Leading international scholars, art critics, curators, writers and artists examine the question of migration of photographic and cinematographic images into painting. Speakers include Parveen Adams, Carolyn Cristov-Barkagiev, Thomas Eggerer, Caroline Jones, Barry Schwabsky, Ralph Rugoff, Kaja Silverman and Luc Tuymans.

£30, Ticket prices include refreshments. Booking essential.

London, New York, and Paris are cities that have organically developed
into fashionable cities, through creativity. In the 21st century, there
is a huge increase in cultural consumption and a desire for the
bourgeois lifestyle. Planners understand this and are jumping on the
‘creative’ and ‘cultural’ bandwagon. Yet, ask a person on the street how
they would describe a planner. After the explicit profanities, the
adjectives ‘grey’ and ‘boring’ would be on top of the list: we are not a
creative profession, yet, hugely influential to providing a container
for creativity.

Current planning interventions on developing, or marketing,
Fashion/Creative/Cultural Quarters have ironically pushed away the
presence of the artists and musicians that made such areas ‘cool’, and
attracting less exciting groups of people. What are we doing wrong?

Anthony McCall in conversation with artists, Graham Ellard and Stephen Johnstone and Mark Godfrey, curator, Tate Modern. Organised in association with the Curating Contemporary Art Department, Royal College of Art.

£5/ £4 for concessions

Betting on Shorts invited filmmakers from across the world to respond to our theme “Mad or Bad”:
“Break the conventions, break free, break your heart or someone else’s, take drugs, become a criminal, become a victim, wherever your fancies take you – are you mad, or are you just bad? You could look at trick or treat, crime and punishment, genetics and eugenics, or: simply consider Michael Jackson.”

£8 / £7 Concessions / £6 ICA Members.

Promising to ‘spread mental wellbeing through non-threatening design’, Sweet Dreams Security™ products combine kitsch and crime prevention in, for example, Victorian railings with bunnies and penguins in place of spikes and padlocks shaped like Teddy bears. Are the desire for kitsch and the demand for security, contradictory impulses or analogous symptoms of a fearful society? Sweet Dreams Security™ is both a business and a research project investigating paranoia and its relationship with retail ‘therapy’.

Free Entry.

Dr Peter Fenwick on Near-Death experiences and coincidences

In Western culture there are very few studies looking at the process of dying and the mental states that are present just before death.
Eastern cultures are much more sophisticated and they not only have detailed descriptions of the phenomena which occur when dying, but also detailed description of the mental states that the dying can expect to experience. To fill this gap we have carried out studies and collected data.
Also sometimes reported are associated phenomena such as clocks stopping or strange animal behaviour.

Free entry

The first of the ICA 60th Anniversary talks, organised in association with the London Consortium.

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?

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

A series of four conversations led by Lisa Le Feuvre and Edgar Schmitz testing ideas surrounding politics and artistic production through discussions with artists, curators, theorists, students and the public. Speakers for On Engagements: Alex Duttmann, philosopher, Maria Fusco, writer, and Tom Morton, curator and writer.

£5/£4

A debate by Charles Jencks and Paul Finch. Modernism has been in its many incarnations - Early, Late and Post forms - the leading cultural assumption in the West since the 1920’s. It is the default mode of capitalists, socialists and architects, a safe neutral harbour in a time of turbulence. Whether in an age of routine lying it can become a new conscious tradition is a question Jencks asks in his recently published ‘Critical Modernism’ (Wiley 2007). Scepticism is widespread, a critical temper is pervasive, the Angry Serene a leading style of art. The preconditions of a movement are in place - - what next?

Peter Markli, one of Switzerland’s leading architects, talks about his design for a visitor centre, prominently positioned in a recent redevelopment of a pharmaceutical industrial site in central Basel. The building comprises a strictly geometrical external structure, supported by Jenny Holzer’s LED facade, and an opulent interior with Alex Herter’s banisters and typography by Bringolf, Irion, Vogeli, leading figures of the local creative sector.

£7 (£5 concessions), booking recommended.