BA & MFA Degree Exhibition

Join us to celebrate the exciting work of emerging artists from the University of Reading.

We are delighted to invite you to the Department of Art Degree Show 2013 preview on Friday 7 June, from 4-7pm. We are open to the public every day from 10th – 21st June, 10am – 4pm

This public exhibition is the culmination of the undergraduate and postgraduate programmes and the students’ experience of studying art. This years show features a curated film space that highlights the exciting cutting edge work of a new generation of video artists and a mini opera inspired by the colour pink, amongst a range of exciting works that include playful and ambitious sculpture, sound and light installations and new thought-provoking approaches to painting and image making.

Tanika K. Ahluwalia, Imogen Banks, Rachel Bedder, Sarah Brady, Chris Brimecome, Jake Broadway, Holly Butcher, Jamie Crawford, Naomi Davies, Daisy Dixon, Nathan English, Louise Fitzgerald, Paroma Guha, Nathalie Hammond, Steven Harris, Lauren Harrison, Maria Iordanous, Emily Lawrenson, Sarah Isaacs, Katya Lewis, Olivia Lewis, Lucy Meadway, Emma Louise, Alexander Newman, Evanthia Nicou, James Quinn, Charlotte Robey, Erika Lee Shaw, Laura Truesdale, Laura Walker, Jack Wilson, Robyn Appleton, Daria Wanzik, Elizabeth Tomopoulos, Ed Quick, Bob Geal

Visit the 2013 Degree Show website here

Degree Exhibition Guest Review

This years graduates will be joined by Mark Titchner (artist) and Marie-Anne McQuay (curator) in a group review of the exhibition at 2pm on Wednesday 12th June 2013.

The exhibition is accompanied by a publication featuring all our finalists designed by Kathryn Chandler and Henry Bacon from the Department of Typography. The publication is made possible with the generous support from the Arts Committee, University of Reading.

See the online catalogue here

BA & MFA Degree Exhibition Catalogue

[click image to read the online catalogue]

Publication featuring all our BA & MFA finalists designed by Kathryn Chandler and Henry Bacon from the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication. The publication is made possible with the generous support from the Arts Committee, University of Reading.

Aspen

Aspen: The 1960s multi-format magazine
Department of Typography & Graphic Communication
18 June – 2 July 2013
Monday – Friday 9am – 5pm

Aspen, described in the 1960s as ‘the first three-dimensional magazine’ was published in California on an irregular schedule from 1965 to 1971. Many leading figures in contemporary North American and European art and cultural criticism were involved in its production as editors, designers or contributors and this, along with its unique format, has contributed to its art historical importance and continued relevance to contemporary art and design practices of today.

Rather than bound printed pages, Aspen was issued in a customized box or folder containing a wide range of items including posters, postcards, tickets, booklets, reels of super-8 movie film and ‘flexi disc’ phonographic recordings. These different published formats turned the magazine into a space where artists were able to move outside the gallery and engage with a broader social and political sphere. As the magazine’s editor Phyllis Johnson claimed: Aspen presented ‘Actual works of art! Exactly as the artist created them. In exactly the medium s/he created them for’.

Few complete sets of Aspen remain and, as such, this exhibition provides a rare opportunity to see items from across all ten issues as well many important individual pieces which have acquired specific art historical and cultural significance. Items featured include contributions by Andy Warhol, John Lennon, Yoko Ono, John Cage, Marshall McLuhan, Quentin Fiore, Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag, George Kubler, Dan Graham, Robert Smithson, George Maciunas, Lou Reed, Ed Ruscha and Hetty MacLise.

Curated by Lisa Stephanides (MA Book Design) Aspen is a joint exhibition by the Department of Art and Department of Typography and Graphic Communication,  supported by  Arts Committee, University of Reading

FluxUsNow Trailer from Dorothee Richter on Vimeo.

Dr Dorothee Richter co- director of the Joint Research Platform with the University of the Arts Zurich, premiered  her new research film “Flux Us Now. Fluxus explored with a camera” at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart on 13 April 3013.

“Flux Us Now. Fluxus explored with a camera” is a research based film by Dorothee Richter und Ronald Kolb in eleven chapters with a large collection of recent interviews with Ben Patterson, Alison Knowles, Hannah Higgins, Letty Eisenhauer, Carolee Schneemann, Jon Hendricks, Geoffrey Hendricks, Larry Miller, Eric Andersen, Jonas Mekas, Daniel Spoerri and Ben Vautier, and historical material featuring Yoko Ono, Jackson Mac Low, Ken Friedman, Dick Higgins, Nam June Paik, Philip Corner, Henry Flynt, Emmett Williams and La Monte Young.

“Flux Us Now. Fluxus explored with a camera” will be screened on June 20^th, University of Reading as part of Art’s Postgraduate Research Symposium.

The Ghost of a Movement

THE GHOST OF A MOVEMENT

EXHIBITION @ EMBASSY GALLERY
OPEN FRI 7 JUNE, 7 – 9PM
8 – 23 JUNE, OPEN THURS – SUN

PATRIK AARNIVAARA – JESS LITTLEWOOD – POLLY FIBRE – COPENHAGEN FREE UNIVERSITY – DAVID RAYMOND CONROY

CURATED BY DANE SUTHERLAND

CLOSING EVENT WITH POLLY FIBRE ON FRI 21 JUNE, 7 – 9PM

The revolutionary Future appears increasingly implausible to most of us, but neither can we simply get rid of it. As a result, it seems to collapse into the present… Genuine knowledge of this Future is impossible, but it is only from the perspective of this unknowable Outside that any real knowledge of the present is possible. The Future has become our Dreamtime. (David Graeber)

Today, throughout the world, the organization of movements, groups and collectives abound in the face of political, social and economic uncertainty. The social experience in the forging of a movement, of a utopian thrust, is animated and problematized by such contingent processes as improvisation and speculation. These inherently social activities suspend and navigate normative procedures of judgement, decision-making and valuation by rejecting established modes of governance in favour of localized heuristic processes. The exhibition, ‘The Ghost of a Movement’, produces a space in which the generative and indeterminate processes of developing emergent forms of experience and sociability beyond the dominant order can be considered in relation to collective deliberation, speculative inquiry and the political valence of science fiction as well as immanent perceptual and conceptual gestalts.

Rubens at Reading

A drawing owned by the University of Reading has been confirmed as a work by 17th Century artist Sir Peter Paul Rubens.

The 4.25in by 3.5in (10.8 cm by 8.9 cm) sketch of the Marie de Medicis has been valued at £75,000. When bought in the 1950s for £50 it was thought to have been drawn “in the style” of the Old Master.

Professor Anna Gruetzner Robins, from the Department of Art, called it an “extremely exciting discovery”. Professor Robins said:

[He] has a special significance for Britain because he undertook several commissions in Britain including a decorative ceiling for the Banqueting House at Whitehall… This sketch belongs to a group of portrait drawings of Marie de Medicis made circa 1622… all of which were studies for 21 life-size paintings representing Marie’s life from her girlhood, coronation as Queen of Henry IV of France, to old age and exile.”

Read more about this story as covered by the Guardian website

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.

Sentenced, The Old Police Station

Mike Nelson in Artforum

Mike Nelson reflects on his time at Reading and his recent exhibitions in this months Artforum

When I was a student at Reading University I was very interested in the experience of eastern cultures, in particular those of the Islamic world. I made work retracing the lineage of designs, such as those from the Arts and Crafts movement, back to their eastern influences. I often found a rebounding dialogue between them. This was the beginning of my interest in the construction of identity and “otherness”, as well as an understanding of my position in that—not only as a European, but also more specifically as a British person.

Mike Nelson, ‘M6′ (photograph), 2013. Courtesy Eastside Projects.

Finalists Interim Exhibition

International Summer School

 

Artists’ Documentary: Elegies for Ideologies

Rachel Garfield, The Straggle

Institute of Contemporary Art, London, 8 January 2013

The sense of melancholia that runs through this programme acts like an elegy to the Twentieth Century ideologies and ideals of the left. Phil Collins’ interviews of ex-GDR teachers echo Rachel Garfield’s interviews with adult children of leftwing activists in the UK, which she interrupts with tragicomic clips from a show of a socialist magician. Uriel Orlow departs from interview aesthetics and into the realm of poetic truth using science fiction as a form from which to explore nostalgia for old ideals but also as a ritualistic marker of history. Chlala and Sansour set up a situation in which their protagonists improvise a conversation teasing out ideologies of nationhood and power, but somehow the overabundant feast at which they are sitting leaves a discomforting feeling that resistance can’t really happen on a full stomach.

marxism today (prologue) – Phil Collins / Germany / 2010 / 25’
The Straggle – Rachel Garfield / UK / 2012 / 20’
Remnants of the Future – Uriel Orlow / Armenia/UK / 2010 / 21’
Trespass the Salt - Larissa Sansour and Youmna Chlala / 2011/ Lebanon, Palestine, UK / 11’

The screening will be followed by a discussion with artists Larissa Sansour and Rachel Garfield and curator / filmmaker Treasa O’Brien of Open City Docs Fest. This event is a special screening by Open City Docs Fest, London’s annual documentary film festival. The festival is committed to strong programming of artists’ documentaries and experimental film. The third edition of Open City Docs Fest takes place in venues around UCL and Bloomsbury 20-23 June 2013.

More info: www.opencitydocsfest.com

Poster Production, Portman Gallery

For this exhibition Dean Kenning has worked with art students from Morpeth School, Central St Martins and Reading University. Each group of students has produced posters based on different themes and according to various methods of working. Year 12 students from Morpeth have created Social Body Mind Maps which are self portraits stemming from a problem or mystery initiated by an artwork, and connecting outwards with social life worlds of families, friends, passions and the imagination. St Martins students have attended a seminar on Maps, Diagrams and Schemas, and have produced new diagrammatic artworks. Reading University students have created posters with a political theme after being involved with a workshop on Political Posters.

Poster Production brings all this work together in one place, and alongside posters by 11 other artists.

Artists:
Morpeth School 6th Form Art:
Sadeeq Adan, Hamida Begum, Resna Begum, Holly Farrell-Kelly, Tufayel Karim, Usof Khan, Sabil Miah, Joanna Webb.

Central St Martins BA Fine Art
Joseph Evans, Emma Vidal, Tais Bean, Madeline Bohrer, Amy Geyer, Edward Gillman, Alexander Skorobogatov, Jeff O’Loughlin, Ana Gold Chumillas, Nural Moser, Katie Tindle, Tom Camm, Alex Pascall, Kavan Balasuriya, Anna Olenicenco, Alina Buzea, Tosin Ogunsanya, Lou Macnamara, Nashrath Lameer, Aram Kim, Thea Mulvey, Ullrike Nordseth, Joanna Knott, Claudia Rowland, Lilly Vogor

University of Reading BA Fine Art:
Beth Colman, Esther Shilliday, Rosie McCarthy, Faye Nelson, Melanie Aston, Rosanna McNamara, Natasha Day, Lucy Hatch, Robyn Appleton, LEWDJAW///Jack Wilson, Laura Prime

Plus:
David Burrows, Sophie Carapetian, Pil & Galia Kollectiv, Emma Hart, Kate Janes, Kommunist Sex Klub, Esther Planas, Clunie Reid, John Russell, Eva Weinmayr, Mary Yacoob

Curated by Dean Kenning

Supported by UAL: Central Saint Martins and University of Reading

Open File III, HASHFAIL

HASHFAIL
Event/Torrent/Publication
Friday 14th December 2012
7 – 11 pm
Grand Union, Birmingham

Featuring work by: Rhys Coren, Joey Holder, Polly Fibre, JK Keller, Yuri Pattison, Oliver Sutherland and Pil & Galia Kollectiv, alongside a text by Gil Leung.

Download the Open File Torrent
Hashfail is the first in the series of 3 nation-wide events by Open File investigating the distribution and production of art via virtual and digital platforms through sound, performance and digital media. Hashfail coincides with (On) Accordance a project by or-bits.com and Grand Union. A Torrent file is a file distributed via the web through rapid peer-to-peer ‘seeding’ of information. Becoming representative or pirate and copyright-infringing distribution it is also a mode of sharing that relies upon direct connection with other anonymous users of the internet. A Hashfail occours when ‘seeded’ files have become corrupt and therefore certain ‘bits’ of data cannot be recieved. Numerous Hashfails leed to the loss of quality and gradual decomposition of a file, shifting it ever-further from its origin, subjecting it to a new type of physicality and texturing.

Grand Union
19 Minerva Works
Fazeley Street
Birmingham
B5 5RS

Hannah Sawtell at Bloomberg SPACE & ICA

Art at Reading’s Hannah Sawtell has been specially commissioned to create two linked, site-specific exhibitions, Osculator at the ICA, and Vendor at Bloomberg SPACE. These exhibitions of video work and installation mark Sawtell’s first solo projects in the UK. Both exhibitions employ material developed from Sawtell’s experience of the Bloomberg office space during her current residency.

Over the next few months the artist will compile material from the digital realm, sourcing images from the internet and live screen-shots of news footage on Bloomberg’s office monitors. Her visual inventory of ‘contemporary material’ or ‘surfaces’, explore the boundaries of image production and consider the culture of over-proliferation. Sawtell’s parallel semi-archival projects will investigate the politics of seduction as well as the idea of the ‘market’ through spatial and visual devices. By categorising and recording certain images, the artist reveals new relationships between objects and creates playful but critical dialectical encounters.

Operating as ‘real-time’ collages, Sawtell’s video and image-based works reconstruct contemporary media as fragmentary documents that collide visual tones with digital noise. By utilising generic editing programmes to cut digital information and formats, Sawtell initiates a process that designates the computer and its screen as a lens.

The exhibition will be accompanied  by a publication, distributed as an insert in Business Week, with essays by Alun Rowlands (University of Reading) and Diedrich Diedrichsen.

Bloomberg SPACE
Vendor
5 October 2012 – 13 January 2013

ICA
Osculator
9 October 2012 – 18 November 2012

Anthea Hamilton: Sorry I’m Late

firstsite
8 September – 25 November 2012

Anthea Hamilton’s energetic collages explore the surreal and seductive nature of images. Her sculptures, installations and vdeos make reference to the history of art, cinema and performance, playfully inserting the viewer into a three-dimensional composition.

Sorry I’m Late sees work installed across the building with firstsite’s galleries dramatically transformed into a series of environments – from a film studio to a restaurant kitchen. Soft sculptures, Perspex figures mounted on wheels, a giant zoetrope-inspired portrait of John Travolta and a medieval cocktail that is claimed to cure cataracts are amongst the works that comprise the exhibition.

Anthea Hamilton’s work has been exhibited internationally including presentations at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris, the Barbican Art Gallery and Tate Britain, London. Her recent projects include a poster design for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games and a major commission as part of the Cultural Olympiad, Frieze Projects East which she produced in collaboration with Nicholas Byrne. In October she will present a work as part of The Tanks programme of live art at Tate Modern.

For further information see: http://www.firstsite.uk.net/page/whats-on

39th Annual AAH Conference & Bookfair

Department of Art, University of Reading to host the 39^th Annual Association of Art Historian’s Conference 11 - 13 April 2013

AAH2013 will represent the interests of an expansive art-historical community by covering all branches of its discipline/s and the range of its visual cultures. Academic sessions will reflect a broad chronological range, as well as a wide geographical one. We will address topics of methodological, historiographical, and interdisciplinary interest as well as ones that open up debates about the future of the discipline/s.

Keynote Speakers:

Adrian Forty, Professor of Architectural History, The Bartlett, University College London ‘in conversation’ with Maarten Delbeke, Associate Professor of Architecture & Urban Planning, Ghent University and Lecturer in Art History, Leiden University.

Okwui Enwezor, Curator and Director of Haus der Kunst, Munich

AAH2013 will take place over three days at the historic University of Reading, Berkshire.

For further information see http://www.aah.org.uk/annual-conference/2013-conference

Platform

Two graduates from Art at Reading, Alana Francis and Hannah Mills will be showing at Modern Art Oxford as part of Platform.

Plaftorm is a new initiative showcasing the talent of emerging artists from across the South East of England will be featured at Modern Art Oxford during October and November.

The two-part exhibition presents the work of nine 2012 graduate artists from Oxford Brookes University, The Ruskin School of Drawing & Fine Art, Oxford Cherwell Valley College, and Reading University.

Initiated through CVAN, the contemporary visual arts network in the South East, Platform has been created to nurture new artistic talent and is supported by a coalition of visual arts organisations: Aspex, Milton Keynes Gallery, Modern Art Oxford and Turner Contemporary.  Each organisation has selected graduates from their local area to participate in this series of exhibitions.

At Modern Art Oxford between 29 September – 28 October, Part I of Platform will feature five artists; Laura Bleach (Oxford Brookes University), Alana Francis (University of Reading), Lucy Garnett (Oxford Cherwell Valley College), Kamila Janska (Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art) and Amy Wilkins (Oxford Brookes University).

Part II of the Platform exhibition at Modern Art Oxford will begin on 30 October and run until 25 November 2012 and will feature the remaining four artists; Jack Eden (Oxford Brookes University), Hannah Mills (University of Reading), Cara George and Jan Kaesbach (Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art).

A shortlist of artists from each of the four exhibitions across the South East will be nominated for the Platform Graduate Award, which includes a financial award of £2,500 and a 12-month programme of bespoke professional development. The winner will be announced at Modern Art Oxford on 22 November 2012

ONE AND ONE AND ONE

A group exhibition that considers the idea of incompletion through the imagined and real spaces of architecture.
Amikam Toren | Bernice Donszelmann | Louisa Minkin & Francis Summers | Mary Maclean | Richard Healy | Ruth Proctor | Sally Morfill | Tim Renshaw | Yonatan Vinitsky

CGP London, Southwark Park, London SE16
26 September to 28 October 2012, Wednesday – Sunday from 12 – 6pm.

For ONE AND ONE AND ONE the participating artists explore the ambient qualities of architectural atmosphere through works that, through their process of production, offer a concept of space that is not static. Freed from reaching a point of conclusion (through the withholding of information), the resulting structures create an absence that generates new material languages.

At the heart of this exhibition, is the perception of the incomplete or a space that is begun and worked upon within its own particular suspended history. In this unsettling absence of concrete information or related historical context, audiences must engage with a willful open-endedness and confront distractions that bring their peripheral imagination into play and in which margins can touch, overlap, rub up against each other, but due to the different shapes of their limits they are bound to never fit into each other completely. Verwoert, J. 2007 Forget the National: Perform the International in the Key of the Local (and vice versa).

The works in this exhibition draw on concepts of architectural materiality, a hypothesis of space and our perception of the built environment. Even architecture, which disposes of the more solid materials is a hypothesis about space, in much the same sense that words on a page do not produce meaning directly but first divide the page and consequently thought and poetry, into significance. Said, E.1985. Beginnings Intention and Method.

Constructed space, then, is more than simply the concrete and material substance of constructed structures, the permanence of elements and the architectonics of urbanistic details. It also exists as the sudden proliferation and the incessant multiplication of special efforts which, along with the consciousness of time and of distances, affect the perception of the environment. Virilio, P. 1984 Negative Horizon.

Discussion Event Sunday 21 October from 3 –5pm at Dilston Grove | Southwark Park | Bermondsey

Conversing on the Incomplete

The incomplete and associated terms such as the fragment and the ruin have had a central place in discourse around the arts, architecture and contemporary experience, shifting away from ideals of wholeness and unity. Always dynamic and in process, incompleteness occupies a field of tension. The dialogic nature of the incomplete can be addressed through its elastic relation to time, doubling as a site of radical potential and the way it suggests an abandoned or eradicated historical continuum.

The theme of the incomplete and its related lines of enquiry will be developed in an afternoon of short talks by Ian Hunt, David Ryan and Ciara Healy. Ian Hunt is a writer and critic David Ryan is an artist, musician and writer Ciara Healy is an artist and writer.

Curated by Outside Architecture: Bernice Donszelmann, Tim Renshaw, Mary Maclean.

Projects include Outside Architecture, Stephen Lawrence Galley, London; Architectural Fictions, South Hill Park, Berkshire; Interior Life, Herbert Read Gallery, Kent; House in the Shape of a Stretcher, Five Years, London; Left of Place, Five Years, London.

Amikam Toren ‘Three years ago, Evelyn House (the house where I live) went through a major renovation. Using a video camera I documented the process. On each of the jobs which were done to the house, I placed a voice over which reads letters I have received ever since I lived at this address. Put together in this form the work becomes a self portrait by proxy. The work duration is 45 minutes, to be shown on a monitor as a continuous loop with no beginning or ending.’

Ruth Proctor Ruth Proctor’s work navigates a performative process, bringing into dialogue sculpture, installation, performance, video, 16mm film and works on paper. Simultaneously playing with a physical and conceptual connection to the use of material, gesture and form, Proctor’s current research and works have been examining notions of luck and failure positioned within the context of potentiality and chance. She often works in response to a particular space and time, staging performative moments within the gallery. She draws on autobiographical influences such as her own past as an ice skater and of contemporary dance as well as art historical concepts such as the flâneur and the derive.

Richard Healy Richard Healy’s works often take the form of prototypes or blueprints. Embodied through simulations of design, they frequently engage with the digital realm as a means for artistic production, and the acts of labour that are obscured beneath the computer’s programmed facade. An artist engaged with a search for new possibilities for the object, Healy displays an interest in the exhaustion of form, bringing together design pragmatics with conceptual play.

Sally Morfill The linear motions of spontaneous communicative gestures and notational drawing tracked using motion capture technology provide the starting point for Sally Morfill’s Position series. The drawings offer material translations of fleeting thoughts and actions, framing fragments of a recorded exchange between architects Pierre d’Avoine and Andrew Houlton. Discussing the incompleteness of architecture d’Avoine and Houlton respond to questions posed by Morfill around e.g. the idea of building as a fragment in relation to its site, or the relationship between the sketch and a developed (built or unbuilt) project. The drawings indicate a stage in an ongoing process of translating and re-working and reflect the open-ended and incomplete nature of the conversation.

Louisa Minkin & Francis Summers For ONE AND ONE AND ONE Louisa Minkin & Francis Summers will ask questions about deserts, desertions and occupations; posing these questions in the context of thinking around faculties of encounter and possible reformulations of belonging. A framing concern: where can effective action and politics appear? Their contribution to the exhibition will, like an emblem, have three parts, an epigram, an image, and a gloss. Louisa Minkin and Francis Summers have previously worked together on Preliminary notes for moving between desert and occupation, 2012, as a Five Years web-project. Both artists are committee members of the collectively organised artist-run gallery Five Years.

Yonatan Vinitsky Presents the work DEADENDEADENDEADENDEADENDEADENDEADEND (‘he was a good man!’) from 2011. Vinitsky’s practice is formed from a series of findings that he ‘translates’ into his own works. The finding can be a piece of paper that he found in the street, an art work by an unknown artist or a document from the archive. It is the process of decision-making of those who originally “made” what he found that motivates his work – the need to figure out how an artist works.

Mary Maclean’s work in photography develops her interest in a viewpoint and the space of cultural exchange. In a new body of work she explores a close up view of writing boards in lecture halls, collapsing their functional surface into the flat plane of the image. The abstract surface traces a written inscription and holds a literate history of information exchange. The written signage does not act as a repetition of the oral structure of knowledge transaction, but instead proposes both a material vestige and an anticipation of what is not there.

Tim Renshaw Tim Renshaw looks both at architecture through painting and for architecture in things that fall outside the domain of building. Rather than directly depict an existing space he identifies a basic underlying structure and through a process of recolouring and redesigning his paintings propose that in addition to function there are forms of spatiality that affect the texture of perception and give a different form of density to that experience.

Bernice Donszelmann Bernice Donszelmann’s installations and objects probe how material surfaces within architecture and domestic spaces produce empathic relationships with the human body. Everyday synthetic materials (plastics, foam, fabrics) are transformed into forms of ‘soft architecture’ – provisional modes of enclosure and gathering of space that echo and address the corporeality of the body.

Organized by Outside Architecture, the discussion forms part of the exhibition ONE AND ONE AND ONE at Cafe Gallery | Southwark Park | Bermondsey, which runs till October 28th.

Touring ONE AND ONE AND ONE tours to K3 Project Space, Zurich from 6 – 14 October Artists’ Talk: Sunday, 14 October 2012 from 16.00 – 17.00 Hrs. Tim Renshaw, Mary Maclean, Bernice Donszelmann, Katrine Hjelde, Monika Ursina Jager, Amikam Toren, Justin Hibbs.

Artists Access to Art College (AA2A) Scheme

Art at Reading is one of 32 universities and colleges that has been accepted to host an Artists Access to Art College (AA2A) scheme, offering four professional artists and makers access to its workshops and supporting facilities to develop their work.

Each place offers 100 hours access, to be used from October 2012 to April 2013. Access is principally across our Digital and Studio Workshops, Darkrooms, Project and Studio Spaces but also includes access to lecture programmes.  With successful applicants receiving up to £220 towards materials and travel costs. Online application deadline Friday 21^st September 2012.

AA2A is a national project funded by the National Lottery through Arts Council, England and by the participating institutions

For more details and application pack for the AA2A scheme contact Gina Field, Department of Art, University of Reading, 1 Earley Gate, Whiteknights Reading RG6 6AT tel. 0118 378 8050  email fineart@reading.ac.uk or visit http://.AA2A.org

  

NIGHT SKY

A film by Alison O’ Daniel with live sound by POLLYFIBRE
Tuesday July 24th 2012, 7:30 pm at WHIRLED CINEMA
259-260 HARDESS ST LOUGHBOROUGH JCTN LONDON SE24 OHN.

Night Sky is a 75 minute narrative film by Alison O’Daniel that enacts a sensory experience on the bodies of the viewers with live accompaniment and parallel, overlapping stories: two girls–Cleo and Jay–travel through the desert while a group of contestants compete in a dance marathon. This performance emphasizes music within the film by Ethan Frederick Greene, Lucky Dragons, and Evelyn Glennie with live musical accompaniment by *POLLYFIBRE* using adapted tools and objects amplified to create noise-scapes. Balloons will be provided for the Deaf audience spectrum.

There will be a Q&A after the screening with Alison O’Daniel and Christine Ellison (POLLYFIBRE).

Night Sky has received support through the California Community Foundation, the Puffin Foundation, the Creative Capacity Fund, and the Medici Foundation. The film premiered at the Anthology Film Archive in November of 2011 with two screenings as part of Performa 11 and the exhibition Walking Forward-Running Past at Art in General in NYC. The film has also screened in the Black Box Performance festival within Pacific Standard Time: Art in Los Angeles, at Evergreen College in Olympia, WA, Krowswork in Oakland, CA,and at the Fusebox Festival in Austin, TX. In September Night Sky will screen at USA Lounge, a defunct casino in Henderson, NV in conjunction with Pop Up Art House, the Guild Cinema in Albuquerque, NM, Plus Gallery’s Experimental Forum in Denver, CO, The Nightingale Cinema in Chicago, IL, the Cleveland Museum of Art, MOCA Detroit, the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, and at NYU.

Merzbarn Residency

Merzbarn Residency, a set on Flickr.

Images from the Merzbarn Residency, June 2011. Our students with Pil & Galia Kollectiv spent a week convening reading groups, screening films and talks from visiting artists in Cumbria. see: http://www.merzbarn.net

Platform Graduate Award

We are delighted to announce that Alana Francis and Hannah Mills (both BA Fine Art) have been selected for the inaugural Platform Graduate Award 2012. The award is part of a partnership between University of Reading and Museum of Art Oxford.

The Platform Graduate Award aims to support graduate professional development and nurture new talent. The programme has come from a coalition of visual arts organisations in the South East (Aspex, Modern Art Oxford, Milton Keynes Gallery and Turner Contemporary) and has been initiated through Turning Point South East see: www.turningpointnetwork.org.uk/south-east/

Platform will showcase the work of six to eight recent graduates at each organisation through a series of one-week presentations or short group exhibitions over the summer/early autumn  2012. The graduates are selected from within the immediate geographical reach of the host organisation – Modern Art Oxford will include Oxford Brookes University, The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford University, Oxford and  University of Reading. The graduates are selected from 2012 degree show presentations.

The successful Platform Award artist will receive a bursary of £2,500 (towards studio accommodation across year), mentoring and access to Directors and curatorial teams of the partnering organisations throughout the year.

 

Cultivation Field Event

CULTIVATION FIELD Third Thursday 21st June by invitation from Jelly

Cultivation Field Exhibition
8th – 22nd June 2012
At: 3rd Floor, 42 Market Place, Reading, RG1 2DE
and
The Keep, 571 Oxford Road, Reading, RG30 1HL

Open: 8th June 12:00-16:00; 9th to 22nd June 12:00-18:00 (42 Market Place is closed on Tuesdays)
Cultivation Field – Third Thursday 21st June 18:30-21:30 at The Keep, with presentations by:

Sarah Lewison will be talking about work with AND AND AND http://andandand.org (featured at Documenta 13 Kassel, Germany), on Monsanto hearings and other cultural practices in defense of soil and diversity. Some experiments and speculative exercises that challenge the hubris of new agricultural technologies that presume humans are able to understand and therefore control life’s complexity.

Alexandra MyGlynn: Doing more than simply drinking tea.  The talk will consider the origins of the agrarian movement in former communist countries of ex-Yugoslavia and displaced women for example from Bosnia and elsewhere who have come together through international gardening projects to be ‘doing more than simply drinking tea’ as a necessity for their own cooking and self-esteem.

Charlie Tweed: The Isles of Grain, Kent (performance film, a 7 minute preview of an event that will be at the Whitechapel on July 26th)

Maria Deegan: Bombus Accessio (performance)

Sophie Payne-Gifford: The Global Challenges to Agriculture: Is it all doom and gloom? Climate change, water security, population stress: Global agriculture has a number of challenges it must meet over the next decades. Sophie will discuss these challenges by reviewing the academic and grey literatures. Sophie is a PhD student focusing on innovation and the regulation of pesticides and is based in the University of Reading’s School of Agriculture.

http://www.cultivationfield.org

Cultivation Field Exhibition:
Cultivation Field explores plant and land cultivation through diverse art practices. Plant life could be considered a low-tech material, because it is vegetation, but in the second decade of the twenty-first century plant life is in constant production as part of consumerist high tech industry. Cultivation Field looks at the cracks in land cultivation systems, collective engagement within local communities, plant based objects and methods of production.

Participating artists: Robyn Appleton, Tom Baskeyfield, Shameela Beeloo, Rebecca Beinart, Camilla Berner, brook & black, Rob Carter, Rachael Champion, Andrew Dodds, Maria Deegan, Adi Gelbart, Fritz Haeg, Maria Hofstadler, Tom Ingate, Ulrika Jansson, Pil & Galia Kollectiv, Rosalie Kim, Gayle Chong Kwan, Sarah Lewison, Alexandra McGlynn, Stéphanie Nava, Raquel Estrada-Nora, Phil Newcombe, Caitlin Parker, Julian Perry, Minna Pöllänen, Janette Porter, Sneha Solanki, Stih & Schnock, Jo Thomas, Carly Troncale, Charlie Tweed, Jane Cradock-Watson, Elizabeth Wewiora

Cultivation Field is curated by artist Kate Corder, PhD candidate at University of Reading

Cultivation Field is supported by Arts Council England, Earley Charity, University of Reading, Jelly, Open Hand Open Space, Sutton Seeds, Laura’s Organics and Office For Contemporary Art Norway

               

Degree Show 2012 – Press

Degree Show 2012

Degree Show 2012, a set on Flickr.

Left of Place – Mary Maclean

Mary Maclean explores the space of borders and thresholds in the everyday structures within architectural environments. The photographic images suggest a backdrop to a series of routines and exchanges implicated in the surfaces of architectural space. How is the image tied to its space? Can it be split, re-positioned, shuffled or extended? Here a possible disorientation is suggested where the space might be alternately revealed or blotted out. A sequence of images, provisionally positioned so that their surfaces are stacked behind or in front of one another suggests a temporary alignment. Their interplay is cut by a different order, one that interrupts, un-fixing the viewpoint, where a fluid state of endlessness extends beyond the moment of a situation.

Cult of the Amateur

CycLE CLUB event curated by James Harper

Tuesday 29th May 2012, 6-9pm 
24 hour website takeover by bubblebyte.org 
Panel discussion with bubblebyte.org, Arcadia_Missa, Sunday Painter, Hotel Palenque, pyramidd.biz. 
Chaired by Sarah McCrory 
Performance by POLLYFIBRE

The sixth CYcLE CLUB event at Cell Project Space, ‘Cult of the Amateur?’ explores how artists and curators are using the Internet to create a new context and framework to produce and display art. Referencing Andrew Keen’s publication, ‘The Cult of the Amateur’, this event will contest Keen’s argument that the Internet is killing today’s culture and try to underpin the enormous potential of the Internet’s hybrid activity, which inspires and influences artists today. Acknowledging that the Internet has become a vital tool, source, and arena for a vast amount of contemporary art practice, James Harper has selected bubblebyte.org and POLLYFIBRE as part of this new development. Bubblebyte.org have invited Arcadia_Missa, pyramidd.biz, The Sunday Painter and Hotel Palenque to come together in discussion for a one-night event chaired by curator, Sarah Mc Crory. Turning Keen’s publication on its head, this event will aim to reveal emerging independent / artist-led activity in London that is using the internet to find new ways to display, make, and interact with their audience.

Live for 24 hours, and for the duration of the event, bubblebyte.org founders, Rhys Coren and Attilia Fattori Franchini, have invited artist Paul Flannery to create a compliant intervention of Cell’s existing and long standing website. Flannery will interrupt its conventional streamline order to interact with the basic framework of the site, creating a non-linear, auto-destructive viral action.

To complete the event POLLYFIBRE will present ‘SlideShow‘, a live work where digital and analogue media collide. The source for this work uses the Internet as a central point of departure in that the script is taken from the Wikipedia definition for the word ‘slideshow’. Information and words are randomly extracted from the Internet and transferred onto photographic 35mm slide to be projected with analogue carousel slide projectors taking the audience into a visual wordplay, from Google to PowerPoint presentation. The sound of projectors is manipulated gradually into a clashing, confrontational, digital/analogue crescendo. Slideshow aims to highlight how information is sourced, navigated and considered in a culture of accelerating mediation. It posits the notion of a post-digital era in which we are increasingly faced with challenging questions of authenticity and authority.

Sarah McCrory is curator of Frieze Projects, London. She recently formed ‘Arts & Jobs’ in Bethnal Green, London which opened in March 2012.

 Arcadia_Missa, The Sunday Painter, pyramidd.biz, and Hotel Palenque are all active independent art organizations that have all developed web-based projects, which are either part or central to their activity.

bubblebyte.org is an online gallery showcasing artists that engage in a creative way with the digital space and stress the multiple possibilities of the media. bubblebyte.org is, in itself, container and content, artist and gallery. 

 POLLYFIBRE is a noise band that incorporate amplified analogue tools and machines in live performances that confront and engage digital culture. Founding member Christne Ellison is an artist and lecturer at the University of Reading. For Slideshow at ‘Cult Of The Amateur?’ she will perform with Lucyana Moore and Claire Moss.

CYcLE CLUB member, James Harper, is an artist and curator currently studying on the MA curating course at Chelsea College of Art and Design. Harper is a former studio member of ‘The Royal Standard, Liverpool’.

 The work of Paul Flannery looks at the decoration of the Internet and its early aesthetics. Using ornamental elements, often produced by amateurs, as icons, background images and memes, Flannery’s work is a deep analysis about digital time and beauty.

Degree Show 2012

John Russell at MOT International, Brussels

John Russell
JEXUS
18th May – 22nd June
MOTInternational, Brussels
Rue Vandenbrandenstraat 1, 1000
Brussels, Belgium

MOTINTERNATIONAL Brussels is pleased to announce a solo exhibition by artist John Russell.

This is the representation of a crucifixion on an alien planet. Of a deep-space pilot who wakes to find herself nailed to a cross. The details of how this happened are unclear. She remembers she was lying on her bunk considering the nature of surplus value … now her ship is long gone … light years away. Two other people are crucified here but there is no audience. No witnesses of this enactment of a cliché … neither a sacrifice nor a prophesy.

It may seem ridiculous to claim that the ecstatic scream of the Madonna, or saints on the cross is connected to the ecstacy of shit and meat rather than the divine but that is exactly what will be claimed here. Not shit specifically or anality, but “O” as the opening (out) of a throat or tunnel. The shit and anus are still key however, in the way they are used in Bataille’s analyses of the ‘dazzling brilliance’ of apes’ anuses “…the enormous anal fruit of radial and shit-smeared raw pink meat” which he contrasts with the ‘blossoming of the human face’. The animalistic, primitivity of the anus compared to the organizing civilized functions of the face (faciality). As an o-pening up as a hole, or extruded as O-O-O-O-O into a tube or tunnel. Or “O” as an opening out onto infinity as ZERO; or as a mouth splitting open the face, opening it backwards to ‘mammal meat’ and noise. A journey into “O” – either the “o” of PORN or some other word like “freedom” or “revolution” – or as the connection to other “O”s – and through these to still further examples.’

Excerpt of the essay written by John Russell to accompany the exhibition JEXUS and available online at: http://www.john-russell.org/Spring.html

Degree Show 2012: Preview

Degree Show 2012: Preview

Claire Saumtally

Degree Show 2012: Preview

Degree Show 2012: Preview

Alana Francis

Degree Show 2012: Preview

Simon Morgan
Table VII
2012
Balaclava, rope, tool wallet, crowbar with taped handle, 1968 Volkswagen manual

Pollyfibre

On 4 May 2012 Breathe live art will launch with an event at Hotel Elephant, featuring performance art, sonic art, live music, installations, films and DJs. The event will showcase local artists and bands plus graduate and student work from London College of Communication alongside more established artists including Andrew Beedle (performance); Black Mass Rising (film by Shazzula); Chris Shen (installation); Electric Puffs (band);Joe Stevens (performance); Lo-budget mayhem from London Short Film Festival 2012; POLLYFIBRE (performance); Tiger Walking Downhill (sonic art / noise act)

http://breatheliveart.wordpress.com

Turner Prize 2012

Department of Art postgraduate researcher Andy Hunt is one of the four judges for this year’s prestigious Turner Prize. The panel of judges drawn from art museums and institutions from UK and Europe – including Migros Museum, Zurich and Modern Art Oxford – announced their shortlist which includes Spartacus Chetwynd, Luke Fowler, Paul Noble and Elizabeth Price.

The Turner Prize 2012 exhibition will be at Tate Britain, 2 October 2012 – 6 January 2013. The winner will be announced live on Channel 4 on 3 December 2012.

For further information on this year’s Turner Prize see here.

Art at Ridgeway Primary School

inter/act 1: Szuper Gallery

“Be realistic! How can lumps of rocks zooming around in space affect our lives down here?”

Projektraum enter 2012 inter/act: New Social Sculptures
A project series at the Kunstmuseum Thun
February 2012 to January 2013

 inter/act 1: Szuper Gallery
31. March – 9. April / 28. April – 24. June 2012

What is the impact of the permanent state of crisis? What do mountain gorillas have in common with 21^st century city dwellers? What are the connections between the utterings of a recovering stroke patient and a group of children lounging in a gallery? These are some of the elements—physical and conceptual— that make up Szuper Gallery’s new project. Economic crisis, global warming, nuclear winter, we are permanently reminded that we are imminently facing a catastrophe. Considering these changing states and the surprising emergence of the normal as crisis, Szuper Gallery presents a multi-layered project in order to explore the notion of performance as social practice. The project includes an installation in the Projektraum enter and a new live performance produced in collaboration with Canadian actor Michele Sereda, featuring Prof. Klaus Zuberbühler, primotologist, University of St Andrews, and Colonal General Hans-Ulrich Haldimann, Kommandant Waffenplatz Thun as well as a group of 30 school children.

Live performance: 30 March 2012, 18.30 h
A co-operarion with the Postgraduate Programme in Curating, Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, www.curating.org. curated by Dorothee Richter

Kunstmuseum Thun
Thunerhof, Hofstettenstrasse 14, CH–3602 Thun
T +41(0)33 225 84 20, F ++41(0)33 22589 06
kunstmuseum@thun.ch,

http://www.kunstmuseumthun.ch/museum/kunstmuseum-thun.html

opening hours :Tues – Sun 10 – 17h, Wed 10 – 19h, Monday closed

It’s Us! It’s Us!

‘It’s Us, It’s Us!’
- a collaborative touring exhibition organised by Reading University Art students and Bristol UWE Students.

It is the first part in a series of group exhibitions between artists working in Bristol and Reading. The opening exhibition at the Motorcycle showroom in Bristol is a parody of conflict between the two cities, as the Reading antagonists intrude the local identity, and any opportunity for compromise is sabotaged. Working in a variety of mediums, the artists present a satiric celebration of the darker desires of the ego, the notion of the masterpiece inspiring their boldest, loudest intentions. An exploration into the nature of group exhibitions, the artist’s work to deliberately out do the other.

The exhibition is being first shown in Bristol (Thurs 9th -11th Feb) and then being transported to Reading to be shown at the Turbine House, Riverside Museum (23rd – 25th Feb).

POLLYFIBRE presents SLIDESHOW

POLLYFIBRE presents SLIDESHOW
A carousel ride from Flickr to Powerpoint via the fairground.
Live Performance at pyramidd.biz
191-205 Cambridge Heath Road, Bethnal Green London E2 0EL
www.pyramidd.biz
www.pollyfibre.com

Cherry Blossom Centenary Project in Washington DC

20th March 2012. Office of Experiments with Neal White and Tina O’Connell

Steve Rowell, International Director of Office of Experiments is leading the curatorial aspects of a project called “Suspension of Disbelief’. In this project he has selected 5 artists, including OOE’s Neal White who is working with University of Reading artist Tina O’Connell. Marking 100 years since the Cherry Blossom Festival started, this project will highlight 25 temporary public art projects across Washington DC. We are working alongside Charles Stankievich, Deborah Sratman and Steve Badgett (Simparch), KunstRePublik and Liz Mogel (Radical Cartography). Other artists include Natalie Jeremijenko and Brandon Ballongee. For more information, please visit the site of 5×5

Reading’s Dr Simon Lee on Radio 4 ‘In our Time’

“Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Delacroix’s painting ‘Liberty Leading the People’. In 1830 revolution once more overtook France, when a popular uprising toppled the French king Charles X. A few months later, the artist Eugene Delacroix immortalised the events of the July Revolution in a painting which remains one of the icons of the age. His allegorical depiction of a Paris barricade, with the figure of Liberty clutching a tricolore while standing on a pile of corpses, is a powerful image which has provoked much debate in the years since it was first unveiled to an enthusiastic public.”

Listen to Simon here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b015zrrj

Professor Anna Gruetzner Robins uncovers new paintings

Early 20th century painter Gwen John has been named as the artist behind a 50 year old collection of unsigned paintings at Princeton University in America.

Professor Anna Gruetzner Robins, from the University of Reading’s Department of Art, has identified two albums containing 23 watercolours as the work of John, now recognised as one of the most important painters of her generation.

The albums are in the extensive papers of the British poet and critic Arthur Symons (1865-1945), and have been preserved in Princeton University’s Library since 1951.

Professor Robins, a world authority on modern British painting, came across the watercolours by chance while researching at Princeton and immediately recognised them as the work of John.   Both John and Symons were natives of Pembrokeshire, Wales, but they met for the first time in Paris. Symons’s letters to John revealed that John gave the albums to Symons in June 1920 shortly after his return from France.

Professor Robins said:  ”Symons and John belonged to interconnecting networks that brought artists, writers, actors, gallery owners and collectors together in the increasingly international world of Paris, London and New York. The discovery of the two Symons albums makes a considerable contribution to an understanding of her greatness.”

Gwen John (1876-1939) was the sister of British artist Augustus John (1878-1961) and the one-time lover and model of French sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840-1917).  Made during her productive years, beginning in 1917, many of the watercolours depict nuns, women parishioners and orphaned girls in the Catholic church at Meudon, the Paris suburb where John lived for nearly 30 years.  Almost all of these subjects are viewed from the back.

Other watercolours in the album portray a woman in a train carriage, a woman wearing a striking boa and a black cat in a window. A few of the watercolours have pencil sketches on the reverse.

The American painter and art collector A.E. Gallatin (1881-1952) acquired the papers and albums from Symons’ widow and donated them to the Princeton University Library in 1951. The albums are preserved in the Library’s Manuscripts Division in Department of Rare Books and Special Collections.

In an article recently published in the Princeton University Library Chronicle, Professor Robins shows the relationship of the Princeton albums to two albums once belonging to the New York attorney and art collector John Quinn (1870-1924) and to works in British institutions.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-south-west-wales-16176016

everything and nothing

Sue Malvern convenes ‘Terrorist Transgressions: Cultural Representations’ workshop, at Birkbeck, University of London.

The workshop will involve a series of screenings of films, some well-known and others less so, that deal with the subject of terrorism. This programme will be interspersed with papers given by network members. There will also be a panel session on the ethics of representing terror featuring the curators Professor Felix Ensslin and Graham Coulter-Smith, the artist Xenophon Kavvadias, and director Anne Crilly. The workshop was organised by University of Reading, Birkbeck, University of London and Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, as part of the AHRC funded ‘Terrorist Transgressions: network on the gendered representations of the terrorist’.

Saturday 12th and Sunday 13th November 2011
Birkbeck, University of London,
Department of History of Art and Screen Media,
43-46 Gordon Square,
London, WC1 0HD
The conference is free of charge, though there may be a nominal charge for lunch. To register please contact:
Nicola Capon n.r.capon@rdg.ac.uk.
www.reading.ac.uk/arthistory/terroristtransgressions

Reading Experimental Film Festival 2011

Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2011

Hyewon Kwon,  PhD researcher has been selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2011: In the Presence 23 Nov – 15 Jan 2012, ICA London.

Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2011 will be showing at S1 Artspace and Site Gallery in Sheffield between 23 September and 5 November 2011 before travelling to the ICA, London, 23 November 2011 until 15 January 2012.