From Weileder to Wearing.
An account of recent artistic projects in Birmingham’s public realm, undertaken by Ikon Gallery.
Jonathan Watkins
director of Ikon Gallery, Birmingham
Friday, 26 May 2017, 2pm
New Seminar Room, Old Fine Art Building
Newcastle University
Ikon is an internationally acclaimed art gallery situated in central Birmingham. Housed in a magnificent neo-gothic school building, it is an educational charity and works to encourage public engagement with contemporary art through exhibiting new work in a context of debate and participation. Ikon’s off-site programme develops dynamic relationships between art, artists and audiences outside the gallery. Projects vary enormously in scale, duration and location, challenging expectations of where art can be seen and by whom. The presentation includes an account of recent artistic projects, involving artists such as Ceal Floyer, Katarina Grosse, Tadashi Kawamata, Cornelia Parker and Wolfgang Weileder, culminating in an in-depth consideration of Gillian Wearing’s controversial sculpture A Real Birmingham Family.
Jonathan Watkins has been Director of Ikon Gallery since 1999. Previously he worked for a number of years in London, as Curator of the Serpentine Gallery (1995-1997) and Director of Chisenhale Gallery (1990-1995).
He has curated a number of large international exhibitions including the Biennale of Sydney (1998), Facts of Life: Contemporary Japanese Art (Hayward Gallery, London 2001), Quotidiana (Castello di Rivoli, Turin 1999, Tate Triennial (2003), Shanghai Biennale (2006), Sharjah Biennial (2007), Negotiations (Today Art Museum, Beijing 2010) and the Guangzhou Triennial (2012). He was on the curatorial team for Europarte (Venice Biennale, 1997),Milano Europa 2000, (Palazzo di Triennale, Milan 2000), andRiwaq (Palestinian Biennial 2007). He curated the Iraqi Pavilion for the Venice Biennale 2013.
Jonathan Watkins has written extensively on contemporary art. Recent essays by him have focused on the work of Giuseppe Penone, Martin Creed, A K Dolven, Semyon Faibisovich, Lee Bul, Yang Zhenzhong, Noguchi Rika, Caro Niederer, Beat Streuli and Cornelia Parker. He was the author of the Phaidon monograph on Japanese artist On Kawara.
Jonathan Watkins has served on numerous committees and boards, most recently for the Imperial War Museum (2011 - 2015), Arts Council Collection Acquisitions Committee (2011 - 2013) and 14-18 Now: First World War Centenary Cultural Programme (2013 - ). In 2013 he was nominated as one of the top 100 Global Thinkers by Foreign Policy Magazine.
More information on https://ikon-gallery.org
'A graffited city is not a safe city!' If the work becomes reassuring...
Elisa Del Prete
director of Nosadella.due, Bologna
Tuesday, 2 December 2014, 4pm
New Seminar Room, Old Fine Art Building
Newcastle University
What does it mean to realize an art project for a specific context? To communicate in a specific context, keeping the context alive, nurturing a cultural community, creating an adding value for the society development?
In Italy each stone on which we plod is a piece of our art history. You can not think about public art projects without to start from this. Whether the 'piece of art' is original or not. People need it. People need to feel safe.
Founded in Bologna in 2006 within a private family house as a curatorial project, as a space dedicated to knowledge, to sharing, to choosing, as one of the first places of art residencies in Italy, Nosadella.due, independent Residency for Public Art started inviting foreign artists to confront with the local and specific territory of the city, its own urban environments, social tissue, history and patrimony. What we found after eight years is that art can create a new form of community, of brave single individuals.
Elisa Del Prete (Bologna, 1978) graduated in History of Art at the University of Bologna defending a dissertation in Iconology about the Aby Warburg's method and Library and his influence on Italian cultural studies. In 2004 started to work as an independent curator and critic focusing her research on sculpture in public space, interaction between art and society, role of visual arts in building imaginaries and modelling identities. In 2006 she founded Nosadella.due, Independent Residency for Public Art as her own curatorial project, an independent residency program for artists and curators focused on art projects in public context with interdisciplinary approach, community based and relational art practices, shared knowledge of local historical and cultural patrimony. She has recently curated the publication Journal 2007-2011 where she collects the entire first five years of Nosadella.due's activity. As journalist she contributes to doppiozero.com, Arte&Critica, Il Giornale dell'arte / Fondazioni art magazines.
More information on www.nosadelladue.com
Art on the Production of Knowledge
Dr. Susanne Witzgall
Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Munich
Tuesday, 7 May 2013, 4pm
New Seminar Room, Old Fine Art Building
Newcastle University
In the nineteen-sixties, young Conceptual artists began to thematize the institutional, social, economic, and historical parameters affecting the fine arts, and in doing so, they challenged the established autonomous and “objective” status of art. In the process, they questioned both the political and social conditions of artistic production (Dan Graham) and—inspired, among other things, by systems theory—the political and social factors determining the reception and the distribution of artistic knowledge (Hans Haacke). At the same time, the artistic deconstruction of the museum was initiated—from the art museum to the museum of ethnology. Artists such as Marcel Broodthaers and Lothar Baumgarten demonstrated how criteria of museum inclusion and exclusion or criteria of taxonomy are personally and politically motivated. Knowledge stored in the museum therefore has to be regarded as fabricated knowledge that tells us more about the culture producing it than the culture it represents.
After all, over the last two decades, contemporary artists have not only made reference to the cultural and political construction of historical knowledge (Simon Wachsmuth), but also to that of scientific facts. Works by the American artist Mark Dion, for example, do not depict scientific theories as being objective, timeless, or trans-cultural, but as unstable models enmeshed in an ecology of divergent interests and historical conditions. Dion cites Michel Foucault and Donna Haraway, who like the biologist Stephen Jay Gould view science as something “which is socially bound, which has something to do with ideology, which is not detached from economical, social and personal conditions.” Drawing on Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, in the course of his theoretical reflections, the Swiss artist Hannes Rickli, for example, highlights the immediate general experimental framework necessary for the production of scientific knowledge.
The understanding that scientific knowledge contains constructive elements, that scientific truths are not discovered but produced, will certainly have ramifications. Some contemporary artists, for instance, have become increasingly interested in a trans-disciplinary cross-linking of knowledge that purposely operates independently of the privilege of scientific logic and systematization.
Susanne Witzgall holds a Ph.D. in art history and is head of the cx centre of interdisciplinary studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. From 2003 to 2011 she was an assistant professor at the department for art history at the same place. From 1995 to 2002 she worked as a curator for the Deutsches Museum Bonn and the Deutsches Museum, Munich, Her research interests focusing especially on the interfaces between art and science, art and sociology/cultural anthropology, art as research and knowledge production. She has curated and co-curated several exhibitions in Germany and Austria among them Art & Brain II (1997/1998), The Second Face (2002, with Cornelia Kemp), Say it isn’t so (2007, with Peter Friese) and (Re)designing nature (2010/2011, with Florian Matzner). She is the author of several books and articles on contemporary art and art and science e.g. Kunst nach der Wissenschaft (Art after Science) (2003) or Medienrelationen (ed. with Cornelia Gockel) (2011).
Historical narratives as aesthetic representations
Dr Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen
Tuesday, 5 February 13, 4pm
New Seminar Room, Old Fine Art Building
Newcastle University
The question whether history as an academic discipline should be seen as a science or as a form of literature has been debated ever since the birth of modern historiography in the mid-19th century. The early theoretical reflections typically emphasised similarities to science and scientific production of knowledge. The analytic philosophy of history made a pointedly strong attempt towards this end in the decades after the Second World War. However, this tendency was reversed in the 1970s by the emergence of so called narrativist philosophy of historiography. A central figure of the school, Hayden White, explicitly highlighted the literary and fictional aspects of history writing. Another prominent scholar, Frank Ankersmit, has gone further than this and suggested that it is art that provides the most feasible reference for historiography. Indeed, he has written that "from a logical point of view representation is prior to the true statement. Or to put it differently, aesthetics precedes epistemology" (Ankersmit 2001, 90).
My talk compares first the programme of the analytic philosophy of history to that of narrativism. After that I will give specific attention to the notion of representation. It has preoccupied a special role in historiography throughout its history. However, while modern historiography tended to accept something like a copy theory of representation, indicating that the past could be copied in the historian's representation, Ankersmit wishes to replace it by the substitution theory of representation. The idea of the latter is that historical representation replaces the (unreachable) past in the same way as a portrait painting substitutes a person in her/his absence. In his most recent book, Ankersmit (2012) says that historical re-presentation brings forward a 'presented,' which shows a an 'aspect' or 'personality' of a part of the past and which is not reducible to historical reality, just like visual aesthetic representation is not a mere reflection of the external world. I will end the talk by evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of this account and asking how apt the analogy between historical narratives and aesthetic representations is. References: Ankersmit, F. R. 2001. Historical Representation. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Ankersmit, F. R. 2012. Meaning, Truth, and Reference in Historical Representation. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.
Dr Jouni-Matti Kuukkanen has studied history and philosophy in Finland, the USA and the UK. He received his Phd in Philosophy in 2006 from the University of Edinburgh. Since 2008 Kuukkanen has been a postdoctoral research fellow in the Institute for Philosophy at Leiden University. Kuukkanen has published many articles in international journals of philosophy. He is currently a recipient of the Young Researcher's Award from the Emil Aaltonen Foundation and writing a book on the philosophy of historiography.
More information on http://www.jmkuukkanen.com
‘Dialogical Portraits’
Angelika Böck
Tuesday, 16 October, 4pm
New Seminar Room, Old Fine Art Building
Newcastle University
Angelika Böck’s ‘Dialogical Portraits’ are directed at forms of expressions, practices, rituals, or signs in various contexts aiming to set side by side different contemporary modes of perception and representation of the individual. This setting has resulted in a series of '(self)portrayals', for which Angelika Böck has applied a 'dialogical' strategy by placing herself as the subject to be negotiated, studied and represented through interpretations by her fellow human beings. The ‘Dialogical Portraits’, which challenge and expand the parameters of the conceptions and conventions of portrayal, are intended as a dual relation between both objectivities and subjectivities within the order of representation and represent both a crossover and reversal of the traditional roles of the artist on the one hand and model on the other.
On the basis of these examples the methodologies, production process, possibilities and/or limitation of artworks applying ethnographic and dialogical methods will be discussed.
The participants are welcome to present projects on ‘portrayal’ (their own or others) in the form of prints or as pp-presentation. Please get in touch with Wolfgang if you are interested.
Angelika Böck (1967 in Munich) graduated in Interior Architecture and Fine Arts. Her recent work focuses on dialogic structures, artistic research on human perception and portrayal. Her work is exhibited in museums and galleries internationally and published in artistic as well as scientific contexts.
More information on http://www.angelika-boeck.de
ART HISTORY
Jonathan Watkins,
direktor of IKON Gallery, Birmingham
Thursday, 8 March 12, 5pm
New Seminar Room, Old Fine Art Building
Newcastle University
For too long in the west those working with contemporary art have tended to repudiate art history. This is a legacy of modernism, an ideology that insisted on every new art movement surpassing the one before, and thus young, emerging artists tend to be fetishised. Like vampires, exhibition curators crave fresh virgin blood, and what has gone before is deemed uninteresting, unadventurous. Students here are rarely taught about any art that is dated before 1900, by which time the seeds of modernism had been well and truly sown.
Art practice without art history is doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past? Well, maybe, maybe not, but certainly a constant emphasis on the avant garde means that a lot of good art work gets overlooked due to eyes being fixed on what lies ahead. For myself, I am concerned to be part of a global art conversation in which it is important to make statements that are pertinent, relevant and not detached from current (art) affairs, but this doesn't mean that art history has nothing to offer.
Postmodernism wasn't so bad. The word itself ("postmodernism") became tired and uncool, and certainly aesthetic crimes were committed with a superficial understanding of the theory, but the postmodern attempt to reset the whole artistic machine was laudable. The cut-and-paste styles, the camp appropriations were awful, but the idea that we could be eclectic, instead of purist - that we could have both David Bowie and Beethoven on our playlists - was like a breath of fresh air. 'Why not?' was the right question, and it still is because, still, the aspiration to the condition of fashion in art persists.
Art itself is a kind of fashion, as history teaches us that there hasn't always been art. Kitagawa Utamaro, recently shown at Ikon, had no idea of "art", as we now understand it, when he made his beautiful woodblock prints. Art came later, with Europeans, c.1850. Utamaro's pictures were not made by him to be put in frames on museum walls but instead to be collected for a very small amount of money (the equivalent of three bowls of rice) and then passed around, hand to hand, amongst a group of friends. As art they sell for thousands and thousands.
I have come to the conclusion after many years of working in the art world that, paradoxically, those artists who don't care so much for art are the most interesting ones. The ones who aren't so precious, not so married to an artistic identity, are usually the best, and this encourages me to think that art, as a kind of pseudo-religion, will not always be with us.
Jonathan Watkins has been Director of Ikon Gallery since 1999. Previously he worked as Curator of the Serpentine Gallery and Director of Chisenhale Gallery. His tenure at the Chisenhale Gallery saw a rise in its international profile, with a number of its artists moving on to win the Turner Prize. He was Artistic Director of the Biennale of Sydney in 1998 and has worked internationally in Beijing, Venice, Turin, Milan, Shanghai, Sharjah and Palestine. He was also on the curatorial team for Facts of Life: Contemporary Japanese Art (Hayward Gallery, London 2001). Watkins is a prolific writer on contemporary art, his recent essays focusing on the work of artists such as Giuseppe Penone, Martin Creed, Yang Zhenzhong, and Noguchi Rika. He was the author of the Phaidon monograph on Japanese artist On Kawara.
http://www.ikon-gallery.co.uk
'The neuralgic point'
Prof Tina Haase and Yvonne Leinfelder, Munich
Tuesday, 21 February 12, 4pm
New Seminar Room, Old Fine Art Building
Newcastle University
This presentation focuses on art in the context of particular spaces or locations. By means of simple and often minimal interventions, such art aims to bring into focus the particular quality or "neuralgic" point of a space or location. In this way, a space or location can be endowed with a completely different mood, thus inviting a second consideration of its nature and function, which in turn often reveals the viewer's own expectations.
The sculptor Tina Haase investigates the qualities and properties of objects, spaces, and locations. On the basis of their specific physical, visual, or contextual features, she creates a variety of artworks, including objects, installations, percent-for-art projects, performances, and short films. The search for the essence of something - or, indeed, its idiosyncrasy, its specificity - is often accompanied by a shift in identity. On occasion, this interface between recognition and reappraisal can give rise, as a by-product, to something very much akin to humour, or even joy.
Prof. Tina Haase (*1957) initially studied German and Education in Cologne. From 1979, she studied Art at the Academies of Art in Muenster and then Duesseldorf, where she graduated as a master scholar of Fritz Schwegler. She has been awarded travel scholarships to work in the U.S. and Italy. Thanks to regular exhibitions, largely in Germany, but also in Spain, Belgium, the U.S., the Netherlands, Austria, and Poland, her work is now well known. In addition to works of sculpture, she also produced short films in the 1980s (Paranose Produktion) and space-specific choreographies in the 1990s. She was appointed Professor of Basic Design at the Hochschule Niederrhein in 2004 and has been Professor of Visual Arts at the Faculty of Architecture of the Technische Universitaet Munich since 2007.
Yvonne Leinfelder's videos and photographs bear the fictional qualities of a documentary as well as a reliable artificiality. Light and time have a pivotal function. It's not important which object is apparent, but in what light it appears.
Yvonne Leinfelder (*1972) studied at the Akademie der Bildenden Kuenste Munich.
Recent exhibitions and projects include: Interference/DVD Project, De Blinde Muur Breda NL,
es diu que les dones son romantiques, Fundacio Vallpalou, Lleida E (2011), Ausstellung zur
PIN.-Versteigerung, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, Nonstop, Raum 58, Munich (2010),
Dimke Egger Engl Erb Leinfelder, Kunstarkaden, Munich (2009), Connecting Principle,
Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK (2008).
Divas and Grandmothers: Kracauer's 'Photography' as Screenplay
Prof Winfried Pauleit, Bremen
Tuesday, 21 June 11, 2pm
New Seminar Room, Old Fine Art Building
Newcastle University
Siegfried Kracauer's essay 'Photography' was published on October 28th, 1927 in the Frankfurter Zeitung. Kracauer starts his essay by analyzing two photographs, a contemporary shot of a film diva and a historical photo of his grandmother taken in 1864. This essay was appropriated as part of his critical and theoretical writing on the media that also lays out grounds for his later 'Theory of Film' (1960).
I would like to demonstrate that this essay is not only a sustained philosophical reflection on photography, but that its writing is also informed by the very techniques of the cinema: travelling shots, montages, superimpositions. My hypothesis is that Kracauer's hidden agenda is to turn writing into a kind of screenplay – and in so doing, to transform our understanding of critical and analytical writing by means of a cinematic shift.
Kracauer's essay was published in Critical Inquiry, Spring 1993, Vol. 19, No 3, pp. 421–436, English translation by Thomas Y. Levin.
Art and Invisibility
Ludwig Seyfarth, Berlin
Thursday, 12 May 11, 5pm - 6pm
New Seminar Room, Old Fine Art Building
Newcastle University
Different types of invisibility can be classified. For example, radiation and other things which physically exist but are not visible. Or abstractions such as the national product or global peace, culture repressed things or official secrets. Invisibility can be temporal: what has already or nor yet happened. Or if something remains at the same place for a long time, it will be overlooked and is therefore invisible. Or people or objects can be invisible when they are hidden in a big crowd.
Visibility and invisibility are anchored in social processes and are called into question by artistic means. The lecture will discuss art and photography concerned with invisibility, including works by Douglas Huebler, Andreas Gursky, Richard Misrach or Georg Polke.
Ludwig Seyfarth is a freelance author and curator living in Berlin. Since 1987 he has regularly been producing articles for several magazines and exhibition catalogues. He conceived several exhibitions, recently „The Fate of Irony“ and „Transformed Objects“ together with Zdenek Felix at KAI 10 – Arthena Foundation, Duesseldorf. Seyfarth was a visiting professor from 2000-2001 at the Braunschweig School of Art and at the Hamburg School of Art 2002-2004. He also taught at the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design from 2004-2006. Since 2010 he is a visiting professor at the Muenster School of Art. In 2007 he has received the ADKV-ART COLOGNE price for art critic.
“Help me, Hurt me, Anthropology… Help me, Hurt me, Sociology”: Artists’ research and social research – Or, picturing irrationalities, picturing inequalities.
Alistair Robinson
Tuesday, 3 May 11, 5pm - 6pm
New Seminar Room, Old Fine Art Building
Newcastle University
Alistair Robinson is Programme Director at Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art.
Alistair Robinson joined NGCA in 2002. Prior to this he held posts at the Victoria & Albert Museum, National Museum of Photography, and The Lowry. He has given the first public shows to emerging UK artists who have secured widespread recognition such as Mark Titchner, Spartacus Chetwynd, Daniel Sinsel, and Alice Anderson, and also to artists internationally who have achieved critical acclaim and subsequently shown more widely in public spaces such as Harun Farocki,Claire Fontaine, Laurel Nakadate, Agathe Snow and Ursula Biemann. His publications include ‘Rank: picturing the Social Order’, and monographs on artists including David Harrison, Daniel Silver, Peter Liversidge, Paul Housley and Tim Brennan.
The title is part of the spoken text from Bruce Nauman’s ‘Anthro/Socio (Rinde Facing Camera)’, 1991.
'Between private and public', working collaborative as an artist duo with passers by.
EMPFANGSHALLE, Corbinian Böhm, Munich
Tuesday, 29 March 11, 5pm - 6pm
New Seminar Room, Old Fine Art Building
Newcastle University
The seminar focuses on collaborative strategies and methodologies in current fine art practice, exemplified in the work of EMPFANGESHALLE. The artists team of EMPFANGSHALLE develop their projects through conversation. The process is like playing ping-pong with an idea. Social structure is the 'sculptural raw material', conversation becomes the 'carving tool'. The seminar will give an inside into the practice of EMPFANGSHALLE focusing on the advantages of working in a team.
Munich based artists Corbinian Böhm and Michael Gruber have worked together since 1996 under the name EMPFANGSHALLE. EMPFANGSHALLE (reception hall) works not in hermetically sealed spaces but perceives itself as own space in the midst of society, an independent display that docks on to society and embraces it. Infrastructural interventions make invisible or unknown elements visible. The projects are temporary and precise staging that call upon moments of coincidence. The work of EMPFANGSHALLE is exhibited in museums and galleries internationally, including He Xiangning Art Museum, Shen Zhen, China (2010); the 3. Moskow Bienale, NCCA Moskow (2009); the 52nd Biennale d´Arte di Venezia (2007); and the 'Ars Electronica', Linz, Austria (2006).
“Expanded Cinema - Refusing and Seduction”
Dr. Cornelia Gockel, Academy of Fine Arts, Munich
Tuesday, 15 March 11, 5pm - 6pm
New Seminar Room, Old Fine Art Building
Newcastle University
Expanded Cinema was an attempt in the 60s and 70s to challenge the borders of traditional cinema. During that time artists and film makers dealt with different strategies like abstraction and interaction with the public as well as the use of different media. Some of those ideas go back to the early history of the cinema. Especially German film makers like Karl Valentin, Lotte Reininger, Walter Ruttmann and Oscar Fischinger were pioneers with their experimental films in the 20s. But Expanded Cinema is more than an experiment with a new medium, it’s a critical approach and a self-reflective artistic practise. The lecture shows how the ideas of Expanded Cinema still influence contemporary art with examples from Kara Walker, Wolfgang Tillmanns and Janet Cardiff & Georges Bures Miller.
Dr. Cornelia Gockel
Video games: Aesthetics and Phenomenology
Antonio Riello
Monday, 11 May 10, 11.00am - 12.30pm
Space 7, Culture Lab, Newcastle University
International artist Antonio Riello will discuss the video game in contemporary art.
"Basically I am interested in the video game as autonomous media. I think it is an important and significant opportunity for contemporary artists. Every time has had its own specific media and video games are marking the culture of this era in a significant way".
His presentation will include basic ideas and concepts about the medium, a brief overview of the history of art and video games, as well as an introduction to new approaches in this area.
Antonio Riello is an artist based in Asiago (Italy) and London (UK). He studied chemistry and architecture in Venice. In 1997 he designed and realized one of the first video game artworks in Europe: "ITALIANI BRAVA GENTE".
He teaches Video game Art at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera (Milano) and at Domus Academy (Milano). Antonio was a visiting lecturer at the Ruskin School of Arts, Oxford; the University of Reading; and Derby School of Art and Design.
As a teacher and artist, he is interested in the interface between contemporary art and video games. His artistic approach is based on the paradoxical inner nature of contemporary culture and way of life. The contemporary Italian society, with all its controversial issues, is the main playground of his artistic research. His most recent work is the Net Art project “ONLYTHEGOOD.ORG”.
Antonio Riello has shown his work worldwide. Recent exhibitions in the North East include:
2005 The world is a safer place, Globe Gallery, Newcastle
2009 B.SQUARE!, Baltic Center for Contemporary Arts, Gateshead
2009 Ashes to ashes, Globe Gallery, Newcastle
“The crisis of public space” or “How to make art in the urban context today”
Dr. Cornelia Gockel, Academy of Fine Arts, Munich
Monday, 13 July 09,
2.00pm - 3.00pm,
New Seminar Room, Old Fine Art Building
The public space is defined as an area, which is accessible for all citizens regardless of gender, ethnicity, age, race or socio-economic level. But the meaning has changed over the last years. Due to the privatization of public spaces like shopping malls or train stations people have been excluded from these areas. On the other hand new public spaces have been opened due to new technologies like the internet. Regarding this development, Cornelia Gockel shows in her lecture, how artists deal with this new challenge.
Dr. Cornelia Gockel
Arts/Health - Practice as Research
Miranda Lawry
University of Newcastle NSW, Australia
Wednesday, 28 May 08, 12.00pm - 1.00pm,
Culture Lab, Space 7
Miranda Lawry is an artist and academic at the University of Newcastle NSW, Australia. She is a founding member of the new Arts/Health Research and Practice Centre and is currently on study leave visiting institutions in Canada, the USA and England.
Miranda will outline several projects including a recent collaboration between University of Newcastle NSW and Columbia University in New York. The New Adventures of Mark Twain- Coalopolis to Metropolis explores a random
visit Mark Twain made to Newcastle NSW in 1895 while on a world speaking tour. The exhibition features the creative work of 10 artists and four writers and explores notions of travel, the archive, gender and politics. Miranda will also outline future projects established under the Arts/Health program.
About Miranda Lawry :
Miranda Lawry is an artist and educator whose teaching interests include
historical and contemporary practice in Photomedia, traditional black and white processes, Early 19th Century processes, artist books, digital imaging, and curatorial practice. Miranda teaches across the undergraduate, Honours and post graduate programs and has an active role as a researcher within the fine art discipline.
Miranda’s executive roles over the past 10 years has offered her opportunities to contribute to the development of programs such as University/TAFE Articulation, , partnerships with Eden Gardens, Hunter Valley Gardens, Hunter New England NSW Health, regional galleries and
university international exchange. She has held positions as Head of School for Fine Art and Assistant Dean International for the Faculty of Education and Arts.
Miranda has travelled widely to visit art schools in Germany, England, Singapore, Spain, Canada and the USA.
Performance Power Politics (PPP)
Brigitte Jurack
Wednesday, 12 March 08,
12.30pm - 1.00pm,
Culture Lab, Space 7
Foreign Investment (Fremd Anlage) , a group of artists/housewives/architects co -founded by Brigitte Jurack in 1996 initially focused on appropriating language and rituals used in the market economy.
Dedicated to invest energy, resources and thinking towards -for the group- unchartered territory, Foreign Investment has been working in the field of ex-change processes and engagement ('Relational Aesthetic').
Questions of product/branding/franchising/shared ownership are as relevant to artists as they are to the manufacturing and distribution industry. Using and simultaneously rejecting these strategies has created challenges in the development of new work for real time-space co-ordinates.
The illustrated presentation will focus on a small number of recent Foreign Investment performances, including the 1st of March 2008 Moonshine Walk - a Channel 4/Helena Housing commission.
www.foreign-investments.com
Brigitte Jurack
The Body as Display -
The Meaning of New Media in Art
Dr. Cornelia Gockel, Academy of Fine Arts, Munich
Wednesday, 5 March 08,
1.00pm - 1.45pm,
Culture Lab, Space 7
Over the last years the body has become one of the favourite, but also one of the most disputed subjects in scientific research. Because of new technologies the anatomic and natural borders of the body were overcome. These are technological advances in genetic engineering, new technologies in the reproductive medicine and modelling of the body through aesthetic surgery. Ethical, scientific and technical problems were not only discussed by experts, but also by the general public because of mass media. The body has developed into a display, where social politics and social historical discourses are obvious. In my lecture I would like to show the influence of new media in art with regards to perception of the body. The images of art and mass media are cultural expressions and influence each other. They mirror social processes.
Dr. Cornelia Gockel
TimeSlicing
Brian Degger
Wednesday, 12 December 07,
12.30pm - 2pm,
Culture Lab, Space 7
TimeSlicing with FLOSS software. Brian Degger talks about his work transversions for the Connecting Principle event in May, 2007. This piece uses a technique of transposition from distance-time (x-t) (or position-time) to time-distance (t-x)tx-transforms. In effect time is turned into space and space into time in the video. There are a number of software techniques to do this, of which he has used a script based video editing software called AVI synth that allows him to shred the video into single pixel slices and regenerate new video frames which he uses to generate the new video. He hopes to explore some of the aesthetic possibilities of this technique in relation to artistic collaborations and promote discussion on where next.
Brian Degger
My Greens and Your Yellows
Paul Wetter and Tony Harrington
Wednesday, 5 December 07,
12.00pm - 12.45pm,
Culture Lab, Space 7
Vietnam Arts in Development Capacity Building Programme
A cross sectoral approach to harnessing Vietnamese creativity in social development.
In his talk Paul Zetter will describe a 3 year programme that brought together a range of people from different disciplines. The programme was designed to build capacity and understanding by creating new connections and collaborations between professionals who don’t normally work together such as artists and social scientists, actors and psychologists. Four action learning arts in development projects were built into the programme and featured at an exhibition in Hanoi in 2006. The Forge is hosting Paul Zetter on a week long visit to the UK as part of an Arts Council England North East programme called Inspiring Internationalists.
About Paul Zetter and ensemble creative training and development:
Based in Vietnam for almost 10 years, the first five at the British Council in Hanoi, Paul is now a leading arts in development pioneer building on the ground breaking Lost Child performance projects of the David Glass Ensemble with new work and collaborations in Cambodia, Vietnam, Indonesia, Singapore and the Philippines. He was also technical advisor for the innovative three year Vietnam Arts In Development Capacity Building Programme funded by the Ford Foundation. More recently expanding the ensemble’s film making arm, ensemble films, Paul has filmed and directed three documentaries with the theme of creative transformation covering Vietnam first deaf contemporary dance company Together Higher and the Hue International Arts Festival.
About Tony Harrington and The Forge:
Tony Harrington has over twenty years of experience of working in the arts, education and cultural sectors. He has worked as an actor and a teacher and has combined his skills across the two disciplines in his career. He is the Director of The Forge which is the Arts and Education Agency for County Durham and Sunderland. He spent many years working in theatre in education and established the Participation Department at Northern Stage. He is a regular lecturer at Durham and Northumbria University and is often asked to contribute to conferences. He is a specialist in developing relationships between the Cultural Sector and policy makers and has been heavily involved in the development of a number of large scale Governmental arts in education initiatives including Creative Partnerships and Cultural Hubs. The Forge is a creative organisation specialising in developing high quality participatory arts projects, working with young people, artists and educators throughout County Durham, Sunderland, nationally and internationally.
www.intheforge.com
Cashpoint
Wolfgang Weileder
Wednesday 14 November 07,
12.30pm - 1pm,
Culture Lab, Space 7
In his presentation Wolfgang Weileder will give a short introduction to his latest project Cashpoint, followed by an open discussion.
Located in the urban centre, Cashpoint is a sculptural intervention that aims to stimulate a discussion about the commercialisation and economics of public space. It provides a framework through which questions about, and understanding of public space can be generated in an unexpected and provoking way.
Cashpoint is an abstracted full-scale version of an ATM (Automatic Teller Machine) that has been designed to randomly dispense a five-pound note once in every 24 hour period. The strategic situation of Cashpoint in the city centre environment initially proposes a direct and random interaction with the general public. The pseudo economic incentive is aiming to re-direct the expected and habitual flow of people through the city. This will inevitably question the patterns of cultural experience and behaviour that define our relationship and interaction with the urban fabric.
Cashpoint will be shown as part of a collaboration with Prof Michael Tawa at 'Back to the City', Newcastle Australia in January 2008.
The software for Cashpoint has been developed by Dan Jackson, Newcastle University.
Wolfgang Weileder
