Author: Christian

‘Everybody in the Place, An Incomplete History of Britain 1984-1992’

Link to short extract/Frieze

Link to Guardian review

Jeremy Deller has generously given us authorisation to screen his excellent film 

Everybody in the Place: An Incomplete History of Britain 1984-1992s currently on show at 180 the Strand as part of the The Vinyl Factory: Reverb exhibition. 

Everybody in the Place: An Incomplete History of Britain 1984-1992 is not a film about climate change, but it is a film about lateral ways of thinking about modes of resistance: It can also be understood as it is a great introduction to the entanglement of capitalist structures at the root of the cliamte emergency and cultural production. 

The film dives into the world of music; examining the socio-political history of the 1980 rave culture and positioning it as a form of resistance to dominant powerstrucures and the miner’s strikes. This work is a film of a lecture Deller delivered to a class of A-level Politics students, it combines rare archive footage with an oral history tracing house music from its Chicago and Detroit origins to its political presence in post-Miners’ strike Britain. 

INTERVIEW

Animation Forum workshop

First Animation Forum workshop/advice session of the term!

24 OCT (THURSDAY) 10am – 1pm in the Media Suite (upstairs near printmaking)

Want to learn some new skills? Troubleshoot an ongoing project? Figure out how to make your moving image dreams come true? Want to make a game/VN? Interested in video but don’t know where to start?

Next up on the Animation Forum agenda is a loosely structured workshop/coworking session in the Media Suite, where you can come to learn new skills and/or develop existing work and receive feedback + help. There’s also drawing tablets to use. Bring your own tablet/laptop if applicable!

Come scan in IRL work to digitize it and try and make it move; come edit videos; come to learn about and experiment with AfterEffects; come draw some animation; come to talk and think about anime/games you enjoy and moving image at large; anything is possible.

Everyone is welcome, no experience needed. Bring your ideas and your enthusiasm.

Please sign up on the noticeboard bc space is limited, but you can come along anyway, and we shall try and make it work. The sign-up sheet will be up from today (Tuesday) late afternoon onwards.

If you’re curious about what the Animation Forum is all about generally, you can read stuff on the blog (link in my email signature below).

All the best,

Petra

Petra Szemán

The Power of Plants: Viruses, Healing and Amazonian Indigenous Art 

Wednesday 23 October, 5.15pm, Fine Art seminar room, KEVII Building

Giuliana Borea (Newcastle University), The Power of Plants: Viruses, Healing and Amazonian Indigenous Art 

Drawing on the work of Amazonian indigenous artist Harry Pinedo-Inin Metsa, “Our Plants, Our Oxygen. Lung Healing” and other works by Pinedo and Santiago Yahuarcani featured in the exhibition Ite/Neno/Aquí: Respuestas al Covid 19, this talk explores the role that plants played in helping to defeat, and cure, Covid-19 in the Amazon.

Focusing on the pandemic, I show how networks of help and knowledge between people, plants, animals and other beings, in what is understood as an extended humanity, occurred through dreams, “mareaciones” and various forms of mobility; and I explain the role of art in this set of exchanges, synaesthesia, and translations and what I call “agents of interface”. I argue that just as scientific visualization techniques offered an image of COVID-19, indigenous art offered a visualization of COVID-19 in the Amazon, and of its forms and agents of healing and care. 

While this presentation concerns the power of plants, it distances itself from recent exhibitions on ayahuasca art in Europe and the UK which I argue re-fuel the exoticism and “primitivist” consumption of the Amazon for a European audience, particularly at a time of global interest in indigenous art.

Giuliana Borea is an anthropologist and Senior Lecturer in Latin American Studies at Newcastle University. Her research concerns the different epistemologies of art; the political economy of contemporary art; museum politics and practices; place-making and sensory knowledge with a focus on Peru and the Amazon. She has been Peru’s Director of Museums and Cultural Heritage, Coordinator of the Lima Contemporary Art Museum, and has curated various exhibition of indigenous art. She is co-convenor of the Anthropology and Art Network (AntArt) of the European Association of Social Anthropologists. She is the editor of Arte y Antropología: Estudios, Encuentros y Nuevos Horizontes (PUCP 2017), co-editor of Antropologías Visuales Latinoamericanas: Estudios, Genealogías y Enseñanza (FLACSO, 2024) and the author of Configuring the New Lima Art Scene: An Anthropological Analysis of Contemporary Art in Latin America (Routledge, 2021), recently translated into Spanish as La nueva escena artística de Lima. Prácticas, museos y mercado. 

Painting Forum

Next Painting Forum:

18 October 2024, 

2-4 PM, Long Gallery

Please join us for the first Painting Forum 2024/25

18 October 2024, 2-4 PM, Long Gallery
In the first session we will discuss some paintings in the studios and speak about general ideas related to painting practice. 

(Please let me know, via e-mail,  if you are interested in discussing your work.)
I will also discuss the programme for the next sessions.

Open to everyone!

Any questions, please contact 

Christian.Mieves@newcastle.ac.uk

Painting + Forum   is a place for regular studio discussions about painting, an exchange of ideas and texts dealing with the everyday task of painting. It started in autumn 2019 with a series of informal discussions on painting with Newcastle University Fine Art students from all years (Undergraduate and Postgraduate).

This year we will have a series of conversations with painters, practical painting workshops and reading group meetings, discussing texts dealing with the idea of painting.


More info

Animation Forum

Petra Szemán <Petra.Szeman@newcastle.ac.uk>

Hello everyone,

This is your belated invitation to the first iteration of the ANIMATION FORUM this year, which will be a special SCREENING EVENT on Friday 11 October, 3-5pm in the Fine Art Lecture Theatre.

We have a very special double bill of the early works of Shinkai Makoto, the short film ‘Voices of a distant star’ (2002) & the short-ish film ‘5 Centimetres Per Second’ (2007). The combined length of the films in 1 hr 20 min, and the rest of the time afterwards will be taken up with an informal discussion. Poster attached.

No particular trigger warnings apply to any of the films. The first one is sci-fi, while the second one is more rooted in real life – both are solid cornerstones for the sekai-kei genre, and deal with themes of disconnect.

Those who dabble in Japanese animation may be familiar with Shinkai’s name through his massive success works in recent years such as Your Name and Suzume. This is a great opportunity to watch his early stuff on a relatively large projection!

The goal of the Animation Forum (in no particular order) is to enjoy animation, think about animation and artists’ moving image in a very expanded sense and critically, and to spread technical skills that let you incorporate animated/video elements into your artistic practice.

This screening session + discussion is a good opportunity to think about how pop culture and “high art” may feed into and interact with eachother, and where we can go from there as artists.

I hope to see many of you there !!

All the best,

Petra

Green Finger Forum

***new poster with time change, 11 Oct 2-7pm*** £1 entry fee***

GREEN FINGER FORUM IS BACK!
Spend an autumn evening with us making pumpkin and chickpea curry (veggie and vegan friendly!)

We will also be having ‘using spices in art’ and henna workshops!

I have attached a map for anyone who is confused as to where to find us! 

See you there for some delicious food!

Clifford Owens- visiting professor.

Next week US artist Clifford Owens is a guest in the department as a visiting professor. On the evening of Wednesday 9 October at 18:00 he will be showing a performance in the Robert Boyle Lecture Theatre, room G42 in the Armstrong building (University map ref:22). This is a rare opportunity to see performance art live and thoroughly recommended for all students. 

Clifford’s work brings the significance of liveness and presence into dialogue with the photograph. It acknowledges the complexities that come with a compulsion to record events and asks questions about the existential anxieties that accompany the camera. His own body is a crucial player in this. His practice takes the legacies of emergent performance art making from the ‘60s and ‘70s in which we see the artist’s body as the site of the work and pulls it into a conceptual dynamic with themes of race, masculinity, class and the fragility of social structures.

His project Anthology features performances scores—written or graphical instructions for actions—that Owens solicited from a multigenerational group of African-American artists. Twenty-six major artists have contributed scores — including Pope.l, Kara Walker and Senga Nengudi — many of whom composed new works specifically for Owens and his project.

TALKER is a self-published interview zine about performance by Giles Bailey. Each issue features a long-form interview with an artist who works in an innovative way with live practice. 

We hope to see you there,

Giles.

Student placement in Cairo, Egypt

To all third and final year BA and MfA students

Two-week fully-funded placement with Alwan wa Awtar, Cairo
(25 January – 9 February 2025)

In this fully-funded internship with Alwan wa Awtar you will be working alongside Alwan wa Awtar’s staff with young people delivering art workshops and art projects.

Established in 2005, Alwan wa Awtar (A&A) is a non-governmental organisation based in Cairo, Egypt that offers artistic and non-formal educational services to children and youth in different community settings, both urban and rural.  A&A’s goal is to enrich children and youth social and cultural wellbeing as well as awaken them to their full potential as dignified, authentic and skilled individuals, who actively engage with their own development and that of their communities.

Across the years, A&A has developed a unique experience in operating highly participatory learning spaces in multiple communities (namely Mokattam, Ezbet El-Nasr, & Kafr Hamza) adopting “arts for development” as its core methodology. Today, A&A runs three service units: the Mokattam community space, the Montessori child corner, as well as the Knowledge Hub which brings A&A’s know-how to various entities active in the cultural, educational and developmental field across Egypt.
Since its inception, A&A has worked with more than 10000 children and youth, 250 mothers and 50 partners.

For more information see also A&A’s website: https://alwan-awtar.org

Online applications here: https://forms.office.com/e/kngAuxQLt1Deadline: 10 November 2024

For more information about this opportunity please contact Wolfgang:
wolfgang.weileder@ncl.ac.uk