Monthly Archives: May 2016

Open Call for Applications: Winston Churchill Fellowships 2017

Applications are now open for the 2017 Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Fellowships, which include a strand for Designers in partnership with the British Council. This is the third and final year of the partnership.

The Design Fellowships are awarded for projects that add to international collaboration and understanding, and also bring back knowledge and best practice for the benefit of others in the UK. Designers in the following applied arts are eligible to apply:

  • Architecture
  • Interiors
  • Product
  • Graphic Design

Successful applicants will be able to apply to the British Council’s Architecture Design Fashion department for a follow-up grant to help with events, exhibitions and further international collaboration to further the outcomes of their Churchill Fellowship.

2016 Fellows in the Design category include:

  • Marc Cairns, Pidgin Perfect. The multidisciplinary designer, who is based in Glasgow, will be travelling to Albania, Serbia, Azerbaijan and Turkey investigating public engagement in architecture and planning.
  • Alexander Groves, Studio Swine. The London-based designer will be travelling to Brazil to research design projects which promote sustainable products from the Amazon Rainforest.

The closing date for applications is 5pm on Tuesday 20 September 2016.

Full details and how to apply can be found on the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust website.

UK ' India 2017 Digital Open Call | British Council

Digital Project funding opportunity. British Council open call for project proposals for a seed funding opportntiy worth 10,000…
“In 2017, the UK and India will celebrate a major bilateral year of cultural exchange. India and the UK have a long and rich history. The India ' UK Year will enrich relationships at all levels of society, their institutions and government, building a shared future for generations to come.
This is the culmination of a five-year British Council programme to introduce a new, young, Indian audience to the best of contemporary UK creativity. We want to present the UK as a diverse, creative and contemporary country and reach a large audience across India during 2016 and 2017.
We have ambitious targets for our online audience ' 10 million people in 2016 and 50 million people in 2017. In order to meet our ambitions the British Council is looking for brilliant, creative, digital ideas.
Projects can have any theme but must:
' Have creativity and culture at their heart
' Be intended for an audience primarily in India, though they can have a wider reach than this
' Respond to the aims and outcomes in the background section below.
In order to be eligible to apply, you must be based in the UK or India and have a track record of developing new digital projects or experiences that have successfully reached new audiences (though not necessarily at this scale before).
Five projects will be selected for seed funding of 10,000 each by the end of June. In return for this seed funding, we would like to see a prototype or proof of concept of your project that we can test with potential audiences in September/October 2016. Following user testing in the autumn, we will make a number of commissions based on potential audiences and costs of the projects. Full commissions must launch during 2017.
For full background and application details please download our open call briefing here.
If you are interested in applying please contact Abby Viner ([email protected])
Ext: 7124

SMALL JOURNEYS | Paul Coldwell

SMALL JOURNEYS

Long & Ryle Contemporary Art. 4 John Islip Street, London SW1P 4PX

April 20th, 2016 – Extended until June 10th, 2016

This, the first exhibition by Paul Coldwell with Long & Ryle, presents a group of recent small sculptures and associated prints which together explore ideas of journey, absence and loss. The sculptures are very much thinking models; propositions about how we might consider landscape, both from an interior perspective but also as seen from photographs and from above through the window of an aeroplane. The prints, developed on screen through the computer are reconstituted and resolved as physical prints, most recently as etchings, in order to reinstate their presence as objects in the world.

The sculptures were all cast in the Foundry at Chelsea College of Art with the assistance of John Nicoll. The etchings plates were made at Byam Shaw, (CSM) with the help of Paul Dewis and then proofed at OBS Oficina Bartolomeu dos Santos, Tavira, Portugal.

Upcoming events include:

– London Original Print Fair (Royal Academy) at which Paul will be giving a talk about his work on Saturday May 7th at 3.30.

– At SASA Gallery (Brisbane, Australia) Coldwell is showing in a five person show along with Aleksandra Antic, Marion Crawford, Joel Gailer, Performprint & Olga Sankey entitled The Unstable Image. 29th March ' 22nd April

– The Artists Folio, an exhibition Coldwell jointly curated with Sonya Kielty originally for Cartwright Hall, Bradford will be shown at Gallery Oldham 16 April – 9 July.

Image: Paul Coldwell, Suitcase & Mountain-Bronze 30 x 40 x 14 cm

Cultural Protection Fund: 2016 ' 2020 | British Council

British Council launch Cultural Protection Fund (2016-2020). If you are interested in applying for this fund then please contact Abby Viner ([email protected]) Ext: 7124.
“In partnership with the Department for Culture Media and Sport., the British Council will be launching the Cultural Protection Fund on Monday 27 June 2016. Our objective for the new 30 million fund is to help to create opportunities for economic and social development through building capacity to foster, safeguard and promote cultural heritage in conflict-affected regions overseas.
The intrinsic value of cultural heritage is immeasurable. Socially, it can embody the identities and histories of people and communities to support post-war recovery through cohesion and wellbeing. Economically, cultural heritage sites and buildings can provide opportunities for sustainable development, tourism and regeneration.
Initially the Fund will be focussed on UK organisations working in partnership with bodies in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, specifically Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Iraq, Palestinian Territories, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey and Yemen.
Fund Design
The Cultural Protection Fund will invite applications for both smaller projects, grants under 100K, and larger projects, grants over 100k. It will be a two stage process. Applicants will be asked to complete an Expression of Interest Form, to confirm eligibility, before being invited to complete a full Application Form. These forms will be available to download on this webpage from 27 June.
It will be essential for applicants to have existing partners in the target countries. Information on the experience and credentials of these partnerships, as well as a strong knowledge and understanding of local context, will need to be provided.
Applicants will need to provide a clear project plan and timeline, evidence of demand and delivery capability including a full budget breakdown, and information on how security risks will be managed monitored and evaluated.
It will be possible to apply for multi-year grants and the anticipated maximum for any such application will be 3m. The anticipated maximum for an application in any one round will be 500K.
Timeline
2016
In the fund's first year, there will be only one funding round for larger project applications. The deadline will be at the end of August, with the intention that awards will be made at the end of October / November 2016.
Rolling assessments will take place for smaller project applications in August, October and December 2016.
In order to strengthen the knowledge base for the Fund, British Council and DCMS have agreed to commission detailed country surveys in the first year. The surveys will provide information about needs, existing activity and potential partners. It will inform assessment and evaluation as well as supporting applicants to develop relevant and impactful projects
2017 onwards
There will be two grant application rounds for larger project applications in each financial year. Other than in the first year, the awards will be made for larger projects at the beginning of April and October in each financial year. In order to ensure maximum time for applicants to put together proposals, the rounds will open in proceeding September and March.
For smaller project applications will be reviewed on a rolling assessment programme every quarter (September, December, April and July).
If you have any questions, or would like to be notified once the Fund's application forms go live, please email us on [email protected].
About our work in Culture and Development
Our Culture and Development team support the building of creative, open, inclusive and secure societies. We currently operate thirteen Official Development AssistanceOpens in a new tab or window. projects in some of the most difficult operating environments across the globe. Our work focuses on ambitious, artistic and creative initiatives that foster social cohesion, freedom of expression, inclusive institutions, dynamic communities, and improved social and economic well-being. We develop structured and sustainable programmes that encourage engagement and a strong sense of cultural identity at an individual and a community level. Our approach includes safely connecting with the past in order to explore new futures and to generate new opportunities. This helps to build individual resilience, encourage community engagement, protect vital cultural heritage, and support policy development.”

Church Street Regeneration Programme

*Camberwell, Chelsea, Wimbledon Staff Only*

We have been invited to make a proposal to Westminster Council to interact with their Church St regeneration programme. The potential opportunity involves negotiating to use an empty shop space in the Church St regeneration area to work with in the Church St areas and initiate a research project that has clear outcomes and benefits to local residents. Additionally we would also be able to apply for up to 10,000 funding to support local projects.

If you are interested in helping to develop a proposal please contact Abby Viner on [email protected] or Ext: 7124 for more information.

Vanessa Mitter: Unquiet Brides

Vanessa Mitter: Unquiet Brides

Bertha is not my name. You are trying to make me into someone else, calling me by another name' ' Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 1966.

Girls are going to find a voice. ' Kathy Acker, 'From Psyche's Journal', 1997.

From now on, she said, you will be able only to repeat out loud the words you've heard others say just a moment before. Won't you?

Won't you, Echo said.

Her eyes grew large. Her mouth fell open.

That's you sorted, Juno said.

You sordid, Echo said.

Right. I'm off back to the hunt, Juno said.

The cunt, Echo said. ' Ali Smith, 'True Short Story', 2005.

Her hands rest on her hips. Delicate hands, they are, and delicate hips: pale and fragile. She looks like she might break, or snap, like a twig, or like the spindly legs of the green bird that flies above her head. She wears flat Mary Janes. This girl is thin, boyish, and wears a drop-waisted 1920s floral sheathe. Her slightness is deceiving, however: she is no sparrow. With her hands on her hips, it looks like she wants to say something: speak up. From that blue mouth will come sound, song, and speech: maybe even screams.

Vanessa Mitter, Threshold, mixed media (acrylic, gouache, watercolour and collage) on canvas,  125cm x 70cm, 2015-16

The dictionary definition says that to be 'unquiet' is to be characterized by unrest or disorder, turbulent: the characterization of the attic-locked hysteric. In the works of Vanessa Mitter, she reclaims the word, and its suggestion of the young girl hysteric, as a position of feminist potential, wherein madness becomes a way of talking back, through domestic walls. To be 'unquiet' is to be the girl who defeats the fate of silence. It is to be the bride that talks, over and above her containment.

The young girl in the drop-waisted dress is the subject of the painting called Threshold (2015). Has she recently been married? She is stood in a densely packed environment of lime green, purple, orange and blue pigment. The work is unquiet in its restless collaging of colour and materials. Perhaps it is domestic wallpaper, peeling away with age, or a tropical jungle becoming overgrown, wilder with time. In some parts of the image, it is possible to spot a leaf, a bird, a flower or a shoe, amidst the eclectic patterning. This girl is confined in her own image. Natural forms become blurred with abstract ones in this thrillingly chromatic assault of the canvas. It is like peering through a kaleidoscope to find the figure of a young girl bride: she is trapped, but talking. Another painting called Silent Treatment (2015), makes this entrapment known, by virtue of its title and its image: an anonymous figure wears a corseted, full-length dress, but she is headless; her voice has been robbed. This shows us what fate the unquiet bride is looking to escape.

The unquiet bride could also be the girl who makes quilts with her other unquiet brides, stitching shapes together as they converse through the craft: a rallying chorus. This is Vanessa Mitter's form, with her visceral layering of paint with collaged material, as well as her content, as the girls that she depicts wear their handmade dresses as loud assertions of identity and presence. Her paintings are thus embodied in two senses: the body of the painter can be felt and touched, as much as the bodies of the paintings.

In Deep Sargasso (2015-2016), for example, a green-skinned young girl, her flesh seemingly wasting away (as the body of Echo does in myth), reclines upon a branch, her vacant face demanding the viewer's gaze. She wears a gown of floral patchwork and crocheted patterns, which disappears into the wider fabric of the embroidered environment. The quilt becomes the dress; the dress becomes the body, an extended body of foreground and background. To immerse yourself in this painting, and others by Mitter, such as Blossom Opening (Keep Dreaming of Kyoto) (2015), is a dizzying, intoxicating sensation. It wills the same feelings of restlessness in the viewer, as is also suggested in the painting's form and subject: an unquiet mode of looking.

The textural ways in which Mitter appropriates her own work, working and re-working the surface, with the addition of a swathe of fabric, a ripped sheet of paper, or an expressive gesture of paint, becomes a signifier of the passing of time, and the intergenerational bonds between women. This is made even more evident in The Beautiful People, wherein the subjects ' although seemingly similar ages ' are loud and uncompromising in their bonded multiplicity. There are five of them, and their clothed bodies blur and fade into the next: a defiantly, unquiet expression of empathic communality. Nearly all of them have their hands on their hips. I imagine them talking, echoing one another, answering back to the silent treatment in which they have suffered, like the young girl rebel of Ali Smith's short story who asserts her right to talk (and rhyme) on her own terms.

 

New Media Art Histories in Asia: AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award

The Courtauld Institute of Art and Tate Research Centre: Asia invite applications for a fully funded AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership Award, starting in October 2016 for a period of three years.

The award will enable the student to pursue doctoral research in Art History while gaining first-hand experience of work within a museum setting. The successful applicant will receive their degree from The Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London.The supervisors are: Dr Wenny Teo (The Courtauld Institute of Art) and Dr Sook-Kyung Lee (Tate Research Centre: Asia).

Application deadline: 20 June
Interviews likely to be held in the week beginning 11 July.

AAH Summer Symposium 2016

AAH Summer Symposium 2016

Gender in art: production, collection, display

Loughborough University

8-9 June 2016

Keynotes:

Professor Katy Deepwell (Middlesex University London) Professor Marsha Meskimmon (Loughborough University)

The development of critical feminist discourses since the 1960s has elucidated ways in which social, political and economic structures have impacted on the production and display of artwork. Gradually, the construction of gender in collecting, curating, exhibiting and producing art began to be understood as a reflection of wider social and cultural narratives, extending beyond gendered identities of individual artists or curators. In collaboration with Loughborough University, this year's annual two-day AAH Student Summer Symposium will investigate current critical and art-historical approaches that develop theories, methodologies and debates to analyse the making, display and collection of art in light of concepts of gender.

As categorical differentiations between 'sex', as a biological distinction, and 'gender', as a culturally constructed version of masculinity and femininity, prove difficult, any critical debate about them inevitably requires careful engagement with the power relations that attempt to shape it. The same applies for the discourses around the power distribution at work in the making, collecting and exhibiting of art. Whether in the studio, in museums, private collections or domestic spaces, works of art and their curatorial framing remain important sites for the construction of meaning concerning the interactions of the sexes. On the other hand, can such heteronormative ascriptions be understood as leftovers of binary thought patterns unable to account for fluid contemporary understandings of gender? In an attempt to understand and explain gendered identities in art, issues of equality, the domestic life, the 'body', the 'self' and the 'other' may be explored as complex intersections of social, cultural and political landscapes.

Registration for two-day symposium includes: Two keynote addresses, fourteen papers showcasing new research, refreshments.

Tickets: 20; AAH Members 10

Bookings at https://www.aah.org.uk/events/summer-symposium or call +44 (0)20 7490 3211

Programme

Wednesday, 8 June

10.00-10.30 Registration/Refreshments

10.30-10.45 Welcome

10.45-12.15 Session 1: Private and Public Elizabeth Kajs (University of Bristol): Woman as 'split': investigations of the public and private in K the Kollwitz's early self-portraiture Molly Eckel (Courtauld Institute of Art): 'A little world within a world': the Wardian fern-case in the Victorian home Caroline McCaffrey-Howarth (University of Leeds): Gendered collections: from the home to the museum'the case of Lady Dorothy Nevill

12.15-13.15 Keynote 1: Prof Katy Deepwell

13.15-2.15 Lunch

2.15-3.45 Session 2: Curating and Display Madeleine Pelling (University of York): 'That noble possessor': the pursuit of virtuous knowledge and its materials in the collection of Margaret Cavendish Bentinck, Duchess of Portland (1715-1785) Elina Suoyrj (Middlesex University): On affects, emotions and feminist curating Wendy Wiertz (KU Leuven, Belgium): 'Honneur aux dames!': displaying 19th-century Belgian amateur women artists

3.45-4.15 Refreshments

4.15-5.15 Session 3: Feminist Practices

Rose-Anne Gush (University of Leeds): Image-body space in VALIE EXPORT Cat Dawson (University of Buffalo, USA): The literal impossible: a critique of literalism in minimalism

 

Thursday, 9 June

10.00-11.30 Session 4: Labour and Practice Helen Osborn (Birmingham City University): Blue period: exploring themes of fertility and motherhood through media experimentation Sarah Charalambides (Goldsmiths, University of London): Situating precarity in feminist art practice Anastasia Philimonos (Collective, Edinburgh) Franki Raffles's 'Lot's Wife': documenting the domestic in the early 1990s

11.30-12.00 Refreshments

12.00-13.00 Keynote 2: Prof Marsha Meskimmon

13.00-2.00 Lunch

2.00-3.00 Degree show tour

3.15-4.45 Session 5: Representing and Contesting Gender Qiuzi Guo (Heidelberg University, Germany): The gaze of voyeur: female representation from porcelain to photography Sabine Hirzer (Graz University, Austria): Women at arms: visualisations of gender in art Minna Hamrin ( bo Akademi University, Finland; Universit di Bologna, Italy): Saint Francis of Assisi's exemplary chastity: picturing hegemonic masculinity in post-tridentine Italian art

5.00 end

The Summer Symposium is generously supported by the School of the Arts, English and Drama at Loughborough University. Enquiries to the convenors: Emma Bourne, Sara Tarter, Sofia Mali and Tilo Reifenstein at [email protected]

MEDIATIONS: Art & Design Agency and Participation in Public Space

MEDIATIONS: Art & Design Agency and Participation in Public Space conference of the EU Marie Curie Research project TRADERS on the 21ST-22ND November 2016 at the Royal College of Art, London. The deadline for papers is 30TH MAY 2016. Please send your submissions to [email protected]. For more information on the paper sessions, submission requirements, keynotes and more, please visit: https://tr-aders.eu/conference

The conference will explore approaches through which artists and designers can pursue the empowerment of publics in the decision-making for, and co -creation of, public space. Operating within the context of public space means dealing with discrepancies between a multiplicity of forces (e.g. political, economical, environmental, legal, etc.), concerns (e.g. social justice, privatisation, digitalisation, etc.) and actors (e.g. citizens, policy makers, urban planners, etc.). Artists and designers who aim to empower citizens in often ‘agonistic’ spaces [i] need to mediate between various aspirations in order to help bring about desired social and/or political change. Such a mediation can take shape in many ways: mediating between different stakeholders, between the client and the public, between different publics, between top -down and bottom-up, between theory and practice, between ideas and action, between imaginaries and reality, and so on.

Through six paper sessions (Data-mining, Interventions, Play, Mapping, Dialogue & Curating), an exhibition and four keynote sessions we will ask: – What alternative empowering practices exist in art and design that can promote citizen participation'– How can artists and designers “make a difference”[ii] within existing/established distributions of power'– How can they use their agency to empower others (e.g. citizens) to bring about desired social or political change'– In other words, through what means, modes and/or practices can artists and designers mediate between multiple actors with diverse agencies?

The keynote speakers, USMAN HAQUE, JANE RENDELL, SUSANNAH HAGAN and RAMIA MAZ , will explore how designers’ agency and attitudes towards the design and production of public spaces have evolved over the last decades; how issues of gender play a role in the use, behaviour and appropriation of public space by a multiplicity of publics; how different participatory approaches can reconfigure existing power relations in art and design processes, and how new technologies can promote greater citizen participation in the design, use and sustainability of public space.

TRADERS - ‘Training Art and Design Researchers for Participation in Public Space’ – is a three year EU Marie Curie research project examining different dimensions and roles of participation in public space. In the project’s closing conference we would like to invite participants to join us in exchanging experiences and knowledge in the field of participation in art and design.'?[i] Mouffe, C. (2000) Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism. Political Science Series 72, C. Neuhold (Ed.). Vienna: Department of Political Science, Institute for Advanced Studies (IHS).[ii] Giddens, A. (1984) The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Berkeley, California: University of California Press. p.14.

Jo Melvin, Luke Skrebowski and Jon Wood in conversation

Image: Untitled performance (with modelled clay head), roof of St Martins School of Art, London, 1964

Waddington Custot Galleries

Tuesday 10 May, 6:30pm

Jo Melvin, Luke Skrebowski and Jon Wood will be in conversation at Waddington Custot Galleries on the occasion of the exhibition ‘Barry Flanagan: Animal, Vegetable, Mineral’. They will be discussing Flanagan’s sculptural legacy and central position within British Conceptual Art.

Admission is free but booking is essential, RSVP to [email protected]