May 10, 2013
This year’s Degree Show, BA cubed, features work by 34 graduating artists who have studied Fine Art at Oxford Brookes University.
Exhibition Opening: Friday 10 May 6-8pm Glass Tank Gallery and Richard Hamilton Building, Oxford
http://www.brookes.ac.uk/about-brookes/visit-us/gipsy-lane-site/
The exhibition will be opened by renowned artist Tamarin Norwood
Exhibition Runs: Saturday 11 May – Friday 17 May 10-6 daily
Guided Tours 2pm daily
Image: Jaclyn McRae
April 13, 2013
London Fieldworks, Super Kingdom, 2009
Just returned from Association of Art Historians conference in Reading where I organised a session on Birds and Art called TWITCHERS, along with my colleagues Paul Kilsby and Clair Chinnery at Oxford Brookes University’s research cluster ARP (Art Research Practice).
The day covered birds in art from the middle ages until now. In my introduction I mentioned art projects involving birds by London Fieldworks, Marcus Coates, Elpida Hadzi-Vasileva and Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas. Paul Kilsby talked about his use of birds in his art works, which often refer to historical art and especially 17th century Dutch paintings. Jana Lucas from Basel talked about the depiction of falcons and herons in the late medieval deck of playing cards: the Ambras Court Hunting Deck. Caitlin Silberman from University of Wisconsin’s examined Victorian illustrated books on birds and discussed anthropomorphic parallels implied in representations of crows and stereotypes of a criminal Victorian underclass. Hanna Johansson from University of Helsinki raised the issue of shifts around animal ethics, looking at the 19th century art and taxidermy of Magnus von Wright and the work of contemporary artist Jussi Heikkila. Steve Pantazis examined the role of live and stuffed birds in the work of Jannis Kounnellis. Alexandra Kokoli from Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen presented a paper on birds as signposts in the work of Sutapa Biswas. Clair Chinnery gave a presentation on her artwork, Cuculus Prospectus and the research she undertook for the work in the Ornithological Collection at the Natural History Museum in Tring. On behalf of artists London Fieldworks, I showed a film made in the Brazilian Rainforest focussed on a bird hunter turned eco-tourism guide and bird mimic.
Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas, Villa Lituania at 2007 Venice Biennale – start of the international pigeon race.
April 11, 2013
This year’s Oxford Brookes Fine Art Degree Show opens on Friday 10 May 6-8pm and runs until Friday 17 May.
April 11, 2013
My essay on artists brook and black and their hops project has just been published here:
Public Art Online: http://www.publicartonline.org.uk/whatsnew/news/article.php/Plot+16%3A+The+Fermenting+Room+%28return+of+the+rhizome%29
March 7, 2013
My essay ‘The Practice of Space: Hayley Newman & Emily Speed’ has just been published by Castlefield Gallery, Manchester to accompany an exhibition by the two artists. http://www.castlefieldgallery.co.uk/event/hayley-newman-emily-speed/
March 7, 2013
School of Arts, Richard Hamilton Building,
Headington Hill Campus, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford OX3 0BP
Exhibition Opening: Friday 8 March 5-7pm
Exhibition continues: Monday 11 March – Friday 15 March 10am-5pm
brook & black - Martha Cadle - Liming Chen - Stephen Cornford
Jack Eden - Sarah Jex - Paul Kilsby - Elaine Le Corre - Ray Lee
Andrew MacConville - Stelios Manganis - Ruth Millar
Magali Moreau - Derek Morris - Adrian Pawley - Helen Slater
Lucy Turner - Tracey Warr
woodshedding = to hone creative skills in a removed location such as a shed
August 22, 2012
The Urbonas Studio residency at Modern Art Oxford finished last week with the maiden voyage of our biomimetic raft inspired by jellyfish and lilypads, made from recycled materials and neoprene, and using a yuloh paddle (thanks to Mike Bedwell). We had an exciting journey down river from Medley Sailing Club on Port Meadow to Osney Mill Marina. We plan to develop the raft to incorporate a water filtration system and a media lab enabling us to undertake a journey interviewing people along the river and recording and broadcasting underwater. During our MAO residency we made 15 film interviews.
Many thanks to all the people and organisations who helped make the project possible including Emily Korchmaros, Michael Stanley at Modern Art Oxford, Laura Degenhardt, Stephanie Turner, Scot Blyth, Lucia, Paul Teigh, Sarah Plumb, Julie Turley, Matt, Chris, Kay, Itzsy, Rectory Farm, Orinoco, Tony Munsey at Osney Mill Marina, Philip Colbourn at St Edward’s School Boatyard, Kate Rew at the Outdoor Swimming Society, Tim Eastop at the Canal & River Trust, Oxford Brookes University, Association of Art Historians, Jonathan & Jane at The Isis Farmhouse, Barry at The Goldfish Bowl, Ryan Pink, Mike Blow, Ieva Kausteklyte, Taz Majid, Haavard Helle, James Hudson, Rachel Cheer,
and to our film subjects in Oxford: Mike Bedwell, Mark Davies, Sarah Markham at Godstow Lock with Mick Lyons and Tony Cross, Russell Robson at the Environment Agency, Richard Bailey of City Barge Rowing Club, Liz Lake, Will McCallum, Vicky Sweetlove, Zena Kamash, Neil and Sem at Salter’s Steamers, Chris Perrins, Bill Heine, Peter Travis at Falcon Rowing Club, Oxford Academicals Rowing Club and wild swimmers at Radley, and in Cambridge, US: Kurt Hasselbach at MIT Museum, Joseph A. Paradiso at MIT, Karl Haglund, Fran Charles at MIT Sailing Club, Renata von Tscharner from the Charles River Conservancy Trust.
Our blog: www.vilma.cc/river
May 27, 2012
39th AAH (Association of Art Historians) Annual Conference and Bookfair, University of Reading, UK
11 – 13 April 2013
Call for Conference Papers for the Session:
TWITCHERS: Birds and Art
Convenors:
Dr Tracey Warr, Oxford Brookes University, t.warr@brookes.ac.uk
Dr Paul Kilsby, Oxford Brookes University
Clair Chinnery, Oxford Brookes University
A clutch of delicately freckled eggs, a sharp beak, the unknown language of bird song, extravagant mating plumage, a brush of wings, a soaring flight: we have a perennial fascination with the familiar and yet alien presence of birds in our midst. Artists have addressed the topic of birds to consider a range of issues. The recent Animal Gaze symposia demonstrated how the inter-species boundary is rich ground for artistic exploration. The ‘twitcher’ is an individual who takes bird watching to the extremes, in collecting ‘sightings’ as a form of experiential acquisition and artists have extended their examinations of birds to address notions of collecting, archiving and taxonomy, in for example, Marcel Broodthaer’s Department of Eagles. Bird envy manifests in works such as Pieter Brueghel’s Icarus, Max Ernst’s Loplop and Ilya Kabakov’s The Man Who Flew Himself Into Space. Gaston Bachelard wrote of the nest-house, and how we inhabit space with our bodies just as a bird creates its nest with its breast, and his writings have in turn inspired artists’ nests examining the practice of space and home. Other birds in art projects have considered communication, ecology, colonialism, flight, the soul, migration. Joseph Wright’s An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, Joseph Cornell’s assemblages with birds, Marcus Coates’ Dawn Chorus, London Fieldworks’ Super Kingdom, Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas’ Villa Lituania pigeon race and pigeon loft at the 2007 Venice Biennale, Agnes Meyer-Brandis’ Moon Goose Analogue and Lynne Hull’s Raptor Perches, are just a few of the myriad artworks focussed on birds. Considering the strutting peacock, the hovering predator, the Christmas robin, the homing pigeon, the clever cuckoo, the swoop of the black swift, the pecking hen and the memento mori of the hung game bird, this session will present papers on the topic of birds and nests in the art and theory of any period.
Details of the conference are at http://www.aah.org.uk
March 8, 2012
30 March 2012 11am-6pm Arnolfini, Bristol
I am speaking at a one day conference Writing Practice: Exploring the Rhythms of Writing Practice in Art, Design & Performance.
Other speakers include John Wood (Design/Goldsmiths), Julia Lockheart (Writing PAD/Goldsmiths), Harriet Edwards (RCA) and Jerome Fletcher (Falmouth University).
http://www.arnolfini.org.uk/whatson/events/details/1293
October 9, 2011
Split nik, Moscow Biennale – in progress
Media coverage:
http://scanpix.no/spWebApp/preview.action?search.tabId=video&search.refPtrs=sy850d41
Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas’ Split nik installation opened in the Moscow Biennale on 22 September and the exhibition runs until 30 October 2011. Split nik is an installation re-reading a book published by Russian author, Alexander Kukarkin, during the Cold War period, discussing Soviet and Western ideologies in relation to consumerism, design and art. I am an ‘embedded writer’ with the project. The installation is a device to look backwards at the history of the Cold War in culture, focussing on the book Beyond Welfare (The Passing Age in English) by Kukarkin, and also to look forwards from now. The installation consists of three elements:
- a presentation of Kukarkin’s book in Russian, Lithuanian and English,
- extracts from a 1970s Lithuanian film Things and People that humorously examines our psychological and ideological relationships with objects,
- and a wooden structure resembling convoluted raked seating designed for dialogue.
Installing the work was fraught with drama. It got held up in customs and then lost in the basement of the luxurious Tsum Department Store in Moscow – our exhibition was on the fifth floor. Then our team was beset with flu, a broken hand, and chronic jetlag – nevertheless after a few 24 hour shifts, Split nik appeared.
THE FOURTH ELEMENT
The Split nik project assistant, Anna Kotova, contacted Moscow artists via Facebook and Nomeda, Gediminas and I ran a week-long workshop which is the developing fourth element of the work. The participating artists are Elle Gard, Liza Izvekova, Anna Prihodioko, Maria Sokol and Vladimir Smyshlenkov. We discussed the work of Future Studies researchers such as the Global Scenario Group www.gsg.org and Kingsley Dennis and John Urry’s book After the Car (Polity, 2009) and artists considering the future: science fiction, and artists such as Lise Autogena, John and Helen Mayer Harrison, Andrew Sunley Smith, Heath Bunting & Kayle Brandon, Kate Rich, Uta Kogelsberger, London Fieldworks and HeHe.
Talking of Khrushchev and Nixon’s 1959 Kitchen Debate, we wondered why the best conversations always happen in the kitchen. We set them a task to sit in a kitchen (their own, their grandmother’s, a showroom kitchen – whatever they like) and make some sketches of their vision of a future scenario – in whatever form they like: drawings, photo, collage, film, text, sound. We will be posting their developing ideas in a few weeks time. You, the reader, are welcome to submit your Future Casts to us too.
THE PEDAGOGICAL TURN
Elle, Liza, Anna, Maria, and Vladmir are also organising dialogues in Split nik during the exhibition with small groups of people. Documentation of these will follow. Sitting in the Split nik structure we discussed with them the pedagogical turn in art.
See Kristina Podesva, The Pedagogical Turn in Art
http://fillip.ca/content/a-pedagogical-turn
and artists and projects such as Tino Sehgal, The Long March (China), Platform (UK), Jeremy Deller (UK) and Nomeda & Gediminas’ other projects on http://www.nugu.lt – click on dossier.
We talked about theorists: Clare Bishop’s book Participation and her articles on The Participatory Turn; Christian Kravagna; Grant Kester’s book Conversational Pieces; Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics and Altermodern; Lars Bang Larsen, and then historically Joseph Beuys, Helio Oiticica, Milan Knizak, Marcel Duchamp’s text ‘The Creative Act’, Umberto Eco’s ‘The Open Work’.
KUKARKIN RESEARCH
Meanwhile, we are also progressing our research on Kukarkin himself, leafing through copies of Amerika magazine and Kukarkin’s personnel records, unearthed by Anna. The top floor apartment in Moscow where we were staying was showing the ill effects of a leaking roof and its age. We imagined it could have been Kukarkin’s apartment. The doors squeak painfully, the floors creak, the lightbulbs blow room by room, the toilet leaks, the kettle has a huge crack down one side but still works. Tea is a small mercy.
Kukarkin was born in 1916 at Gorky (now Nizhny Novgorod). His parents died when he was a child and he was raised by his uncle, a doctor living in Moscow. From the age of fifteen Kukarkin worked at the factory Dinamo. During 1934-35 he served as secretary in various offices. From 1936 he studied at M. Gorky’s Institute of Literature in Moscow, graduating in 1940. During his studies he published his first critical essays in the magazines Flag (Znamya), New World (Novyj Mir), Literary Observer (Lietarturnoje Obozrenyje). Due to bad eyesight he was decommissioned from army service and worked for various newspapers and publishing houses. In 1943 he was sent by the Communist Party to the Higher School of Diplomacy, which he graduated in 1945. After graduation he began a diplomatic career and was sent to USA.
He was working as an attaché and head of the Press Department at the Soviet Embassy in Washington from September 1945 to August 1946. His time there coincided with the period when Alexander Feklisov was the KGB handler for Julius and Ethel Rosenberg at the New York Soviet Embassy. The Rosenbergs were executed as spies in 1953 and alleged to have given away US atomic secrets to Russia.
In August 1948 Kukarkin was part of a Soviet Delegation visiting the London Olympics at a time when USSR was negotiating terms to join the Olympics – it competed for the first time in 1952. He was a member of the Soviet delegations at the First World Congress for Peace in Czechoslovakia in April 1949; the United Nations Fourth Session September-November 1949; and the Second World Peace Congress in November 1950. The World Peace Council was established in response to fears of a third world war and the threat of atomic annihilation as the Cold War was escalating in Korea. Peace Congress deletes gathered in Sheffield in the UK, including Kukarkin, Picasso and ‘the Red Dean’ of Canterbury Cathedral, Dr Hewlett Johnson, who argued that capitalism lacked a moral basis and the moral impulse of communism constituted the greatest attraction. The British Labour government sabotaged the Congress and it was forced to shift behind ‘the Iron Curtain’ to Warsaw.
Kukarkin was a member of the editorial board of the magazine The New Times (Novoye Vremya). From 1951 he worked as editor of NEWS (Novosty) a newly established English language magazine for foreign countries. He travelled to France as a member of the Soviet delegation to the United Nations Sixth Session November 1951 – January 1952.
From 1953 he continued his literary work. He took a job as head of the Drama Department at the magazine Arts (Iskusstvo). He then disappears from the official records for five years. According to the personnel file during this time he was focussing on literary translations, and writing on Charlie Chaplin.
During 1958-61 he was head of the Foreign Film Department at the State Film Foundation USSR (GosFilmFond). During this time he collected materials for his major work on American film, which was published as part of the larger book: Cinema, Theater, Music, Painting in USA by Znanye (Knowledge).
From 1963 he started research work at the institute of Philosophy at the Academy of Science USSR where he worked until his pension in 1976. During these 13 years he wrote books, essays and articles on contemporary cinematography and critiques on bourgeoisie ideology and culture. The Passing Age – a book for foreign readers was published by Progress, and The Mass Culture of Bourgeoisie was published by PolitIzdat.
He lived his last years with his daughter and granddaughter – who we are hoping to find and interview. We are also very keen to find out more about his diplomatic career and whether there is any information on him, his book designers and illustrators in the archives of Progress publishers. If you have any information on Kukarkin, or would like to comment on his book or Split nik please contact us.
Also see http://www.vilma.cc/splitnik
