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’.

How to Identify with Difference? Doing Art in the Public Realm

Symposion curated by Elke Krasny
January 30th 2013 4 pm – 9 pm
Kunstraum Niederoesterreich, Herrengasse 13, 1014 Vienna
Part of the programme of Public Art Lower Austria, http://www.publicart.at

The shadows cast by the past are growing longer. The identifications with the present time are shattered by numerous fault lines. In the context of globalized artistic and cultural production, history becomes both, a circulating resource and a challenge to specifically address the local. Temporay but equally long-term articulations in public space, ranging from performance to monuments, manifest how differences in remembering, politics, feminisms are questions of curating and of artistic production.

The symposion aims at discussing the articulation of difference, the ethics of curatorial and artistic production in addressing identification in the public realm when it comes to articulating the perspectives on the past in the now and seeks to develop an understanding what modes of contemporary sharing in public space are. Central issues addressed in the contributions on art in the public realm are politics of remembrance, feminist practices and curatorial and artistic production between art and activism.

Invited Speakers:

Ines Doujak, artist, Vienna,
Amelia Jones, art historian and curator, Montréal
Elke Krasny, curator, Vienna
Suzanne Lacy, artist, Los Angeles
Suzana Milevska, curator, Skopje
Mechtild Widrich, art historian, Zurich
Maayan Shaleff, curator, Tel Aviv

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

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

Art Postgraduate Symposium

PROGRAMME

Wednesday 27^th June 2012, G09 Old Whiteknights House, Reading University

10.00 – 10.20 Registration and Uploading Power Points

10.20 Welcome

First Panel   Chair: Barbara Berrington

10.30 – 10.50   Jane Williams: Boris Anrep’s Mosaic for Augustus John.

This early commission by the mosaicist Boris Anrep for the home of Augustus John portrays both the artist and his family. Anrep depicted them in a reverential manner which is more closely aligned in spirit to his religious works rather than his society portraits.

10.50 – 11.10   Alison Boyd: The Significance of the Location and Planning of Southampton Civic Centre.

This presentation will consider the choice of site and the comprehensive plans for the area surrounding Southampton Civic Centre (1929-39) as these highlight the hopes and aspirations of those responsible for the project and are an indication of a considerable investment in the future of the town.

11.10 – 11.30   Holly Barton: Illustrations of war in photographs and artist’s interpretations: an example of the transition between media in the British Illustrated Press from 1915.

This paper will explore how different media of illustration were used to support and consolidate one another, and how the limitations of photography were circumnavigated in the early years of the war. The transition will consider how photography, even when censored, suggested authenticity, while illustration continued the narrative, and filled the lacunae in scenes of battle that could not be caught on camera.

11.30 – 11.45   Questions

11.45 – 12.00   Tea/coffee break

Second Panel   Chair: Clair Drever

12.00 – 12.20   Donna Yamani: Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum: History, Memory and Community Uniting in the Twenty First Century.

This paper will consider how Skulpturenpark Berlin_Zentrum has included installations which explore and challenge the historical aspect of the site and the development of the term ‘community art’ and what ‘community’ means to artists and residents of the city. The artists to be discussed here are Katerina Seda (Over and Over, 2008) and Matthias Einhoff (Celebration, 2009).

12.20 – 12.40   Kevin O’Connor: Betwixt Belief and Doubt.

Research focuses on firstly, how the artist and artwork although experiential, are believed to be rational in origin, and as such, are the subject of belief and doubt. Secondly, how the belief and doubt that surrounds artist and artwork centres on the nature of the subjectivity of their connection.

12.40 – 1.00   Kate Corder: Cultivation Field.

Kate’s recent research has centered around Cultivation Field as a curatorial project, the focus of which extended from the Cultivation Field Postgraduate Symposium that took place last September at the University of Reading.  This presentation will consider curation as practice or medium, the wider area of Cultivation Field as a discourse or field of interest in art and how this fits in with Kate’s own allotments research studies.

1.00 – 1.15   Questions

1.15 – 2.00   Lunch in the Art History Reading Room

Third Panel   Chair: Donna Yamani

2.00 – 2.20   Clair Drever: Underground Film in London, 1960’s and 1970’s.

Ideas of temporality, image and the materiality of film permeated the culture of The London Film-Makers Cooperative in the 1960’s and 70’s. They made significant innovations with multi-screen films and expanded cinema events, producing works whose essence was defined by their ephemerality. How are such expressions of immediacy remembered in the twenty first century?

2.20 – 2.40   Giulia Mezzi: Camillo Boito’s restoration of Donatello’s Altar in the Basilica del Santo in Padua.

Donatello’s Altar underwent several modifications since its original conception designed in the 1440’s. This presentation focuses on Boito’s reconstruction and restoration of the altar (1895), which has been documented by the same architect in an original volume published in 1897.

2.40 – 3.00   Glenis Kerr Elliot: Memory and Memorial: The Radcliffe Camera in Oxford.

This paper looks at the concept of encyclopaedia and memory and the classical basis of education in late seventeenth century Britain, and suggests that for patrons, trustees and architects the tombs of emperors were inspiration for this memorial to Dr John Radcliffe in his university city.

3.00 – 3.15   Questions

3.15 – 3.30   Tea/coffee break

Fourth Panel   Chair: Glenis Kerr Elliot

3.30 – 3.50   Barbara Berrington: Habits of Performance.

A Dominican Friar appears in almost every fresco of Fra Angelico’s decorative programme at San Marco Convent. His dress identifies and separates him out, proclaims his role and his social purpose. But what performance practices did the habit embody for strict observant Dominicans in the Florence of 1450 – and how is this portrayed?

3.50 – 4.10   Rebecca Gill: From Heretics to Saints: the church of San Barnaba, Milan.

This paper will address how the Barnabite Order, having been accused of heresy by the church of Rome, sought to redefine themselves through the architecture of their mother church, San Barnaba, designed by Galeazzo Alessi in 1561.

4.10 – 4.20   Questions and concluding comments

4.30 and onwards   A glass of wine in the Art History Reading Room

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.

Cultivation Field

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

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

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

NEW Practice-based PhD programme in collaboration with Zurich University of the Arts

 The Department of Art at the University of Reading, in collaboration with the Postgraduate Programme in Curating at Zurich University, are excited to announce a new Curatorial and cross-disciplinary cultural studies, practice-based doctoral programme in Art starting in January 2012. 
http://www.reading.ac.uk/art/pg-research/art-postgraduate-rsearch-zurich-phd.aspx

Reading and Zurich are offering this doctoral program for research in and as curatorial and/or artistic practice. Whilst being enrolled in Reading, students will be part of a research group hosted by the Postgraduate Programme in Curating in Zurich, where they will also be offered opportunities for teaching and lecturing in Higher Education. The new PhD programme specializes in offering established curators, artists, art critics and designers from all disciplines the critical framework to focus on specific curatorial and cultural research topics through a combined theoretical and practical approach. The programme aims to provide a cooperative environment with a decidedly cross-disciplinary and international bent based. Participants will be able to engage with an ongoing international public programme in Zurich and with the independent OnCurating magazine.

For further information please contact: fineart@reading.ac.uk

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

Curating Research: Practice-based PhD

The Department of Art at the University of Reading in collaboration with the PostgraduateProgramme in Curating, Zurich is offering a new doctoral program for research in and as curatorial and/or artistic practice.Research students are enrolled at the University of Reading and the Postgraduate Programme in Curating is hosting a research group and offers opportunities for teaching and lecturing in Higher Education. The new PhD programme specializes in offering established curators, artists, art critics and designers from all disciplines the critical framework to focus on specific curatorial and cultural research topics in order to earn a Doctorate from the University of Reading through a combined theoretical and practical approach.

The Research Platform aims to provide a cooperative environment with a decidedly cross-disciplinary and international bent based on an association of two outstanding Programmes, the Department of Art at the University of Reading and the Postgraduate Program in Curating at the Zurich University for the Arts. The program responds to recent changes in the processes of the production of culture and a shift in the organisation of work processes throughout society. Within this shift, individual areas of action are coming together in new meta-levels, such as networks and knowledge transfer. The program aims to address and to question the significant changes affecting cultural production. It seeks to provide a productive environment for participants to discuss and develop their research, to critically reflect on the issues involved and to transform their own respective positions as producers, agents, designers, artists, archivists, and conveyors of those economies, and the politics, aesthetics and effects related to them. The program emphasises the reflection of curatorial and artistic methodologies and prospects of arts production, its practitioners, and its audiences.

The Practice-based PhD program is designed for a three year duration. Participants are enrolled at the Department of Art at the University of Reading and they should be prepared to take part in seminars and communal meetings in Zurich and Reading. Over the course of the three years participants will develop and realise their projects supported by the academic and artistic team of co-participants and faculty.

The participants have access to the facilities and resources of the Department of Art at Reading and at the Postgraduate Program in Curating and to the institutions and people that form the broader and expanding Research Platform. Participants will be supported to pursue and develop dissertation work resulting in a curatorial/artistic project and a written component displaying a strong emphasis on methodological reflexivity and documentation. Moreover, participants are expected to take an active part in organizing the program (coordinating workshops, guest lectures, conferences, exhibitions, screenings, etc.). After successful completion and submission of the PhD, a Doctorate will be awarded by the University of Reading.

Participants will be able to engage with the ongoing international public programmes connected to the Postgraduate Programme in Curating Zurich, and with the independent OnCurating magazine.

Entry requirements

Requirements for admission to the PhD in Practice program are a degree (MA, MFA or diploma) from a recognized University or Academy, and the submission of a portfolio and/or a written project proposal (to be written in English). Applicants who are already engaged in an artistic or academic career are encouraged to apply. Applications will be made directly to the University of Reading.

Please contact the Department of Art for further information: fineart@reading.ac.uk

The main practical areas for curatorial approaches are:

• Exhibitions and exhibition architecture
• Design
• Production of books and catalogues
• Installations
• Digital projects
• Transdisciplinary practices
• Art Mediation
• Art in public spaces
• Art education projects/ communication projects
• Sound-specific projects
• Film/Video/Performance

Areas of Research

Transfer: contemporary discourses of exhibition practice / undertaking a critique of ideology through the medium of exhibition making / everyday culture to high culture/ media in relation to curating

Display: the practices and power relations within modes of display; modes and discourses of audience address

Context: Sites/ discourses of space and body politics / review of political missions/ (post)colonial perspectives / Re-interpretations of collection politics

Contemporary Practices: artistic and curatorial projects / paradigm shifts concerning the production, distribution, and reception of exhibitions, curating as cultural practice, performative curating

Susanne Clausen is an artist and Head of the Department of Art at of the University of Reading; 
Dorothee Richter is Head of the Postgraduate Programme in Curating, ICS, DKV, ZhdK and supervisor for PhDs at the University of Reading.

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.

After Shelley Duvall ’72 (Frogs on the High Line)

Curated by Bjarne Melgaard

September 17 – October 22
featuring
Anonymous Three: Anonymous Three Selects Omar Harvey
Fabienne Audéoud and John Russell
Michael Alig
Alissa Bennett
Sverre Bjertnes
Big Fat Black Cock, Inc.
Caroline Busta
William L. Copley
John Duncan
John Kelsey
Richard Kern
Michael Bernard Loggins
Lydia Lunch 
John Patrick McKenzie
Dwight Mackintosh
Bjarne Melgaard
Marlon Mullen
William Pope.L
Seth Shapiro
Estate of Martin Wong

Performance by
Fabienne Audéoud and John Russell

Saturday, September 17,
8:00 pm

Maccarone 630 Greenwich Street NY, NY 10014  www.maccarone.net 

 

Researchers’ Night

Everything and Nothing

What shapes could the universe be? Does it have an ‘edge’? Is it infinite? A performance project exploring the possible shapes of the universe

Friday 23rd September 6.30pm as part of Researcher’s Night
Department of Art, University of Reading, 1 Earley Gate, Reading RG6 6AT

Intent on creating a map of the universe using complex mathematics, the Everyman Explorer encounters aviator Amelia Earhart who was lost in her 1937 attempt to circumnavigate the globe. The pair find themselves in the company of an order-obsessed librarian who isn’t quite what he seems, in a time-warped universe controlled by an old radio.

In a playful encounter between sound, image, text and mathematics, multi-disciplinary company the19thstep present everything and nothing, devised by composer Dorothy Ker and sculptor Kate Allen with performers Lucy Stevens, Chris Brannick, and Kelcey Swain. The piece was developed in consultation with mathematician Marcus du Sautoy and inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’ story The Library of Babel. Performance lasts c.50 minutes

Angel of History: I Can See for Miles

John Russell ’Angel of History: I Can See for Miles’
A new temporary public artwork commissioned for the railway bridge in Southend-on-Sea

Angel of History: I Can See for Miles’ is the first in Focal Point Gallery’s new series of temporary public artworks commissioned specifically for the railway bridge that spans Southend-on-Sea’s pedestrianised high street. For this inaugural project, artist John Russell has digitally reworked a famous portrait from 1981 of former British Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and focused exclusively on the aging woman’s eyes. This new image, which will effectively gaze down Southend’s main commercial thoroughfare, is installed on the north side of the overpass and printed on a fifteen-metre wide custom-made support. Unveiled between 4.00pm to 7.00pm on Saturday 10 September at The Sunrooms, 20-21 Market Place, Southend-on-Sea

Project runs until Saturday 22 October 2011

Focal Point Gallery Southend Central Library Victoria Avenue Southend-on-Sea Essex SS2 6EX, UK www.focalpoint.org.uk

Cultivation Field: Postgraduate Symposium

 

The premise for this Symposium is that cultivation is leading to new art practices deserving of critical inquiry and articulation. Whether in the garden or allotment, the soup kitchen or the road, on wasteland or the tower block, or wherever there are cracks in the system, cultivation provokes questions about human being’s relation to and encounter with the earth and its growth systems and operations. The purpose of this Symposium is to encourage discursive exchange and productive encounter between art practitioners and researchers whose work explores plant-based material, land use, growth, ecosystems, economy, taxonomy, environment, power and chaos in the field of cultivation.

Wednesday 28^th September 2011
Bulmershe Theatre, the Minghella Building

10.30am – 11.00am	Arrival and Registration.
11.00am – 11.10am	Welcome, Housekeeping and Outline of Event
11.10am – 11.40am	Gayle Chong Kwan – Invisible Twinning
11.40am – 12.10am	Rosalie Kim – Ruining a Ruin
12.10am – 12.40pm	brook & black -The Fermenting Room: return of the rhizome
12.40pm – 13.00pm	Fritz Haeg – Edible Estates – Lenape, New York (film, 23mins)
13.00pm – 14.00pm	Lunch – The Graduate School, Old Whiteknights House
14.00pm – 14.30pm	Pil & Galia Kollectiv – Asparagus: A Horticultural Ballet
14.30pm – 15.00pm	Kenna Hernly – FIELDCLUB - The Interactive Meaty Master
15.00pm – 15.30pm	Amy Cutler – Peter Larkin’s Leaves of Field and British Woodlands
15.30pm – 15.45pm	Tea and Coffee – The Green Room
15.45pm – 16.15pm	Carly Troncale – ANSR – Social Practice and Criticality/ Cooperation and Resistance
16.15pm – 16.45pm	Janette Porter – Field Based Works
16.45pm – 17.15pm	Rachael Champion -The Mechanical Nature
17.15pm – 17.40pm	Adi Gelbert – Vermin (film, 23mins)
17.40pm – 18.00pm	Conclusion

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All papers/presentations are 20 minutes in duration followed by 10 minutes question times unless stated.
Chair is Kate Corder.

As part of The Cultivation Field Symposium, more film works will be shown in the Minghella Building Atrium on monitors Stih & Schnock – ORBIT (in the Green Room), Fritz Hage, Edible Estates, London and LA, and Pil & Galia Kollectiv – Asparagus: A Horticultural Ballet.

This Symposium is organised by Kate Corder doctoral student in Art.  

INDEPENDENT/NEZALEZHNI. NEW ART OF A NEW COUNTRY 1991-2011

4th Moscow Biennial/Special Project
Museum Complex Mystetskyi Arsenal/Art Arsenal, Kyiv August 22 – September 13, 2011

INDEPENDENT/NEZALEZHNI features 2 new videos projects by Szuper Gallery (Susanne Clausen and Pavlo Kerestey) from the Ballet series in a new installation with a series of new paintings by Pavlo Kerestey. Ballet – Granite is a rock opera performance that flirts with a posthuman conception of action, focusing on the border between human bodies and their outside. Set in a world askew with attempts and remnants of civilization it questions how the world of vibrant and edible matter might affect the way we live. The setting: a mystical landscape, a crash site, in the wild or in the rush of a blackout. Pulling apart the “ballet” of the food system in musical scenes and absurd stories a hysterical cabaret unfolds with simple actions which gradually unravel.

4^th Moscow Biennial

http://4th.moscowbiennale.ru/en/program/special_projects.html

INDEPENDENT / NEZALEZHNI at Art Arsenal http://artarsenal.in.ua/eng/event21.html

Anna Gruetzner on the Vorticists

Anna Gruetzner, Department of Art, is a contributor to the catalogue ‘The Vorticists: manifesto for a Modern World’ that accompanies the exhibition currently on at Tate Britain ( 14 June -4 September). In June she gave a paper at the conference ‘Repositioning Vorticism’ which looked at the importance of some paintings by the American modernist Max Weber, now in the collection of the University of Reading, for the Vorticist artists.

Anna  has also written a major essay ‘J’arrive de London: Jane Avril and Britain’ in the catalogue ‘Toulouse-Lautrec and Jane Avril. Beyond the Moulin Rouge’  that accompanies the exhibition currently on show at The Courtauld Institute Gallery, London ( 16 June -18 September). She will be speaking at a study day at the Courtauld Institute of Art on 10 September 2011.

Marc Camille Chaimowicz at Tate

For the first time at Tate Britain, a performance work, Marc Camille Chaimowicz’s Partial Eclipse… 1980–2006 will be integrated within the displays. The performance will take place each Saturday afternoon at 3pm.

Has the Film Already Started? is a new suite of collection galleries which highlights ways in which ideas of performance have come to occupy a defining place in art of the last 30 years. These major works explore different approaches to the use of narrative, tableaux and found objects.

Postgraduate Research: Dexter Sinister

 

Afterall issue 27, Summer 2011, themed around notions of mapping and territory, and how they might be used as constructive methodologies.

The work of New York-based duo Dexter Sinister (Stuart Bailey, University of Reading) may not immediately be considered as territorial or even spatial. However, as demonstrated by their piece A Note on the Type included in the journal, the terrain of Dexter Sinister’s work is the field of criticality and (therefore) of the printed word itself. Writer Saul Anton places their approach within a historical spectrum of criticality and progression; while Anthony Elms provides a ten-point legend towards navigating the ‘space’ between reading and writing in the artists’ work.

Dieter Roelstraate considers the strategy of artist Jef Geys, whose practice attempts an institutional critique from a prosaic and hyper-local perspective. Chris Sharp attempts to deduct an objectifying logic within Geys’s work, explaining his remarkable methodological integrity.

Francis McKee and Jean Fisher look at Mexican artist Minerva Cuevas, whose work ranges from entomological observation to social and political emancipation in provocative arcs.

Andrea Zittel’s designs for living use a specific geographical location as a testing site for her living experiments. Steve Rowell discusses the particularities of inhabiting the Southern Californian landscape, and collaborators Lisa Anne Auerbach and Robby Herbst take a road trip, mapping the vernacular architecture of playgrounds as an homage to Zittel’s models for improved—or improvised—living.

Increasingly in the context of exhibitions, publications and collections, methodologies of mapping have emerged as a means of deducting logic from a spatial or ideological terrain. Stephanie Smith’s reassessment of Suzanne Lacy’s 1995 book Mapping the Terrain: New Genre Public Art discusses an overlooked history of participatory practices, while Stephanie Jeanjean’s piece on 1970s French feminist video collectives describes how the spatiality of information exchange became crucial in disseminating new video art. Information exchange, and the validity thereof is unpicked in a historical sense by Michèle Faguet, who considers the fate of East German Marxist-Leninist educators within Phil Collins’s video project marxism today.

Issue 27 can be purchased in bookshops across the UK, Europe and America; find a stockist near you here. For more information on Afterall or to subscribe, visit our website: www.afterall.org.

Annual History of Art Postgraduate Symposium

Everyone is welcome to join in the Symposium  10.00 a.m. Humanities Building, Room 141

Wednesday 22nd June, 2011 Programme

10.20                    Welcome
10.30 – 10.50     Alison Boyd – The influence of Architectural Competition on the Design of Southampton Civic Centre.
10.50 – 11.10      Holly Barton – Images of War on the Western Front in the French and British Illustrated Press, 1914-1918
11.10 – 11.30       Barbara Berrington – Virtually Unrecordable: Filming Fra Angelico’s frescoes in the convent of San Marco
12.00 – 12.20     Nicola Capon – The Latonian Ideal: a consideration of a key sculpture by John Tweed.
12.20 – 12.40     YiFang Chen – Searching cultural identity in digital simulation – Mei Dean-e’s works and post-colonial aesthetics.
12.40 – 1.00       Suriyya Choudhary – Contemporary vs. Colonial gaze
2.00 – 2.20        Youjin Chung – The Unity of Art and Life: the Synthesis of Fluxus and Zen Buddhism.
2.20 – 2.40        Clair Drever  –  Hermann Nitsch: Viennese Aktionist, cult provocateur and the mysterium of existence.
2.40 – 3.00        Jessica Feather – Collecting Watercolours at the British Museum.
3.30 – 3.50        Rebecca Gill – Galeazzo Alessi and Church Reform: Santa Maria presso San Celso.
3.50 – 4.10        Glenis Kerr Elliott – In Camera: The Radcliffe Camera – Patron and Society.
4.10 – 4.30        Giulia Mezzi:  Camillo Boito and Heritage Protection in Post-Unification Italy.

                               

NOVEL at Sculpture Centre, New York

Time Again
Featuring work by: Richard Aldrich, Troy Brauntuch, Manon de Boer, Matthew Buckingham, Moyra Davey, Thea Djordjadze, Aurélien Froment, Rachel Harrison, Charline von Heyl, Ull Hohn, William E. Jones, Elad Lassry, Rosalind Nashashibi, Blinky Palermo, Laure Prouvost, Steve Roden, Emily Roysdon, and Rosemarie Trockel

Novel with: Ed Atkins, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Steven Claydon, Sergej Jensen, Sam Lewitt, R.H. Quaytman, Josef Strau, and Paul Thek

New York – SculptureCenter is pleased to present Time Again, an exhibition that explores the language of repetition, bringing together works that destabilize conventional ways of seeing and considering what is past and what is present. Engaging gesture, image sequence, material affect, and displaced narrative, the works on view create disjunctions with the way the time of the present is experienced, challenging our understanding of what it means to be contemporaries. Curated by Fionn Meade, Time Again will be on view May 9 – July 25, 2011. An opening reception will take place Sunday, May 8th, 5-7pm and is open to the public.

Within the exhibition, archival and historical settings are re-animated only to be undone, including William E. Jones’s video Berlin Flash Frames, 2010, which parcels out footage from an unedited film produced by the U.S. Information Agency found in the National Archives of the United States labeled with the provisional title “Berlin, 1961″. Jones’s re-edit features distanced shots of the Berlin Wall under construction alongside propagandistic scenarios featuring actors on stage sets. Similarly, Emily Roysdon’s Untitled (David Wojnarowicz Project), 2001-2007, responds to and redirects Wojnarowicz’s earlier work Arthur Rimbaud in New York, 1978-79, while an excerpt from Marc Camille Chaimowicz’s Shoe Waste?, 1971-2005, returns to documentation of a clandestine action performed above and beneath the River Thames in London.

Additional works to be exhibited include a new sculpture by Rachel Harrison, Avatar, 2010; Ull Hohn’s series of plaster relief paintings, Untitled, 1988; Thea Djordjadze’s Deaf and dumb universe (Gerüst), 2008; and Troy Brauntuch’s Stamps, 1975-2007, which gathers together the artist’s collection of figurative rubber stamps that have been used in his collages over the past thirty years. Also on view will be sculpture, collage, and video works from Rosemarie Trockel, including Goodbye Mrs. Mönipaer, 2003, a cinematic pantomime that explores the psychologically fraught role-playing that can emerge between artists and gallerists, studio and market concerns, and private and public selves.

The performing body and political subject present themselves throughout the exhibition via acts of estrangement, reversal, ritualized behavior, and fragmentation. Manon de Boer’s film Attica, 2008, for example, captures a refracted consideration of the 1971 prison uprising in the form of a musical performance, while Rosalind Nashashibi’s This Quality, 2010, offers an indirect view of Cairo through tightly framed observations of likeness and variation. Matthew Buckingham’s Image of Absalon to be Projected Until It Vanishes, 2001, addresses a public that may no longer exist in a fragmented portrait of the Danish warrior-bishop and quasi-mythic founder of the city of Copenhagen. Similarly, the place of abstraction reasserts a longstanding dialog with the place of iconography through modes of projection, superimposition, doubling, and associative image sequences in works by Richard Aldrich, Moyra Davey, Charline von Heyl, Elad Lassry, and Blinky Palermo.

Also included within Time Again is a presentation of works organized in collaboration with Novel, a project founded by London-based editors and curators Matt Williams and Alun Rowlands. A publication project that takes up experimental writing as a parallel practice to visual art making, Novel draws on politics, poetry, theory, and storytelling to promote explorations of language and the possibility of a new critical fiction.

Extending across artistic mediums into sculpture, film and video, photography and painting, Time Again provokes a consideration of how ‘the now?’ of our time is perceived.

A series of talks and performances will take place at SculptureCenter, and a related screening series will be presented in collaboration with Anthology Film Archives in July (Dates TBA). The exhibition catalog will feature texts by contributing artists—including Ed Atkins, Josef Strau, and Richard Aldrich—and essays by Fionn Meade, Jacob King, and Isla Leaver-Yap.

About SculptureCenter
Founded by artists in 1928, SculptureCenter is a not-for-profit arts institution in Long Island City, NY dedicated to experimental and innovative developments in contemporary sculpture. SculptureCenter commissions new works and presents exhibitions by emerging and established, national and international artists. Our programs identify new talent, explore the conceptual, aesthetic and material concerns of contemporary sculpture, and encourage independent vision.

Szuper Gallery at McKenzie Art Gallery, Canada

Ballet by Szuper Gallery
April 29 – August 28, 2011 at the MacKenzie Art Gallery
Exhibition Opening: Friday, April 29, 2011 at 7:30pm
Performance: Friday, May 6 at 8:00pm and Saturday, May 7 at 2:00pm

Curtain Razors 2011 is pleased to present it’s newest international creation -
BALLET by Szuper Gallery and Curtain Razors in collaboration with the Mackenzie Art Gallery.

Regina, SK – Szuper Gallery (Susanne Clausen and Pavlo Kerestey) are back in Regina with a follow-up to their highly successful project The Extras (2008). Ballet brings into focus current anxieties around food production and crisis through an exhibition, a spectacular video installation, and performance that was originally inspired by Cold War instructional films for farmers. Through a blended choreography of farm labour and movement actions, the London-based duo dissolves the neat separation of rural and urban – the “ballet” on which the world food system depends. Originally developed for the Museum of English Rural Life in Reading, England with the participation of artistic director Michele Sereda of Curtain Razors, the MacKenzie Art Gallery exhibition will mark the Canadian premiere of this unconventional response to agricultural realities.

On May 6 and 7, 2011 a newly commissioned performance of Ballet will take place at the MacKenzie Art Gallery. Ballet is a rock opera performance that flirts with a posthuman conception of action, focusing on the border between human bodies and their outside. Set in a world askew with attempts and remnants of civilization it questions how the world of vibrant, edible matter might affect the way we live. The setting: a mystical landscape, a crash site, in the wild or in the rush of a blackout. Pulling apart the “ballet” of the food system in musical scenes and absurd stories a hysterical cabaret unfolds.

Imagine a three-piece band and an international performance art ensemble on an apocalyptic desert island, where a series of tableaus unfolds. The Ballet performance features Morgan Garneau, Jason Cawood, Blair Fornwald, John Hampton, Susanne Clausen, Pavlo Kerestey, Billy Hughes, Trent Mailander, Otis Young and Michele Sereda.

Tickets are $20 each or $15 for MacKenzie Art Gallery members. Student and group rates are available. Tickets are available at the Mackenzie Art Galley Gift shop. Reservations can be made by calling 306.584.4273 <tel:306.584.4273> . Seating is limited.

Media Contact
Carey Shaw, Curtain Razors Communications
306.584.4273 <tel:306.584.4273>
curtainrazors@gmail.com | http://www.curtainrazors.com <http://www.curtainrazors.com/>

The MacKenzie Art Gallery
3475 Albert Street
Regina
SK S4S 6X6
Canada
http://www.mackenzieartgallery.ca/exhibitions/upcoming_exhibitions/287/

Ballet is produced by Szuper Gallery/Curtain Razors and presented by the MacKenzie Art Gallery and Curtain Razors. Curtain Razors gratefully acknowledges the support of Saskatchewan Arts Board, Regina Arts Commission, Szuper Gallery, MacKenzie Art Gallery, New Dance Horizons, University of Reading and the British Council.

On May 6, 2011 an exciting performance of Ballet with Michele Sereda of Curtain Razors and Susanne Clausen and Pavlo Keresty of Szuper Gallery will take place at the MacKenzie Art Gallery. Imagine a three-piece band and a group of performers on a cinematic apocalyptic fairytale set who pull apart the “ballet” of the food system in the tradition of a cabaret. Tickets, $20 each, will be available at the Gallery Shop.

Produced by Szuper Gallery & Curtain Razors, presented by the MacKenzie Art Gallery with support of the British Council and University of Reading 

April 30 to August 28, 2011

Exhibition Opening: Friday, April 29, 7:30 pm, Free
Performances of Ballet: Friday, May 6 at 8 pm and Saturday, May 7 at 2 pm

ARTFORUM: Marc Camille Chaimowicz

JEAN GENET… THE COURTESY OF OBJECTS

A BOWLER HAT, a dressing table, a scrum of silver-painted shoes; a Roxy Musuc record, a movie poster, a school ofcarp in an indoor pond: Marc Camille Chaimowicz’s installatios are spaces in which the cultural unconscious becomes, however fleetingly, an embodied reality. As viewers wander through the artist’s immersive amalgams of sound, images and objects, they may encounter the sheen of high-modernist design or glitter of the 1970s London underground in which the artist began his career. Yet just as often, mirrored surfaces, pools of coloured light, flickering projections, and murmuring sound tracks undermine coherent readings, while surface decoration threatens to swallow the whole. Within the exploded Gesamtkunstwerk legibility dissolves into synesthetic scatter.

Dispersions and fusions likewise animate the seven collages on the pages that follow, which are part of a new body of work prompted by the writings of Jean Genet and debuting in April at the Gallery at Norwich University College of the Arts, UK. Commissioned by the Norwich & Norfolk arts festival in association wtih Nottingham Contemporary – which will host an expanded version of the exhibition in July – the show will include works on paper, theatrical propos, furniture, slide projections, documentation and an imaginary casting session for Genet’s 1947 play The Maids and videos charting Chaimowicz’s pilgrimages to the author’s childhood home in Burgundy, France, and to his grave on the Moroccan coast. Genet relics will find their place among these materials, and, in keeping with Chaimowicz’s practice of inviting ‘guests’ into his own exhibitions, the show’s expanded version in Nottingham will also play host to work by a number of other arists. Foremost among these is Alberto Giacometti, whom Genet, later in life, described as the only person he’d met for whom he had unreserved respect. Continuing the theme, a second section of the exhibition will be devoted to the poltical Genet. And as always, viewers will be enlisted as collaborators, both experiencing and contributing to the production of one of Chaimowicz’s dreamworlds. – Elizabeht Schambelan

Artforum, March 2011, Features, p.224 Jean Genet: The Courtsey of Objects, Marc Camille Chaimowicz

WE: Pil & Galia Kollectiv

WE is the ghost of the future of the left. To perform political speech, you have to say WE and we all know this WE will exist as a result of what I have said now – Slavoj Zizek

WE is a live music performance by Pil and Galia Kollectiv, Victor M. Jakeman and Ruth Angel Edwards. Challenging the individualism of Western pop, WE reveals the latent politics of love songs and transforms chart hits by annihilating their liberal subject and replacing it with a collective consciousness. Through the simple substitution of the plural for the singular, intimacy becomes a form of collective action and the unique universal.

8pm, 8 April 2011, Institute of Contemporary Art, London
Book now at: http://www.ica.org.uk/28653/Live-Art/WE-Pil-Galia-Kollectiv.html

Art Monthly: John Russell

On Ugliness
Dave Beech on the counter-promise of ugliness

There has been an upsurge in talk of beauty, but no corresponding discussion of ugliness. Surely the socially ugly – the ugliness of resistance, with its oppositional stance against the status quo – is far more relevant than beauty in this time of protests? ‘The political opposition between beauty and ugliness is not felt as political at all, but as the self-evident, correct and natural affirmation of beauty and the equally self-evident rejection of ugliness. Beauty is good, ugliness is bad.

The nearest equivalent to Picabia we have today is John Russell. Art historians in the future will not look back incredulously at our judgement of Russell’s ‘orgiastic’ images as ugly. Jonothan Jones loves his work, which is usually a bad sign, but what he loves is his ‘hyperbolic overactive pop monstrosity’. These works will not suddenly reveal themselves to future generations as beautiful after all, once the limitations of our taste have been breached. No, these works are ugly with a purpose. Russell produces gruesome displays of horror like the Chapman brothers, whose work is also ugly in this critical sense that I am developing here. But Russell’s work is ugly twice over: once in the monstosity it depicts and twice  in the monstrosity it acts out in its materiality. In other words, his works are ugly in the precise the sense that baffles Schjedahl. Russell is not taken in by Schjedahl’s common-sense advocacy of beauty. His works, in all their teeth clenching audacity, have taken sides with the counter-promise of ugliness.

Art Monthly, 344, March 2011 http://www.artmonthly.co.uk/magazine/site/issue/march-2011/

Where is Heidenheim?

Public Art Commission. WERK 10 – Bildhauser Symposium Germany
Exhibition – Heidenheim Gallery – 16/07/2010
With artists Michael Beutler, Vanessa Henn, Tina O’Connell /Neal White, Götz Arndt
Stefan Sous. Nomination by Penelope Curtis.

Working with artist Tina O’Connell (Department of Art, University of Reading) we made a proposal for working in both physical of the town and media space of the local newspaper – Heidenheim Zietung.

As artists working from within a situational perspective, we have learned much from working alongside artists such as John Latham (see Artist Placement Group), Danish Architects N55, and with innumerate factories and production teams. We see sculpture more as a malleable process informed by the broader social contexts, and now bound in form by physical materiality, but through the flux and dynamics of events, which in turn become the substance and context of our own practice.

In making this proposal we believe that we are making a gesture that is both serious and at the same time, implies humour and a sense of inquisitiveness that are essential aspects of our own shared psyche.

Heidenheim over the course of the work will discover many places that it did not know of before. At the same, this will be true of the link papers and the places from which they come, as far flung as the wilds of Asia, the troubled regions of the Middle East, the burgeoning economies of Latin America and India, and the deep backwater of the midwest of the United States.

By uniting places through this project, a global dynamic will open up that is both a tribute to communications, as well as indicating other possibilities for exchange and co-operation against a background of future economic difficulties. The work occupies physical space globally and locally, as well as being conceived in the imaginary space that media sometimes makes. It is a sculptural work that is both material and immaterial, an event structure for a contemporary world.

http://www.bildhauersymposion.heidenheim.com/fs_10.htm

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

Marc Camille Chaimowicz at Inverleith House

31^st October 2010 to 6^th February 2011
Inverleith House Royal Botanical Gardens, Edinburgh Arboretum Place/Row EdinburghEH3 5LR
www.rbge.org.uk/inverleith-house

Marc Camille Chaimowicz is one of the most influential visual artists working today with a career that spans four decades. He makes relatively few exhibitions, yet his work is constantly cited and referenced in leading journals devoted to art and theory. The major solo exhibition due to be presented at Inverleith House this Autumn will be the artist’s first in the UK since 2002.

John Russell at Frieze

Dr John Russell from the Department of Fine Art, will be exhibiting a striking piece of artwork in Regent’s Park, London at the end of this week. The piece was commissioned by the Frieze Art Fair, who are the most prestigious contemporary art fair in the UK to present an installation in the Sculpture Park.

‘Public Sculpture [the social]‘ (2010) takes the form of a large scale digital print on vinyl (4.6 x 8.4 metres) depicting a futuristic public sculpture. This imagery was developed in part, from a recent AHRC funded project researching the visualization of philosophical and political ideas as art.

Dr Russell said: “The sculpture presents the image of a virtual sculpture, constructed using 3D modelling, and outputted as a large scale print. In part I was influenced by J.G.Ballard’s descriptions of impossible, futuristic sculptures in his book Vermillion Sands.”

The work can be seen at the Frieze Sculpture Park, from Thursday 14 – Sunday 17 October 2010.

Frieze Projects

Based on an architectural blue print from 1847, Shannon Ebner and Dexter Sinister will build a room from Aircrete breeze blocks. However, although the original 1847 structure was designed to keep the weather out, the work for Frieze Art Fair is designed to keep sound in.  The situation of the fair and its material resources are being used to commission an eight-part episodic text on the octopus. Twice daily at 12 and 4pm the room will be closed to the public and the text will be read and recorded.  As the fair closes, the episodes will be stuck together to form a whole, to be played to a dedicated audience on the 31st floor of the Chrysler Building in New York. The recording will then be transcribed and republished as a PDF on servinglibrary.org

Dexter Sinister is the co-operative name of Stuart Bailey (b. 1973) and David Reinfurt (b. 1971). Dexter Sinister constitutes a triangle of activities: (a) a publishing imprint, (b) a workshop & bookstore, and (c) a pseudonym making site/time-specific work in art venues. David graduated from the University of North Carolina in 1993, Yale University in 1999, and formed the design studio O-R-G in 2000. Stuart graduated from the University of Reading in 1994, the Werkplaats Typografie in 2000, and co-founded the journal Dot Dot Dot the same year.

Shannon Ebner (b.1971) is an American artist based in Los Angeles. Recent solo exhibitions include ‘Signal Hill’, Altman Siegel Gallery, San Francisco (2010); ‘Invisible Language Workshop’, Wallspace, New York (2009) and ‘Special Project: Shannon Ebner’, P.S.1/MoMA Center for Contemporary Art, New York (2007).  Selected group exhibitions include ‘6th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art’, Berlin (2010); ‘Les Recontres d’Arles 2010 / 41st Edition’, Arles, France (2010); ‘2008 Whitney Biennial’, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2008); ‘Learn to Read’, Tate Modern, London (2007) and ‘Uncertain States of America: American Art in the 3rd Millennium’, The Serpentine Gallery, London (2006-2007).  Ebner’s work is held in public collections such as The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, LACMA in Los Angeles and The Gallery of New South Wales in Australia.  In 2009 Ebner’s artist’s book The Sun as Error was published by LACMA and co-ordinated by Dexter Sinister.

Other things to do

Curated by Philip Newcombe (MFA Fine Art 2001-3) ‘Other things to do’ includes a screening of James Gilham, current postgraduate research student at the Department of Art.

Existential Territories

Department of Art’s Dr John Russell will be speaking at Existential Territories, Saturday 17 July 2010, 7—9pm at FormContent. Organised by Jeremy Akerman and Fine Art alumni Gavin Everall Existential Territories is series of six, monthly events that focus on artists’ writings, readings, discussion and debate. Themes include: artists’ publications, nomadism, cosmopolitanism, the avant-garde, transgression, power.

The events prioritise work that carves out new territories and disrupts established forms. No consensus of practice is aimed for, rather these six events present a range of singular and contesting voices that question: How do you see the relationship between the verbal and visual in your work? What is the place of writing in your practice and how does it influence the images you make, and vice versa? What is your take on art-writing?’

With a.o. David Burrows, Clunie Reid, Fiona Banner, John Russell, Harry Pye, Michael Dean, Paul Buck, with recorded or visual contributions from Margarita Gluzberg, Charlotte Young and Stewart Home. Organised by Jeremy Akerman, Gavin Everall, Paul Buck and Francesco Pedraglio.

Noise, Affect, Politics Conference

Christine Ellison, Lecturer in Fine Art, will be performing at  Noise, Affect, Politics Conference at University of Salford, July 1-3 2010

If there are people that are dumb enough to use Metallica to interrogate prisoners, you’re forgetting about all the music that’s to the left of us. I can name 30 Norwegian death metal bands that would make Metallica sound like Simon and Garfunkel. – Lars Ulrich

… this music can put a human being in a trance like state and deprive it of the sneaking feeling of existing, ’cos music is bigger than words and wider than pictures… if the stars had a sound it would sound like this.” – Mogwai, “Yes! I Am a Long Way from Home.

Noise Annoys. Is it not a banal fact of modern, urban existence that one person’s preferred sonic environment is another’s irritating, unwelcome noise – whether in the high-rise apartment, on public transport or the street, or almost anywhere else? The contingent soundscape of jack-hammers and pneumatic drills, mobile phone chatter, car sirens and alarms, sound leakage from nightclubs and bars and – moving into the suburbs – lawn-mowers and amateur renovation projects, neighbouring kids and dogs, represents a near-constant aural assault. As a pollutant, noise can legally attain noxious levels; it is both potentially biologically harmful and psychologically detrimental.

But what exactly is noise and what conditions these relative thresholds in which sound crosses over into noise? Or are these more organised and polite sonic phenomena merely varieties of noise that have been tamed and civilised, and yet still contain kernels of the chaotic, anomalous disturbance of primordial noise? As a radical free agent, how is noise channelled, neutralised or enhanced in emergent cityscapes? As a consumable, how is noise – or lack of noise – commodified?

Such questions are particularly applicable to contemporary forms of music which, based as they are on a variety of noise-making technical machines, necessarily exist in the interface between chaotic, unpredictable noise and the organised and blended sounds of music and speech. Does modern noise seek to lead us to new, post-secular inscapes (as with psychedelia and shoegazer), or defy the lulling noisescapes of processed background muzak with punitive blasts of disorientating, disorderly noise? And why the cult of noise – in term of both volume and dissonance – in which low cultural practices (metal, moshing) meet those of the avant-garde (atonalism, transcendentalism)?

Architectural Fictions

PhD Symposium in Art

PhD Symposium in Art
Graduate School in the Arts and Humanities
University of Reading

Wednesday 23 June 2010

A Symposium to discuss practice-led research in art across disciplines at the University of Reading, featuring presentations by PhD researchers in Fine Art, History of Art, and Philosophy, and interventions by Art & Language and Herman Rapaport, Reynolds Professor of English, Wake Forest University.

11.15-11.45 Neil Chapman, ‘The Winter Journey: Vitalism’s Rosetta Stone’
11.45-12.15 Roxana Tohanaeanu-Shields, ‘Conceptual Art and the Aesthetic’
12.15-13.00 Art & Language
14.00-14.30 Andy Hunt, ‘One Curator, Three Dealers: Serota, Fischer, D’Offay and Gagosian’
14.30-15.00 Claire Drever, ‘Art as the Negation of One’s Ego’
15.00-15.45 Herman Rapaport, ‘Let Freedom Ring! Cutting Loose with Albert Ayler and Carolee Schneemann’
16.00-16.30 Kate Corder, ‘Allotment Plot and its Growing History’
16.30-17.00 David Stent, ‘A Skinned Mule – Portraits of a Research Project’

For directions to the University: http://www.reading.ac.uk/about/find/about-findindex.aspx

A Productive Relationship

Integration of Practice and Theory in Post-graduate Research

These five seminars led by Dr Martine Rouleau, lecturer at Birkbeck College, take place in March, April and May 2010, providing a platform for the discussion of issues arising from the integration of theory and practice in post-graduate research . The outcome of the series will be a conference held at Birkbeck College in June 2010 where the participants to the seminars, other research students and scholars will be invited to discuss their approach.

In media, culture and creative practice, the choice of a research framework is often intertwined with the practice that you will engage with in order to conduct your research, be it media and film, arts management, music, creative writing, screenwriting, journalism, performance or cultural studies. More than an object of study, each comes to existence through a process that can contribute to the direction your questions, reflections and arguments might take. How can the integration of practice and theory provide means to encompass these dimensions in research?

Each seminar will take the form of a brief presentation introducing a reading and/or a particular research. The participants are then encouraged to engage in discussion on the basis of the introduction, the recommended readings and their own research.

Art and the Limits of the Political

24 May – 14 June

A series of three lectures examining the proposition that contemporary art can go beyond transforming our understanding of the political and build new forms of political and social relations.

Monday 24 May, 6.30 – 8.00pm
Alexander Düttmann,
Professor of Philosophy and Visual Culture, Goldsmiths,
University of London

Monday 7 June, 6.30 – 8.00pm
Herman Rapaport,
Reynolds Professor of English, Wake Forest University

Monday 14 June, 6.30 – 8.00pm
Jonathan Lahey Dronsfield,
Reader in Theory and Philosophy of Art, University of Reading

All lectures at Wolfson Theatre, New Academic Building, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, LSE
For further information visit www.philosophy-forum.org