Passport to Peking 

Lecture at the National Portrait Gallery 

12 May 2011, 13:15 - Ondaatje Wing Theatre - Free

History, comedy, travelogue and cultural history collide as Patrick Wright uncovers the story of four British delegations who ventured behind both the iron and bamboo curtains in 1954, in response to Chou En-Lai’s invitation to ‘come and see’ the new China. Wright will look at three British artists who went to China over the summer and autumn of 1954. Of these, Denis Mathews, then head of the Contemporary Art Society at the Tate Gallery, is little known. However, Paul Hogarth and Stanley Spencer, both considerable figures in the art world, were instrumental in producing a ‘portraiture’ of New China. The architect Hugh Casson also went and produced drawings that are very evocative of the time and place. Find out and see more in this lunchtime lecture.

Big City Stories, is a collection of film extracts depicting Black London in the twentieth century. This compilation of archive footage presents the changing lives, and, changing perceptions of Black Londoners as their place was established among the city’s diverse cultures and communities.

Big City Stories will be launched at the Ritzy Picturehouse, Brixton on the 26th March as part of the cinema’s centenary celebrations; and at the BFI Southbank on the 12th April.

For more information on the project please check out the facebook page here.

Tickets for the screenings are available from the BFI website or Ritzy Picturehouse.

Women’s History Month
Green Lens Studios
March 8th – 22nd 2011

Opening night – International Women’s Day:
Tuesday 8 March, 6:00pm-9:00pm

Exhibition runs 9th March to 22nd March 2011, 10.00–17.00

Location : Green Lens Studios, 4a Atterbury Road, London N41SF

This March, to celebrate Women’s History Month, Green Lens Studios in collaboration with project curators Jonida Gashi and Roger Orwell, are staging an exhibition by a group of international female artists based in London. In this exhibition the transnational and multi-ethnic nature of women’s history will be explored through differing media. Each artist will engage with a particular aspect of this history through the media of: painting, sculpture, exterior architecture, sound, moving image, writing and mark-making. In some ways these are hidden histories in that messages of female identity are opened up and exposed from within.

The participating artists are: Lina Hakim (Lebanon), Bommsoon Lee (South Korea), Mina Salimi (Iran), Macarena Yanez (Chile), Linshu Zhang (China).

Duets

On the 17th of March the Barbican Art Gallery presents an evening of duets, taking a cue from works by Laurie Anderson and Trisha Brown on the same theme. In this event, Aura Satz presents new performance works using acoustic devices such as a Chladni plate and a sound sensitive flame.

Performances from 7 to 10 pm. Tickets and other information may be found here .

A two day symposium on Arte Povera.
Saturday 12th March at the Italian Cultural Institute, 12:00 - 6:00pm
Sunday 13th March at Camden Arts Centre, 12:00 - 5:00pm

See Poster here for full details on speakers and tickets.

A series talks will take place at the AA in the months of January and February.

Mark Cousins will lecture on Technology and the Subject from 5.00-6.00 on the following Fridays: 28 January,4 February, 11 February, and 25 February. Cousins is Director of Histories and Theory at the Architectural Association, and a founding member and Senior Fellow of the London Consortium.

On selected dates, immediately following these lectures, invited artists will discuss their work as well.
Peter Welz: 28 January 6.30-8.00. Welz has worked with the choreographer William Forsythe, transforming his bodily rhythms with video, photography, drawing and sculpture, into a three-dimensional portrait.

Hito Steyerl: 11 February 6.30-8.00. Steyerl is concerned to loosen ‘documentary’s complicity with dominant forms of a politics of truth’ in the examination of the relations between the global economy and film. She focuses on the image as a restless and transitory object, subject to violent dislocation in what she calls ‘the vicious cycles of audiovisual capitalism’

Jeff Kipnis in conversation with Tobias Rehberger: 25 February 6.30-8.00. Jeff Kipnis is Professor of Architectural Design and Theory in the School of Architecture at Ohio State - a curator, filmmaker, designer, architectural critic and theoretician. Rehberger has been called a conceptual sculptor who invents tasks for others to carry out.

Entrance is free
Architectural Association / 36 Bedford Square / London

For more information, please see here

On Living in a World of Facades
8 February, 18:00 AA Lecture Hall

From Prince Potemkin’s villages to the Berlin Wall, Iraq and the Truman Show, this lecture will describe how theatrical techniques have been employed to shape public and political reality in the modern era. It will consider three aspects of theatrical technique and their extension into the wider world: the growing symbiosis between acting and political leadership in the contemporary media landscape; the way in which the iron curtain, initially a metal barrier fitted into theatres as an anti-fire device, was used to define relations between blocs, states and nations in the twentieth century; the extent to which theatrical ideas of scene-building have been put to use in politics, architecture and international media reportage extending up through the war in Iraq.

Entrance is free
Architectural Association / 36 Bedford Square / London

Flyer poster here.

Hidden
A six-week, multi-disciplinary course at Tate Modern
Saturdays 5 March - 19 April 2011
Led by Lucy Scholes and Richard Martin

Contemporary culture is fascinated by the ‘hidden’ - “ the idea that secret desires and covert activities are taking place behind closed doors. This new six-week course places architectural, cinematic and psychoanalytic theories of interiority alongside the models explored by modern and contemporary artists within the Tate Collection. Concepts of containment and concealment will be assessed across a range of contexts and media with some key questions in mind: In what sense are our memories and desires housed? Do individuals contain a chamber of secrets waiting to be unlocked? What remains truly ‘hidden’ to us?

The course begins with Michael Haneke’s film Cache (2005), which has provoked widespread debate over its representation of personal and political concealment. In the weeks that follow, we will investigate the psychology of hidden spaces, Freudian theories of narrative, the role of family life, and the myths of the modern media. The course ends with a trip to Tate Britain to see Mike Nelson’s labyrinthine installation The Coral Reef (2000), which explores the unseen layers of contemporary society. Each weekly session will pivot around a central theme, with film clips, illustrated presentations and short handouts offering suggestive directions of inquiry.

Booking details, and a full course outline, are available here.

In the first three months of 2011 a series of four talks will explore the nexus of ‘sound’, ‘noise’ and ‘music’ from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. In the context of a bourgeoning sensitivity to the auditory across a range of disciplines, these talks will consider how particular formulations of these interdependent notions transform ‘sound’ from an isolated attribute of sensory experience into a embedded, ecological means of world-inhabitation.

As has been an ongoing tradition for the London Consortium, the series will be held in the Wheatsheaf pub (25 Rathbone Place, W1T 1DG) – a favourite of 1930s writers such as George Orwell and Dylan Thomas – a venue that will also provide a great opportunity for continuing informal discussion following each paper.

The current series has been organised by London Consortium and Birkbeck College postgraduate students Matt Clements and Jonathan Tee, and is also associated with the London Sound Seminar. It is free and open to all.

If you would like more information about these events please contact: Jonathan Tee (jonathantee [at] cantab [dot] net) or Matt Clements (m.clements [at] bbk [dot] ac [dot] uk).

Wednesday, 19th January, 7pm
Eric Clarke – ‘Musical Meaning: an Ecological Approach’
Eric Clarke went to the University of Sussex to read for a degree in Neurobiology, and graduated with a degree in Music. In 2007 he was elected to the Heather Professorship of Music at Oxford, and is currently an Associate Director of the AHRC Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music. For 10 years he was a member of the improvising string quartet The Lapis Quartet. Eric Clarke’s research embraces a number of areas within the psychology of music, music theory, and musical aesthetics/semiotics. He is the author of a recent monograph on listening (Ways of Listening. An Ecological Approach to the Perception of Musical Meaning OUP, 2005) and co-editor of a volume on Empirical Musicology (OUP, 2004). He has also published more than 60 papers and book chapters on music related topics.

Tuesday, 1st February, 7pm
David Toop – ‘A Sinister Practice: The Uncanny Space Between Improvisation, Composition, Live Performance and the Digital Domain’
David Toop is a composer/musician, author and curator who has worked in many fields of sound art and music, including improvisation, sound installations, field recordings, pop music production, music for television, theatre and dance. He has published five books, including Ocean of Sound, Haunted Weather, and Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener. He has released eight solo albums, including Screen Ceremonies, Black Chamber and Sound Body, As a critic he has written for many publications, including The Wire, The Face, Leonardo Music Journal and Bookforum. Exhibitions he has curated include Sonic Boom at the Hayward Gallery, London, Playing John Cage at Arnolfini, Bristol, and Blow Up at Flat-Time House, London. Visiting Professor at the University of the Arts London, he is a Senior Research Fellow at London College of Communication.

Wednesday, 16th February, 7pm
Henry Stobart – ‘Saturating the Soundscape? Conceptualizing Sound and Silence in the Andes and Beyond’
Henry Stobart is Reader in Music/Ethnomusicology in the Music Department of Royal Holloway, University of London. His research has principally focused on indigenous music of the Bolivian Andes; examined from a wide range of perspectives. His books include the monograph Music and the Poetics of Production in the Bolivian Andes (Ashgate, 2006) and several edited volumes: The New (Ethno)musicologies (Scarecrow, 2008), Knowledge and Learning in the Andes: Ethnographic Perspectives (co-edited with Rosaleen Howard; Liverpool University Press, 2002), and Sound (coedited with Patricia Kruth; Cambridge University Press, 2000). He is currently working on a monograph provisionally entitled Digital Indigeneity and has been invited to write a theoretical volume on ethnomusicological perspectives to Music and Environment.

Tuesday, 1st March, 7pm
Karin Bijsterveld – ‘Car Sound Ecologies: A History of Listening to and in the Automobile’
Karin Bijsterveld is historian and professor in the Department of Science, Technology and Society Studies, Maastricht University. She is author of Mechanical Sound: Technology, Culture and Public Problems of Noise in the Twentieth Century (MIT Press 2008), and co-editor (with José van Dijck) of Sound Souvenirs: Audio Technologies, Memory and Cultural Practices (AUP 2009). With Trevor Pinch, she is working on The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies. She has recently been awarded with a NWO-VICI grant for the project Sonic Skills: Sound and Listening in Science, Technology and Medicine, 1920s-now.

Creating an ethereal resonance between sound and vision, ‘Sound Seam’ begins by enticing the viewer through the mouth of a series of gramophone horns, like a portal into another place and time. The film invokes the idea that every surface, in particular parts of our anatomy, is potentially inscribed with an unheard sound or echo of voices from the past. The process of exposing these hidden sounds is mirrored by the various processes associated with record cutting, record playing, overwriting and erasing technologies, as the seemingly infinite grooves are seen spinning and distorting at high magnification, with a dizzyingly hypnotic effect.

‘Sound Seam’ is created by Consortium fellow Aura Satz with funding from the Wellcome Trust Arts Award grant scheme. It runs as a single screen projection in the Forum at Wellcome Collection from 9 December 2010 to 16 January 2011. For more information see the Wellcome website.

A small publication with contributions from Steven Connor and Tom McCarthy will also be available during the exhibition.

According to the critic Laurence Rickels, ‘every point of contact between a body and its media extension marks the site of some secret burial’.

On 4 December at 2pm artist Mark Leckey and novelist and Consortium fellow Tom McCarthy discuss the importance to their own work of the three-way relationship between selves, technological media and practices of mourning.

The conversation will take place at Chisenhale Gallery at 64 Chisenhale Road, London, E3 5QZ. To reserve a place please contact: mail@chisenhale.org.uk

Patrick Keiller’s film Robinson in Ruins, released on 19 November, is one of several outcomes of a three-year, AHRC-funded research collaboration between Keiller, Doreen Massey, Patrick Wright and Matthew Flintham.

On Saturday, 20 November at 17:20 the film will be screened. Following the screening, the co-researchers will present their shared project. Through its study of a landscape, the project challenges commonly-held assumptions about the current economic and ecological crises: about market forces, commodification, and the terms of belonging in an age supposedly characterised by mobility and displacement.

Please see link below for additional information:
http://thefutureoflandscape.wordpress.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4Sr0Y–ldI&feature=related
http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/feature/49663

Consortium alumna Dorothée Brill has just published her new book Shock and the Senseless in Dada and Fluxus (Hanover and London: University Press of New Hampshire, 2010), based on the PhD that she completed at the London Consortium in 2007.

Mark Cousins’s Friday Lecture Series begins Friday October 22nd, at 5pm in the AA Lecture Hall. It is entitled ‘Technology and the First Person Singular: Homer and the voice’. You can find more details here. The following Friday, October 29th, his talk is entitled ‘Technology and the First Person Singular: Inscription and Spacing’ - more details here. Further dates for this series will be November 12th and November 19th for which you should refer to the AA website for more information.

Histories of Hatred free film screening and wine reception7pm, Friday 22 October, Birkbeck Cinema, 43 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PDIt is a problematic theme, and one that is rarely discussed: what is our responsibility when it comes to writing histories of hatred? How can we talk about hatred? Do we merely sanction and further discourses of violence by engaging with them? When does documentation become participation? Should we be chroniclers, or should we get involved?This summer the London Consortium convened a panel of academics, artists and critics to tackle these questions. Drawing on their own experiences in diverse fields and disciplines – from medieval Christian visual culture to contemporary litigation – they offered a series of compelling reflections on ethics and practice. This 30-minute documentary reviews key moments from the discussion with conference organiser Noam Leshem, and features speakers including Anthony Julius, Deborah Lipstadt, Pratap Rughani, Senam Okudzeto, Anthony Bale and Joanna Bourke.Histories of Hatred was filmed and edited by Lily Ford (PhD Humanities and Cultural Studies, London Consortium) and Jonathan Law (PhD History and Philosophy of Art, University of Kent). As part of the LCACE Inside Out Festival, there is a free screening at Birkbeck Cinema at 7pm on 22 October 2010, followed by a free wine reception.To attend, please register by following this link: http://www.insideoutfestival.org.uk/2010/details/histories-of-hatred.html

Patrick Wright will discuss his new book Passport to Peking (published by Oxford University Press 27 October) with the journalist and historian Neal Ascherson at the London Review Bookshop. The conversation will be held Thursday, 21 October at 7.00 p.m. The book, which has been described as a hodgepodge of literary styles: travelogue, cultural history, and comedy, details the story of four British delegations setting off to Beijing in 1954 at the invitation of then Chinese prime minister, Chou En-Lai. The Bookshop is located at 14 Bury Place, London, WC1A 2JL, near Holborn tube station.

The London Sound Seminar offers an opportunity for research students and faculty in London to explore issues relating to the history and theory of all forms of sound-making and auditory culture.

All meetings are in room 112, 43 Gordon Square, London WC1

Wednesday 6 October, 4.30-6.00
Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening (New York: Fordham University Press 2007), pp.1-18.

Wednesday 20 October, 4.30-6.00
Michel Serres, Genesis, trans. Geneviève James and James Nielson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), pp. 2 – 8, ‘The Object of the Book’; pp. 12 – 14. ‘Noise’ and ‘Sea Noise’; pp. 19 – 22, ‘Ichnography’ and ‘The Foot’; pp. 25 – 26. ‘The Apparition of Forms’; pp. 57. – 70. ‘Dovetail’, ‘Demons’ and ‘Vortex’.

Wednesday 3 November, 4.30-6.00
Rudolf Arnheim, Radio:An Art of Sound, trans. Margaret Ludwig and Herbert Read (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), pp. 211-25
Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Film and Radio, trans. and ed. Marc Silberman (London: Metheun, 2001), pp. 41-46 Session led by James Emmott.

Wednesday 17 November, 4.30-6.00
Samuel Beckett, Embers.
Donald McWhinnie, The Art of Radio (London: Faber and Faber, 1959), pp. 21-28, 34-36, 77-93.

Wednesday 1st December, 4.30-6.00
Historical Soundscapes
Mark M. Smith, Bruce R. Smith and John Picker. Session led by Katherine Hunt. Texts to be notified.

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(RE)BRANDING FEMINISM

A conference hosted by the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies (IGRS), Stewart House, 32 Russell Square, London, WC1B 5ND.

1st-2nd March 2011.

In recent times there has been a general recognition, if not acceptance of many of feminism’s key concepts. But does this mean that it has ceased to assert itself as a unique movement? Indeed, should feminism be (re)branded in an age when all ideologies are subject to market forces? And what should this rebranding consist of?

Two years on from the stimulating ‘Where are we now? A workshop on women and heterosexuality’ hosted by the IGRS, this conference will address some of the issues raised then (see link below) to question the place of feminism in the twenty-first century. While there has always been ambivalent press and general apathy towards those issues that once encouraged women to put the political into the personal, nowadays it is women themselves who think there is nothing more to discuss. Why has there been a decline in the link between the personal and the ideological? Do we need a different kind of feminism to meet the cultural, political and academic needs of a younger generation?

Abstracts of between 200-300 words are sought that explore any aspect of (re)branding feminism. Topics might include but are not limited to:

· Are sisters doing it for themselves?
· Feminism on the frontline
· I can be a real bitch
· Family romances
· Home-makers versus career women
· God was/is a woman
· Feminism and the sex industry
· Feminist renaissance
· Feminism is bollocks
· Rebranding feminism
· Pub talk

Poster submissions are also sought on any topic related to rebranding feminism.

Please send abstracts and poster ideas both to Jean Owen (ojean27@yahoo.com) and Elisha Foust (elishafoust@googlemail.com) by 5pm 1st October 2010.

From 26th to 31 July, the London Consortium is hosting the 2010 European Summer School in Cultural Studies, on The Cultures of Food, Cooking and Eating .

Programme

Participants and Abstracts