Talk at the University of Nottingham

Jérôme Grivel speaks about his occursus residency at Site Gallery

occursus has its 3rd artist in residence at Site Gallery

As part of the occursus research project, Jérôme Grivel has just begun his residency at Site Gallery (Sheffield). This is the third residency we have been able to commission and host at Site, thanks to the generous funding of DLA Piper.

While Jérôme is here, Jérôme and I will be developing exhibition and publication plans. He will also be giving invited talks to final-year undergraduate students at the University of Sheffield and leading on of the occursus Reading Loops.

For more information, see http://www.sitegallery.org

 

Reading Loop (2)

The next series of Reading Loop begins in October 2011.

The series – which will include texts by authors such as Jacques Rancière and Nicolas Bourriaud – takes place at the University of Sheffield.

In 2012, I will be editing a 2nd occursus book based on responses to the texts selected for the second series.

Owen Hatherley talk at Site Gallery

On Friday April 8th, 2011, I was pleased to organise and chair a talk by Owen Hatherley, author of Militant Modernism and A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain at Site Gallery.

Images and video-recording of the talk to follow.

New Debates on Culture and Confidence

I have been invited to speak at a symposium hosted by Postcolonial and Migration Studies Research Cluster at the University of Sheffield.

The Postcolonial and Migration Studies Research Cluster will host a one-day symposium on New Debates on Culture and Confidence on Wednesday 6 July 2011. During the day we will investigate from an interdisciplinary and intercultural angle, the relationship between national narratives and cultural confidence.

It is envisaged that during the symposium we will the discuss three strands of research in this area that we have identified in preliminary discussions:

• Cultural confidence and concerns of belonging. Belonging emerges as a critical concern in a globalising world. How is belonging defined in cultural terms in both (popular) writing and visual arts across Europe? Comparative practices across linguistic borders will be investigated.

• Cultural ‘untouchability’ or multicultural madness. With traditional monolithic definitions of national and identity becoming untenable, has cultural insecurity led to a need for both the culturally extraneous and the European “natives” to assert themselves?

• Cultural confidence and the home. Is the rift between private and public widening in a culturally anxious society? Is the home increasingly emerging as an exclusive space to which religious and cultural expressions are confined away from the public sphere.

For more information, visit the webpage of the Postcolonial and Migration Studies Research Cluster.

Exhibition of works by Paul Evans and Hondartza Fraga

As part of the collaborative occursus research project, I have curated an exhibition of works by Paul Evans and Hondartza Fraga at DLA Piper Sheffield.

occursus is proud to present an exhibition of works by Sheffield-based artists Hondartza Fraga and Paul Evans at DLA Piper, Sheffield.

The works in the exhibition explore the ways in which we encounter and make sense of the complex world we inhabit. Produced in a variety of media (drawing, painting, sculpture and site-specific installation), they ask spectators to come close and immerse themselves in their mesmerizing worlds within a world; worlds which delight in changing, more or less perceptibly, with every minor variation in light, the passing of time and the position of one’s own body in front of the canvas or frame. Both Evans and Fraga interrogate the extremes of scale, locating the human somewhere between the immensity of the cosmos and unicellular microorganisms; between otherworldly cetacean gigantism and the tiny landscapes we seek to capture and contain in the snow globes that sit on our desks and shelves.

Paul Evans’ paintings are not landscape paintings in the traditional, representational sense; rather, in the processes and tensions of their very making, they mirror the artist’s own embodied relationship with the landscape. A keen climber, walker and surfer, Evans’ sense of the forces and muscular rhythms of nature, as well as his own physicality, manifest themselves in his engagement with the materiality of the paint, its malleability and resistance as it is scraped, poured, brushed and dripped on the canvas. The works are sublime in the art historical sense of the word: they convey something both of the beauty and the danger of nature. Beneath the surge of paint, barely corralled into the articulation of half forms, we perceive the traces of a myriad of drawings and marks, weathered and eroded by the artist’s perpetual and tireless revisiting of the canvas. It is in the dynamic irresolution of the paintings, in their oscillation between chaos and order, entropy and form, that the works finally open up beyond Evans’ own experience to produce a space for the viewer; a landscape to be contemplated, practised, traversed.

Hondartza Fraga explores universal themes such as exile, nostalgia, journeys and longing through the media of the map and the miniature. We produce maps to make sense of the unknown; an ultimately futile gesture (even in this, our technological age) to force the world to yield its immensity to us. Fraga’s Mappa series (2010-2011) beautifully illustrates our propensity and need to domesticate the infinite and strange. Its title is drawn from the Latin word mappa, which means napkin, tablecloth and map. The images resemble polar coordinate graphs of places which do not exist and are made by laboriously tracing and painting lace and paper doilies. Incandescent (2011) is a site-specific installation, produced specially for this exhibition. The landscapes drawn by Fraga on the wall, made of the play between shadows and light, depict industrial scenes of the kind we might see in Sheffield. Like her other works, Incandescent speaks to the fragility and evanescence of the landscapes we construct. Destined to disappear when the exhibition closes, they represent the fragments from which we create fleeting narratives of our world.

This exhibition is organised by the occursus research group at the University of Sheffield.

Amanda Crawley Jackson

For more information visit http://occursusexhibitions.wordpress.com

Ruins in contemporary art from the French-speaking world

You can listen to a recording of my paper at the Beyond the Global City conference (London, Centre for Creative Collaboration, 20-21 May 2011) here.

ex libris, 28/6/11

I have been invited by Ex Libris to give a talk on June 28th at Site Gallery about Italo Calvino’s 1972 novel, Invisible Cities, the book I donated to the new library in Site.

At times all I need is a brief glimpse… a glint of light in the fog, the dialogue of two passersby meeting in the crowd, and I think that, setting out from there, I will put together, piece by piece, the perfect city, made of fragments mixed with the rest, of instants separated by intervals, of signals one sends out, not knowing who receives them. (Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities)

Secret Cinema

On May 5th 2011, I was invited by Secret Cinema to give a talk in the Old Vic Tunnels about Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 film, The Battle of Algiers.

Dr Amanda Crawley Jackson will talk about (post) colonial urbanism in Algeria, focusing particularly on the representation of the Casbah in The Battle of Algiers. Referring to her ongoing research on contemporary art from Algeria, she will address the relevance of The Battle of Algiers to contemporary audiences and in particular, its contribution to our understanding of contemporary global spatialities and the proliferation of what Giorgo Agamben has called ‘spaces of exception’.