within 25 miles of the University, and must satisfy normal entry requirements.

The deadline for applications is Wednesday 1 May 2013.  Please click here for further details.

Contact Dr Rachel Garfield  r.s.garfield@reading.ac.uk if you would like to discuss your proposed research.

Between Curatorial and Urban Practice

Listen to Elke Kransy, Reading – Zurich PhD Curating Platform in discussion with Dr Clémentine Deliss, Maria Lind, Justin McGuirk

Recorded on 2 March 2013 in Sheikh Zayed Theatre, New Academic Building.

In recent years arts practice has shifted towards new modes of collaborative production while digital platforms continually offer new ways to distribute and engage with the arts. As performing and visual arts organisations are transforming relationships with audiences, more varied roles have emerged for curators beyond exhibition making and collections management. Curating has evolved to embrace audience-generated content. Many curators see their role more and more as a cultural producer.

The panel will examine an evolving definition of contemporary curation within their practices, and their relationships to the cities and people around them. Is an architect who arranges and designs spaces or the city a curator? Is a curator an architect of sorts producing spaces of exchange? What about the work a writer or researcher does in ‘curating’ arguments and ideas? Finally, how does the increasing importance of the everyday, of the street, and of shifting political geographies of art practice mark curation today?

Clémentine Deliss is director of Weltkulturen Museum, Frankfurt am Main since April 2010. She studied contemporary art in Vienna, and social anthropology in Vienna, London, and Paris. She holds a PhD (1988) from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London on 1920s French museum anthropology and dissident surrealism.

Elke Krasny is a cultural theorist, curator, urbanist and author, based in Vienna. She researches on the interrelations of architecture, urban space, issues of cultural identity and representation, engaged art practices, gender and world fairs, museums and exhibitions as cultural formations. She teaches Art and Public Space, Museum Pedagogy, Visual Didactics, Didactics of Architecture and Space and Cultural Education at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, “Garden as Community” at the Technical University of Vienna, Cultural Studies at the FH Joanneum Graz and is a visiting professor at the University of Bremen “Urban Transformation and its Narratives” 2006.

Maria Lind is a curator and critic. She is director of Tensta Konsthall, a centre for contemporary art in Stockholm, Sweden. Between 2001 and 2004 she was director of the Munich Kunstverein. Previous to that she was curator at Moderna Museet in Stockholm (from 1997-2001) and in 1998 was co-curator of Manifesta 2 Europe’s nomadic biennale of contemporary art.

Justin McGuirk is a writer, critic and curator. He is the director of Strelka Press, the publishing arm of the Strelka Institute in Moscow, and the design consultant to Domus. He has been the design columnist for The Guardian and the editor of Icon magazine. In 2012 he was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture for an exhibition he curated with Urban Think Tank. He is currently working on a book about activist architecture and social housing in Latin America.

Theatrum Mundi / The Global Street is a new urban forum based in London at LSE Cities. It seeks to understand what brings life to a city, particularly in its public places and asks how these might be better designed. Theatrum Mundi, focused on urban culture, brings architects and town planners together with performing and visual artists to reimagine the public spaces of twenty-first century cities – streets, squares, parks, and places for culture. We begin with theoretical conversations and move towards real projects, celebrating those which embody new thinking about public space.

This event forms part of LSE’s 5th Space for Thought Literary Festival|, taking place from Tuesday 26 February – Saturday 2 March 2013, with the theme ‘Branching Out’.