‘My work is all about the potential of materials ­– even when it looks like they’ve lost all possibilities.’ In the course of making her work, Cornelia Parker has shot at objects, thrown them from cliffs, blown them up and rolled over them with a steam roller. Her sculptural processes have been described as ‘mimicking cartoon deaths’. Parker’s work is both dramatic and delicate, powerful and intricate – out of destruction she creates tragedy and beauty. Cornelia Parker is interviewed by writer and curator Lisa LeFeuvre.

£8 (£6 concessions), booking recommended

To coincide with his current exhibition at Haunch of Venison Gallery renowned South African photographer David Goldblatt discusses his work with curator and art historian Tamar Garb. Born in Randfontein in 1930, Goldblatt has been documenting the changing political landscape of South Africa for over five decades.

8 (£6 concessions), booking required

Cranach went as far as Matisse towards confusing, or identifying, beauty with sexiness, and perhaps further towards using paint’s affinity with flesh to make the connection. Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, demonstrates how Cranach, like Kant, associated beauty with nature – foliage, water and fruit – but also with girls.

£14 /£6 Concessions. Includes lecture & a drink.

Is it useful to define an exhibition by its nationality? Can cultural distance and proximity both be advantages in the curatorial process? A panel discussion on how curators translate artists work.

£5.00 / £3.50 concsessions.

A group of esteemed thinkers discuss the history and future of radical thought at this centrepiece event in the SouthBank literature series All Power to the Imagination. To what extent have the events of 1968 affected the world today? The panellists discuss to what extent radical thinkers reshape society in the future, in a period when unequal wealth, mass migration and environmental concern threaten to destabilise global society. The event is chaired by Patrick Wright, author of Iron Curtain: From Stage to Cold War.

£12, concessions £6.

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.

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

This symposium examines Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky’s films in the context of contemporary art, exploring the impact of the director’s work on artists working across a range of mediums. Leading artists and writers examine Tarkovsky’s legacy in Russia and the West, and discuss the relationship between film and artistic expression. This landmark event will provide a fascinating insight into the mind of this legendary artist.

£18 (£15 concessions), booking recommended. Price includes refreshments.

Stephen Johnstone, Lecturer in Fine Art, Goldsmiths and Editor of ‘The Everyday’, the latest edition in the Whitechapel’s Documents of Contemporary Art series, considers the range of contemporary art engaged with the everyday, as well as its antecedents in Dada and Surrealism, Pop, Situationism and Fluxus.

Art’s turn to the ordinary is symptomatic of a desire to address things in the world, rather than the history and institutions of art, showing a recognition of ordinary dignity or the accidentally miraculous; an engagement with a new kind of anthropology; an immersion in the pleasures of popular culture; or a meditation on what happens, when nothing happens. The celebration of the everyday has oppositional and dissident overtones, offering a voice to the silenced and proposing possibilities for change.

Free. Booking essential.

Mignon Nixon, Associate Dean, Courtauld Institute of Art, talks about art and transference. Taking the dynamic of transference in the analytic situation, as a logic through which to reflect upon the dynamics of the making and reception of art in recent times, she explores ways in which art invokes, provokes, and analyses transferences.

Concentrating on recent projects that take transference as a structural dynamic, Nixon offers some reflections on the limits and possibilities for art and for critical writing on art of one of psychoanalytic theory’s “big ideas.”

£8/6 concessions and Whitechapel Members