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.

Cranach went as far as Matisse towards confusing, or identifying, beauty with sexiness, and perhaps further towards using paint’s affinity with flesh to make the connection. Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, demonstrates how Cranach, like Kant, associated beauty with nature – foliage, water and fruit – but also with girls.

£14 /£6 Concessions. Includes lecture & a drink.

Is it useful to define an exhibition by its nationality? Can cultural distance and proximity both be advantages in the curatorial process? A panel discussion on how curators translate artists work.

£5.00 / £3.50 concsessions.

A group of esteemed thinkers discuss the history and future of radical thought at this centrepiece event in the SouthBank literature series All Power to the Imagination. To what extent have the events of 1968 affected the world today? The panellists discuss to what extent radical thinkers reshape society in the future, in a period when unequal wealth, mass migration and environmental concern threaten to destabilise global society. The event is chaired by Patrick Wright, author of Iron Curtain: From Stage to Cold War.

£12, concessions £6.

What can be learned from other people’s experience of things we rarely think about? The sixth event in the series focuses on the act of collecting: seeking, locating, acquiring, organising, cataloguing, displaying, storing, and maintaining whatever items are of interest to the individual. Why do certain people collect? What do they collect? How do they go about amassing a number of items around a specific interest? Is the search for specific items more rewarding than actual possession? Can a collection ever be complete? Why make a collection publicly accessible – or why keep it private?

Speakers: Anita Zabludowicz, art collector and founder of Project Space 176; John Sellars, senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of the West of England and a fellow of The London Consortium; Mike Presdee, Senior Lecturer in Criminology, University of Kent. Chair: Martine Rouleau, The London Consortium.

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

This symposium examines Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky’s films in the context of contemporary art, exploring the impact of the director’s work on artists working across a range of mediums. Leading artists and writers examine Tarkovsky’s legacy in Russia and the West, and discuss the relationship between film and artistic expression. This landmark event will provide a fascinating insight into the mind of this legendary artist.

£18 (£15 concessions), booking recommended. Price includes refreshments.

Stephen Johnstone, Lecturer in Fine Art, Goldsmiths and Editor of ‘The Everyday’, the latest edition in the Whitechapel’s Documents of Contemporary Art series, considers the range of contemporary art engaged with the everyday, as well as its antecedents in Dada and Surrealism, Pop, Situationism and Fluxus.

Art’s turn to the ordinary is symptomatic of a desire to address things in the world, rather than the history and institutions of art, showing a recognition of ordinary dignity or the accidentally miraculous; an engagement with a new kind of anthropology; an immersion in the pleasures of popular culture; or a meditation on what happens, when nothing happens. The celebration of the everyday has oppositional and dissident overtones, offering a voice to the silenced and proposing possibilities for change.

Free. Booking essential.

Mignon Nixon, Associate Dean, Courtauld Institute of Art, talks about art and transference. Taking the dynamic of transference in the analytic situation, as a logic through which to reflect upon the dynamics of the making and reception of art in recent times, she explores ways in which art invokes, provokes, and analyses transferences.

Concentrating on recent projects that take transference as a structural dynamic, Nixon offers some reflections on the limits and possibilities for art and for critical writing on art of one of psychoanalytic theory’s “big ideas.”

£8/6 concessions and Whitechapel Members

Tate’s fourth Triennial exhibition, curated by Nicolas Bourriaud who co-founded the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, opens at Tate Britain in February 2009. It explores a new concept, defined by him as ‘the Altermodern’. The term describes art made in today’s global context which is a reaction against standardisation and commercialism. A series of one-day events, or Prologues, are taking place in the lead up to the show, to introduce and provoke debate on the Triennial’s themes. Each Prologue includes films, performances and talks.

Prologue 1 presents art which reflects the decline of postmodernism. A film by Navin Rawanchaikul investigates identity in the manner of Bollywood film, Spanish philosopher Jordi Vidal’s filmic essay pursues avenues into contemporary thought, British artist Tris Vonna-Michell presents a new performance and critic Okwui Enwezor pulls all the strands together to debate the Altermodern. Look out for details of future Prologues featuring Tom McCarthy, TJ Demos, Carsten Höller, Christian Marclay, and Bob and Roberta Smith happening in June, October and January.

Free, no bookings taken.

In 1957, the ICA held An Exhibit, a show that took the organising of space and the visitor’s movement through the show as its content. This architectonic art exhibition was followed, six years later, by Archigram’s Living City, which resembled more an art exhibit than an architectural project. In 1982, the ICA’s interest in the relationship between art and architecture was further developed with the conference Art and Architecture, which addressed the role of art in public environments.

Today, the possibilities offered by the interplay of art and architecture continue to capture the art world’s imagination, with both the Serpentine Pavilion and the Turbine Hall installation being highlights in the art calendar. Such projects raise questions about the connections between curating and socio-political concerns about constructing and distributing space. Is there a politics of movement? If there is, how should the curator mediate the relationship between the human body, the art space and the physical dimensions occupied by the art object? Should the curator be responsible for the ergomomics of an exhibition? Should the curator be concerned with the physical experience of the audience at all?

Speakers: Dr Andrea Phillips, director, Curating Architecture research project, assistant director MA curating at Goldsmiths; artists Cornford & Cross; Celine Condorelli, whose practice is concerned with architecture as support and interface, developing critical models towards exhibition making and public space; and Secret Agent Bristly Pioneer, The Space Hijackers. Chair: Clare Carolin, senior tutor, curating contemporary art MA, Royal College of Art

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

Renzo Piano introduces The New York Times Building, the 52-storey glass skyscraper housing the new headquarters of the newspaper. In contrast to the usual Manhattan office building, clad in mirrored or tinted glass, Piano’s elegant structure is clear glass. Sited in Times Square, the building invites interaction with the street: its lobby forms a public walkway between streets, and internal staircases flow along the side facades, allowing passers-by a view inside.

£7 (£5 concessions), booking recommended

David Levy, an expert on artificial intelligence, comes to the ICA to argue that we are headed inexorably towards a society where human affection and human desire are extended into psychological and physical relationships with robots. Love and sex with robots, he argues, is a natural extension of the relationships which we have already cultivated first with pets, then with virtual pets, then with virtual avatars in Second Life.

David Levy is president of the International Computer Games Association, winner of the Loebner Prize for conversational computer software, and author of Love and Sex with Robots. After a short talk, he will be in conversation with Dr Petra Boynton, sex researcher and broadcaster. Chair: Bill Thompson, journalist and technology critic.

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

Herzog & de Meuron, architects of Tate Modern, present the National Stadium for the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. With an almost circular footprint, the bowl-like stadium, which seats 91,000, containing a network of bars, restaurants, hotels and shops, is expected to become a vital, urban space with a future beyond the Olympics.

£7 (£5 concessions), booking recommended

Tom McCarthy will be reading his latest short story “Kool Thing, or Why I Want to Fuck Patty Hearst”. The reading is part of the London Short Story Festival. This piece will feature in the forthcoming anthology Fiction Inspired by Sonic Youth (Serpent’s Tail, 2008).

Free entry.

Architect Norman Foster has designed some of our most iconic buildings and his most recent work – Beijing Airport – is the largest and most advanced airport building in the world. He talks to Rowan Moore about this ground-breaking project.

£8, concessions available. Book on the V&A website.

To mark the launch of The Street, a year-long programme of new artist commissions on Wentworth Street exploring the limits and possibilities of art in social context.

Speakers include the artist and curator collective – Canal, participating artists, Minerva Cuevas, Jens Haaning, Henry VIII’s Wives, Bernd Krauss, Shimabuku and Nedko Solokov. And participating writers Lars Bang Larsen and General Public Agency.

Booking essential. £5 entry includes lunch.

With biennials and art fairs in every continent, the contemporary art world is now truly global. So is the art world now a utopian space, where cultural differences are successfully negotiated, borders are open, and racism has no place? Or are artists encouraged to fetishise ethnic and national identities to protect their ‘brand’? Or is art becoming too homogeneous, too Western?

Speakers: artist Wolfgang Tillmans; artist Jorge Pardo; art critic and historian Marcus Verhagen; artist Jananne Al-Ani. Chair: Iwona Blazwick, director of Whitechapel art gallery.

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

Continuing on from Supernatural’s previous lectures exploring the development of visual effects and computer animation, this next installment introduces lecturers from a broader spectrum of disciplines within digital creativity to include not only visual effects in film, television and advertising but also the computer games industry and product design. They will be accompanied by representatives from the software and hardware industries whose vision and understanding of the creative process are so vital in pushing the realms of possibility within digital expression.

£8 (£6 concessions), booking recommended

A discussion of new models of narrativity, the changing nature of storytelling, and new ways of thinking about images, with two great writers and directors. Peter Greenaway is director of The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover and The Draughtsman’s Contract and author of The Rise & Fall of Gesture Drama. Raoul Ruiz is director of Treasure Island and City of Pirates, and the author of the Poetics of Cinema series.

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