ICA founding president Herbert Read described the ICA at its inception as an “adult play centre”. This was a serious declaration: Read believed that “aggression is kept in check via sublimation - namely through play.” Jasia Reichardt’s 1969 exhibition Play Orbit was a literal articulation of Read’s commitment to play featuring toys and games as works to be considered as art, however, within the concept of ‘play’ arguably lies an assumption of a more direct act of participation.

In 1965 Mark Boyle and Joan Hills staged an exhibition/happening, Oh What a Lovely Whore. The title was not only irreverent, but also alluded to the violence which Boyle and Hill felt was generally inflicted upon a passive, viewing public. So the artists informed the audience that if they wanted a happening they would have to do it themselves. In This Success/This Failure (ICA 2007), Tino Sehgal presented no objects, but instead a group of playing children. Upon entering the ICA’s lower gallery one of the children would declare to the visitor that the exhibition was titled either This Success or This Failure, after which the visitor could opt to join in the game.

Were Boyle and Hill right, is the audience a victim in its passivity? Or are strategies of ‘involvement’ off-putting and even unwanted? Is play a vital dimension for engagement or a banal distraction from the serious business of contemporary exhibition making?

Speakers: Sebastian Boyle, Boyle Family; Jessica Morgan, curator of contemporary art, Tate Modern; Louise Hojer, art theorist and curator; Dr Ricarda Vidal, cultural critic and short film curator. Chair: Marko Daniel, curator of public programmes, Tate Modern.

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

‘Then you see it, now you don’t': Giotto’s Magic Box
Laura Jacobus, Lecturer in History of Medieval and Renaissance Art, HAFVM

Pieces of Conversation: Narrative in Eighteenth-Century Portraiture
Kate Retford, Lecturer in History of Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Art, HAFVM

Divided Interests: Split Screen Aesthetics in ‘24′
Mike Allen, Lecturer in History of Film, Television and Electronic Media, HAFVM

Narrative Techniques in Adventure Comic Strips
Eric Fernie, Director Emeritus and Fellow, Courtauld Institute

Free entry (contact a.stockbridge@bbk.ac.uk to book a place).

If you could live without sleep, would you? Drugs that enable you to stay awake 24 hours a day have been produced, but would you want them? Should they be made available? What would be the impact on your body, your relationships and your life? Join a panel of outspoken speakers to debate whether drugs are the answer to 21st-centruy life.

Free entry.

Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Her most recent book, Giving an Account of Oneself, appeared with Fordham University Press (2005) and considers the partial opacity of the subject, and the relation between critique and ethical reflection. She is currently working on essays pertaining to Jewish Philosophy, focusing on pre-Zionist criticisms of state violence. She continues to write on cultural and literary theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis, feminism, and sexual politics.

Free entry.

This lecture by the University of St Andrew’s Steve Reicher critically addresses Hannah Arendt’s hypothesis on the banality of evil arguing that those who commit extreme acts are not aware of the consequences of their actions: rather, they celebrate these consequences as moral.

Free entry.

Ghosts by Nick Broomfield [60mins]
Coolie labour was for centuries the dirty little non-secret of the British Empire, and a few years ago, a calamity here showed that, in 21st-century Britain, it is alive and well. In February 2004, 23 illegal Chinese immigrants were drowned in Morecambe Bay, trapped by the terrifyingly fast incoming tide while picking cockles. Three Chinese gangmasters were imprisoned, but none of the English client-base was ever held to account. The 58 Chinese immigrants found dead in a lorry in Dover three years earlier was horrifying enough, but this was a grotesque mass death nurtured well within our national boundaries, cultivated by UK market forces in the heart of picturesque seaside England.

Night and Fog [Nuit et Brouillard] by Alain Resnais [30mins]
Filmmaker Alain Resnais takes up the challenge to make this small chapter in the history of human misery, The Holocaust, into a powerful reminder that we must take responsibility for our actions. Whether you call it a documentary, or a cinematic essay, or perhaps even as Truffaut named it, the greatest film ever made, Night and Fog endures, a needle to sting our psyches numbed by war. This is the most powerful sort of film, the kind that is too unbearably intense to watch, yet is too riveting to
turn away.

How has the presence of Muslim Europeans, especially after September 11 exacerbated the deep-seated Orientalist anxieties in Europe? This Orientalist unease with Islam goes hand in hand with the interest in bringing to fore the so-called distinctive European characteristics and thereby distinguishing the Europeanness of Europe. Speaker, Meyda Yegenoglu, traces how orientalism refigures in the discourse of European cultural identity by way of the expulsion of Islam from what is deemed to be the proper identity of Europe. She will examine the role of the discourse of “cultural difference” in this exclusion, which is in fact “a secularized version of a religious discourse that now is fundamental in the refashioning of European identity.”

Meyda Yegenoglu is Professor of Sociology at the Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey.

Free entry.

What is ideology? When we are dealing with a problem which is undoubtedly a real one, its ideological designation-perception introduces an invisible mystification. Say, tolerance designates a real problem – how can one be for intolerance towards foreigners, for antifeminism, for homophobia? But what should be against is the (today’s automatic) perception of racism as a problem of tolerance: why are so many problems today perceived as problems of intolerance, rather than as problems of inequality, exploitation, or injustice? Why is the proposed remedy tolerance, rather than emancipation, political struggle, even armed struggle? Such mystification is not a matter of sophisticated argumentation: it is part of our spontaneous everyday understanding of ideology – like the journalists who report embedded with the US forces in Iraq, we are all embedded in ideology. Since one of the privileged mechanisms which (re)produce this everyday ideology is cinema, the course will focus on the analysis of today’s cinema – not only Hollywood and not only popular cinema: from 300 to The Hero, from Da Vinci Code to Perfume, from The Fall of Berlin to Sacrifice, from United 93 to World Trade Center, from Taxi Driver to The Fugitive – The class will have 5 sessions: four lectures and a general debate.

1. The basic Hollywood matrix: creating a couple
2. Violence as ideology
3. Subtraction in cinema
4. An excursion into opera: Wagner and ideology

Literature:
Slavoj Zizek: IN DEFENSE OF THE LOST CAUSES, Verso Books 2008
Jacques Lacan: THE OTHER SIDE OF PSYCHOANALYSIS (SEMINAR XVIII), Norton 2006

£15 - Birkbeck Staff/Student and all Students from other institutions

Built around the idea of the taxonomy – the classification – of the visible, Graziani’s photographic project documents collections and institutions from the sphere of the natural sciences that are historically entwined with colonial practices and historical ways of observation. The project depicts specific aspects of botanical collections, herbariums and naturalistic dioramas.

Stefano Graziani: This work is built around the idea of the taxonomy as the structural quality of photography since its origin. The idea of series, sequences and repetition, present in the debate and in the development of contemporary photography since the 1970s, is one of the fundamental aspects running through this project. I asked myself whether it would be possible to refer to a thought eluding the verisimilitude of photography.

Free entry.

Novelist AS Byatt and scientist Steven Rose discuss the interplay of memory and writing. How does what we remember and what we forget find its way into the novel or the biography? How does the chemistry of the brain shape the stories we tell? To mark the publication of Memory: An Anthology, co-editor AS Byatt and Steven Rose, author of The 21st Century Brain, explore these themes with chair John Carey.

£10, concessions £5.