Call for Papers: New Voices – Art and Decolonization

A conference at the Henry Moore Institute, 16 November 2013

Art and its histories have ‘complex entanglements’ with empire and imperialism, to borrow a phrase from theorist Nikos Papastergiadis. In collaboration with the Henry Moore Institute, New Voices investigates the intersections of art and decolonisation to ask what the specific implications of decolonisation are for art and art history. This symposium turns attention to the geo-political struggles, revolutions and cultural recalibrations that artists and art historians have championed, challenged and negotiated as imperialism and colonialism weakened their grip and took on new forms.

Call for Papers: Imaginary Exhibitions

The Henry Moore Institute , 6 November 2013

This symposium is part of our present research project looking at ‘Sculpture and its Exhibition Histories’. Through this project we address how developments in sculpture have impacted upon the spaces of exhibition, how the material conditions of the display of sculpture have played increasingly important roles in the meaning and making of sculpture as an art form, how the modes of presenting sculpture have shifted and how curatorial practice has impacted on the understanding of sculpture, and vice versa.

The formal exhibition, staged indoors in the spaces of the art gallery or museum or outdoors in the sculpture park or urban setting, is key to these histories. This one-day symposium seeks to further complicate this larger history of sculpture and exhibitions by looking at the place of the ‘imaginary exhibition’ within this narrative. The ambitions and registers of such projects vary: they range from the utopian to the tentative, the immaterial to the highly materialised, through to exhibitions that were hampered by logistics or that were inscribed with impossibility from their inception. Instances of these ‘imaginary exhibitions’ are to be found internationally, across ancient, modern and contemporary epochs, in the work of many twentieth-century artists, including Constantin Brancusi, Marcel Duchamp, Henry Moore and David Smith, and embedded within curatorial, artistic and textual practices.

Workshop: Feminist Object(ive)s: Writing Feminist Art Histories

University of York, 21st May 2013, 12.00 – 7.00pm

This event, hosted by the Centre for Modern Studies at the University of York, will explore the aims, challenges and complications of writing art histories from a feminist standpoint, considering feminist methodologies, encounters with feminist art and culture, and working with women artists, as well as more broadly politically engaged art practices. Six scholars will reflect on their experiences of engaging with and constructing feminist art histories, before a roundtable involving all participants at the end of the afternoon. Confirmed speakers: Henrietta Stanford (Courtauld Institute of Art), Hilary Robinson (Middlesex University), James Boaden (York), Sylvie Simonds (McGill), Catherine Grant (Goldsmiths), Harriet Riches (Kingston). 

Seminar: Visualising the Bible in the Nineteenth Century

Thursday 13th June 2013, CRASSH, University of Cambridge, 9.30am – 5.30pm

What is the artist’s role – and responsibility – in visually interpreting the Bible? How did this change in nineteenth-century Britain, when the stability of scripture was increasingly uncertain? How do sacred texts in particular pose problems for the relationship between the verbal and the visual? This one day colloquium will consider how religious belief, form, function, medium, gender, and sexuality figured in representations of Biblical narrative, spanning textiles, painting, drawing and sculpture. Speakers:, Michaela Giebelhausen (Essex), Colin Cruise (Aberystwyth), Ayla Lepine (Yale/Courtauld), Claire Jones (York )

Seminar: Tate British Art Research Network – First World War

Friday 19th April 2013, Tate Britain

This is a one-day seminar on British art and the First World War at Tate Britain for members of the British Art Network. The British Art Network is a new resource and community organised by Tate – you can find more information and how to register here. The first British Art Network seminar is based around the First World War. Led by Dr Emma Chambers, Curator of Modern British Art at Tate Britain in collaboration with the Imperial War Museum, London, and with contributions from other network members, the seminar will combine an academic element with the chance to share information about individual collections and future exhibition projects.

Exhibition: The Independent Group at the ICA

Nigel Henderson, Shattered Glass, 1961

Until 9th June 2013, Institute of Contemporary Art, London

To coincide with the 60th anniversary of the ground-breaking exhibition Parallel of Life & Art, this display presents original art works by the Independent Group in the Fox Reading Room.

The Independent Group met at the original ICA in Dover Street from 1952-5 and comprised architects Alison and Peter Smithson, James Stirling and Colin St John Wilson; artists Magda Cordell, Richard Hamilton, Nigel Henderson, John McHale, Eduardo Paolozzi and William Turnbull; music producer Frank Cordell and writers Lawrence Alloway, Reyner Banham and Toni del Renzio. Celebrated today as the so-called Fathers of Pop, the Group worked with art, science, technology and popular culture. From horror films to theories of evolution, modern architecture to Marilyn Monroe, this group project worked beyond traditional boundaries and conventional disciplinary areas.

Exhibition: R. B. Kitaj – Obsessions

Until 16th June 2013, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester

This exhibition at Pallant House Gallery, subtitled ‘Analyst for Our Time’, will feature over 70 major paintings, sketches and prints presenting an overview of all periods of Kitaj’s extensive oeuvre from the 1960s to his death in 2007. It will consider Kitaj’s early presentations of a fragmented world, reflecting his interest in art history and intellectuals such as ‘Aby Warburg’, and his paintings and collages addressing issues of European politics, philosophy and literature such as ‘The Murder of Rosa Luxembourg’ and ‘The Rise of Fascism’. It will also include Kitaj’s remarkable portraits of personal friends and figures he admired such as his portrait of David Hockney, ‘The Neo-Cubist’, and fictional characters from literature such as ‘The Arabist’ His fascination with the relationship between the body, sexuality and history is presented in a series of powerful paintings of bathers including ‘Self-Portrait as a Woman’ and ‘The Sensualist’.