AURA SATZ
TURNTABLE TABLEAU, a film performance, Sun 9 May, 5pm
ICA - Live Weekend 1 - Performance etc (produced by David Gryn)

Consortium teaching fellow Aura Satz presents a talking book ventriloquist act, followed by a live soundtrack to her recent film ‘Sound Seam’, performed Alex Baker, Frances Scott and and Consortium students Lina Hakim, Roger Orwell.

‘Sound Seam’ is a film featuring abstract imagery of close-ups of gramophone grooves, giving voice to the idea that every surface, in particular parts of our anatomy, is potentially inscribed with an unheard sound or echoes of voices from the past. The hypnotic film uses microscopic close-ups of gramophone grooves, wax and acetate shavings, phonograph cylinder recording and erasing technology, as well as footage of the anatomy of the ear, where inner ear hair cells have been animated to look like a sound groove, and a gold-plated cochlea spirals like a shellac disc. Presented at the ICA as a silent film, accompanied only by the surface noise of crackle, the performers enact a live sculptural sound-track, a spiraling multivocal counterpart, a cornocupia of voices recounting a tale of mourning and technology, a forensic love-story of sorts in which the voices overlap, echo and pre-empt each other. The layers of voice-overs narrate a tale which draws on Rainer Maria Rilke’s text ‘Primal Sound’, where he reflects on the possibility of playing the coronal suture of a skull with a phonograph needle. The cinematic stage is animated by a voice-over carousel, a spinning tableau vivant, a canon of voices amplified by horns set on a rotating stage.

‘Sound Seam’ premiered at the AV festival in Newcastle in March 2010 as a complex filmic multi-channel sound installation in collaboration with Aleks Kolkowski, featuring 20 original phonograph and gramophone horns, a number of hearing trumpets, and an 8ft auxetophone horn on loan from the Discovery museum in Newcastle. The installation will tour to the Wellcome Collection in London in December 2010. The film was funded by the Wellcome Trust, and was produced during an artist residency at the Ear Institute, UCL.

Facebook invite: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=109832822380753&ref=ts#!/event.php?eid=118623424831585&ref=ts

Artist’s Series (supported by the London Consortium)

Organised by Parveen Adams

Architectural Association: 36 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3ES

Friday 12th February              ALFREDO JAAR                  6.30-8.00

Jaar explores the public’s desensitization to images and the difficulties art has in representing genocides, epidemics, and famines. He is concerned with different strategies of communication to make images visible. For the installation of Let there be light : the Rwanda project 1994-1998 (1998) Jaar placed each photo in a black box with a description of what couldn’t be seen, “as if I were describing the piture to someone who was blind.” Jaar has shown at over half a dozen Biennales and at Documenta in 1987 and in 2002. Fundación Telefonica Chile, Santiago (2006) was his first in his native country in twenty-five years. The Politics of the Image showed at South London Gallery in 2008. He has been a Guggenhein Fellow (1985) and a MacArthur Fellow (2000) and he won Spain’s Premio Extremadura la Creación.

Friday 5th March                    EYAL SIVAN                                   6.30-8.00

In an investigation of the way in which memory is used for political purposes Sivan works with the idea of an archive common to victims and perpetrators – in this case Palestinians and Israelis.  His films include Slaves of Memory (1991); The Specialist (1999) using footage from the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem; Route 181 – fragments of a journey in Palestine-Israel (2003); Jaffa, the Orange’s Clockwork (2009). His powerful work has drawn accusations of all kinds and even a court hearing. “In the Israeli case…What is surprising is to notice to what extent the analogy with the Nazi genocide existed already during the 1948 event—it was only three years after the end of the Second World War. It throws a completely new light on the myth … that memory can be a vaccine against future crimes.” He is a film-maker, a writer and a Research Professor at the University of East London.

Monday 8th March                 MARCEL ODENBACH       6.00-8.00

Odenbach is one of Germany’s leading video artists. He has produced a large body of work since the seventies. He will be speaking about and showing two works in their entirety, something necessitated by the way the work is conceived and structured in time. In Still Waters Crocodiles Lurk is a work on the Rwandan genocide of 1994 completed in 2004. The second Turning Circles is a newly completed work concerned with the relation of architecture and memory. It is a study of the Majdanek Mausoleum which was built on the site of the Lublin concentration camp in 1969. Odenbach has lived and worked in New York and Ghana and is now in Cologne.

Friday 12th March                  TOM McCARTHY                            6.30-8.00

McCarthy is a writer and artist. He won the 2008 Believer Book award for his novel Remainder. He has also published Men in Space and his third novel C will appear later this year. His International Necronautical Society is an on-going art project which surfaces in a number of forms. The discussion will focus on the relation between literature and film. Remainder is being made in to a film; McCarthy has written some script for Johan Grimonperz’ Double-Take; and C contains a big film-strand. Tom McCarthy lives and works in London.

Andrew Brighton and Teresa Gleadowe have put together a five week seminar series for London Consortium students on Curating Modern and Contemporary Art

These will be held on Wednesdays (10am -12pm) on the following dates:

13 January - The Objects of Curation: Art and its Markets /Curating Contemporary Art since the 1960s

20 January - Some current texts

27 January - Hanging Tate Modern

3 February - Artists, Galleries and Curators

10 February - Curating Contemporary Art

The series will focus on a number of issues, addressing questions such as: How do curators decide what to exhibit and collect? What considerations guide the collection and display of works of art in museums of modern and contemporary art? What factors shape the exhibition programmes of galleries of contemporary art? What are the considerations? Are they, for instance, aesthetic or historical or to be answered by audience research? And in practice what are the constraints and obligations at stake in a publicly funded museum or contemporary art gallery? How do visitors, artists, the art market and the media figure in curators’ discussions? Are some forms of art and visual practice beyond the museum curator’s consideration?

Click here for further information about speakers and where each session is being held. Enquiries can be directed to Steve Connor: s.connor@bbk.ac.uk.

Tue 29th September 6-8pm
Dan Graham Pavillion
Hayward Gallery

2: Examining the “experience of the visitor”

Stefano Collicelli Cagol and Seph Rodney shall be in conversation on the experience of the visitor. Cagol will determine how the New Wing, Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam) opened in 1954 as the apex of the director William Sandberg’s vision, enabled the meaning of the institution to be positioned in constant dialogue with the city. Sandberg wanted to allow contemporary art to affect and change the visitor in his/her everyday life. Cagol’s focus is upon how this may put into question the rhetoric of some assumptions on the white cube and advances other ways of re-thinking the potentialities existing in the experience of an art institution. Seph Rodney will look at the experience of the museum or gallery visit through the lens of migration. When addressing the visitor as a migrant, Rodney investigates how and why it may be useful to reconsider social capital in relation to contemporary cultural value systems. He questions what specific cultural goods signify today and how are they appropriated; as against the backdrop of a migrant it is not possible to take what Bourdieu refers to as ‘habitus’ and its social capital, for granted. Rodney shall discuss how particular experience compares between modern and contemporary art exhibition spaces.

For those wishing to attend click here for texts suggested as contextual material.

Admission free but booking is essential as places are limited, to book please email: louisa.adam@gmail.com
www.haywardconversations.tumblr.com

Steve Connor will be speaking at How Insect Are We?, the keynote symposium of Pestival, a festival celebrating insects in art, and the art of being an insect. The symposium takes place at Zoological Society of London, London Zoo, Regent’s Park at 7.00 on Thursday 3rd September. It is chaired by Roger Highfield, editor of New Scientist, with other contributions from Stanford University biologist Deborah Gordon, the world’s leading ant specialist, engineer and designer Natalie Jeremijenko and Simon Laughlin, Professor of Neurobiology in the Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge, an expert on the insect brain and vision. Tickets are £10, from http://pestival.org/symposium/

Consortium fellow Tom McCarthy is speaking in the symposium on Futurism and the Avant-Garde taking place at Tate Modern on 27th June 2009, to coincide with the recently-opened Futurism exhibition. His talk, entitled ‘These Panels Are Our Only Models for the Composition of Poetry, or, How Marinetti Taught Me How to Write’, asks what characteristics a genuinely Marinettian contemporary literature might have. Other contributors include Lutz Becker, Mary-Ann Caws, David Cottington, Alex Danchev and Matthew Gale.

Tate Modern Saturday 20 June 2009, 14.00-21.30

Saturday 20 June 2009, 14.00–21.30

14.00–17.00 symposium 18.00–21.30 dinner in the East Room

In short, this event brings together practitioners and theoreticians of the humanities, arts and sciences to extol or berate, to discuss, explore and explain shortness in all its spatial and temporal manifestations.

Shortness tackles topics ranging from aphorisms, txt msgs and short attention spans to nanophilology, sampling, ephemeral relationships, punch lines, short narratives and other short-lived entities and phenomena (insects and fashion).

The short conference is followed by a long dinner in Tate Modern’s East Room. Dinner guests will be entertained by short speeches and the whole event is supplemented by short films, performances and various interventions.

Conference speakers: DJ Spooky, Sadie Plant, Dan and Lia Perjovschi and Tom Shakespeare. Dinner speakers include Clare Wigfall and Steven Connor amongst others. The compère for the dinner will be Nicholas Parsons.

Organised by Tate Modern Public Programmes in collaboration with Irini Marinaki and Konstantinos Stefanis (London Consortium) and Ricarda Vidal (Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies)

In collaboration with The London Consortium and with additional support from LCACE
Tate Modern Starr Auditorium
£15 (£10 concessions), booking required
£50 (£45 concessions) for dinner and conference

For more information about the event and to book tickets, please visit Tate’s website http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/eventseducation/symposia/18189.htm
book online or call 020 7887 8888.

www.shortness.co.uk

The Thread will be on summer hiatus during the months of July-September.  Our third series will start in either October or November, subject to scheduling.  An updated schedule of shows will be posted to the website upon availability.  We appreciate your listening and look forward to another season of engaging discussion.

Call for Submissions - Shortness, Tate Modern, 20 June 2009

shortness - a very short conference and a very long dinner

Deadline: Friday 20 March 2009

This event will bring together practitioners and theoreticians of the humanities, arts and sciences to extol or berate, to discuss, explore and explain shortness in all its spatial and temporal manifestations.

Topics that Shortness aims to cover include: aphorisms, txt msgs, short attention spans, nanophilology, music samples, ephemeral relationships, short narratives, punch lines, orgasms and other short-lived entities and phenomena (insects and fashion).

The conference itself will only last a few hours and will be followed by a very long dinner. Guests will be entertained by short dinner speeches and the whole event will be supplemented by short films and various interventions.

This call invites submissions for presentations or performances of up to 7 minutes to take place during the long dinner. Please note that we cannot cover any expenses incurred nor can we accommodate installations.Speakers include DJ Spooky, Sadie Plant, Tom Shakespeare, Clare Wigfall and Steven Connor amongst others. The Compère for the dinner will be Nicholas Parsons.

Please send an abstract of no more than 200 words to the organisers and include a short bio of no more than 100 words.

Contact:

short.at.tate@googlemail.com

Shortness is organised by Irini Marinaki, Konstantinos Stefanis, Ricarda Vidal and Tate Modern Public Programmes in collaboration with The London Consortium and the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, School of Advanced Study (University of London).

ARCHITECTURAL ASSOCIATION

Artist’s Series (supported by the London Consortium)

Organised by Parveen Adams

Friday 27th February

Jane and Louise Wilson

have worked together for the last twenty years. Their multi-part video installations are notable for their handling of the viewer’s relation to the spaces as the artists have experienced them - Stasi City (1997), Gamma (1999), Erehwon (2000) among many others. Their most recent work, Unfolding the Aryan Papers (2009) is currently at the British Film Institute’s Southbank Gallery. It is based on unmade Kubrick film concerning a wartime story of a Jewish woman. The actress who was to have played the lead herself figures large in the Wilsons’ film which also includes Kubrick’s wardrobe stills and wartime newsreel images - a complex and stunning work.

Friday 6th March

Melik Ohanian

is a French-Armenian artist working in Paris. In 2006 he showed in South London Gallery - Invisible Film (2005) along with Seven Minutes Before. The latter is an experiment with narrative structure which involves seven screens with seven films taken across two kilometres of a French valley floor which culminate in a single dramatic explosion. In the same year the Institut d’Art Contemporain put their entire space at his disposal. His work has been described as ‘among the most intriguing forms of creative work to be seen at the present day’ (J-L Maubant). Among many projects this year is a group show entitled The Times of a Place in Spain.

Friday 13th March

Matt Collishaw

Haunch of Venison show (2008) - a marvel - Böcklin’s Island of the Dead animated by light changes during the course of a day and projected onto a two-way mirror with complex effects - the viewer held as much by the sheer beauty of the piece as the need to work out how it worked. Shooting Stars projected images of children (from old and new photographs) onto the walls of a huge room in a series of fleeting flashes that might appear anywhere. What were we seeing and why were we seeing it this way? Throbbing Gristle, a large mesmerising sculpture with human and mythological figures, animals and birds constructed like a merry-go-round that rotated with accompanying strobe lighting which conjured up a fearful yet compulsive scene of Chapmanesque excess.

Friday 20th March

Mary Kelly

has shown her work round the world and it is included in major collections. Working in London in the 1970s she incorporated her feminist concerns in the landmark five-part Post-Partum Document. This was followed by a complete showing of the four-part Interim at the New Museum in New York in 1990. She then developed a powerful technique utilising the lint screen of a clothes-dryer by which she produced curved grey mini pads of lint. She has used these to great effect in a series of works in the nineties. She will speak about her recent work including her part in Documenta 2007.

All sessions are 6.30-8.00 at the AA, 34-36 Bedford Square, WC1

Mark Cousins 5.00 lectures Distructure of Cities - on the above dates 

Fortnightly research seminars series presented by David Bennett:

Thursdays, 12.00-2.00 p.m., on 30 Oct., 13 Nov., 27 Nov. and 11 Dec., 2008.

Location: Tillotson Room, 30 Russell Square

What is ‘libidinal economy’ and how has it informed ideas about subjectivity, desire, commerce and subversion since the rise of consumer culture in the eighteenth century? These four research seminars will investigate a tradition of thinking sexuality through the trope of economy which figures desire or libido as something quantifiable that may be spent, saved, squandered or profitably invested. Since ‘to spend’ became the standard vernacular term for orgasm in the late seventeenth century, the metaphoric commerce/intercourse between the languages of money and sex has been richly promiscuous, producing such influential bodies of theory as Freudianism’s economic model of the psyche. These seminars will examine how libidinal economy has operated in discourses as disparate as Victorian pornography and self-help manuals, psychoanalysis, radical political philosophy, market research and advertising. They will consider how the ‘homo oeconomicus’ model of the citizen-subject-on which both classical political economy and neo-classical economics are predicated-has shaped explanations of sexual desire, deviancy and pleasure, and how changing accounts of the costs and benefits of expending libido have interacted with the producer and consumer ethics in the transition from liberal capitalism to late consumer culture.Each seminar (talk + discussion) will focus on a different aspect of the sex-money nexus that libidinal economists have undertaken to interpret, regulate or exploit.

Click here for full information: Libidinal Economy.

The fourth annual Betting on Shorts short film competition, organised by Consortium students Ricarda Vidal, Irini Marinaki and Konstantinos Stefanis, came to a great climax on Friday 21st November 2008 at the ICA. The audience watched a programme of 17 wonderful short films on the theme of ‘Money, Money, Money’, which were simultaneously being seen in 12 other European cities - Athens, Barcelona, Bucharest, Istanbul, Maribor, Naples, Novi Sad, Paris, Poznan, Stockholm, Thessaloniki and Wiesbaden. The London jury chose as its winner Paul Cotter’s Last Hand Standing, finding it ‘perfectly conceived and executed, in such a way as to pack a full-length feature into 7 minutes’ and calling it ‘a film fable that educated its viewer out of cynicism into joy’. The overall winner across Europe was Mischa Leinkauf and Matthias Wermke’s Trotzdem Danke. Watch trailers from all the films in this year’s competition on the Betting on Shorts website.

Philosophy of the Overlooked - String

ICA, 7 October 2008

The latest in a London Consortium/ICA series exploring the structures of lived experience and modes of human existence. What can be learned from other people’s experience of things we rarely think about? The seventh event in the series focuses on string: tying, knotting, measuring, adorning, playing. What are the origins of the modest string? Does an illlusionist use string the same way a musician does? Does a physicist think of string in similar terms to an artist?

Speakers: Cornelia Parker, visual artist; Mark Messenger, head of strings at the Royal Academy of Music; David S Berman, reader in theoretical physics at Queen Mary University. Chair: Martine Rouleau, London Consortium.

There will be a demonstration by John van der Put, award-winning contemporary magician and co-founder of standnotamazed theatre company.

£10 / £9 Concessions / £8 ICA Members.
Nash Room, ICA, 7.00 pm

London Consortium director Steve Connor and student Lee Scrivner will be contributing lectures to Resonance FM’s Free University of the Airwaves which runs from 18-22 August 2008. Steve Connor’s ‘Taking to the Air’ will be broadcast on 104.4FM or online at on Monday 18 August at 10.00 and 19.00. Lee Scrivner’s ‘Aphorism’ will be broadcast at 12 noon on Friday 22 August.

Thursday 15th May, 7pm, ICA (Nash Room)

A series exploring the structures of lived experience and modes of human existence.

What can be learned from other people’s experience of things we rarely think about? The sixth event in the series focuses on the act of collecting: seeking, locating, acquiring, organising, cataloguing, displaying, storing, and maintaining whatever items are of interest to the individual. Why do certain people collect? What do they collect? How do they go about amassing a number of items around a specific interest? Is the search for specific items more rewarding than actual possession? Can a collection ever be complete? Why make a collection publicly accessible - or why keep it private?

Speakers: Anita Zabludowicz, art collector and founder of Project Space 176; John Sellars, senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of the West of England and a fellow of The London Consortium; Mike Presdee, Senior Lecturer in Criminology, University of Kent. Chair: Martine Rouleau, The London Consortium.

The talk will begin with a slideshow of personal collections. If you are attending the talk and would like your collection to be included (anonymously), please email a photograph or image of the collection to jennifert@ica.org.uk.

In association with the London Consortium.

£10 / £9 Concessions / £8 ICA Members.

Full details and booking information are available on the ICA website

ARCHITECTURAL ASSOCIATION
Artist’s Series (supported by the London Consortium)

Organised by Parveen Adams

Friday 8th February JUDITH BARRY

Judith Barry’s work is interdisciplinary and she won the Friedrich Kiesler Prize for Architecture and the Arts in 2000. She was awarded best pavilion at the 8th annual Cairo Biennial and has been exhibited internationally at biennials in Venice, São Paulo, Nagoya, Cairo, Australia, and U.S., among others.

Friday 15th February STAN DOUGLAS

Stan Douglas ranks among the most important of contemporary artists. He has participated in Documenta and in the Venice Biennale many times. His recent exhibition in Stuttgart showed the principal works of the last twenty years. He is concerned with the history of places - Potsdam, Vancouver, Cuba, Detroit - which are reflected along various literary, filmic or musical references. His recent work has engaged with the work of Samuel Beckett.

Friday 29th February WALID RAAD (Atlas Group)

Walid Raad works with film. video, photography and literary essays to investigate the contemporary history of war in his native Lebanon. He is widely known for The Atlas Group project. Raad uses film, video, and photography as documents of physical and psychological violence. He teaches at Cooper Union in New York.

Friday 7th March MICHAEL LANDY

Michael Landy is the man who destroyed everything he possessed in what a critic described as ‘an act of self-abrogation worthy of the great hermit of Cordoba’. He is also the man who built a life-size replica of his parents’ house - a pebble-dashed suburban semi-detached in Essex – and placed it in the Duveen gallery. He is currently working on a project around Jean Tinguely’s machine, destined for auto-destruction.

All sessions are 6.30-8.00 at the AA, 34-36 Bedford Square, WC1

Mark Cousins’ 5.00 lectures on Nothing – 1st February and on the above dates

The Wheatsheaf lecture series ‘Organics’, organised by Matthew Wraith and Ben Dawson will be continuing this term. The lectures in their various ways investigate contemporary conceptions within the biological sciences of what an organism is, does, and can become and how these have inflected the ancient use of the notion of the organic as a structuing metaphor or aspirational model for society, culture and the built environment as a whole. These will both be in the Wheatsheaf pub 25 Rathbone place W1T 1DG:

Wednesday 23rd January, 7pm
Neil Leach - The Organic in Contemporary Architectural Design

Neil Leach is an architect and theorist. He is teaching now at Brighton University and has been closely involved with both the AA and the London Consortium in the past. His books include The anaesthetics of Architecture, Camouflage and most recently Forget Heidegger. His talk at the Wheatsheaf will be on how concepts central to biology like ‘morphogenesis’ and ‘emergence’, together with the biologically informed writings of theorists like Gilles Deleuze and Manuel DeLanda have colonised architectural theory and prized the idea of the organic away from its traditional assocations with the Organic Movement in Twentieth Century Architecture.

Tuesday 19th February, 7pm
John Marks - Symbiosis and virtulisation - The Mind of Society

John Marks is Associate Professor of French Studies at the University of Nottingham and a member of the Science, Technology and Cultures research group. His work focuses on the possible ways in which the human body and brain might be transformed, mediated theoretically through a reading of French thinkers such as Foucault and Deleuze, along with a more recent interest in the cultural and intellectual impact of molecular biology as a discipline.

His talk will be on the French biologist, geologist, and jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s notion of the noosphere, focusing on some of the ways in which this idea has re-appeared in recent French writing on the Internet, cyberspace, cybernetics and biology.

Paul Sheehan ‘Animals on Film: Godard, Bresson, Herzog and the “Politics of ‘Pure Seeing” ‘

ICA Cinema 2

Friday 18 January 2.00 pm

Animals are ‘anti-cinema’, given the irreducible, unmediated alterity they bring to the image. In posing a permanent challenge to the formal and financial controls exerted by the medium, animals reveal the otherness of the non-manipulable. In this paper, I explore some early episodes of animals on film, to outline the link between the two (animals and film), and how deep it runs. Then I examine the metaphysics of identity as the implicit screen logic that separates human actors from animal ‘performers’, and consider attempts to disrupt or bypass that logic in Jean-Luc Godard and Robert Bresson. And thirdly, I outline Werner Herzog’s daring and extraordinarily varied use of animals, and show how it might be seen to exemplify a politics of animal being, one that both reveals and puts into question the cardinal tenets of a medium founded on the metaphysical privileging of human beings over animals.

Paul Sheehan is a Senior Lecturer at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. He is the author of Modernism, Narrative and Humanism (2002) and the editor of Becoming Human: New Perspectives on the Inhuman Condition. Most recently, he has contributed chapters to The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism, The Matrix Trilogy: Cyberpunk Reloaded, and Beckett after Beckett. His current project is a historical poetics of transgression in literature and film, entitled Violence and Aesthetics: From Dorian Gray to Hannibal Lecter.

To mark the ICA’s 60th anniversary, a series of talks will look back at the dominant curatorial approaches of the ICA’s history, questioning their continued relevance today and looking at the possibility of their revival. The series takes key exhibitions and themes from the ICA’s past as the starting point for discussion at each talk, which will take place over the coming months. Transcripts from the talks will form the basis of a publication to be released at the end of the series.

The first two talks have now been annouced:

Political manifesto as curatorial project
Tuesday 27th November, 7pm, ICA

The ICA played host to the politically controversial Unknown Political Prisoner exhibition in 1953, offered solidarity in the early 60s to LA artists protesting against Vietnam, and most recently invited artists’ proposals for a Memorial to the Iraq War (2007). In a time which is often described as apathetic, but which has also seen some of the biggest anti-war demonstrations ever, should contemporary politics be the domain of the curator?

Speakers include: artist Liam Gillick, contributor to Memorial to the Iraq War; Mark Nash, head of curating contemporary art, Royal College of Art, and co-curator Documenta 11 (2002); Sophie Hope, co-founder B+B, co-curator, Real Estate for London in Six Easy Steps (2005); Will Bradley, co-curator, Forms of Resistance: Artists and the desire for social change from 1871 to the present, Van Abbemuseum; Polish-born, London-based artist Marysia Lewandowska, who has collaborated with Neil Cummings since 1995, and whose recent Enthusiasm project explored, through amateur films made by Polish factory workers under socialism, the potential of working outside ‘official’ culture. The discussion will be chaired by Andrew Brighton, writer, contributing editor to Critical Quarterly and painter.

The Artist-curator: curators as artists and artists as curators
Tuesday 11th December, 7pm, ICA

The postwar era fundamentally altered the way in which the public interacted with art. One of the most visible changes was the emergence of the artist from studio to exhibition space. Key exhibitions of the late 50s, such as This is Tomorrow (Whitechapel, 1956) and Parallel of Life and Art (ICA, 1953) saw artists and architects collaborating on exhibition stands and curatorial models. This fluid positioning has resulted in some of the most interesting exhibitions in the contemporary British art scene, and recently, due to pressures both creative and economic, the rise in the artist-run space. Many questions remain unanswered: is there a fundamental difference of position between artist and curator? Do we need curators at all? Should the curator be considered an artist?

Speakers include: Mark Sladen, ICA director of exhibitions; Jeremy Millar, artist and AHRC Research Fellow in the Creative and Performing Arts at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, University of Oxford, and curator of The Institute of Cultural Anxiety - Works from the Collection’ at the ICA in 1994; Gavin Wade, Director of Eastside Projects, Birmingham; Siobhan Wootton, co-director and curator of Alma Enterprises, an artist/curator run space on Vyner Street; Dr. Cameron Cartiere, Director of Doctoral Research for the Faculty of Lifelong Learning at Birkbeck College, and MA course director for the department of Arts Policy & Management.

For further details about both of these talks, and to book tickets, go to the ICA’s website.

The talks have been developed by London Consortium student Ben Cranfield and the ICA’s Talks Department, and are organised in association with the London Consortium.