How do we think about visual art now? What is happening to art history? Are visual culture studies taking its place? What is the place of fine art practice as thought, critical knowledge or transformative practice? Are we left in an interdisciplinary free-for-all or are disciplinary models of knowledge still valid? The Centre for Cultural Analysis, Theory and History is a transdisciplinary project straddling fine art, histories of art, and cultural studies promoting a radical concept of research as intellectual and aesthetic encounter. CentreCATH’s work is now emerging in a series of collections and monographs that will be launched with an afternoon of discussions.

Speakers include Elisabeth Bronfen, Victoria Anderson, Nicholas Chare, Vanessa Corby, Griselda Pollock, Alison Rowley and Liz Watkins. Chair: Adrian Rifkin.

£15 / £12 Concessions / £10 ICA Members.

Founded in Canada in the late 1960s by AA Bronson, Felix Partz and Jorge Zontal, ‘General Idea’ was a collaborative group who produced witty and humorous critiques of modern culture in a variety of media. This retrospective of their films features peeing poodles, crescent moons and spilled cocktails, all hallmarks of the group’s lunatic inspiration.

Free, no bookings taken

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.

Bruce Altshuler discusses some of the many roles played by art exhibitions in the history of modern culture. These include the introduction of the museum as an educational enterprise, the presentation of new forms of artworks to the public, and varying political uses to which exhibitions have been put. Central to the effectiveness of exhibitions in their diverse purposes is the relationship between forms of display and the content presented. This connection between exhibition form and content is explored through examples ranging from shows of early modern art through conceptual art presentation practices of the late 1960s and 1970s.

£8 (£6 concessions), booking recommended
Price includes drinks afterwards

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.

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.