IDEAS IN PROGRESS
CURRENT PROGRAMME
SPRING 2007
Ideas in Progress is a Visual Culture graduate seminar programme that has been running since 1986. Seminars are held fortnightly and are intended primarily for staff and graduate students in the area of visual culture and media, but any interested members of the University are welcome to attend.
The coming semester’s talks are being organised by Harriet Riches and Luke White. Speakers will include Ben Campkin (Bartlett), Dot Rowe (Bristol) and Lindsay Seers (DeMontfort/Nottingham Trent/Royal Academy). For further details please contact Luke White or Harriet Riches.
13 February 2007 – Paul Antick – Romancing the Other: itourist? and the affective economies of death camp tourism
Paul Antick is Senior Lecturer in Visual Culture and Media at Middlesex University, UK. He has recently exhibited work in Europe and North America and his writings on photography have appeared in various publications including the Journal of Fashion Theory (2002) and (ed.) Aoife Mac Namara, Bungalow Blitz (2006). In collaboration with John Hansard Gallery (UK) he is presently developing itourist?, a billboard art and internet project that focuses on the relationship between history, contemporary consumer culture and the Holocaust.
27 February 2007 – Lyndsay Seers – Becoming Something Else
Lindsay Seers is a London-based artist whose work over the past ten years has evolved as an autobiographical narrative that tells of her desire to become a camera, her career (from having being unable to speak as a child) in ventriloquism, and her most recent attempts to become a projector. Lindsay has performed and made hundreds of images by using her own body as a camera. Her art works take the form of DVD films, text, photographs, sculptures and performances, and have been shown in solo exhibitions at London’s Gasworks, Market Gallery, Glasgow, the Gallery of Photography in Dublin, and the City Gallery, Leicester. Her work has also been included in recent group shows at Gimpel Fils, Smart Projects (Amsterdam), and at UKS in Oslo, and she has performed at a number of locations including the Site Gallery in Sheffield, Fact in Liverpool, and the Corner House in Manchester. Seers studied at the Slade School of Fine Art and Goldsmiths College, and she is currently working as a lecturer in MA Fine Art at Goldsmiths and Slade.
13 March 2007 – Dot Rowe – The Diasporic Subject – Mapping Biographies and Spaces in Contemporary British Art
Dorothy Rowe is Lecturer in History of Art at the University of Bristol, and has research interests in contemporary diasporic art and in German visual culture and the city. This paper will explore the role of biographical and autobiographical self-presencing in the work of contemporary diasporic women artists working in Britain today, including Mohini Chandra, Sonia Boyce, Zarina Bhimji and Oreet Ashery. Dorothy has published extensively on sexuality and the city of Berlin, and race and transgender in the work of moti roti, and her forthcoming publications include chapters on spatial experience in contemporary diasporic art in (eds.) D. Arnold & J. S. Derevenski Biographies and Space (2007), and black and Asian British art in (eds) D. Arnold & D. Peters-Corbett Re-Mapping British Art and Architecture 1400-2000 (2008). She is also co-editing the book Diasporic Futures: Women, the Arts and Globalisation, a collection of essays arising from an international conference held at the V&A in July 2006.
27 March 2007 – Ben Campkin – Down and Out in the Elephant and Castle? Photographing Life in the Elephant, 1948 and 2005
Ben Campkin is Lecturer in Architectural History and Theory at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. With Rosie Cox he is editor of Dirt – New Geographies of Cleanliness and Contamination (London, IB Tauris, forthcoming 2007) and with Paul Dobraszczyk of ‘Architecture + Dirt’, a special issue of the Journal of Architecture (Routledge, forthcoming 2007). Ben’s ongoing doctoral research looks at post-industrial representations of London’s King’s Cross and Elephant and Castle districts as blighted urban landscapes.
24 April 2007 – Edwina Ashton – Do Mice Think in Italian?
Edwina Ashton is an artist working in the media of video, performance, drawing and installation. She teaches and researches at Chelsea College of Art, where she is a member of the Subjectivity and Feminism research group. She has taught at the University of Newcastle, University of Central Lancashire , University of the West of England and Goldsmiths (amongst others). Recent exhibitions include an installation at the Camden Arts Centre in Sept-Nov 2006. From Sept 2006-Jan 2007, she has been the Wingate Scholar at the British School at Rome. She has forthcoming exhibitions in London, Frankfurt and Cardiff.
Seminars are held on alternate Tuesdays from 4.30pm to 6pm in Room 137 at Cat Hill, Barnet, Hertfordshire EN4 8HT.
Getting there: Cockfosters or Oakwood tube (Piccadilly line), then 10 mins walk or bus / Buses 298, 299, 307 to Cat Hill roundabout / New Barnet rail, then bus 307 to Cat Hill roundabout.
