Betting on Shorts presents animations, narrative, documentaries, artist films from around the world, in response to our theme Money Money Money.

21 November 2008 ICA, Cinema 1, The Mall, SW1Y 5AH, 6.30pm

Betting on Shorts (BoSs): More than a Eurovision of Shortfilm is an international short film contest with simultaneous screenings in 13 cities all over Europe. In its fourth year at the ICA, BoSs presents this year’s programme of short films on the theme Money Money Money.

It will be screened simultaneously at the ICA in London and in Athens, Barcelona, Bucharest, Istanbul, Maribor, Naples, Novi Sad, Paris, Poznan, Thessaloniki, Stockholm and Wiesbaden.

The films are judged in each venue by a local jury and the overall favourite is awarded a prize. After the screening we’ll convene in the ICA bar and set up an audiolink to all participating venues to find out which film has won in which city.The film that has won in most is awarded fame, glory and £500 in cash!

Before the show begins the audience will be asked to bet on who will be the grand winner. Check out clips of the films in the ICA bar or on the Betting on Shorts website from 15 November.

Bet on the right film and win an ICA Membership or cinema tickets. Audience winners will be announced in the bar as soon as all the juries’ decisions are in. Join us for music and celebrations in the bar from 8pm till late.

Sponsored by The London Consortium, Minimatik, Nextnode.net and Plaisio.

Curated by Ricarda Vidal, Irini Marinaki and Konstantinos Stefanis.www.bettingonshorts.comThe London Jury includes: Steven Connor (London Consortium), Philip Ilson (London Short Film Festival), Kathy Noble (Tate Modern), Tejinder Jouhal (ICA), Caren Willig (BFI). Tickets: £8 / £7 Concessions / £6 ICA Members. Book here.

Ferran Adria has been described as the best chef on the planet, and his restaurant, elBulli, was voted the World’s Best Restaurant for the fourth time this year. It receives over two million requests for 8,000 places each year. To mark the publication of A Day at elBulli, published by Phaidon Press this autumn, Ferran Adria is joined by Observer food writer and restaurant critic Jay Rayner to discuss his inspiration, philosophy and the extraordinary techniques which lie behind his spectacular creations. Questions from the audience follow.

£12 (limited concessions available)

The Pulitzer Prize-winning creator of Maus returns to autobiography in his latest graphic novel, combining multiple reflections on how comics have warped his life with a facsimile reprint of Breakdowns, his rare collection of conceptual strips from the 1970s which anticipated the medium’s most progressive innovators today. Art Spiegelman will be talking to Posy Simmonds.

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

David Harvey, American geographer and author of seminal book The Condition of Postmodernity, has written the introduction to a brand new edition of The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels. On a rare visit to the UK, he comes to the ICA to talk about the contemporary relevance of the manifesto, how it might inspire a new generation of political activists and how it might be rewritten for contemporary times. Harvey will be in conversation with Frank Furedi, professor of sociology at the University of Kent and author of Invitation to Terror.

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

In The Marriage of Reason and Squalor, Jake Chapman slashes the romantic novel down to bare bone and constructs his own disfigured version from the slaughtered remains. At this exclusive event, Dinos Chapman talks to his brother Jake about this debut work of fiction.

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

Psychoanalysis has been used to discuss visual pleasure and the significance of the gaze in the apprehension of art. Freud suggested that visual pleasure is also related to shame, the complex, universal and painful affect that connects subjects to social relations. The recent publication Shame and Sexuality: Psychoanalysis and Visual Culture brings the issue of shame into sharp focus by using psychoanalysis as a method for the analysis of visual culture. The authors will present their topics in relation to Tate’s current exhibitions and displays and launch the book as a contribution to visual culture debates.

This event is chaired by Tamar Garb (University College London), panellists Griselda Pollock (University of Leeds), Malcolm Pines (psychoanalyst), Claire Pajaczkowska (Middlessex University), Amna Malik (Slade School of Fine Art) and Ivan Ward (Freud Museum) will present a number of perspectives on shame, sexuality, the gaze and the image today.

In collaboration with the Royal College of Art and the Freud Museum

£10 (£8 concessions), booking required

Screening Andy Warhol’s film Kiss as a historical backdrop, this event looks at kissing, both as physical act and metaphor, as a gesture of exchange or desire, as hidden by the very anatomy of faces and bodies, as playing with the invisible aspects of love. Speakers: artists Melanie Manchot and Wiebke Leister, who will both be presenting new work, writer and curator Lisa Le Feuvre and film historian A.L. Rees.

Followed by a drinks reception.

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

As a writer, critic and curator Gilane Tawadros has researched and worked with ideas of ‘difference’ in multiple contexts, across varying cultural and geographic sites. In this lecture, the second in the series of The Status of Difference, Gilane will offer critical insight into the shifting nature of ‘difference’ by drawing on her ongoing engagement with artistic and curatorial practices in the UK, Europe and Southern hemisphere. Gilane Tawadros is an international curator and writer. She is Chair of the International Foundation Manifesta, formerly the founding Director of the Institute of International Visual Arts (inIVA) and joint Chief Executive of Rivington Place in London. She has written extensively on contemporary art, most recently she edited Changing States: Contemporary Art and Ideas in an Era of Globalisation. She has curated numerous exhibitions including Fault Lines: Contemporary African Art and Shifting Landscapes, for the fiftieth Venice Biennale.

£7 (£5 concessions), booking recommended

Price includes drinks afterwards

At the beginning of the new century the notions of Empire and imperialism had all but disappeared from the lexicon of western humanities. Washington’s ‘war on terror’ and the accompanying invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, coupled with the publishing sensation that was Hardt and Negri’s Empire suddenly reversed this neglect. Questions of political hierarchy, military competition and socio-economic domination which had apparently disappeared from the world stage with the end of the Cold War have returned with a vengeance. In recent years, the most innovative scholarship and trenchant political interventions in the humanities have arguably emerged from engagements with such questions, offering a fresh range of concepts, analyses and interpretations on the place of Empire and imperialism in our world today.

This BIH roundtable aims to take stock and contribute to the conceptualisation of contemporary Empire and imperialism. An international panel of renowned scholars of Empire will debate the character of this phenomenon from various disciplinary and political angles. Among the questions to be addressed are: what is the nature of American empire? How have space, identity and power been re-articulated since the end of the Cold War? Can the notion of the ‘post-colonial’ illuminate the current global condition? What are the contemporary prospects of a viable anti-imperialism’?

Entry is free - Please contact Julia Eisner for a place at this event: j.eisner@bbk.ac.uk

By the early 20th century, both mechanistic and vitalistic theories in science and philosophy had been significantly transformed and ceased to be clearly distinguished. Mertins explores evidence of a similar blurring in the work of constructivist artists El Lissitzky and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy in the 1920s and of Friedrich Kiesler in the 1930s. This work appears mechanical since it preceded the popularisation of biomorphic forms, yet was profoundly engaged with how nature builds across scales and in different material regimes and with the potential for technology to hasten human evolution.

Detlef Mertins is an architect, historian and professor at the University of Pennsylvania. His essays on the history and theory of modern architecture have appeared in numerous journals, anthologies and exhibition catalogs, including NOX: Machining Architecture, Phylogenesis: FOA’s Arc, Zaha Hadid (Guggenheim), and Mies in America (CCA, Whitney). He is editor of The Presence of Mies and of the English translation of Walter Curt Behrendt’s The Victory of the New Building Style, 1927 (Getty).

Free entry.