This years Visiting Speaker Programme (VSP) combines talks, seminars and tutorials from a wide selection of artists, curators and researchers.
The programme takes place every Wednesday during term time, starting at 12 noon in the Fine Art Lecture Theatre.
The four thematics for this years VSP orbit around Ecological Thinking, Critical Media and AI, Thinking-Through-Making and Wellbeing.
Visiting speakers are invited to talk about their creative practice, but also how and why they work the way they do. You will gain insights into creative methods, realising commissions, getting funding, working collaboratively and the many other aspects of being a creative practitioner.
A cross-year, student-led seminar will take place after the talk. When possible, one to one tutorials will also be offered. Check out the VSP noticeboard for more details and sign-up sheets.
The VSP is coordinated by Tim Shaw, contact him (tim.shaw@ncl.ac.uk) if you would like to get involved.
Coming up:
25 September – Chris Watson – https://chriswatson.net/
02 October – Joanne Coates – https://www.joannecoates.co.uk/
09 October – Clifford Owens – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_Owens
16 October – Kyp Kyprianou – https://neveroddoreven.org/
23 October – Jayne Dent – https://www.jaynedent.com/
30 October – Climate Action: Future Climates
13 November – Emily Compton – https://www.emilycropton.com/
20 November – Laura Harrington – https://www.lauraharrington.co.uk/about
27 November – Mali Morris – http://malimorris.co.uk/
04 December – Angelos Theocharis – https://www.ncl.ac.uk/sacs/people/profile/angelostheocharis.html
11 December – Luis Bernardo Guzmán – https://www.radix-lucis.studio/
Visiting Speaker Programme 2023/2024
The Visiting Speaker Programme is a mix of talks, student-led seminars and tutorials that will take place every Wednesday during term time. The programme is organised under five themes; Community, Materiality, 21st Century Making, Interdisciplinarity and Social Justice. These headers build on existing interests and expertise amongst students and staff in the department.
The programme aims to demonstrate the many varied ways artists make work as well as highlight expert knowledge from Newcastle University.
The lecture will be held in the Fine Art Lecture Theatre at 12 pm every Wednesday.
A cross-year student-led seminar will take place after the talk. If you are interested in participating, please contact gayle.meikle@newcastle.ac.uk.
When able to we will offer One-to-One Tutorials. Check out the VSP noticeboard for sign-up sheets.
The programme is organised by Dr Gayle Meikle to get involved, please drop her a line at gayle.meikle@newcastle.ac.uk
Coming up:
27 September – Peter Brathwaite – https://www.peterbrathwaitebaritone.com/
4 October – Constanza Mendoza- https://conniemendoza.de/filter/projects
11 October – Mani Kambo – https://manikambo.co.uk/
Full listings added shortly…
Visiting Speaker Programme 2022/2023
- 10 May Martin La Roche
- 3 May Jamie Crewe
- 8 March Christopher Ulutupu
- 1 March Lyn Hagan
- 22 February Prof. Anya Hurlbert
- 15 February Ingrid Pollard (not recorded)
- 8 February Kara Chin
- 14 December Hinterlands Panel
- 7 December Anti-Racism Forum
- 23 November France-Lise McGurn
- 16 November Sheree Angela Matthews
- 2 November Dr Tina Sikka
- 26 October Emii Alrai
- 19 October Richard Bliss
- 12 October Keg de Souza and Emma Nicolson
- 5 October Wendy Gers (not recorded)
- 28 September Slugtown
Catch-up on recap
Martín La Roche
Martín La Roche (Santiago Chile, 1988) studied Visual Arts at the University of Chile and then in 2015 he completed a postgraduate program at the Jan Van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, the Netherlands. Since then he lives and works between Amsterdam and Santiago. His practice explores the construction and modes of being of collections. In 2017 he initiated the Musée Légitime, a nomad art institution that was born inside a hat. He is co-founder of Good Neighbour, an artist book platform that makes an art in the form of ‘words’. He is also part of To see the inability to see, a collective research project around ‘archive’ and ‘anarchive’.
Watch on recap (you will need your university log-in to access)
Jamie Crewe
An amalgam (2021), courtesy of the artist.
Jamie Crewe is a beautiful bronze figure with a polished cocotte’s head. They make artworks with video, text, installation, sculpture, drawing, painting, and more. These works think about constriction: the way people are formed by their cultures, environments and relationships, and the things that herniate from them as a consequence.
Jamie’s solo exhibitions include Ashley at LUX Moving Image, London (2020); Solidarity & Love at Humber Street Gallery, Hull (2020); Love & Solidarity at Grand Union, Birmingham (2020); Pastoral Drama at Tramway, Glasgow (2018); Female Executioner at Gasworks, London (2017); and But what was most awful was a girl who was singing at Transmission, Glasgow (2016).
In April 2022 Jamie released False Wife (2022), a website and video commissioned by the University of Edinburgh Art Collection and Dr Chloë Kennedy of Edinburgh Law School, which received the EMAF Award for groundbreaking work in media art at the 35th European Media Arts Festival in Osnabrück, Germany. She received the Margaret Tait Award in 2019, a Turner Bursary in 2020, and was shortlisted for the Jarman Award in 2022.
Watch on recap (you will need your university log-in to access)
Christopher Ulutupu
Christopher Ulutupu is a contemporary artist of Samoan, Niuean and German descent. Born in 1987, he lives in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Wellington, New Zealand.
Christopher uses the conventions of cinematic storytelling to interrogate the relationships between landscape and indigenous identities. He employs a cast of actors consisting almost entirely of friends and family in his work. These actors sing, dance and perform, often hamming it up for the camera. There’s pop-culture reference abound, from girl-group renditions of Britney Spears to a loose re-enactment of an infamous drug-fuelled photoshoot for a luxury furs catalogue. However, in these references brown bodies take centre stage. The artist is as much interested here in contending with Samoan and Pacific representation as he is centring his personal relationships—in his work a singer is his sister, the keyboardist his partner, one bride is played by his mother.
Inspired early in his career by postcard imagery of Pacific Island nations marketed to early 20th Century European audiences, Christopher’s video work challenges an assumed affinity between exotic-nature and exotic-person. Vignettes or scenarios are regularly set against striking landscapes, but equally featured are highly constructed environments. With a background in film and theatre, Christopher understands the dramatic potential of scenery. One video might take place high atop the Southern Alps, while another might feature a green screen waterfall. Both tactics are part of the world-making of film, and this is part of Christopher’s skill as a storyteller. Like any good speculative fiction based beyond reality, he creates an internal logic of storytelling. It’s a logic that challenges assumptions placed on brown bodies and seeks to imagine new alternatives for contemporary indigeneity.
Watch on recap (you will need your university log-in to access)
Lyn Hagan
Lyn is an artist from Newcastle who makes work about her interaction with subjects who find themselves or are put, in situations outside most of our lived experience. This has included ‘Porculpa – Cat in Zero Gravity’ (2008), in which she chartered a zero-gravity plane with the Russian Space Agency to film a cat and two mice in weightlessness. This film went viral on YouTube with nearly 2 million hits. It led to her fascination with the human and non-human animal survival instinct and our limited autonomy in moral and legal systems. In ‘The Mexican Mafia and Me’ (2015) Lyn collaborated with a prisoner on San Quentin’s Death Row who was convicted of murder. She exchanged letters and drawings (some of which were sent to him by other women) and Lyn told his story in embroidery, film and animation.
Now, Lyn is undertaking research into non-human post-nuclear landscapes as part of an Early Career Researcher Leverhulme Fellowship at Newcastle University. Before joining Newcastle, Lyn was artist in residence at a ‘Prepper’ site (575 bunkers wide and 3/4 the size of Manhattan) in South Dakota called Vivos X Point, where their seemingly eccentric action of self-exile became surprisingly prescient as COVID-19 hit.
Watch on recap (you will need your university log-in to access)
Prof. Anya Hurlbert
Anya Hurlbert is Professor of Visual Neuroscience and Dean of Advancement at Newcastle University. Anya’s research interests are focused on the understanding of human vision, especially colour perception and its role in cognition and behaviour; her work includes applications in imaging, lighting, visual art, and human health. Anya speaks and writes widely on colour perception and art and has devised several science-based art exhibitions, including an interactive installation at the National Gallery, London, where she was recently Scientific Trustee and still serves on its Scientific Consultative Group. She is currently Trustee of the Science Museum Group and a member of the Advisory Board of the National Science and Media Museum.
Watch on recap (you will need your university log-in to access)
Kara chin
Chin is a British-Singaporean artist working across animation, ceramics, sculpture and installation. She explores our relationship to increasingly digitised environments and devices, presenting technocratic premonitions through fictional archaic objects and ceremonies. Works have explored the extremities of transhumanist ideologies, biohacking, and ecological disaster, and how these exacerbate a haunting of the present by the future. Chin delivers these subjects with injections of humour, combining a variety of materials, audio-visual media, organic and synthetic matter, and animatronics, into bizarre narratives and chaotic configurations.
Chin lives and works in Newcastle. She holds a BA in Fine Art from The Slade School of Fine Art (2018). She was featured in Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2018, and has been awarded the Woon Foundation Painting and Sculpture Prize (2018); The Duveen Travel Scholarship, UCL (2018); The Alfred W Rich Prize, Slade (2017); Max Werner Drawing Prize, Slade (2015).
Chin has exhibited at galleries and museums including: Humber Street Gallery, Hull, The 8th International Triennial of Art and Ecology, Maribor, Slovenia; BALTIC39, Newcastle; South London Gallery, London; The Art Science Museum, Singapore; DKUK, London, UK; Gallery North, Newcastle; Quench Gallery, Margate; VITRINE, London, Basel, and Digital.
Watch on recap (you will need your university log-in to access)
Hinterlands’ Panel
with artists Michele Allen, Jo Coupe and Sabina Sallis
Hinterlands is a group exhibition that invites us to consider our relationship with the land and its ecosystems. The artists showcased explore complex histories, mythologies, legacies and potential futures for its custodianship.
The show considers the landscape of the North East, its histories, mythologies and legacies and potential futures for custodianship. New commissions and existing works by artists connected with the area reflect on ideas of rootedness and belonging, human and more-than-human relationships, boundaries, land and time in the era of the climate emergency.
The idea of hinterlands – the land away from the coast or the banks of a river – is at the core of the exhibition, which explores what lies beyond the visible or known. Considering land and place as a complex layering of relationships, the exhibition will explore these ideas through innovative artistic processes and approaches, including through the possibilities of materials and contexts: geological, biological and social, shaped and hardened by history.
(source: Baltic Website)
ABOUT the artists
Michele Allen is a multimedia artist and researcher based in North East England, her work is often produced over lengthy periods of time working with communities or in response to specific sites and locations. At the core of her practice is a deep concern for the relationships we form with the natural environment and over the past eighteen years she has worked on a series of interconnected projects which explore, place, environment and community. She has a doctorate by photographic practice and regularly presents her artistic and academic work at events across the UK.
Jo Coupe’s work is underpinned by a fascination with the interconnected processes of decay and the narrative and metaphorical potential that these processes represent. It seeks to undermine what we consider to be solid and stable and reveal not only invisible forces and unseen patterns but also the fluid and shifting nature of all materials. Her practice is structured around a series of sustained research projects investigating new contexts and sites and culminating in significant works which combine time-based performative elements with sculptural presence and considerations. These manifest as objects, installation, photographs, film, collage sound and performance, which together interrogate what ‘liveness’ might mean within the context of sculpture.
Sabina Sallis’ multifaceted approach to creative practice interweaves fact and fiction and includes exhibiting, research, collaboration, curation, foraging, hospitality, somatic practices and pedagogy. Working across multi-mediums and disciplines in a speculative and trans-disciplinary way, Sabina’s work explores art as a sustainable land practice concerned with re-indigenizing local ecosystems through pleasurable entrenchment in the world of senses, engagement with plants, healing and cosmology. As cultural praxis of nurture and care, her artistic practice engages the entanglement between the human mind, knowledge and more-than-human worlds.
Watch on recap (you will need your university log-in to access)
anti-racism forum
For our second Anti-racism forum, we used the Audio Arts archive to listen to artists talk about issues surrounding race, class and gender and how they tackle this through their work and practice.
The artists were exhibiting as part of two exhibitions that are seen as pivatol moments of representation of race in Western exhibition practice From Two Worlds (1986) and documenta11 (2002) . We listened to extracts from interviews with artists Rasheed Araeen and Chantal Akerman.
Watch on recap (you will need your university log-in to access)
France-lise mcgurn
France-Lise McGurn lives and works in Glasgow. She graduated from a Master’s in Painting at the Royal College of Art, London in 2012.
Her vibrant and lyrical work is intuitively made and populated by a cast of archetypal figures who she paints from her imagination. The paintings explore sexuality, ecstasy, loss and consciousness with her characters becoming central in these emotions. She paints on canvas but often her works expand out on to the walls and surroundings of the exhibition creating immersive environments.
She takes inspiration from historic Italian painting, twentieth-century art history, popular culture, magazines and newspapers.
Watch on recap (you will need your university log-in to access)
Sheree Angela Matthews
Dr Sheree Angela Matthews is Creatrix: she who makes.
Her personal working definition of creativity is that it’s a changing practice depending on this journey of life to becoming whole.
With a practice which manifests through poetry, storytelling, image and the unfolding histories of Black people. Sheree engages audiences around Black women’s voices and bodies, black feminism, ecology and memory, nature and wellbeing, trauma and healing. She advocates for Black women’s voices, facilitating national and international creative workshops and retreats in the landscape, encouraging and supporting women on their journey of remembrance back to their bodies and authentic selves.
She’s the creator and host of The Earth Sea Love Podcast, sharing stories from people of colour and their connection with nature.
Watch on recap (you will need your university log-in to access)
Dr Tina Sikka
Dr Tina Sikka spoke in conversation with Gayle about her research into Feminism, #MeToo, Sexual Consent and Restorative Justice. She regularly collaborates with artist Lady Kitt to explore issues of consent through creative workshops and is an advocate for using creative methods in research.
Dr. Tina Sikka is a Reader in Technoscience and Intersectional Justice in the School of Arts and Culture at Newcastle University, UK. Her current research includes the critical and intersectional study of science, applied to climate change, bodies, and health, as well as research on consent, sexuality, and restorative justice.
Her most recent book, Sex, Consent, and Justice: A New Feminist Framework (2021) offers a novel approach to sexual ethics and transformative forms of justice using case studies from #MeToo, while her previous book, Climate Technology, Gender, and Justice: The Standpoint of the Vulnerable (2019), draws on feminist science studies to explore the science underpinning solar climate engineering.
Dr. Sikka’s forthcoming book, Health Apps, Genetic Diets, and Superfoods: When Biopolitics Meets Neoliberalism (2023), uses autoethnography, science and technology studies, and new materialism to examine what constitutes ‘good health’ and explore possibilities for enacting health justice.
Dr. Sikka’s work on EDI, and current role as Director of EDI in the Media, Culture, and Heritage at Newcastle University, has led to invitations to lead workshops and act as a consultant on race, gender, and the workplace, cancel culture, and equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) in the public and private sectors.
Watch on recap (you will need your university log-in to access)
Emii alrai
Emii Alrai is an artist working mainly in sculpture and installation. Her work spans material investigation in relation to memory, critique of the western museological structure and the study and complexity of ruins. Alrai’s installations work as large-scale realms built in relation to bodies of research which start with archaeology and the natural environments objects are excavated from. Weaving in social memory, inherited nostalgia and the lives of the ancient past which question objects’ roles in the world around us, their power and the hierarchies they sit in.
Watch on recap (you will need your university log-in to access)
Richard Bliss
Richard is an artist whose work only exists through collaboration. He works with community groups, and directly with the public. His work mainly focusses on two areas, exploring masculinity, mainly through the Quest for the Perfect Shirt and uncovering hidden histories, particularly LGBTQIA+ histories.
Richard describes himself as an artist/tailor as he is interested in how clothes work as signifiers. He often work in public, particularly making shirts in public places as part of the Quest for the Perfect Shirt.
Watch on recap (you will need your university log-in to access)
keg de souza and emma nicolson
Keg de Souza and curator Emma Nicolson in conversation with Gayle about their latest project together. Shipping Roots transforms the exhibition spaces at The Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh into a site to talk about the Climate Emergency through artists working in interdisciplinary spaces.
About Keg de Souza
Keg de Souza is an artist of Goan heritage who lives and works on unceded Gadigal land and explores the politics of space through temporary architecture, radical pedagogy and food politics. This investigation of social and spatial environments is influenced by architectural training, squatting and organising, as well as personal experiences of colonialism – from her own ancestral lands being colonised to living as a settler on other people’s unceded lands. Keg often creates projects that focus on pedagogy to centre voices that are often marginalised – for learning about Place.
Keg has exhibited globally including Sydney Biennale (2020); Artspace, Sydney (2018); The National: New Australian Art, AGNSW (2017); 20th Biennale of Sydney and Setouchi Triennale, Japan (2016); Temporary Spaces, Edible Places: Vancouver and Preservation as part of a multi-year project with Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (2015); Temporality in Architecture, Food and Communities, Delfina Foundation, London; Temporary Spaces, Edible Places, Atlas Arts, Isle of Skye and If There’s Something Strange In Your Neighbourhood, Ratmakan Kampung, Yogyakarta (2014); 5th Auckland Triennial, 15th Jakarta Biennale and Vertical Villages (with ruangrupa) at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney
About Emma Nicolson
Emma Nicolson is Head of Creative Programmes at Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh with a particular interest in developing programming that helps engender individual and societal change, she is committed to partnership working for and with artists, creative professionals and communities, encouraging creative and critical thinking with local, as well as national and international audiences. Emma has been actively involved in the visual arts for over twenty years and has worked with leading cultural institutions in Scotland, England, Ireland and Australia, including ATLAS Arts on the Isle of Skye (2010 -2018), Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney Australia (2007-2010), National Galleries of Scotland (2001-07), and Fife Council.
Watch on recap (you will need your university log-in to access)
Slugtown
Matt talked about history of Slugtown, how it has developed over the years, what they are currently doing and what their plans for the future are. He also discussed how running a gallery space connects with his practice as an artist.
About Slugtown
Slugtown is a not-for-profit gallery space dedicated to offering a platform for early-career and emerging artists and making art accessible to all through a free public workshop programme.
Watch on recap (you will need your university log-in to access)
Archive
Visiting Speaker Programme Sem2 2022
3rd February 2022 Rosalind Nashashibi
10th February 2022 Yuri Pattison
Friday 11th 10.00am seminar Sam Buchan- Watts
17th February 2022 Jenn Ellis
Friday 18th 10.00am seminar Sam Buchan-Watts
24th February 2022 Roger Hiorns
3rd March 2022 Abbas Akhavan
Friday 4th March seminar Jane and Louise Wilson
10th March 2022 Osman Yousefzada
24th March 2022 Bruce Yonemoto
28th April 2022 Cliff Lauson
5th May 2022 Julie Lomax
Friday 6th May in person tutorials with students
12th May 2022 Margarita Gluzberg
Please note Margarita will be giving In-Person TUTORIALS on THURSDAY MAY 12TH 1pm – 4.45pm the sign-up sheets for tutorials will be outside Fine Art Office
Thursday 17.15pm – 18.15pm February 3rd – 03/02/22
Rosalind Nashashibi
Rosalind Nashashibi is a London-based artist working in film and painting. Her films use both documentary and speculative languages, where observations from her own life and the world around her are merged with paintings, fictional or sci-fi elements; often to propose models of collective living. Her paintings likewise operate on another level of subjective experience, they frame arenas or pools of potential where people or animals may appear, often sharing the picture plane with their own context of signs and apparitions that hint at their position vis a vis the artist. Nashashibi has showed in Documenta 14, Manifesta 7, the Nordic Triennial, and Sharjah X, she was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2017 and won Beck’s Futures prize in 2003. She represented Scotland in the 52nd Venice Biennial. Most recent solo shows include Vienna Secession, CAAC Seville, Chicago Art Institute and Kunstinstuut Melly, Rotterdam. She was National Gallery artist in residence 2020.
Please view the link below to VIVIAN’S GARDEN – A FILM BY ROSALIND NASHASHIBI (2017) https://vimeo.com/showcase/6357690/video/216150268 Password: Thi5Qu@lity Vivian Suter and her mother Elisabeth Wild are two Swiss / Austrian émigré artists in living in Panajachel, Guatemala, where they have developed a matriarchal compound in an environment that offers both refuge and terror. This film takes a close and dreamy look at their artistic, emotional, and economic lives.
Please note Rosalind’s VISITING SPEAKER TALK will be running in the FINE ART LECTURE THEATRE live on ZOOM
Thursday 17.15pm – 18.15pm February 10th – 10/02/22
Yuri Pattison
Yuri Pattison is an artist with a focus on sculpture, video, and digital media. He explores the visual culture of digital economies and investigates the political, social, and material ramifications of technology on sleep hygiene, flexible labor, travel – and most recently, time. Among other recognitions, Pattison was awarded the Luma Arles Residency in France in 2018 and his practice was central to the prestigious CREATE Residency from 2014–2016. The latter concluded with a major solo show, namely user, space, Chisenhale Gallery, London, 2016. Other recent notable solo exhibitions include the engine, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, 2020; and Trusted Traveler, Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, St. Gallen, 2017. With the work sun_set. pro_vision, he was part of One Escape at a Time – 11th Seoul Mediacity Biennale, 2021; and exhibited at TECHNO, MUSEION, Bolzano 2021. He lives and works in London.
Please note Yuri’s VISITING SPEAKER TALK will be running in the FINE ART LECTURE THEATRE live on ZOOM.
Please note that Yuri will be giving a ZOOM SEMINAR on FRIDAY FEBRUARY 11th 10am-11am the sign-up sheets for this event will be outside Fine Art Office
Thursday 17.15pm – 18.15pm February 17th – 17/02/22
Jenn Ellis
Jenn Ellis FRSA is a curator, founder and patron from Colombia, Switzerland and the UK based in London. Over the last decade Jenn has built innovative businesses and projects across the public and private art sector that have been featured in the Evening Standard, BBC, ArtReview, Financial Times, and others. Jenn is the founder of curatorial studio APSARA, which has collaborated with leading galleries and museums globally including Lehmann Maupin, Tate, and South London Gallery. Jenn is equally the co-founder of AORA, the space for your senses. She also co-hosts podcast Between Two Curators, lectures at various institutions including Sotheby’s Institute of Art, collects contemporary art, mentors, and sits on the committee of Chisenhale Gallery.
Please see the link to AORA a virtual space and platform created by Jenn Ellis and Benni Allan AORA is aimed to instil calm and wellbeing through a curated meeting of architecture, art and sound. www.aoraspace.com
Please note Jenn’s VISITING SPEAKER TALK will be running in the FINE ART LECTURE THEATRE live on ZOOM.
Please note that Jenn will be giving a ZOOM SEMINAR on FRIDAY 10am-11am FEBRUARY 18th the sign-up sheets for this event will be outside Fine Art Office
Thursday 17.15pm – 18.15pm February 24th – 24/02/22
Roger Hiorns
Roger Hiorns (1975, Birmingham, United Kingdom) is an artist whose sculptures investigate material and form. In his installation ‘Seizure’ (2008) he filled an apartment in London ready for demolition, with a copper sulphate solution, which through chemical process resulted in an interior fully covered with gleaming blue crystal formations. He uses processes in which he himself has no influence on the eventual appearance of the work. The relation between the movable and the immovable, the living and the dead yields an undeniable tension in his work. Solo exhibitions include Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (2017), Rudolfinum Gallery, Prague (2015), Corvi-Mora, London, (2015), Corvi-Mora, London, (2015), Luhring Augustine, New York (2014), The Hepworth Wakefield, Wakefield, (2013), MIMA, Middlesbrough (2012), Aspen Art Museum, Aspen (2010), The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago (2010), the Tate Britain, London (2010), the Camden Arts Centre, London (2007) and the UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2003). He was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2009.
Please note Roger’s VISITING SPEAKER TALK will be in the FINE ART LECTURE THEATRE live on ZOOM (tbc)
Thursday 17.15pm – 18.15pm March 3rd – 03/03/22
Abbas Akhavan
Abbas Akhavan’s practice ranges from site-specific ephemeral installations to drawing, video, sculpture and performance. The direction of his research has been deeply influenced by the specificity of the sites where he works: the architectures that house them, the economies that surround them, and the people that frequent them. The domestic sphere, as a forked space between hospitality and hostility, has been an ongoing area of research in his practice. More recent works have shifted focus, wandering onto spaces and species just outside the home – the garden, the backyard, and other domesticated landscapes.
Akhavan’s recent solo exhibitions include Chisenhale Gallery, London (2021), Fogo Island Arts, Fogo Island (2019), and The Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco (2019). Group exhibitions include Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool (2018), SALT Galata, Istanbul (2017), and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2016). Akhavan was recently the artist in residence at Atelier Calder, Saché (2017), Fogo Island Arts (2013, 2016, 2019), and Flora: ars+natura, Bogota (2015). He is the recipient of Kunstpreis Berlin (2012), The Abraaj Group Art Prize (2014), and the Sobey Art Award (2015).
Please note Abbas VISITING SPEAKER TALK will be in the FINE ART LECTURE THEATRE live on ZOOM.
Please note that Abbas will be giving a ZOOM SEMINAR on FRIDAY MARCH 4th 10am-11am the sign-up sheets for this event will be outside Fine Art Office.
Thursday 17.15pm – 18.15pm March 10th – 10/03/22
Osman Yousefzada
Osman Yousefzada born into a family of artisans in Birmingham, Osman Yousefzada had a needle in his hand well before the age of 10. Learning his trade from his Afghan and Pakistani mother and father, a tailor and a carpenter, he founded his eponymous label in 2005. In 2019, the brand finally parted ways from what Yousefzada describes as a series of rather ‘nasty’ partners, allowing him to bring his roles as an artist, fashion designer and activist, together as one. Osman’s practice revolves around modes of storytelling, merging autobiography with fiction and ritual. His work is concerned with the representation and rupture of the migrational experience and refers to socio-political issues of today. These themes are explored through moving image, installations, text works, sculpture, garment making and performance.
Please note Osman’s VISITING SPEAKER TALK will be in the FINE ART LECTURE THEATRE live on ZOOM.
Thursday 17.15pm – 18.15pm March 24th – 24/03/22
Bruce Yonemoto
Bruce Yonemoto is a Japanese-American multimedia artist. His photographs, installations, sculptures, and films appropriate and play with familiar narrative forms. Working in collaboration with his brother, Norman Yonemoto, since 1975, Bruce Yonemoto’s work explores the intersections of traditional Japanese and contemporary American cultures. He has been recognized by the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Film Institute, The Rockefeller Foundation, the Maya Deren Award for Experimental Film and Video, and a mid-career survey show at the Japanese American National Museum. He has had solo exhibitions at Alexander Gray Gallery, New York, Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, Tomio Koyama, Tokyo, Galerie Quynh, Ho Chi Minh City and his work was featured in Los Angeles 1955-85 at the Pompidou Center, Paris, and the Generali Foundation, Vienna, the 2008 Gwangju Biennial. Pacific Standard Time, Getty Research Center and most recently an expansive survey show in Kanazawa, Japan.https://www.eai.org/artists/bruce-and-norman-yonemoto/biography
MADE IN HOLLYWOOD https://vimeo.com/66213933 Password: byonemoto
Please note Bruce’s VISITING SPEAKER TALK will be in the FINE ART LECTURE THEATRE live on ZOOM
Thursday 17.15pm – 18.15pm April 28th – 28/04/22
Dr Cliff Lauson
Dr Cliff Lauson is Senior Curator at the Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre, London. Since arriving as Curator at the Hayward in 2009, he has organised major exhibitions of work by Bridget Riley, Martin Creed, Ernesto Neto, Tracey Emin, and David Shrigley and the critically-acclaimed group exhibitions Light Show and Space Shifters. In addition, he has curated numerous exhibitions of artists in the HENI Project Space, including Dineo Seshee Bopape, Emmanuelle Lainé, Kate Cooper, and Adapt to Survive: Notes from the Future. He has also commissioned artworks and projects across the wider Southbank Centre site.Cliff was a 2015-6 Fellow of the Clore Leadership Programme, and undertook the secondment component of his fellowship at Industrial Light & Magic, London. He co-hosts the Between Two Curators podcast, and is a trained life and executive coach. For 2021, Cliff is a participating mentor on the I Like Networkingprogramme.Cliff was previously Assistant Curator at Tate Modern, working on exhibitions such as Frida Kahlo, Mark Rothko, Per Kirkeby, and World as a Stage
Please note Cliffs VISITING SPEAKER TALK will be in the FINE ART LECTURE THEATRE live on ZOOM
Thursday 17.15pm – 18.15pm May 5th – 05/05/22
Julie Lomax
Julie Lomax has over 20 years of experience working in the public sector and is the Chief Executive Officer at a-n Artists Information Company, which is the largest membership organization in the UK for visual artists with over 25,000 members. Julie Lomax joined a-n Artists Information Company after working as the Director of Development at Liverpool Biennial. In London, Julie Lomax was a commissioner for the Fourth Plinth contemporary art project in Trafalgar Square, sat on the commissioning panel for artworks in the 2012 Olympic Park, and was on the advisory group for Art on the Underground.
Julie Lomax is the Chair of The Showroom, London, she is also an Executive Committee member of the Association of Women in the Arts. Julie Lomax originally trained as an artist, graduating from Chelsea School of Art with a degree in Fine Art.
Please note Julie’s VISITING SPEAKER TALK will be In- Person the FINE ART LECTURE THEATRE.
Please note Julie will be giving In-Person TUTORIALS on FRIDAY MAY 6TH 9am -1pm the sign-up sheets for tutorials will be outside Fine Art Office
Thursday 17.15pm – 18.15pm May 12th – 12/05/22
Margarita Gluzberg
Margarita Gluzberg Born in Moscow in 1968, Margarita Gluzberg left the Soviet Union in 1979, and now lives and works in London. She studied at Oxford and the Royal College of Art. Her practice ranges from painting and drawing, to performance, sound installation and slide projection. She is currently Senior Lecturer at the Royal Academy Schools, London.
Please note Margarita’s VISITING SPEAKER TALK will be In- Person the FINE ART LECTURE THEATRE.
Please note Margarita will be giving In-Person TUTORIALS on THURSDAY MAY 12TH 1pm – 4.45pm the sign-up sheets for tutorials will be outside Fine Art Office
Visiting Speaker Programme Sem1, 2021-22
30/09/21
SARAH STATON
07/10/21
CATRIONA GALLAGHER
14/10/21
PAUL WALDE
21/10/21
KRISTIN OPPENHEIM
28/10/21
REZA ARAMESH
04/11/21.
ZINEB SEDIRA
18/11/21
YOUNG HAE CHANG
25/11/21
SARAH JONES
02/12/21
SUTAPA BISWAS
09/12/21
IRENE ARISTIZABAL
16/12/21
ABBAS AKHAVAN
Thursdays, 5 PM in the Lecture Theatre and on Zoom.
2021-22
Sarah Jones
Thursday 25/11/21, 5 PM
Born in London, UK. Lives and works in London, UK. Sarah Jones first gained international attention in the late 1990’s for her large-scale photographs of psychoanalysts’ couches and her studies of three young women pictured in domestic settings, from adolescence to early adulthood. Jones’ subsequent works have further drawn attention to a relationship between subject, location and photographer as seen in her composed photographs of life models, and young female actors, shot in both studio and on location. In more recent works, Jones’ use of the cinematic lighting technique of day for night on location has built a compressed photographic realm where her subjects, seemingly emerging from an inky black photographic night, making for a compelling and distinct visual language.
Recent solo shows include Hall of Mirrors, Maureen Paley, London (2021); Sarah Jones: The Pleasure Gardens, Weinstein Hammons Gallery, Minneapolis (2019); Anton Kern Gallery, New York (2018); Minneapolis Institute of Arts (2013); Sarah Jones: Photographs, National Media Museum, Bradford (2007),; Huis Marseille, Foundation for Photography, Amsterdam (2000); Museum Folkwang Essen (1999); and Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid (1999). She has exhibited in group shows worldwide, including Dulwich Picture Gallery, London; Guildhall Art Gallery, London; Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate Gallery, London. Sarah is a Reader in photography at The Royal College of Art.
YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES
Thursday 18/11/21, 5 PM
YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES is yhchang.com is Young-hae Chang and Marc Voge.
Based in Seoul, YHCHI has made their signature style of original text and music in 26 languages and shown it in major art institutions. In 2012 they were Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Creative Arts Fellows. In 2018 M+ Hong Kong acquired an archive of all of their past and future work YHCHANG.COM/AP2: THE COMPLETE WORKS.
They gave the 2020 Renato Poggioli Lecture at Harvard University. In July 2021 they presented a show of their work which opened at Tate Modern, both on- and offline. For the opening of M+, in November 2021, they’re presenting a major new project, CRUCIFIED TVS.
Zineb Sedira
THURSDAY 04/11/21 , 5 PM
Sedira has exhibited in solo exhibitions at the Photographer’s Gallery (London, 2006); New Art Exchange (Nottingham, 2009); Pori Museum (Finland, 2009); Bildmuseet (Sweden, 2010); Kunsthalle Nikolaj (Denmark, 2010); Palais de Tokyo (France, 2010); [mac] musée d’Art contemporain (Marseille, 2010); Blaffer Art Museum, (Houston, 2013); Prefix – Institute of Contemporary Art (Toronto, 2010); Charles H. Scott Gallery (Canada); Art On the Underground, (London, 2016); Sharjah Art Foundation (2018); Beirut Art Center (Lebanon, 2018); Jeu de Paume (Paris) and IVAM (Spain, 2019), Bildmuseet (Sweden) and SMOCA (USA) in 2021.Sedira has in group shows at Tate Britain (London, 2002); Centre Pompidou (Paris, 2004, 2009); Mori Museum (Tokyo, 2005); Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art (Gateshead, 2005); Musée d’Art Moderne of (Algiers, 2007); Brooklyn Museum (New York, 2007); Gwangju Museum of Art (South Korea) (Washington, 2015); Guggenheim and Studio Museum (NY); Museum Colecao Berardo, (Lisbon, 2016); MAC VAL (France , 2017) and Whitechapel Gallery (London, 2019)Also in biennials and triennials including the Venice Biennale (2001 and 2011); Limerick Biennial (Ireland 2001); ICP Triennial (New York, 2003); Sharjah Biennale (UAE, 2003 and 2007); Folkestone Triennial (2011); Thessaloniki Biennale (Greece, 2011), Prospect, New Orleans, (USA, 2016).
Zineb Sedira is the founder of aria (Artist Residency in Algiers) which supports the contemporary artistic scene in Algeria through intercultural exchanges and collaborations. The artist has been shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize 2021.In April 2022, Zineb Sedira will be representing France at the 59th Venice Biennale, 2022.
Reza Aramesh
Thursday 28/10/21 , 5 pm
Working in photography, sculpture, video and performance, Aramesh’s profound understanding of the history of art, film and literature is ever-present in his artwork. Aramesh de-contextualises scenes of reportage images of violence from their origins, exploring the narratives of representation and iconography of subjected body in the context of race, class and sexuality in order to create a critical conversation with the western art history.
Reza Aramesh’s work has been exhibited in both solo and group exhibitions most recently at 9th Edition of Sculpture in the City, London, Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge 2020, Asia Society Museum in New York (2021), Met Breuer in New York (2018), SCAD Museum in Georgia Atlanta (2018), Akademie der Kunst Berlin (2016), the 2015 Venice Biennale, Art Basel Parcours 2017, Frieze Sculpture Park 2015 and 2017, and at Maxxi Museum in Rome (2016). He has orchestrated a number of performances and exhibitions in such spaces as at Barbican Art Centre,Tate Britain and ICA, London.. Reza Aramesh was born in Iran and has been living in London since his teenage years. He holds an MFA from Goldsmiths University, London (1997).
Kristin Oppenheim
Thursday 21/10/21, 5 PM
chaired by Jane and Louise Wilson
Kristin Oppenheim is an American artist best known for her immersive installations based in sound, film, and performance. Over the last three decades, she has composed vocal works not as a musician, but as an artist working in gallery and museum contexts. Oppenheim’s installations saturate space, touching on fragmented memories that blur the lines between reality and abstraction. In spring 2021, she released a new vinyl record, “Night Run”, which features the first collection of her early sound works recorded in her studio between 1992 and 1995. Her upcoming exhibitions include 303 Gallery, New York in January 2022, and greengrassi, London in May 2022. A new vinyl record, “Voices Fill My Head” will also be released in spring 2022.
Kristin Oppenheim was born in 1959 in Honolulu, Hawaii. She received a BA from San Fransisco State University in 1984 and MFA from Hunter College in 1989. She lives and works in New York City, and is represented by greengrassi in London, and 303 Gallery in New York. Oppenheim’s work is included in the Art Foundation Mallorca Collection, the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the FRAC Des Pays de la Loire, Carquefou, France; in MACBA Barcelona; in MAMCO Geneva; in MOMA New York; San Francisco MOMA; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
Please see these links below NB Kristin recommends you listen to her work with stereo headphones
https://kristinoppenheim.bandcamp.com/album/night-run-collected-sound-works-1992-1995
https://www.303gallery.com/artists/kristin-oppenheim/a-press2
Paul Walde, ‘Requiem for a Glacier’
Thursday 14 Oct 2021, 5 PM (Zoom)
chaired by Jane and Louise Wilson
Paul Walde is an award-winning artist, composer and curator who lives in Victoria, Canada on lək̓ʷəŋən territory. Originally trained as a painter, Walde’s music and sound compositions have been a prominent feature in his artwork for over 20 years. He is best known for his interdisciplinary performance works staged in the natural environment, often involving music and choreography. The documentation of these events is frequently used as the basis of his sound and video installations which have been the subject of exhibitions nationally and internationally. Currently, his work is featured in the exhibition HYPER-POSSIBLE at the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum as part of the 3rd Coventry Biennial.
Catriona Gallagher
Thursday 07 Oct 2021, 5 PM
CHAIRED BY JANE AND LOUISE WILSON
Catriona Gallagher is a British-Irish visual artist based between Northumberland and Athens. Her work moves between film, drawing, writing and installation and navigates the overlooked details in our physical surroundings and the psychological landscapes mirroring them. She has exhibited internationally, and her films have premiered at Sheffield Doc Fest, Ann Arbor, New Holland Island and Laterale film festivals. In 2020-2021 she was an Artist in Residence at Visual Arts in Rural Communities in Northumberland, as part of the two-year multi-partner ENTWINED programme. She is also a co-founder of A – DASH project space and studios in Athens, which she ran with Eva Isleifs, Noemi Niederhauser and Zoe Hatziyanaki between 2016 and 2019.
Sarah Staton, SupaStore
Thursday 30 Sept 2021, 5 PM (ZOom)
Sarah Staton (b.1961 UK) lives and works in London. Her ongoing project SupaStore (est.1993), plays with the relation between art’s publics and its markets in an ever mutating series of exhibitions involving established and upcoming artists. SupaStore has been shown in numerous galleries and museums internationally, iterations include SupaStore, Kunstkammerkiosk, Tate Modern, London (2001); SupaStore Air, a duo show with Marta Rosler’s Airport Series, Midway Contemporary, Minneapolis, USA (2016); SupaStore Southside, Slingbacks and Sunshine, South London Gallery (2021). Staton’s interest in art’s relation with the social is further explored in the creation of public artwork that often invites a tangible bodily interaction, in that it can be sat on, or under. Her public sculpture Alphonso opens in September 2021 at Newton Leys. Staton is creating public art on the Tideway on 3 sites in London, a commission that completes in 2024. Sarah has exhibited widely across Europe and North America and is presently Senior Tutor in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art.
Visiting Speaker Programme 2020-21
Camille Yvert
Thursday 13/05, 17.00
LARISSA SANSOUR
chaired by Erika Servin
Thursday 06/05, 17.00
Larissa Sansour works mainly with film as well as with installation, photography and sculpture. Central to her work is the dialectics between myth and historical narrative. Born in East Jerusalem, Palestine, her recent work uses science fiction to address social and political issues, dealing with memory, inherited traumas, power structures and nation states.
Sansour is currently shortlisted for the Jarman award. Her work is shown in film festivals and museums worldwide. She has shown her work at Tate Modern, MoMA, Centre Pompidou and the Istanbul Biennial. In 2019, Sansour represented Denmark at the 58thVenice Biennale. Her most recent shows include Copenhagen Contemporary in Denmark and EMST in Greece. Heirloom is currently showing at Bildmuseet in Sweden.
Susie Green
Thursday 29/04, 17.00
Susie Green (b.1979) works across painting, performance and sculpture, focussing on empowerment through dress, fetish & disguise. At the heart of her work is an exploration into the personal and political powers of intimacy, vulnerability and transgression. Current two person exhibition with Cathy Josefowitz, Empty Rooms Full of Love (2021) (postponed), FRAC Champagne Ardenne, Reims, FR. Recent solo exhibitions and projects include: Double Trouble (2020) online solo exhibition, New Viewings curated by Andrew Renton, Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin DE; Club Goddess (2020), live stream commissioned by Kunstraum, London, UK. Recent solo and two person exhibitions include: Jerwood Solo Presentations (2018), Jerwood Arts, London; Interior Report (2018), Workplace, Gateshead; If They be Two (with Kim Coleman), Five Years, London; Pleasure is a Weapon (2017), Grand Union, Birmingham, UK. Group exhibitions include: Canons, Galerie Derouillon, Paris (2021), Something Soft (2019) Kunstraum, London; Idea Home (2017), MIMA, Middlesbrough; Exhibition of a Dream, Gulbenkian, Paris (2017). Recent performances: The Hold (2019) (in association with Huguette Caland exhibition), Tate St Ives, Cornwall; ROMANTI-CRASH (2018), Jupiter Artland, Edinburgh; Dwarling, My Darling (2017) (performance with Rory Pilgrim as The Brilliant State), Oude Kerk, Amsterdam, NL. She received a BA in Fine Art from Newcastle University (2002) and an MA in Fine Art, Chelsea College of Art UAL (2009). In 2020 she was selected for BALTIC STATES – a 3 month residency at Nida Art Colony, Lithuania, in association with BALTIC, Gateshead, UK.
Jasmina Cibic
Thursday 25/03, 17.00
Jasmina Cibic (b. Ljubljana 1979) is a London based artist who works in performance, installation and film. Her work draws a parallel between the construction of national culture and its use value for political aims, addressing the timelessness of psychological and soft power mechanisms that authoritarian structures utilise in their own reinsertion and reinvention.
Jasmina Cibic represented Slovenia at the 55th Venice Biennial with her project “For Our Economy and Culture”. Her recent exhibitions include solo shows at: Museum of Contemporary Art Ljubljana, CCA Glasgow, Phi Foundation Montreal, BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art Gateshead, Kunstmuseen Krefeld, Aarhus 2017, Esker Foundation Calgary, Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb, Museum of Contemporary Art Belgrade, MGLC Ljubljana and Ludwig Museum Budapest along with group exhibitions at Steirischer Herbst ‘19, MOMA NY, MUMA Monash Museum, CCS BARD and Guangdong Museum of Art China. Cibic’s films have been screened at Whitechapel Gallery, CCA Montreal, Pula Film Festival, HKW Berlin, Louvre, Les Rencontres Internationales Paris, Dokfest Kassel and Copenhagen International Documentary Festival. Cibic has been shortlisted for the Jarman Award (2018) and was the winner of the MAC International Ulster Bank and Charlottenborg Fonden awards (2016) and B3 Biennial of the Moving Image Award (2020). Her upcoming solo shows include macLyon, Museum Sztuki Lodz and the Museum der Moderne Salzburg.
Amalia Pica
THURSDAY 18/03, 17.00
chaired by Jane and Louise Wilson
Amalia Pica (born 1978 in Neuquén, Argentina) is a London-based Argentinian-British artist who explores metaphor, communication, and civic participation through sculptures, installations, live performances, and drawings. In 2021 Pica will exhibit at The Wellcome Collection, London, England, and Fondazione Memmo, Rome, Italy. Previous solo shows include: Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich. Switzerland, 2021; The New Art Gallery, Walsall, England; Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Sevilla, Spain; Herald St, London, England, 2019; Perth Institute of Contemporary Art, Perth, Australia, 2018, The Power Plant, Toronto, 2017; Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2017; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. Group exhibitions include: 12th Shanghai Biennale, Power Station of Art, Shanghai, China, 2018; Hayward Gallery London, 2018; Folkestone Triennial, Folkestone, 2017; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2017.
Tianzhuo Chen
Thursday 11/03
chaired by Rachel Maclean
Born in 1985, Tianzhuo Chen is currently living and working in Beijing, China. After graduating from Central St. Martins College of Art and Design in London, he received his Masters in Fine Arts from the Chelsea College of Art and Design, London. As a younger generation artist, Tianzhuo Chen skillfully works between the artistic disciplines of installation, performance, video, drawing on paper and photography. Many of his artworks require others’ participation or that of the audience so to take the form of a “happening”, such as an underground party, staged performance, or more conceptually, a constructed ritual site, and ultimately transforming reality into fantasy. Within his artworks, Chen mixes his well versed knowledge of elements and symbols found in religion (like Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, and Shamanism, etc.), subculture (like cult cultures, drag and rave, etc.), popular culture (such as cartoons, hip hop and electronic music, etc.), and dance (like Japanese Butoh and Vogueing) in order to juxtapose the atmosphere, and cause the audience/participants to transcend both superficial sates of the body and spirit. Ultimately, arriving at, what the artist himself has referred to, as a “state of madness”.
The Producers:
Charlotte Cotton and Shoair Mavlian
Thursday 25/02 , 17.00
Chaired by Uta Kögelsberger
Charlotte Cotton is a curator and writer based in Los Angeles. She has held positions including Curator of Photographs at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and head of the Wallis Annenberg Department of Photography at LACMA, and is currently the Artistic Director of the inaugural Tasweer Photo Festival in Qatar, launching in Spring 2021. She is the author of books including ‘Imperfect Beauty’ (2000); ‘Guy Bourdin’ (2003); ‘Photography is Magic’ (2015); and ‘Fashion Image Revolution’ (2018). The revised and updated 4th edition of ’The Photograph as Contemporary Art’, part of the Thames & Hudson World of Art series, was published in September 2020.
Shoair Mavlian is director of Photoworks and was named Apollo Magazine’s 40 under 40 Europe – Thinkers. As director of Photoworks her recent curatorial projects include ‘Photoworks Festival: Propositions for Alternative Narratives’ (2020) and ‘Ursula Schulz-Dornburg, Zone Grise / The Land In between’ for the MEP Paris (2019) and ‘Brighton Photo Biennial: A New Europe’ (2018). From 2011-2018 she was Assistant Curator, Photography and International Art at Tate Modern, London, where she curated the major exhibitions ‘Shape of Light: 100 Years of Photography and Abstract Art’ (2018), ‘The Radical Eye: Modernist Photography from the Sir Elton John Collection’ (2016), ‘Conflict, Time, Photography’ (2014), ‘Project Space: A Chronicle of Interventions’ (2014) and ‘Harry Callahan’ (2013)
Uta Kögelsberger is Professor of Practice at Newcastle University. She initiated and devised the talk series Producers Part II: New Positions on Curating in collaboration with Chris McCormack. Kögelsberger’s artistic practice articulates and engages with social and political concerns through photography, video, sculpture and sound. It has been exhibited at the Brighton Photo Biennial, at Art Night, London, LACMA, Los Angeles, Les Nuits de L’Annee, Rencontres, Arles, the Athens Photo Biennial, and the Glassell Project Space, MFAH, Houston. It is held in public and private collections including the Museum of Modern Art, Houston and the LACMA, Los Angeles.
Celia Hempton
Thursday 18/0217.00
Hempton’s art explores concepts of voyeurism in the post-digital age. In her paintings, performances and installations, she investigates the blurred lines of comfort and consent; desire and subjugation, visibility and opacity, seeking to deconstruct the ways in which we engage with humans in an evolving hyper-mediated age. Formally, Hempton’s paintings, which range in size from intimate to the life-size acknowledge the tropes of ‘history painting’ and the often subjugated female body. Hempton’s richly layered paintings directly play and confront this historical dynamism, producing tactile celebrations of the body, as well as multiple perspectives on how the bodily gaze is constructed.
Celia Hempton lives and works in London. In recent years her work has been included in exhibitions at ICA Boston, Performance Space 122 NYC, Artspace Sydney, Whitechapel Gallery, London, amongst many others. She has had solo presentations at Gwangju Biennale, Art Night with ICA London, Kunstverein Aachen and performances at Fiorucci Art Trust, Stromboli, Serpentine Galleries, London. Her work will be included in the British Art Show 9 in 2021. It is held in international private and public collections including The Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellin, Colombia, The British Council and the Government Art Collection, UK.
Richard Saxton
Thursday 11/0217.00
Richard Saxton is an artist and the founder of M12 STUDIO, an interdisciplinary collective that creates and supports new modes of art making in often rural and remote areas. He is based in Colorado, USA. His work focuses primarily on rural knowledge and landscape. It has been described as contemporary vernacular and non-heroic. The M12 Studio focuses on experiential practices that explore community identity and the value of often under-represented rural communities and their surrounding landscapes. Recent exhibitions and commissioned works have appeared at the 21st International Art Biennial of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia; The Center for Contemporary Arts, Santa Fe, The 13th International Venice Architecture Biennale; The Kalmar Konstmuseum; The Santa Fe Art Institute; The Des Moines Public Art Foundation; Franklin Street Works; Wormfarm Institute; The 2011 Australian Biennial (SPACED); The 2010 Biennial of the Americas; The Center for Land Use Interpretation; The Kohler Arts Center; The Contemporary Museum in Baltimore; Wall House #2 in the Netherlands, and The Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin.
Hardeep Pandhal
Thursday 4 February, 17.00
Hardeep Pandhal (b.1985, Birmingham. Lives and works in Glasgow) works predominantly with drawing and voice to transform feelings of disinheritance and disaffection into generative spaces that bolster interdependence and self-belief. Applying practices of associative thinking, his research-led projects exhibit syncretic strains of post-brown weirdness. Across media, his works are imbued with acerbity and playful complexity; at once confrontational and reflective.Pandhal’s work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including: Goldsmiths Centre of Contemporary Art (2020); Tramway, Glasgow (2020); New Art Exchange, Nottingham (2019); Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (2019); South London Gallery, London (2018); New Museum, New York (2018); Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham (2018); Eastside Projects, Birmingham (2017); Modern Art Oxford, Oxford (2016).
Emily Speed
THURSDAY January 14th
Emily studied BA (Hons) Drawing & Painting at Edinburgh College of Art (2001) before completing an MA in Fine Art: Drawing at University of the Arts London: Wimbledon College of Art (2006). Emily was resident at the British School at Rome as the Derek Hill Foundation Scholar (drawing) in 2014/15. Recent exhibitions include solos at Tate St Ives, TRUCK, Calgary, Fort Worth Contemporary Arts, Texas and group exhibitions at: Laumeier Sculpture Park, St Louis, USA; Bluecoat, Liverpool; Yorkshire Sculpture Park and Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne, Switzerland. In 2021 she will present a new commission at Tate Liverpool as the recipient of the inaugural Art NorthWest Award.
Please contact Uta Kogelsberger, organiser of the Visiting Speaker Programme, uta.kogelsberger@newcastle.ac.uk for any questions or suggestions.
Seminars:
List of seminars running alongside the Visiting Speaker Programme.
Please contact the VSP conveners if you have any questions.