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.

Through a series of examples - a close reading of penny chews; a history of half timbering; the chemistry of Starbucks foam - the talk will tour some sites of everyday pop-vernaculars in an attempt to unravel their codes, meanings and politics. We’ll also look at the legacy of a variety of Pop-isms, argue about the relevance of architecture’s abandoned post-modern project, the construction of meanings against the abstraction of modernism, and how Pop-esque strategies might allow architecture a more relevant, engaged and critical stance – a means of escape from abstract formalism.

Sam Jacob is an architect and critic. He is a founding director of FAT, where he was most recently partner in charge of the Hooglivet Herlijkheid project, a park and cultural building in Rotterdam. He is also architecture editor of Contemporary, and writes for magazines including Icon, Art Review and Metropolis. He has taught at a variety of universities, most recently at Yale as the Louis I. Kahn Visiting professor. Sam studied at the Mackintosh School of Architecture, Glasgow and the Bartlett, London.
See www.fat.co.uk www.strangeharvest.com

Free entry.

The Pervert’s Guide to the Cinema takes the viewer on an exhilarating ride through some of the greatest movies ever made. Serving as presenter and guide is the charismatic Slavoj Zizek, the Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst. With his engaging and passionate approach to thinking, Zizek delves into the hidden language of cinema, uncovering what movies can tell us about ourselves. It offers an introduction into some of Zizek’s most exciting ideas on fantasy, reality, sexuality, subjectivity, desire, materiality and cinematic form. Whether he is untangling the famously baffling films of David Lynch, or overturning everything you thought you knew about Hitchcock, Zizek illuminates the screen with his passion, intellect, and unfailing sense of humour. The Pervert’s Guide to the Cinema applies Zizek’s ideas to the cinematic canon, in what The Times calls ‘an extraordinary reassessment of cinema.’

There will be a screening of the film followed by a Q & A with the film’s director Sophie Fiennes.

Entry is free, but numbers are limited - please register by contacting Julia Eisner: j.eisner@bbk.ac.uk

In 2005 Martha Rosler restaged her piece from 1973, Garage Sale. The exhibition offered a piece of institutional critique on object festishism, the act of buying and selling, and the notion of an ‘art exhibition’. However, Rosler was now a known entity, an institution in herself. Is all critique eventually undone, institutionalised, aestheticised? Or did the restaging prove the persistent validity of such a project? Art into Society: Society into Art (ICA, 1974) brought together the greatest agent provocateurs of their day - Hans Haacke, Gustav Metzger and Joseph Beuys. Are such attempts at undoing the binary oppositions suggested by that exhibition title still pertinent? Was truly anti-institutional exhibition-making simply channelled into live art and happenings, events and music, leaving the exhibition the place for historicised critique? Did we stop chewing the fat of Beuys’s critique when we started preserving it?

Speakers: Roger Malbert, senior curator, Hayward Touring Exhibitions; artist Carey Young; Dave Beech, artist and member of the Freee collective; Simon Sheikh, critic and curator, Berlin; Peter Osborne, director of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University, and an editor of the journal Radical Philosophy. Chair: Victoria Preston, deputy director, Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva and PhD candidate, Birkbeck, researching Institutional Critique.

In association with the London Consortium.

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

A lecture by the great American art critic, art historian and poet whose latest book Why Photography Matters As Art As Never Before is out this autumn. On this occasion, Michael Fried will focus on the work of Douglas Gordon in an attempt to show that he belongs to an anti-theatrical tradition that Diderot was the first to theorise roughly 250 years ago. The larger implication of Fried’s argument is that the most interesting and important contemporary art bears a far more productive, if dialectical, relation to high modernism than is usually imagined to be the case.

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

Bacon was a consummate urban resident, as a Soho drinking club stalwart he revelled in the violence and structured chaos of urban existence. His city was a place of conflict between the illicit and the public, whose versatility he used as a place to hide and a substance to exploit. With the destruction of World War II as a backdrop, city life blossomed, beginning a re-discovery of the urban that continues today. This panel, featuring eminent architectural historian Joseph Rykwert, experimental architect Nigel Coates and former London Mayor Ken Livingstone, will look at how urbanity grew to its present condition, where more than half the world’s population lives in cities.

£7 (£5 concessions), booking recommended

Manifesto Marathon, the third in the Serpentine Gallery’s acclaimed series of Marathon events, takes place in the closing weekend of the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2008, designed by Frank Gehry. Manifesto Marathon comes at a time when artists are working less in formal groups and defined artistic movements. The Marathon showcases a new generation of artists alongside practitioners from the worlds of literature, design, science, philosophy, music and film who are returning to the historical notion of the manifesto. The Manifesto Marathon draws on the Serpentine Gallery’s close proximity to Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park, which has been used as a platform by Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, George Orwell and William Morris, among many others.

Avant-garde pioneer Yoko Ono, Gilbert & George, who famously proclaimed ‘Art for All’, Ben Vautier, key protagonist of the Fluxus movement, and legendary artist Elaine Sturtevant will join a new generation of artists such as Terence Koh, Hilary Koob-Sassen and Athanasios Argianas to present their manifestos for the 21st century in this two-day ‘futurological congress’ in the park. The Marathon will also feature architects, including Andrea Branzi, Peter Cook, Charles Jencks, Claude Parent and Rem Koolhaas; scientists, writers and historians including the eminent Eric Hobsbawm; film directors including the legendary Agnès Varda; and philosophers, designers, and musicians including musical revolutionary Brian Eno. Vivienne Westwood’s manifesto Active Resistance to Propaganda will be presented by 26 performers and Marina Abramovi? will be accompanied by 14 performers.

This year’s Manifesto Marathon is the third in a series of Marathon events conceived by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Serpentine Gallery Co-director of Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects and follows the 2006 24-Hour Interview Marathon, created with Rem Koolhaas, and the 2007 Experiment Marathon, created with Olafur Eliasson.

Tickets available from: Ticket Web 08700 600100
www.ticketweb.co.uk or the Gallery lobby desk.

Dust is everywhere: the product of civilization and the sign of its decay, the name for a miniature universe that is both despised and indispensable. Cabinet, the New York-based quarterly of art and culture, presents an evening of dust-related talks, films, images and other oddities.

£5 (with limited concessions)

Analyses of contemporary terrorism are dominated on the one hand by instrumental theories of violence which understand violence as a tool, or by cultural and psychological analyses that approach violence as a pathology of modernity, religion, ‘identity’ or personality. This paper explores terror as both private experience and public relationship, and considers the extent to which contemporary forms of jihadi violence can be analysed in terms of emerging models of global movement, where we see the importance of global cultural forms such as conspiracy theory, technological mediations such as the Internet, the importance of horror and the extreme, the inexperiencable and the unimaginable that together may constitute a new ‘grammar of violence’. The paper considers the implications of such violence for the way we attempt to understand and respond to increasingly globalized forms of conflict.
Professor Kevin McDonald is Marie Curie International Fellow in the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. His research centres on contemporary social movements in the context of globalization, his most recent book being Global Movements: Action and Culture (2006). His current research is entitled ‘Violence and subjectivity in a global movement: jihadi trajectories in Spain and the United Kingdom’, a two-year project exploring emerging forms of increasingly personalised violence charactering jihadi violence in Europe.

Free entry.

The first ever in-depth discussion between two quintessentially British pioneers of graphic novels: Raymond Briggs and Bryan Talbot. Tonight Briggs, whose work includes The Snowman, When The Wind Blows and Ethel & Ernest, and Talbot, author of Luther Arkwright and Alice in Sunderland, will discuss their work and mark new editions of Briggs’ Gentleman Jim and Talbot’s The Tale of One Bad Rat. Chaired by Rachel Cooke of The Observer.

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

A series exploring the structures of lived experience and modes of human existence. What can be learned from other people’s experience of things we rarely think about? The seventh event in the series focuses on string: tying, knotting, measuring, adorning, playing. What are the origins of the modest string? Does an illlusionist use string the same way a musician does? Does a physicist think of string in similar terms to an artist?

Speakers include Cornelia Parker, visual artist; Mark Messenger, head of strings at the Royal Academy of Music; David S Berman, reader in theoretical physics at Queen Mary University. Chair: Martine Rouleau, London Consortium.

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

The sound-world of a piece is a vital part of an artist’s vision for a new work, but how do choreographers choose their music and how do they use it in their work?
Join renowned choreographers Richard Alston and Charlotte Vincent as they reveal something of their very different working methods and give insights into their own individual relationships with music and movement. Facilitated by dance author and archivist Dick McCaw.

With performers from Richard Alston Dance Company and Vincent Dance Theatre.

£7 / Limited Concessions

Dr De Cataldo is a Criminal Court Judge in Rome and a well-known writer of crime fiction. He is the author of ‘Romanzo Criminale’ and co-screenwriter of Michele Placido’s internationally acclaimed film of the same name. This event will begin with a screening of the film followed by a discussion and drinks reception.

Entry is free, but numbers are limited - if you would like to attend please contact Leila Dajani: l.dajani@law.bbk.ac.uk

This symposium brings together a stellar cast of international speakers to explore Mark Rothko’s late work in the context of the 1960s, a time of historic turmoil when the practice of painting was under increasing attack. The speakers explore key issues such as series and seriality, and the existentialist endeavour of Rothko’s late paintings against the rise of Pop art, minimalism and Conceptual art, offering new ways of thinking about one of the most significant artists of the last century.

£20 (£15 concessions), booking recommended

During the first Fluxus event at the ICA, 1962’s Festival of Misfits, it is reported that artist Robin Page kicked his electric guitar off the stage and down the stairs of the Dover Street building and into the street. The July 1966 press release for The Destruction in Art Symposium (at the Africa Centre) announced that: “The main objective of DIAS was to focus attention on the element of destruction in Happenings and other art forms, and to relate this destruction in society.” In January 1964 the ICA was given over to the theme of Violence, while that November Cornelius Cardew warned that “Experimental music is the most DEADLY form of TOTAL ABSTRACTION ever devised… INSTANTLY you will see how to DESTROY ILLUSION AND DRAW ATTENTION TO THE FACTS.”

Can curators and artists draw attention to the ‘facts’ of an often violent world through extreme methods of curation? Is it possible through extreme methods and content to avoid mere spectacle within the gallery? Speakers: artists Stuart Brisley and Mark McGowan; Lauren Wright, curator Long Weekend, Tate Modern; Yasmin Canvin, curator AfterShock: Conflict, Violence and Resolution in Contemporary Art, Sainsbury Centre; artist and novelist Stuart Home. Chair: Dr Dorothée Brill, lecturer and curator.

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

The internationally acclaimed critic, artist and novelist John Berger is here to talk about his new book, the Booker-longlisted From A To X: A Story in Letters, and about the connection between writing and political resistance. Berger will be in conversation with Geoff Dyer, critic and author of The Ongoing Moment and But Beautiful.

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

The skeletons in the Wellcome Collection’s exhibition may be hundreds of years old but they have the power to stir living feelings in many of us. How does London feel about its dead bodies? Body-snatching in the 1800s had a huge influence on the development of modern medicine. But what rights does a dead body have today, and how do these rights change over time?

What’s the difference between a skeleton that is 99 years old and a skeleton that is 100 years old? Should we be using the dead at all? What limitations, rules and regulations are in place to mark our use? Join our speakers for a discussion of regulatory, philosophical and historical perspectives on death and dying in the capital.

Free entry (Booking required).

Professor David Crystal, one of the world’s foremost experts on language, presents three of his most popular lectures in this special one day event taking place of Thursday 16th October in The Shaw Theatre.

Lecture 1- The Future of Englishes. English is now a global language, but what are the consequences of this newfound status for the future development of the language? Lecture 2 - Language death: writing the obituary of languages? David Crystal reviews the way languages are dying, asks why and what can be done. Lecture 3 - Internet linguistics. What influence is the interet having on language, and what is happening to language as it comes to be used on the Internet?

£10 / £5 concessions