How can cultural information from one part of the world be shared with another? How is this knowledge relayed through writing or performance? And what part does the traveller play in the telling?

This reflection on Lift’s curatorial approach and its decision to devolve programming power to a network of international and national associates is chaired by Ruth Holdsworth, currently working with University of Bristol and Arnolfini on curating risk. The discussion focuses on how individuals speak for and on behalf of the collective. Speakers include Lift Director Angharad Wynne-Jones, Lift International Associates Lemi Ponifasio (New Zealand) and Roma Patel (UK), and Paolo Favero (University College, London), a social anthropologist interested in tourism and cultural mediation.

Please note: this free event requires a ticket.

This two and a half day conference is intended to be inter-disciplinary and inter-practice, bringing policy makers and practitioners to the table in order to enable an exchange between those designing and implementing post-crisis interventions and those researching these situations. Aside from paper presentations the conference will include: a photography exhibition, documentary evening and project presentations. The inaugural lecture will be given by Paddy Ashdown on the evening of 25 June.

£20 / £10 Concessions.

When Soft Machine played with the Boyles in 1969, when The Resplendent Kaleidoscope offered “celebration of faith dedicated to the Clear Light”, when the ICA celebrated a Mid Summer High, was the intellectual field of the curator in danger of giving way to drugs and flashing lights? Or was the transcendent space of artistic experience being fully realised?

Speakers: Neil Mulholland, director of The Centre for Visual and Cultural Studies at Edinburgh College of Art; Christoph Grunenberg, director of Tate Liverpool; Tot Taylor, director, Riflemaker gallery; artists Neil Bromwich and Zoë Walker; artist Peter Jones of Colourscape. Chair: Barry Curtis, emeritus professor of visual culture, Middlesex University.

In association with the London Consortium.

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

This one-day symposium considers the status of the artist book. Commentators have foreseen a radical change in both the form of this enduring cultural object and the way we interact with it. New technology always questions the relevance and significance of traditional forms.

The Liquid Page invites academics and artists to explore the ways in which both the book and the act of reading are being reshaped, expanded and coaxed into new directions and hybrid forms.

£35 (£25 concessions), booking required.

We tend to think of learning and skills as mental or intangible acquisitions, an idea that is backed up by the modern philosophical tradition. How might we conceive of knowledge as a bodily phenomenon, and what are the social and political implications of doing so? Richard Sennett, whose recent book The Craftsman reflects on these questions, will be in conversation with philosopher, writer and broadcaster Jonathan Rée.

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

The Olympic Artist Forum is an information and events platform for artists and creative practitioners engaging with the Olympics and the changing cultural landscape of London. Using the ‘Pecha Kucha’ 20 slides 20 seconds approach, this Olympic Artist Forum event features artist, Richard Dedemonici, heads the evening with his ‘Culturail’ project before introducing:

Time Jeeves
Grunts for the Arts. www.gruntsforthearts.com
Thomas Pausz
Revisiting the Community Shed. www.pausz.org / www.lifeisland.org
Ana Mendez de Andes
I Love the Olympic Future
Immortal Spirits and Foodstuffs Ltd.

Consortium faculty-member, Patrick Wright, has written four 15 minute talks for ‘The Essay’ slot on BBC Radio 3. They will be broadcast at 23.00 on consecutive evenings.

1. ‘A Museum of Embryos’: The Great Exhibition and London’s Chinese Junk.

2. Limehouse Chinatown: The Opium Wars Brought Home.

3. ‘Dumb-Walking-Man’: Chiang Yee becomes The Silent Traveller.

4. ‘China Stands Up’: From Maoist Peasant to English Leveller.

The history of philosophy reveals a recurring obsession with death. How might the lives and deaths of philosophers alter how we conceive of philosophy as a practice? Simon Critchley, author of The Book of Dead Philosophers, will be in conversation with Tom McCarthy, author of Remainder and general secretary of the International Necronautical Society.

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

The lawfulness that is law’s defining feature and that distinguishes a lawful condition from a state of nature is synonymous with welcome, receptiveness, and hospitality to the stranger as other. Yet, this hospitality is also necessarily conditional because of the territorial limits of state sovereignty and jurisdiction. Today, the various emergent sovereignties and legal regimes beyond the nation-state that have developed after the Second World War and especially after the end of the Cold War such as transnational human rights instruments, and the international civil society of NGOs present themselves as progressive attempts at eroding the conditionality of law’s hospitality to the stranger. The equation of transnational legal regimes with unconditional hospitality is problematic because it does not sufficiently account for the ways in which the transnational connections formed by capitalist globalization necessarily exclude certain categories of foreigners and strangers even as it simultaneously incorporates them into the circuits of global capitalist accumulation out of an equal necessity. This paper explores the role of law in the interminable processes of incorporation/exclusion of global capitalism in order to draw out some of their general theoretical implications for understanding the aporetic character of law’s hospitality towards the stranger. It begins with a reading of Kant’s account of cosmopolitan right as a philosophical template for the understanding of law as universal hospitality before examining two different cases of human rights abuse in the incorporation/exclusion of strangers in high growth East and Southeast Asia-the place of foreign female domestic workers in Singapore, and the treatment of sex workers from Mainland China in Hong Kong.

Attendance is free.

Curating Fictions invites artists, curators and writers to present a piece of fiction that has had a theoretical or practical influence on their work. Marti Manen, independent curator and Cultural Manager, Instituto Cervantes, Stockholm talks about David Lynch’s film Mulholland Drive in relation to Lynch’s non-narrative development and Manen’s own curating practice.

£7/5 concessions and Whitechapel Members.