Cloning Tom: An Audience with W.J.T. Mitchell, Monday 13th June, University of Westminster, 2-6
Cloning Tom: An Audience with W.J.T. Mitchell
13th June 2011, 309 Regent Street, University of Westminster, 2:00-6:00, FREE. Booking essential.
To celebrate the publication of ‘Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present’ (The University of Chicago Press), the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture at University of Westminster is thrilled to host an audience with Professor W. J.T. Mitchell.
Mitchell will deliver a presentation entitled ‘The Historical Uncanny: Phantoms, Doubles, and Repetition in the War on Terror’. His presentation will be followed by a Roundtable with contributors including Maxime Boidy (Strasbourg), Abdelwahab El-Affendi (Westminster), Eyal Weizman (Goldsmiths), and Mitchell himself. The event will be chaired by Dr Marquard Smith (Westminster).
The event is FREE but booking is essential so please RSVP to Sharon Sinclair on sinclas@wmin.ac.uk
Contributors:
Professor W. J. T. Mitchell is Editor of Critical Inquiry and the Gaylord Donnelley Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature, the Department of Art History, and the College at the University of Chicago. He is the author of seminal books including What Do Pictures Want? and Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, and editor of collections such as Against Theory, Landscape and Power, On Narrative, and Picture Theory.
Maxime Boidy is the French translator of W.J.T. Mitchell’s Cloning Terror (with S. Roth) and has also translated books by Susan Buck-Morss and Mike Davis, as well as Mitchell’s Iconography. He is a doctorial candidate in the Laboratoire Cultures et Sociétés en Europe at Université de Strasbourg.
Dr Abdelwahab El-Affendi is Reader in Politics at the Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster and co-ordinator of the Centre’s Democracy and Islam Programme. He is also currently an ESRC/AHRC Fellow in the Global Uncertainties Programme working on a project entitled ‘Narratives of Insecurity, Democratization and the Justification of (Mass) Violence.’ Dr El-Affendi is author of books including About Muhammad: The Other Western Perspective on the Prophet of Islam, The Conquest of Muslim Hearts and Minds, For a State of Peace: Conflict and the Future of Democracy in Sudan, Rethinking Islam and Modernity, and Who Needs an Islamic State?
Dr Marquard Smith is Director of the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture, University of Westminster, and Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Visual Culture.
Dr Eyal Weizman is Director of the Centre of Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. His work includes buildings and stage sets in Israel/Palestine and Europe. Weizman works with a variety of NGOs and Human right groups in Israel/Palestine. He co-curated the exhibition A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture, and co-edited the publication of the same title. These projects were based on his human-rights research, and were banned by the Israeli Association of Architects. They were later shown in the exhibition Territories in New York, Berlin, Rotterdam, San Francisco, Malmoe, Tel Aviv and Ramallah. His books include Lesser Evils, Hollow Land, A Civilian Occupation, and the series Territories 1,2 and 3.
Cultures of Capitalism I: The Culture Industry Now
Thursday 12 May 2011, 7pm
Whitechapel Gallery, 77-82 Whitechapel High Street, London E1
Price: £7.00 (includes free glass of wine).
In the first of four events interrogating contemporary economies of art and culture, Esther Leslie, author of Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism, Adrian Rifkin, author of Street Noises, and David Cunningham, co-editor of Adorno and Literature, discuss ‘The Culture Industry Now’. Chaired by Marquard Smith.
The Whitechapel Salon is an annual series co-organised by the Whitechapel Gallery and the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture at the University of Westminster, in which leading intellectuals conduct discussions on a contemporary cultural issue in an informal atmosphere (with booze). Come and join us.
Book your ticket at:
http://www.whitechapelgallery.org/shop/product/category_id/22/product_id/871
Further details: http://instituteformodern.co.uk/
Our friends in the Department of Art and Media Studies at NTNU, Trondheim, Norway, are organizing The 10th International Conference of the Nordic Society for Intermedial Studies, 26th-28th October, 2011. Entitled ‘Media Acts’, Confirmed speakers include Jacques Ranciere, James Elkins, Sara Danius, Frederik Tygstrup, and Aud Sissel, Hoel. The ‘Call for Papers’ can be found here – http://instituteformodern.co.uk/2011/media-acts-call-for-papers-ntnu-trondheim – and the deadline for abstracts is 15th May!
Private View, 11th May, 309 Regent Street Gallery: ‘Poster Power: Images from Mao’s China, Then and Now’
You are invited to the Private View of:
‘Poster Power: Images from Mao’s China, Then and Now’
At 309 Regent Street Gallery, University of Westminster, London
On Wednesday 11th May 2011
From 6:30-8:30 p.m.
Please do come along. And bring a friend. Or two.
Exhibition continues 12th May – 14th July
Invitation to the Private View attached. For further information on the exhibition please see:
http://www.westminster.ac.uk/about/news-and-events/events/2011/poster-power
Posters from Mao’s China exercise an enduring appeal to audiences across the globe, more than sixty years after the events that produced them. They are revisited in modern and contemporary Chinese art and commercial design, and curated in exhibitions in China, the US and Europe.
So why does imagery produced to support a revolutionary ideology half a century ago continue to resonate with current Chinese and Western audiences? What is the China we see between posters of the Mao years and their contemporary consumerist reinventions? How do we explain the diverse responses such imagery evokes? And what does the appeal of the posters of Mao’s China tell us about the country’s ‘red legacy’?
Poster Power explores some of these questions through setting up a visual dialogue between posters produced during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) and their echoes in recent years. With posters from the University of Westminster’s Chinese Poster Collection, Chinese video art, documentary film, photographs, and contemporary items such as playing cards, nightclub advertising and tourist travel publicity, the exhibition invites viewers to explore the posters’ ambiguities of appeal to their audiences. As visual reminders of both autocratic rule and exuberant youthful idealism, they evoke diverse responses, challenging the idea that Cultural Revolution poster propaganda transmitted a single, transparent meaning. These posters’ capacity to inspire ambiguous responses opens up new narratives of what remains a complex period of China’s recent past, and sheds light on its changing significance in contemporary China.
Last week the ‘Visual Culture in Europe Network’ held its second annual conference, programmed marvelously by Joachin Barriendos and Anna-Maria Guasch, members of the ‘Global Visual Cultures’ project based in Barcelona.
The conference, entitled ‘Visualizing Europe: The Geopolitical and Intercultural Boundaries of Visual Culture’ was hosted by University of Barcelona and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona (MACBA).
An incredible couple of days, over 20 conference participants hailed from Vienna, Rome, Vilnius, Trondheim, Lisbon, Berlin, Lund, Skopje, London, Bergen, Zagreb, and Barcelona. Each and every one of them delivered fascinating and at times provocative presentations that led to a great deal of productive, meaningful, and at times even fractious debate. It was a timely reminder that there’s nothing tidy about what we as academics, scholars, educators, curators, and practitioners care about, why we care about it, and how that care is articulated as a politics, an ethics, as a praxis.
Following the conference, the Visual Culture in Europe Network held its second annual meeting. (For details of the Network please see: http://culturasvisualesglobales.net/vcine/). For your information, the Network’s 2012 conference will be held in Trondheim, Norway, hosted by Nina Lager Vestberg (NTNU) and Øyvind Vågnes (Bergen). The 2013 conference will take place in Croatia, hosted by Kresimir Purgar, Centre for Visual Studies, Zagreb.
Watch this space for further details of the conference themes, calls for papers, etc.
Visualizing Europe
The Geopolitical and Intercultural Boundaries of Visual Culture
Second Conference of Visual Culture in Europe
University of Barcelona, April 11-12 2011
Following its successful launch at the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture, with a conference at Westminster in February last year, the 2nd Conference of Visual Culture in Europe will be hosted by our partners at the University of Barcelona, Spain on April 11-12, 2011. The conference elaborates on the interplay between the geopolitical designs of the European Union and transnational visual cultures in the region. Taking as a point of departure the strategic expansion and uneven porosity of Europe’s political and cultural boundaries, this conference will explore the role that visuality has played in the process of reinvention and postcolonial relocation of the cultural image of the EU.
Further details and programme here: http://culturasvisualesglobales.net/visualizingeurope/about/
An International Conference organized as part of the AHRC Research Project: ‘Concentrationary Memories: the Politics of Representation 2007-2011′, from 13th-15th April 2011 at the University of Leeds.
Speakers include: Andrew Benjamin, Adriana Cavarero, Ian James, Griselda Pollock and Samuel Weber
Venue: Yorkshire Bank Lecture Theatre, Business School, University of Leeds, Clarendon Road.
For further information, conference schedule, etc., please see the conference website.
This PhD course/Research workshop at the Norwegian University Centre in Paris, will run 11-13 April 2011.
The last few decades have witnessed rapid developments and innovations in visualization techniques. This is the case for a wide variety of visualization genres, whether in scientific fields, in the fashion industry or in the arts. There are, however, overlaps of style as well as techniques between different genres. As Lisa Cartwright notes, there is a symbiotic relationship between scientific and popular imaging technologies. In a similar vein, we find an interaction between art and science in the genre known as bio-art.
In this PhD course/Research workshop we will explore images of relevance to the study of gendered bodies. This is an interdisciplinary course, and the concept of “body images” is to be understood in a broad sense, as transcending the categories of art and science, including art history. The course lecturers cover a variety of disciplinary backgrounds, including media studies, science and technology studies and gender research. All lectures and discussions will be held in English.
‘To fasten words again to visible things’: the American imagetext
A two day conference held by the American Studies department at the University of East Anglia
18th-19th June 2011
When Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that ‘America is a poem in our eyes’, he was partly expressing the transcendental belief that words and images share a unique and ‘radical correspondence’ that might enable the poet ‘to fasten words again to visible things.’ Walt Whitman answered Emerson’s call for such a poet, cementing the special relationship that still exists in America between the written word and visual image.
The burgeoning discipline of visual studies is perfectly placed to take the exploration of this relationship in new directions. However, there is at present a tendency in such studies to neglect the roots of language in pictures, and to overlook the importance of visual/textual relations to the expression of American character, culture and identity. Whilst the growth of visual studies is an exciting development, ‘visual literacy’ remains a nebulous and confusing term, and as a field of academic study, tends not to generate readings outside a tried and trusted sociological and ideological framework. There is a pressing need for scholarship in image – text relations to be made more various, more theoretically adventurous and more culturally and historically penetrating, and for scholarship to place the study of contiguous images and texts in a much deeper cultural history of visual/verbal responses to film and theatre, to landscape and the built environment, to the visual and plastic arts, to contemporary considerations of mixed media texts, illustrated texts, illuminated manuscripts, and more.
International Association for Visual Culture Studies: An Invitation
At the end of the 2010 Visual Culture Studies Conference, the final session discussed the prospect of establishing an International Association for Visual Culture Studies. During this session, a motion was put forward to establish the Association; the motion was carried.
It was a very productive discussion, I felt, and a really good way of beginning to imagine the shape, the role, and the tasks of such an Association.
We’ve set up an online forum as a space where we can discuss the Association, its purpose, role, ambitions, aims and objectives, etc. You are invited to contribute to these on-going discussions by registering as a user at www.journalofvisualculture.org/bbpress.
Once you have registered, you will have to be approved as a user (so we can stop trolls and spam). Do bear with us as we open up this forum to you all. Should you encounter any technical issues, please email contact@visualculturestudies.org.
About the online forum
We have kept the forum open, with one section for aims and objectives, and another for activities – please feel free to add topics under these headings. Also if you have any suggestions for the forum’s development, do let us know.
To explore the Association’s possible composition, structure and purpose, one forum asks:
- How do we need to imagine this community of scholars, students, emerging scholars, curators, educators, museum professionals, practitioners, and cultural sector specialists?
- What are the academic, intellectual, and professional ambitions of the Association?
To explore the possible activities of the Association, another forum asks:
- What will the Association do?
- What kind of forums are most appropriate/necessary (meetings, networks, conferences, etc.) to support the activities of this community, and facilitate the (formal and informal) exchange of ideas and information, as well as its conviviality, sociality, and collaborative impulse?
Here’s to New York City 2012, and to the launch of the International Association for Visual Culture Studies. And to the many productive conversations that will take place in the next few weeks and months – many thanks for contributing.
