A series of talks about or inspired by Soundings From The Estuary, an ongoing project that is inspired by the Estuary’s industrial, architectural, and maritime traces as well as the present threat to the existing terrain.

Speakers Include:
Michael Edwards (Bartlett School of Architecture) - a Professor of Planning who has written extensively on urban regeneration and economic development.
Patrick Wright (Nottingham Trent University) - a Writer, Broadcaster, Cultural Critic and Consortium faculty member.
David Hughes - a Local Historian who lives on the Isle of Sheppey, Kent.
Artists Frank Watson and Germander Speedwell will also introduce their work.

To reserve a free ticket, e-mail info@soundingsfromtheestuary.com

An event celebrating The Hayward’s 40th anniversary. The discussion brings together a distinguished group of artists and architects including Zaha Hadid, Antony Gormley, Anish Kapoor and Dennis Crompton, one of the group of architects who designed The Hayward.

Taking the The Hayward and its surrounding environment as a point of reference, the panel discuss and debate different, but often concurrent, approaches to designing gallery architecture: the great modernist tradition of building-as-machine and idea of gallery as sculptural icon.

£8 / £4 Concessions.

What role do jokes play in the world of science? Do they exclude outsiders or raise issues? What are snouters?

Following in the Grant Museum’s series of events looking at the lighter side of science, we look into the way in which each scientific discipline has inside jokes.Dr Joe Cain, historian of biology at UCL, will bridge the gap between science and comedy to tell the amusing story behind one of biology’s most favourite practical jokes, the ’snouters’. He will then consider some of the social functions these pranks have in our communities. Following the talk the audience is invited for a glass of wine at a private view of the Museum. This talk is suitable for adults.

Richard Sennett joins sculptor Grayson Perry, tenor Ian Bostridge and writer Marina Warner to discuss the value and importance of craftsmanship in the digital age. With his keen social observation, Sennett’s book The Craftsman argues that perfecting skills and doing a job well - from learning the piano to rearing children - is an essential urge that we all share, and its erosion in contemporary life is a social ill. Our panel discuss these issues with regard to their own work and then take questions from the audience.

£9 / £4.50 Concessions.

The Long Table on Performing Rights is an invitation to explore the role of performance in communicating human rights issues; to look at the new relationships between art and activism; and to debate the responsibilities of artists, organisers, activists and audiences in the understanding, enactment and sustenance of human rights. Conceived by artist Lois Weaver, The Long Table is inspired by Marleen Gorris’ film Antonia’s Line, in which a dinner table grows longer and longer as Antonia’s family welcomes outsiders and accommodates eccentricity. Everyone is welcome to come to the table, ask questions, make statements, leave comments, or simply sit, listen and watch.

£5 / £2.50 Concessions.

Mark Godfrey, Curator at Tate Modern, investigates how American abstract artists and architects from the 50s to the present day have negotiated Holocaust memory without ever representing the Holocaust directly. Through close consideration of work by artists and architects such as Frank Stella, Barnett Newman, Susan Hiller, Beryl Korot, Louis Kahn and Peter Eisenmam, Godfrey proposes new possibilities for reading abstraction.

£8/6 concessions and Whitechapel Members.

How can cultural information from one part of the world be shared with another? How is this knowledge relayed through writing or performance? And what part does the traveller play in the telling?

This reflection on Lift’s curatorial approach and its decision to devolve programming power to a network of international and national associates is chaired by Ruth Holdsworth, currently working with University of Bristol and Arnolfini on curating risk. The discussion focuses on how individuals speak for and on behalf of the collective. Speakers include Lift Director Angharad Wynne-Jones, Lift International Associates Lemi Ponifasio (New Zealand) and Roma Patel (UK), and Paolo Favero (University College, London), a social anthropologist interested in tourism and cultural mediation.

Please note: this free event requires a ticket.

Friedrich Kittler has been hailed as the ‘Derrida of the digital age’ and his work is indispensable to anyone thinking about technoculture across the fields of art, design, technology and science. This landmark event brings one of today’s foremost philosophers of media to Tate Modern for an unmissable opportunity to examine the relationship between culture and technology with a range of leading thinkers and practitioners. For anyone interested in our complex interactions with the technologies that surround us this event is essential, while for those unfamiliar with Kittler it presents an opportunity to discover the work of the leading figure in the flourishing area of German media theory.

Media Matters is a two-day series of events that comprises:
•A keynote lecture by Friedrich Kittler
•A symposium featuring leading thinkers in the fields of cultural theory, film and the arts
•’Gramophones, Films, Typewriters’: audio, video and text works curated by Seth Kim-Cohen

In collaboration with the London Consortium

£32 (£24 concessions), booking required

This two and a half day conference is intended to be inter-disciplinary and inter-practice, bringing policy makers and practitioners to the table in order to enable an exchange between those designing and implementing post-crisis interventions and those researching these situations. Aside from paper presentations the conference will include: a photography exhibition, documentary evening and project presentations. The inaugural lecture will be given by Paddy Ashdown on the evening of 25 June.

£20 / £10 Concessions.

When Soft Machine played with the Boyles in 1969, when The Resplendent Kaleidoscope offered “celebration of faith dedicated to the Clear Light”, when the ICA celebrated a Mid Summer High, was the intellectual field of the curator in danger of giving way to drugs and flashing lights? Or was the transcendent space of artistic experience being fully realised?

Speakers: Neil Mulholland, director of The Centre for Visual and Cultural Studies at Edinburgh College of Art; Christoph Grunenberg, director of Tate Liverpool; Tot Taylor, director, Riflemaker gallery; artists Neil Bromwich and Zoë Walker; artist Peter Jones of Colourscape. Chair: Barry Curtis, emeritus professor of visual culture, Middlesex University.

In association with the London Consortium.

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

This one-day symposium considers the status of the artist book. Commentators have foreseen a radical change in both the form of this enduring cultural object and the way we interact with it. New technology always questions the relevance and significance of traditional forms.

The Liquid Page invites academics and artists to explore the ways in which both the book and the act of reading are being reshaped, expanded and coaxed into new directions and hybrid forms.

£35 (£25 concessions), booking required.

We tend to think of learning and skills as mental or intangible acquisitions, an idea that is backed up by the modern philosophical tradition. How might we conceive of knowledge as a bodily phenomenon, and what are the social and political implications of doing so? Richard Sennett, whose recent book The Craftsman reflects on these questions, will be in conversation with philosopher, writer and broadcaster Jonathan Rée.

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

The Olympic Artist Forum is an information and events platform for artists and creative practitioners engaging with the Olympics and the changing cultural landscape of London. Using the ‘Pecha Kucha’ 20 slides 20 seconds approach, this Olympic Artist Forum event features artist, Richard Dedemonici, heads the evening with his ‘Culturail’ project before introducing:

Time Jeeves
Grunts for the Arts. www.gruntsforthearts.com
Thomas Pausz
Revisiting the Community Shed. www.pausz.org / www.lifeisland.org
Ana Mendez de Andes
I Love the Olympic Future
Immortal Spirits and Foodstuffs Ltd.

Consortium faculty-member, Patrick Wright, has written four 15 minute talks for ‘The Essay’ slot on BBC Radio 3. They will be broadcast at 23.00 on consecutive evenings.

1. ‘A Museum of Embryos’: The Great Exhibition and London’s Chinese Junk.

2. Limehouse Chinatown: The Opium Wars Brought Home.

3. ‘Dumb-Walking-Man’: Chiang Yee becomes The Silent Traveller.

4. ‘China Stands Up’: From Maoist Peasant to English Leveller.

The history of philosophy reveals a recurring obsession with death. How might the lives and deaths of philosophers alter how we conceive of philosophy as a practice? Simon Critchley, author of The Book of Dead Philosophers, will be in conversation with Tom McCarthy, author of Remainder and general secretary of the International Necronautical Society.

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

The lawfulness that is law’s defining feature and that distinguishes a lawful condition from a state of nature is synonymous with welcome, receptiveness, and hospitality to the stranger as other. Yet, this hospitality is also necessarily conditional because of the territorial limits of state sovereignty and jurisdiction. Today, the various emergent sovereignties and legal regimes beyond the nation-state that have developed after the Second World War and especially after the end of the Cold War such as transnational human rights instruments, and the international civil society of NGOs present themselves as progressive attempts at eroding the conditionality of law’s hospitality to the stranger. The equation of transnational legal regimes with unconditional hospitality is problematic because it does not sufficiently account for the ways in which the transnational connections formed by capitalist globalization necessarily exclude certain categories of foreigners and strangers even as it simultaneously incorporates them into the circuits of global capitalist accumulation out of an equal necessity. This paper explores the role of law in the interminable processes of incorporation/exclusion of global capitalism in order to draw out some of their general theoretical implications for understanding the aporetic character of law’s hospitality towards the stranger. It begins with a reading of Kant’s account of cosmopolitan right as a philosophical template for the understanding of law as universal hospitality before examining two different cases of human rights abuse in the incorporation/exclusion of strangers in high growth East and Southeast Asia-the place of foreign female domestic workers in Singapore, and the treatment of sex workers from Mainland China in Hong Kong.

Attendance is free.

Curating Fictions invites artists, curators and writers to present a piece of fiction that has had a theoretical or practical influence on their work. Marti Manen, independent curator and Cultural Manager, Instituto Cervantes, Stockholm talks about David Lynch’s film Mulholland Drive in relation to Lynch’s non-narrative development and Manen’s own curating practice.

£7/5 concessions and Whitechapel Members.

‘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

Disciplinary boundaries can be both prisons and safety zones. We are often tempted to transgress the boundaries of our disciplines, but at what cost and with what consequences? The Faculty of Lifelong Learning, Birkbeck, with Consortium Projects, invite you to a multifaceted conference celebrating and critiquing interdisciplinary work. As well as interrogations of the very concept of interdisciplinarity, specific issues within the fields of art, architecture, film, education, law, and literature will be examined.

Speakers include
•Marko Daniel, Curator of Public Programmes, Tate Modern (Chair)
•Matthew Gandy, Professor of Geography, University College London, and co-ordinator of the UCL Urban Laboratory
•Dr Tim Boon, Head of Collections, Science Museum

Attendance is free, but registration is required. Please email boundariesconference@yahoo.co.uk by 5pm on Friday 23rd May 2008.