FROM HOUSE TO SQUARE: A practice based research presentation by FRAN COTTELL

We are pleased to announce the following event as part of a new programme of themed symposia:


FROM HOUSE TO SQUARE

A practice based research presentation by
FRAN COTTELL


THURSDAY 26 JANUARY 16.30 – 19.30
Central Saint Martins, Kings Cross Room C202 

Fran Cottell is an artist producing performance and installations since the 1970s. Her work questions how to show everyday ephemeral live experiences within the fixed frame of the art institution - how to preserve life, or rather the breath of ‘aliveness’. She has featured in exhibitions, performance art festivals and lectured about her work worldwide. For over 10 years Fran Cottell has also been staging live installations displaying the contents, visitors and occupants of her house for CGPLondon, documented in House: from Display to Back to Front; published by ktpress and supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation.  Fran is a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Camberwell College of Arts.


http://www.francottell.com/


Fran has been collaborating with architect Marianne Mueller since 2011, when documentation of Fran's House Projects were exhibited by the Concrete Geometries Research Cluster; an initiative lead by Marianne that investigates the relationship between architectural form and social behaviour. The installation: The Relational in Architecture was then jointly developed for the research group at the Architectural Association. They recently co-produced (July-August 2016) the intervention Pentagon Petal for the Rootstein Hopkins Parade Ground. Publication published by Camberwell Press 2016. A book chapter: From House to Square, for Architecture in Effect, Rethinking the Social, Sweden will be published 2017.


http://www.pentagon-petal.org


Call for Proposals
As part of this event we are inviting proposals from current PhD or post PhD researchers who are working in the field of performance/ sculpture in relation to public and domestic architecture to contribute short presentations to the event. Please contact Susan Trangmar s.trangmar@csm.arts.ac.uk with a title, short proposal max 150 words and personal biography if you would like to present work, deadline January 1 2017. 



King’s Cross Late Autumn Walk

An Invitation to King’s Cross Late Autumn Walk

Kate Corder invites you to take part in a late autumn King’s Cross Walk

at 14:00 on Wednesday 30th November 2016

Using Apple’s Maps app and Google Maps one can observe that satellite images of King’s Cross (London) are yet to be updated to a current view. The map images show an area in early stages of renovation where extended sites are experiencing bulldozing and deconstruction before reconstruction and manipulation by corporate powers takes place. In a transformation process teams of workers are deployed transplanting materials gleaned from other sites to assemble and create other visions. The satellite map images are historic in their observation, because the built environment changes through human labour on an everyday basis. The darkness of dereliction alters. Sites are conjured, as if by magic, in to regenerative usefulness. This new usefulness seeks to cloud memories of dance raves in warehouses of a bygone era, but memories linger as unseen and are sensed. 

The fabricated aggregation of the site diminishes as accumulated materials settle. When we are in the site everyday life surrounds us with presence and the archival map images are seen on device screens for us to compare with the here and now. 

We will meet at the big Oak Tree on King’s Boulevard at 14:00. The Oak was uprooted and travelled from Germany to be replanted here. At 14:15 (allowing for latecomers) we will stroll up the Boulevard observing its stuck down river of gravel*. We will walk down Goods Way observing the Plant Wall and on up to Camley Street Natural Park**. From here we will walk to St Pancras Gardens and observe the Old Church situated in the grounds and the back of St Pancras Hospital. Then we will walk up Camley Street, across the canal to the Regent’s Canal Towpath and walk to King’s Cross Coal Sheds***, and then on to the Lewis Cubitt Park beyond observing all the while materials used to construct the place. The Walk returns, finishing back at the Granary Building at approximately 16:30. 

*The gravel is an aggregate material possibly mined by London Concrete at Sipson (a village experiencing hostility through on-going threats of Heathrow Airport expansion). During glacial melt deep layers of gravels were deposited on riverbeds in the Heathrow region. Over a large flat area the rivers silt accumulated above the gravel producing fertile soil, which has been used by humans for agricultural land and airline travel amongst other things. 

**Camley Street Natural Park is a community garden existing since 1984 and run by London Wildlife Trust. The Park is an inspiration for the plants used in King’s Cross renovation. 

***The Coal Sheds are currently being converted in to a shopping arcade.

Mediating Environments

sensingsite collaborator John Wild will present his latest investigation of the invisible geographies of electromagnetic communications as part of the Mediating Environments exhibition at Catalyst Arts Gallery, Belfast.

Mediating Environments 

The world beyond the confines of our body is intimately connected to our actions – as much cultural artefact as something wild and other, ‘out there’ – nature and techne vitally expressed through our lives and creations. We continually feed into and are moulded by an interminable flux of co-creative relationships and cycles, reflexive actors who fall in and out of sync with innumerable collectives and circumstances. How we perceive these complex ecologies and the meanings we derive from what we do within them, frames our worldview, subtly affecting how we are subsumed by social fields and evolutionary flows. In this time of accelerating change and spiritual transformation can we come to terms with our uncertain predicament? How to navigate the indescribable, manifold environments in which we are embedded? 

Matthew Bourree | Paula Deji | John Wild 

Opens Thursday 3rd November 6-9pm with a live performance by John Wild at 7.30pm. 

Exhibition continues until Wednesday 23 November
Catalyst Arts Gallery
5 College Court
Belfast BT1 6BS 

The Network :: ‘Network: is a plurality of (organic and artificial) beings, of humans and machines who perform common actions thanks to procedures that make possible their interconnection and interoperation’? (Berardi, 2011) 

The network has become central to our experience of the world, its tentacles reaching into every area of life. Linking together machine to machine, people to machines and people to people through giant invisible networks of information; a technical infrastructure of cables that feeds an invisible infrastructure of wireless signals. 

As part of the mediating environments exhibition John Wild (CODEDGEOMETRY.NET) will be transforming the gallery space into a dysfunctional network of devices, creating an invisible geography of wireless communications, as devices try and fail to establish contact, calling out to each other through unanswered electromagnetic signals. 

This network of electromagnetic communications will be made knowable to visitors to the show through a hand held receiver that makes the invisible geography audible.

On the opening night John Wild will carry out a live electromagnetic audio drift of the gallery. Making use of electromagnetic induction coils and a broad spectrum RF receiver he will allow himself to be guided by the intensities, textures, and ambiances of the site’s electromagnetic transmissions, materialising the invisible architecture of the ‘The Network’.

RUN! RUN! RUN! Biennale 2016

 

Three female artist/researchers and runners Dr Kai Syng Tan, Annie Grove-White and Dr Carali McCall to explore running as a metaphor and methodology for us to think about the body, gender, ageing, the city and borders. With guests and colleagues including charities Free to Run (an NGO for running for women and girls in Afghanistan), A Mile In Her Shoes (a running group for homeless women) and Headway East London (a charity supporting people affected by brain injury), Eddie Ladd (international performance maker), Dr Karen Throsby (University of Leeds), Joe King (Royal College of Art), Simon Freeman (Like the Wind), Dr Andrew Filmer (Aberystwyth University), Catrin Kean (writer), Dr Alan Latham (UCL), Amelia Johnstone (illustrator) Sarah Brown (Leeds Art Gallery) and Dr Debbie Lisle (Queen’s Belfast). RUN! RUN! RUN! Biennale 2016 is sponsored by Leeds College of Art and presented by RUN! RUN! RUN! International Body for Research.

How does running (dis)connect people across borders?

November 21 / Leeds: Discussion. 2-4pm. MA Creative Studio.

Leeds College of Art Blenheim Walk, LS2 9AQ

http://r3fest2016_leeds.eventbrite.co.uk

How does running (dis)connect people with the city?

November 23 / London: Screening. 6-8pm. Exhibition Room. Pearson Building

Department of Geography. UCL Gower Street, WC1E 6BT

http://r3fest2016_london.eventbrite.co.uk

How does running (dis)connect people with their body?

November 24 / Cardiff: Performance. 6-9pm. National Indoors Athletics Centre.

School of Sport, Cardiff Metropolitan University CF23 6XD

http://r3fest2016_cardiff.eventbrite.co.uk

SIGHT (UN)SPECIFIC @ Chalkwell Hall

 New works by Lee Campbell, Rory Flynn, Adrian Lee and Carali McCall
+ artist discussion 16.00-18.00

 Saturday 22nd October 2016


This event curated by Dr. Lee Campbell presents a combination of art performance, performative lecture and reflective discussion. It aims to contribute to an area of contemporary art practice relating to how practitioners have not only made works that go beyond pure visual sensation and incorporate, or are wholly dedicated to, non-visual aspects, often prioritising the haptic, orality, sound elements and other sensory components (Coles, 1984; Marks, 2002; Paterson, 2007), but how practitioners have deployed the concept of visual impairment and blindness as informing the work’s form and content, and by doing so generate public pedagogy of what it may mean to experience interrupted/removal of sight.

The event, extending Campbell’s recent event You Don’t Need Eyes To See, You Need Vision in London aims to add to the rich contextual history of artworks made by artists and performers who challenge aspects of visuality within their practice. For example, Artur Zmijewski’s work Blindly at Tate Modern, London in 2014 explored what it means to imagine and represent without relying on the sense of sight. In Sight (Un)Specific, Campbell, Flynn, Lee and McCall attempt to extend existing practices and produce creative responses that make positive usage of visual deprivation as a means to think more deeply about how we perceive the operations of certain concepts in the world.

Furthermore, this quartet attempts to test the viewer’s understanding of how we may theorise, articulate and demonstrate what may be classed as a dominance of visuality over other senses (Jay, 1993; Crary, 2000) and provoke discussion as to what it might mean to live in a society, which Martin Jay has described as ‘occularcentric’ or ‘dominated’ by vision (1993:3). Works made as part of this event will be reflected upon and disseminated during a conference paper that Campbell, Lee and McCall will give as part of The Future of the Document: documenting performance, Interdisciplinary Symposium Monday 31st October 2016, at City, University of London.

The event is free to attend. This event contains, at times, low levels of lighting. The event will be documented using video and still photography.

contact:
Lee Campbell
lcampbell@lincoln.ac.uk
+44 7917 363235 

Metal at Chalkwell Hall Chalkwell Avenue

Southend on Sea, SS0 8NB
chalkwell@metalculture.com
+44 [0] 1702 470 700
 
Notes on the artists:
Dr Lee Campbell is an artist, curator and academic and teaches at Central Saint Martins and University of Lincoln. His practice plays with the parameters of contemporary art that draw attention to the performative and the participative within an art historical vernacular and seeks to interrogate how we may construct meaning between politics of space and the politics of artist/performer/protagonist articulated through visual and verbal languages. His doctoral thesis Tactics of Interruption: Provoking Participation in Performance Art made a contribution to knowledge in participative performance practice and the positive deployment of using interruptive processes; this is in order to provoke participation within the context of Performance Art as well as gain a better understanding of the operations of power relations at play. Campbell will be artist-in-residence at Metal, Southend in April 2017 http://www.leecampbellartist.blogspot.co.uk

Aiming to complexify the viewer/artist relationship through intentional awkwardness and discomfort between protagonist and audience, Rory Flynn is an artist who uses performance in relation to the body, sculpture and humour. Flynn graduated with a Fine Art degree from Loughborough University in 2016 and has since performed as part of Tactics of Interruption, Toynbee Studios, London (June 2016) MASS. Truman Gallery, Brick Lane, London (July 2016) and You Don’t Need Eyes To See You Need Vision, The Queen’s Head, London (September
2016).
http://www.roryflynn-performanceartist.com/

Adrian Lee is an artist working primarily in video, performance and sculpture. He explores the material that surrounds us by reworking and re-examining the trappings of our culture. His practice investigates the processes of communication and persuasion used on both domestic and international scales. It appropriates numerous visual and aural languages, re-circulating their symbolic components to disrupt the logic of our assumptions. He reorganises familiar elements from multinational corporate advertising, to vernacular promotional material, via the icons of art history and the rhetoric and actions of those with power and influence. He is also a part-time lecturer at Central Saint Martins.
http://www.adrianlee.info

Dr Carali McCall is a Canadian-born, London UK-based artist; awarded her Ph.D. at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, UAL (thesis title, A Line is a Brea(d)thless Length: introducing the physical act of running as a form of drawing). Her practice addresses how duration, and imposed restrictions on the body can contribute to a greater awareness of what it means to draw. Approaching the body as a tool, she embraces the idea that the artist is not only physically present in the act of drawing, but also brings an experience to something that exceeds the object of art (be it through the body in live performance, video or sound recording, or photograph).
http://www.caralimccall.com

References
Coles, P. (1984). Please Touch: An Evaluation of the ‘Please Touch’ exhibition at the British Museum 31st March to 8th May.

Crary, J. (2000). Suspension of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture. Cambridge: MIT.
Jay, M. (1993). Downcast eyes: the denigration of vision in twentieth- century French thought. Berkeley; London: University of California Press.
Marks, U, L. (2002). Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. London: University of Minnesota Press.

Paterson, M. (2007). The Senses of Touch – Haptics, Affects and Technologies. New York: Berg Publishers.
 

Unfound by Susan Trangmar

A FILM MARKING THE CENTENARY OF THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME 2016

A first visit takes place with the arrival of Spring, fertile and green. Roadside signs to the sites are well situated and can be read easily enough. The cemeteries themselves, appearing so arbitrarily dotted within the landscape, are shocking either in their intimate serenity or their exposed, stark brutality. ROSSIGNOL WOOD. SUNKEN ROAD. Entering each enclosure, there is always a sense of crossing a boundary. The efflorescence of nature creeps up to the external perimeter, ready to reclaim the ground, or else agricultural production spares a few centimeters of bare terrain before the marshalling begins, long ranks of headstones lined up in military formation. GUARDS. QUEENS. GUNNERS. One walks up and down the lines inspecting each headstone, feeling the imperative to take note of every single name, every inscription, every memorial, even though this is impossible. The more names are read, the less the imagination is able to make sense of the scale of destruction they represent. Names pile up as a monstrous accumulation of wasted potential. BITTER.

The repetition of the essential fact is exhausting. While the individual reproduction of each and every headstone with its measured naming of facts and acts serves the plea to not repeat past mistakes, mass formation acts to dull and abstract, reinforcing a failure of comprehension. Within the retaining walls which demarcate each site as a presence in absence, industrial efficiency and carefully designed spatial geometries monumentalize and petrify, neutralising the experiences that once took place around here.

Looking outwards for respite one sees the intensively worked landscape beyond, knowing that scattered material remnants of the violence still infuse the soil, surfacing over time and dissolving on the air perhaps, or finding their way back to an intimacy within our own bodies. Everyday sounds come to the ear, of tractor, birdsong, the clatter of bicycle and bark of dog. Occasionally a shot bursts out. Sounds travel far, such is the scope of the space. But within the boundary of the cemeteries there is always an atmosphere of silence. What is one straining to hear? A VANISHED SOUND

UNFOUND Susan Trangmar, film, 23:42

11h Sunday 9 October 2016

Les Photaumnales

Le Quadrilatère

Auditorium

Beauvais

France

more information

UNFOUND film projection Susan Trangmar and meeting with the artist. The film is accompanied by the publication UNFOUND including an essay ‘ A Memorial on Film’ by Yves Abrioux and DVD.

This body of work is the result of a residency proposed by Diaphane. It is edited as a DVD book and Susan Trangmar’s film will be shown during the Photaumnales festival.