Dorothee Richter

“Artists and Curators as Authors  – Competitors, Collaborators, or Teamworkers?”

Dorothee Richter is a curator, art historian and author. She is Director of the Postgraduate Program in Curating, Institute Cultural Studies, Universtiy of Fine Arts, Zürich. She was Artistic Director of the Künstlerhaus in Bremen, Germany, where her curated program of projects, exhibitions, talks and symposiums have explored amongst others the issues of socially engaged practice, feminist positioning today and artistic collaboration. She has lectured at Merz Akademie in Stuttgart, the University of Bremen, the Critical Curatorial Cybermedia course at l’Ecole des Beaux Arts Geneva and at the University in Lueneburg. She also founded the  Curating Degree Zero Archive, from 1998 to 2009. In 2008 she initiated the web-journal  www.on-curating.org.

Dummy

Dummy at The Railway Hotel, Clifftown Road, Southend-on-Sea, Essex, SS1 1AJ, between 4pm and 8pm on Saturday 20 November 2010.

This is a live event in which recent University of Reading graduates Katie Barrington, Abi Bryant, Owen Chapman, and Christian Tilt will ‘parrot’ texts by artists including Sue de Beer, Ryan Trecartin, Liam Gillick, Mark Titchner, Stuart Bailey, Patricia MacCormack. Rebecca Warren, Pierre Huyghe and Laura Cull.

The event is organised by Focal Point Gallery, Southend http://www.focalpoint.org.uk/

Stuart Bailey

            

(DEXTER SINISTER | DOT DOT DOT MAGAZINE)

 TO:  Department of Typography & Graphic Communication and the Department of Art
DATE: Wednesday 10 November
TIME: 2pm
VENUE: Nike Theatre in Agriculture  

Stuart Bailey completed a BA in Typography and Graphic Communication at Reading and went from there to the masters programme at the Werkplaats Typografie in Arnhem the Netherlands. He is now registered as a theory/practice postgraduate researcher in the Department of Fine Art at Reading. He was based for some years in Amsterdam and now lives and works in New York and Los Angeles USA.

Stuart is (with Peter Bilak) editor and designer of dot dot dot magazine and is also (with David Reinfurt) part of the group Dexter Sinister, who operate a ‘just-in-time workshop’ and ‘occasional bookstore’ in New York City. The work of Dexter Sinister has increasingly been featured in the context of contemporary art through events such as the Whitney Biennial in New York (2008), the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London (2009) and the Frieze Art Fair in London (2010). Their engagements with the idea of text-based art practice and with typography and the ‘space’ of publishing as a means of dissemination and dispersion follows on from Conceptual Art practices of the 1960s and 70s and a more recent Post-Conceptual territory which has seen the collapsing of traditional distinctions between art, design, writing editing, publishing and distribution. Dexter Sinister ‘publishes’ works that explore these intersections.

Stuart will be talking about some of his recent projects with Dexter Sinister.

The Making of Ballet

A talk by Susanne Clausen
The Museum of English Rural Life Redlands Road Reading RG1 5EX
Tuesday, 2 November, 4.30pmartist and Reader in Fine Art at the University of Reading

Susanne Clausen,

A talk examining Susanne Clausen’s recent filmed performance project Ballet and the resultant video performance and installation on display in the Museum of English Rural Life. The work engages with histories of documentary filmmaking, movement and dance and draws on selected farming-related films from the Museum’s archives, made to provide information and propaganda relating to warnings of contagion and procedures in case of emergencies.

“Current anxieties about food production have resulted in a growing social phenomenon: urban twenty-somethings, with no ties to the land, who are obsessed with threats to the integrity of our food supply (GMOs, pesticides, etc.). For these young urbanites, hypervigilant consumption has become a popular lifestyle choice. It is against this backdrop that the drama of Ballet unfolds. Here, the threat of nuclear war stands in as the symbol for all other contaminations. Through a blended choreography of farm labour and dance movement, the separation of rural and urban is registered on a number of levels: in the young actors’ soft urban bodies, in their awkward imitation of everyday agricultural chores, in the eruption of dance movements culled from music halls and the avant-garde. In the past, the court derived their dances from the peasants; now the sources of new movement are all urban, a reminder that the separation of the two realities is more or less complete. However, as the mushroom cloud at the end of the video reminds us, catastrophes, nuclear or otherwise, threaten to disrupt our neat separation of rural and urban—the ‘ballet’ on which the world food system depends. The genius of Ballet is to make manifest through an apocalyptic ‘dance of the dead’ the underlying threat to a fundamental aspect of our global social organization.”
Timothy Long, Head Curator, Mackenzie Art Gallery, Regina, Canada on Ballet

Interior Life