Stuart Hall Library Research Network meeting, 12 December 2013, 6.30-8.00

Join us for our last Research Network meeting of the year.

Sayed Sattar Hasan and Karl Ohiri will present

My Grandad's Car

Sayed Sattar Hasan and Karl Ohiri shared a desire, they wanted to touch their grandfathers' cars in their country of birth and park them side-by-side. After much planning the artists made their respective journeys to Pakistan and Nigeria, only for their ambition of returning to the UK with the cars to end in failure. Instead, Ohiri's fragile Beetle shell and Hasan's retired hulk became stuck within dysfunctional legal systems and the uncompromising grip of corrupt officials.

My Grandad’s Car is the story of two friends who set out to explore their heritage and identities through their connections with their cars and each other. Ohiri and Hasan's project considers the legacies of migration and the relationship subsequent generations have with other home spaces. The artists unorthodox use of ritual and cultural motifs alludes to the sense of 'familiarity' and 'naivety' they feel towards everyday life in Pakistan and Nigeria, in particular as young British-born men. Through collaboration they look to develop work which disrupts conventional ethnic labels, by representing themselves as culturally hybrid and complex individuals.

The artists will be showing a selection of photography and video documenting their experiences, revealing the intimate acts and processes involved in their on-going work.

Sayed Sattar Hasan - Biography

Sayed Sattar Hasan values art as a way of contemplating and rethinking the social, political and cultural spheres that affect personal and public lives. He is influenced by his Pakistani and English heritage and plays with his hybrid identity to question norms which organise everyday life.

Themes in his work include the family, religion, the body and public interaction, explored through photography, video and installation.

Since graduating in 2009 in MA Photography and Urban Cultures at Goldsmiths, he has received funding from Arts Council England for solo and collaborative projects as well as exhibiting in galleries and art festivals nationally and internationally. Including The New Art Exchange, Heathrow Terminal 5, The primera photography biennale, Lima 2012 and LagosPhoto13.

www.sayedsattarhasan.com


Karl Ohiri - Biography

The framework of his practice consists of two overlapping points of interest; ‘cultural studies’ and 'the human condition’. This is explored through personal and public encounters primarily using photography, video and performance.

Since completing his Masters at Goldsmiths University in 2008, his artwork has been a mixture of conceptually driven, documentary based works that consist of natural and constructed images and the recontextualisation of pre-existing artefacts.

His work has been exhibited internationally (most recently at LagosPhoto13) and in various galleries throughout the UK including; The New Art Exchange, Heathrow Terminal 5 and Tate Britain.

www.karlohiri.com


Spaces in the Library are limited. Book a place here

Stuart Hall Library Research Network meeting, Thursday 21 November, 6.30-8.00

Join us for November’s Research Network meeting of talks and discussion.

Sarah Stefana Smith will present

"A Poetics of Bafflement and Queer Affect in the Work of Contemporary Black Visual Artists"

‘My presentation focuses on the artistic work of contemporary black diaspora artists who negotiate different conceptions of blackness. Through an engagement of queer affective space, I cultivate what I call a “poetics of bafflement” that works through slippages among aesthetics, blackness and desire (homoerotic and otherwise) to engage the affective and sociocultural dynamics of black belonging. Bafflement acts as a mode in which to negotiate spaces of contradiction, dis-ease and dis-satisfaction. For the purposes of this presentation, I focus on the work of Deana Lawson whose work considers the body’s ability to take up the everyday, the sexual and the abject. Not shying away from articulations between the profane and the sacred Lawson’s photography explore the interior spaces of matters of the heart—family, desire, mothering and sexuality. Yet these interior spaces make public the slipperiness of the erotic. Molding time and space in relation to moments that baffle Lawson's work is useful in grappling with often “un/invisible economies” of relation that coalesce both and through the making, execution, content and context in which the work is received and able to circulate.’

Sarah Stefana Smith is a visual artist and scholar. Currently she is a doctoral student in the Humanities, Social Science and Social Justice in Education Department at OISE, University of Toronto. Her research considers the work of black diaspora artists (1990-present) who negotiate radically different conceptions of blackness. Taking up the work of bafflement as a means to address slippages among belonging, aesthetics and blackness—and engaging affective and sociocultural dimensions of dis-satisfaction—she examines the “door of no return” as queer assemblage space. She is currently a visiting scholar of Black Studies at the University of Bremen, Germany. Sarah holds a MFA from Goddard College in Interdisciplinary Art. As a member of Massmus Collective and La Boi Band International, respectively she received an Ontario Arts Council Grant and IdeasTap Zine submission grant in 2013. Visit her online at: www.sarahstefanasmith.com.

Our second speaker is art historian Courtney J. Martin. Courtney's presentation is "Mark Bradford: Darkest America in Brightest London". Mark Bradford's work is currently on show at the White Cube, Bermondsey, London.

Courtney J. Martin is an assistant professor in the History of Art and Architecture department at Brown University.  She received a doctorate from Yale University in 2009.  Prior to Brown, she was an assistant professor in the History of Art department at Vanderbilt University (2010-2013); Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the History of Art at the University of California at Berkeley (2009-2010); a fellow at the Getty Research Institute (2008-2009); and a Henry Moore Institute Research Fellow (2007). She also worked in the media, arts, and culture unit of the Ford Foundation in New York on an international arts portfolio that funded major arts projects, including the Venice Biennale and Documenta. After leaving Ford, she served as a consultant for the foundation’s Gulf Coast Transformation Initiative and the Integrating the Arts and Education Initiative.  In 2012, she curated a focus display of Frank Bowling’s painting at Tate Britain. This year she is working on a manuscript about British art and politics after 1968, curating an exhibition of post-minimalist art and co-editing a volume of essays on the critic/curator Lawrence Alloway.   

Space is limited in the library, so if you have not already done so please book a place here.

For more information or to submit a proposal to present at future meetings, email us.

Guest Blog post: Srajana Kaikini, Stuart Hall Library Research Network

Reading an opaque language

What does it mean when one speaks in an opaque language?

The construction of ‘experience’ in art has been closely explored through the concepts of ‘rasa’,  ‘sensation’, ‘affect’ etc. in philosophical enquiry across the globe which have given rise to the question that informs my current research - the role of the ‘literal’ object and the objectified ‘letter’ in contemporary art practices.

Outside the Serpentine Gallery, presently sits a newly commissioned work by Fischli and Weiss titled ‘Rock on Top of Another Rock’. The work is essentially that – one boulder balancing precariously on another boulder on the ground. The work at once strikes the nail on its head and is the experience of precariousness itself. At the same time, it also confronts the art ‘reader’ (and here I address all acts of experiencing as acts of ‘reading’ ) with the challenge of trying to see the subtlety and humour of the work without falling prey to an urge to over-interpret.   

Fischli/Weiss- Rock on Top of Another Rock 2013-2014 | Image - Srajana Kaikini

The ‘literal’ somehow finds itself at this strange crossroads of explicit and implicit communication.

The Dhvani theory ( dhvani can be loosely translated as ‘resonance’) or the theory of Suggestion, one of the several linguistic theories in Indian aesthetic philosophy, emphasizes on reading and receiving language through multiple levels of interpretation. At the same time it puts emphasis on expressing emotions through material symbolism i.e referring to concrete objects in the world to convey an abstract expression. The landscape poetry in Tamil Sangam Literature is an instance of highly charged symbolism where the landscape becomes the expression of the state of mind.

Water lilies bloom
in the lagoons
where cranes part the water lilies
looking for fish
then fly away to stay
in fragrant seaside groves,
near my lover's village washed by the sea.

His love for me
is greater than the sea.

- Neithal (Ainkurunuru - 184)

(Selby, Martha Ann. Tamil Love Poetry: The Five Hundred Short Poems of the Aiṅkuṟunūṟu, an Early Third-Century Anthology. Columbia University Press, 2011.)

Meanwhile, a challenge to this notion of objectified experience comes from the proponents of Concrete Poetry beginning with Swiss poet Eugene Gomringer (Constellations, 1953) and the Noigandres group of poets in Brazil – Haroldo de Campos, Décio Pignatari and Augusto de Campos who published the Concrete Poetry manifesto (“I Exposição Nacional de Arte Concreta” in the Museu de Arte Moderna of São Paulo, 1956) which begins thus.      

 “Concrete poetry begins by assuming a total responsibility before language: accepting the premise of the historical idiom as the indispensable nucleus of communication, it refuses to absorb words as mere indifferent vehicles, without life, without personality without history - tabu-tombs in which convention insist on burying the idea.”

Here the words turned into materials to make visual/sensorial experiences out of them, and ‘they became beautiful simply because they are what they are’; an inversion of linguistic role-play and a tendency towards a more universal poetry where form and content collapse into each other.

These two contrapuntal impulses frame a contemporary condition where art vocabulary takes recourse to the ‘material’ once again. This could be a symptom of globalization as an inevitable precursor for most cultural processes today and the circulation of geo-global artists in the international sphere. The artist has emerged also as a cultural translator but is the medium she chooses to express her art also implicated in this new role-play?

Some thoughts on the Research Network Meeting @ the Stuart Hall Library

I am thankful for the rich discussion generated at the Research Network meeting in conversation with Sunil Gupta on invitation from Roshini Kempadoo. The evening had several inter-disciplinary points of entry. This included personal insights from anecdotal recollections and reflections of the activist art worker’s role in present times by Sunil Gupta as well as suggestions and ideas from artists, researchers and practitioners in the field of philosophy, global arts and cultural studies present during the evening. I noticed an emphasis in general on the practice of art as a cultural activator of relations and a larger concern around the anomalies and differences that exist in terms of vocabularies in contemporary art language and the difference in the nature of infra-structure and institutional frameworks for the arts in the Indian contexts as compared to the local context in London, something to ponder upon despite the blanket effect of a term like globalization that exists as a discourse predominantly in locations already in its grip.

Srajana Kaikini is a writer, curator and researcher working with the spoken and written word, Indian literary theories – rasa dhvani, architectural urban spaces and aesthetics. She is the third Delfina Foundation Research Fellow, in partnership with the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art, Iniva and Goldsmiths College (Department of Visual Cultures). 

Srajana was in conversation with Sunil Gupta at the Stuart Hall Library Research Network meeting, 17 October 2013.

For more information about the Stuart Hall Library Research Network, email us.

Stuart Hall Library Research Network meeting, Thursday 17 October 2013, 6.30-8.30

Join us for our next Research Network meeting for a great evening of thought-provoking discussion.

To kick-start our Autumn 2013 meetings we have two established artists/curators.

We are joined by Srajana Kaikini, who is visiting from India and is the third Research Fellow with the Delfina Foundation (2013), in partnership with the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art, Iniva and Goldsmiths College (Department of Visual Cultures). Srajana is a writer curator and researcher working with the spoken and written word, Indian literary theories – rasa dhvani, architectural urban spaces and aesthetics.

Sunil Gupta is known in the UK and India as an international Photographer, curator, activist and scholar. As a founding member of Autograph ABP and OVA, and curator of the recent exhibition When Three Dreams Cross: 150 Years of Photography from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, Whitechapel (2010) amongst others, he has been at the forefront of exploring photography in relation to Indian photography practice, queer culture, and HIV awareness. 

Space in the Library is limited so please book a place. You can book online or by contacting library staff via email.

For more information or to submit a proposal to present at future meetings, email library@iniva.org

Late opening on 3rd October until 20:00

Library display of material related to Iniva's current exhibition Tagore's Universal Allegories

Next Thursday, 3rd October, the Stuart Hall Library will be opening late until 20:00. We have a display of books and other material on Tagore, Anna Boghiguian and Goshka Macuga. The material is related to Iniva's current exhibition Anna Boghiguian & Goshka Macuga: Tagore's Universal Allegories. Our collection includes books on Indian art, and exhibition catalogues and journal articles related to Anna Boghiguian and Goshka Macuga. You are of course welcome to use the Library's facilities as usual during this late opening.

Stuart Hall Library Research Network, Autumn 2013

Following the success of The Trouble With Research symposium in June, the Stuart Hall Library is organising a series of Research Network meetings to take place this Autumn.

Save the dates:

Thursday 17 October, 6.30-8.00

Thursday 21 November, 6.30-8.00

Thursday 12 December, 6.30-8.00

The Stuart Hall Library Research Network was established in January 2013 as a meeting place for postgraduate researchers (artists, critics, curators) to present work that resonates with Iniva’s vision for visual arts and international perspectives, and is inspired by the work of Stuart Hall.

We welcome proposals to present at the Autumn meetings. To submit a proposal, send a 250 word summary of your intended presentation to library@iniva.org

Further details and booking information to follow shortly.

Meetings take place in the library, 2nd floor of Rivington Place from 6.30-8pm.

Iniva,

1 Rivington Place

Shoreditch

London EC2A 3BA

For more information or to submit a proposal to present at future meetings, email library@iniva.org

Guest blog post: Joshua Hastings, Stuart Hall Library Volunteer

Joshua Hastings

My time spent volunteering at the Stuart Hall Library has been a fantastic experience. I have met so many helpful and supportive people who have aided me in my undergraduate study at the University of Westminster where I have just graduated with first-class honours in BA Contemporary Media Practice.

The opportunity to produce source notes as a guide to the Library’s unique collection based on the theme of ‘Geography, Space and Place’ enabled me to extend my research interests in cultural identity to consider the environments in which identity and cultural understanding are constructed. The importance of this came as such in my last year of study when writing my dissertation and producing my major project in which I explored the history and heritage of Britain in the rural space, and the experience of migration and new settlements from the late 20^th Century to the present day. I intend to continue researching the relationship between geography, space and place, and how differing geographic locations produce varied concepts of national, cultural and racial belonging and identification.

With the help of general guidelines, I was able to freely select which material would be included in the guide. I made my selection based upon texts which helped me to understand the subject area as a newcomer, and those which I felt would be useful for others similarly exploring this subject area for the first time. I was stunned at the range of theoretic and artistic engagement in the collection and have included a select few examples ranging from general overviews to in-depth critical theory, stimulating artist works and also engaging panel discussions, each categorised accordingly.

Key themes which came out from researching Geography, Space and Place were to do with the structures of power in mapmaking and the limitations of traditional cartography in representing the world, and also how the experience of displacement and migration have altered how we presently may understand cultural identity. Also raised were questions of belonging, territory and globalisation. Whilst there are no conclusive answers or simple resolutions here, I hope to offer up multiple leads for investigation and plenty of food for thought. 

Joshua Hastings

http://joshuahastings.com

Stuart Hall Library source notes: Geography, space and place

This guide provides an introduction to resources for exploring and studying Geography, Space and Place. The library’s collection ranges from texts on Human Geography, Urban and Cultural Studies, to audio-visual material, catalogues and ephemera from exhibitions held at Iniva. Library shelfmarks can be found under each title, and keywords are listed under each abstract to indicate a general subject area for each item.The guide aims to be indicative rather than comprehensive.

The following texts introduce key themes and theories in relation to Geography, Space and Place:

Key Thinkers on Space and Place     

ESS KEY                                                                             

Edited by Phil Hubbard and Rob Kitchin

Los Angeles; London: Sage Publications, 2011

A comprehensive introduction to the key themes and thinkers of contemporary geographic and cultural studies, and explores the importance of space and place in social, political, economic life.

Human Geography/ Cultural Studies/ Urban Studies/ Anthropology

Space and Place: Theories of Identity and Location   

ESS SPA                                                  

Edited by Erica Carter, James Donald and Judith Squires

London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1993

A collection of essays citing examples from various locales between 1987 and 1991 to examine the effects of displacement and exile on the cultural production of identity and belonging, and how these experiences have disrupted concepts of place, nationhood, and home.

Cultural Identity/ Displacement and Migration/ History/ Transnationalism

Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change          

ESS MAP                                                  

Edited by Jon Bird, Barry Curtis, Tim Putnam, George Robertson and Lisa Tickner

London: Routledge, 1993

A range of in-depth analyses critically examining recent social, political, and economic changes and the implications of globalisation for framing and understanding cultural practice in the future.

Cultural Studies/ Globalisation/ Transnationalism/ Art & Cultural Practice

  

For Space

ESS MAS

Doreen Massey

London: Sage Publications, 2010

Massey reconsiders assumed understanding of space and time, critiquing their political and social impacts on global perceptions of populations and territorial boundaries.

Human Geography/ Globalisation/ Urban Studies

In Place/ Out of Place: Geography, Ideology, Transgression       ESS CRE         

Tim Cresswell

Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996

Cresswell examines the associations between ideology and geography, and the normalised hegemony of social structures which assume particular behavioural patterns and cultural understanding of people in the spaces they inhabit.

Cultural Studies/ Human Geography/ Power and Authority

Rethinking the Power of Maps                                                      ESS WOO                          

Dennis Wood

New York: The Guildford Press, 1992

An introductory read into the history of mapping and cartography as an organisational tool from the 16th Century to the present day, and also considers “counter-mapping” and “critical cartography” as an undermining process to national institutional authority over mapmaking. The book contains illustrations and examination of the mapping and counter-mapping of Palestine.

Cartographic Studies/ History/ Power and Authority/ War and Conflict

In/Different Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture           ESS BUR                                           

Victor Burgin

Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996

The book consults a range of psychoanalytic theories to analyse the role of visual media representation in the physical space and its effects on identity construction and constitution of ‘self’ and ‘other’ in the imagined, interior, psychological space.

Cultural Studies/ Psychoanalysis/ Identity/ Visual Culture

Displacements: Cultural Identities in Question  

ESS DIS

Edited by Angelika Bammer

Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994

A collection of texts which explore the continuation of culture when dislocated from its native geographical space through the experience of displacement, colonisation, and migration; the book includes contributions by Homi L. Bhabha, Doreen Massey and Julio Ramos among other cultural theorists.

Cultural Studies/ Diaspora/ Transnationalism/ Postcolonialism/ Displacement; Migration/ Cultural Identity

Terra Infirma: Geography’s Visual Culture                                   ESS ROG                                                  

Irit Rogoff

London: Routledge, 2000

The book analyses the work of international contemporary artists to examine the extent to which geography as a signifying practice can fully represent contemporary experience of migration, ‘inbetweenness’ and belonging.

Cultural Studies/ Art and Cultural Practice/ Geography/ Migration

Rethinking Curating: Art after New Media

ESS GRA

Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook

Cambirdge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2010

The book reflects on internationalism in art and curatorial practice, and considers a decentralised networked approach to communities across physical and virtual spaces. 

Art and Cultural Practice/ Globalisation/ New Media

Artist's monographs and exhibition catalogues

A selection of artists and exhibition catalogues addressing issues of Geography, Space, and Place:

Trade Routes: History and Geography: 2nd Johannesburg Biennale 1997             

682.2 BIE 1997

Okwui Enwezor

Johannesburg: Greater Johannesburg Metropolitan Council, 1997

The catalogue for the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale 1997 includes illustrations of artists’ works and text from writers and contributors engaged in discussion of globalisation’s history and its cultural produce born from resilience and fusion, displacement and migration.

Globalisation/ History/ Displacement and Migration

Alfredo Jaar: Geography=War                                                       AS JAA                                                  

Richmond, VA; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and Anderson Gallery, Virginia Commonwealth University, 1991

The book features images and text on Alfredo Jarr’s provocative exhibition ‘Geography=War’ in which the artist confronts Eurocentric and divisive representations of the world as geographical truth, and critiques the disparity between industrialised and non-industrialised countries in the world. Catalogued also is the Arnold Peters 1974 map of the world which distinctly and accurately maps territories scaled in relation to their landmass.

Mapping and Cartographic Practice/ Power and Authority/ History/ War and Conflict

Ingrid Pollard: Postcards Home                                                       AS POL                         

London: Autograph, 2004

Pollard’s photographic engagement with geography, space and place addresses cultural identity, national history, and authority, particularly across the imagined marginalising boundaries of the British rural and coastal landscape documented in this book.

Cultural Identity/ Power and Authority/ History

Landscape Trauma: In the Age of Scopophilia                               410.111 AUT LAN                             

Richard Hylton (curator)

London: Autograph, 2001

The book catalogues works by several artists featured in the exhibition of the same title, opening up revised perspectives and views of the world by distorting, disrupting and deconstructing representations of the landscape in response to national and global changes to the geographic, social and economic climate. Contains illustrations of works by; Annabel Howland, Henna Nadeem, Ingrid Pollard, Camila Sposati, S.T.I. Consortium

Visual Culture and Representation/ Globalisation

Whose Map is it? New Mapping by Artists                                     410.111 INI WHO  

Christine Takengny, Teresa Cisneros

London: Institute of International Visual Arts (Iniva), 2010

The exhibition considers the role of mapping in contemporary art and the perspective from which maps have been produced and how they inform our world view. The booklet includes illustrations of artists’ works and texts from several writers.

Mapping and Cartographic Practice/ Power and Authority/ Visual Culture and Representation

Creative Compass: New Commissions by Agnes Poitevin-Navarre and Susan Stockwell

 410.111 RGS CRE

Vandana Petal, Teresa Cisneros

London: Royal Geographic Society

The book features information on a Royal Geographic Society’s initiative in collaboration with INIVA to engage new audiences with Geography as a means to further understanding of the world, its populations and environments. Building upon the Society’s extensive collection of maps and atlases, along with commissioned pieces by artists Agnès Poitevin-Navarre and Susan Stockwell, Creative Compass confronts the challenges that global change presents, explores the history of map making and the role of the map in everyday life, and the exclusion of information in cartographic practice.

Mapping and Cartographic Practice/ Visual Culture and Representation/ Power and Authority

Artists and Maps: Cartography as a Means of Knowing               795 ART                                            

Portland, Oregon: Ronna and Eric Hoffman Gallery of Contemporary Art Lewis; Clark College: 2003

This booklet features illustrations of artists’ works shown in the exhibition exploring the metaphoric and narrative components of maps in intersecting fact and fiction into our world view. Commentary by Linda Brady Tesner (Director of the Ronna and Eric Hoffman Gallery of Contemporary Art: Lewis; Clark College).

Mapping and Cartographic Practice/ Visual Culture and Representation

                                                                                                             

Place

ESS DEA                            

Tacita Dean and Jeremy Millar

London: Thames and Hudson

The exhibition catalogue features illustrations from artists in addressing political, historical and social distinctions between concepts of space, place and less familiar non-places.

Urban Studies/ History/ Power and Authority

Audio-visual material

A select of archived recordings exploring Geography, Space and Place held in Stuart Hall Library’s audio-visual collection;

INIVA : ‘Nation’   

(panel discussion)                                                                  

CD 316

London: INIVA, 2009

This audio CD recorded at INIVA features discussion led by Argentine-born Gabriela Salgado exploring concepts of national and transnational identity as a subject for artists and a context for their work, with responses from artists Alexandra Handal and Nada Prija who reflect on their practice and examine to what extent local notions of belonging and rootedness have been redefined by transnationalism in the arts.

Visual Culture and Representation/ Cultural Identity/ Transnationalism

Crossing Boundaries Symposium                                                    CD 320     

London: Royal Geographic Society, INIVA, 2010

The tracked CD documents various panel discussions with geographers and artists on the convergence of humanities and the visual arts by INIVA and the Royal Geographic Society, and considers creative and critical approaches to mapping and cartographic processes, the limitations of traditional cartography, and also the technology used to produce and read maps.

Mapping ; Cartographic Practice/ Visual Culture; Representation/ Technology

Whose Map is it? 

(panel discussion)

CD 327                                                                      

London: INIVA, 2010

The CD contains two sessions, both featuring artists in discussion of their work and engagement with mapping. The first features Colombian, Moroccan and Nigerian artists exhibited in INIVA’s ‘Whose Map is it?’ show who expand on their selected themes concerning migration, land ownership and borders. How these artists have used mapping creatively is then explored by Dr Harriet Hawkins in conversation with Heath Bunting in the second part of this audio CD.

Visual Culture and Representation / Displacement and Migration/ Mapping and Cartographic Practice

Whose Map is it? The Content and Meaning of the Spaces we Encounter

CD 329

London: INIVA, 2010

This CD is a recording of a panel discussion between Paul Goodwin and Alex Vasudevan held during INIVA’s ‘Whose Map is it’ exhibition, focusing on the city space and analysing migrant patterns in urban areas. The panel elaborates on contemporary mapping practices by artists in relation to their research, examining urban development in Lisbon and the history of squatting in Berlin.

Urban Studies/ Visual Culture ; Representation / History/ Displacement ; Migration

Volunteers for Closed Week, 12-14 August 2013

End of Closed Week, 2012

Stuart Hall Library, part of Iniva at Rivington Place, is a special Library focusing on international visual arts.


The Library will be closed for a week in August (12-16) to undertake essential Library housekeeping work, and the Library team are looking for volunteers to help.

This is an opportunity for:

- those with an interest in libraries

- pre-library school applicants to acquire basic Library skills

You will gain valuable insights into how a special Library collection is managed and organised by working on tasks including:

- Shelving

- Journals maintenance

- Basic catalogue work

- Collection care


Professional Library qualifications are not essential, but knowledge of how to use a Library and searching catalogues is required. You will need to be available for three days, from Monday 12 to Wednesday 14 August, 10.30-4.30.

Lunch and travel expenses will be reimbursed.

Please email a CV and covering letter to Sonia Hope, Library Manager explaining why you would like to volunteer at the Stuart Hall Library.

Closing date: Friday 2 August.

Informal meetings to be held week beginning 5 August.

Iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts) explores key issues in society and politics, creating a platform for artistic experiment, cultural debate and exchange of ideas. We work with artists, curators, creative producters and writers to promote a greater understanding diversity in a rapidly changing world.

www.iniva.org

Notes from the Stuart Hall Library – 2012_2013: No.7 From: Roshini Kempadoo (Animateur for SH Library) – 8th July 2013.

credit: Karen Roswell

credit: Karen Roswell

The Trouble With Research symposium held for the first time June 27th 2013, acted as a dimension to the SHL Research Network meetings Sonia Hope and I had co-convened and as a culmination of the work by the first SHL Animateur. The day was packed from 12:00 – 6:00, with some 12 contributions by artists, critics and researchers. As with the SHL Research Network our intention was to explore/expose the kinds of research involved for the artist, the scholar undertaking written research; the critic; and the cultural activist. The intention too was to frame the conversation within the context of Stuart Hall’s writings, cultural politics and modes of reflecting, thinking and creating cultural work.

Three elements were important to conceptualising the symposium.

The first was to consider perspective and place. This is to consciously consider our own projects, here in London as a metropolitan centre of Europe, from within the context of the international frame – if only to be reminded of our own perspectives and positions from which we speak. A dialogue between Christopher Cozier - an international artist, curator and cultural activist - and I became the starting point for the symposium. He was able to speak cogently about some of the ‘trouble’ associated with being construed as a Trinidadian/Caribbean artist by curators working internationally. Christopher also presented the importance of thinking beyond and through conceptual frames of identity and self, which also includes the use of technologies as a practice of self-determination, self-articulation and autonomy. 

See Christopher's project In Development: http://vimeo.com/56825269

The second element was to consider the context of the present moment as Hall so often reminds us. In other words to consider the contemporary and current neoliberal regime we all work within as cultural producers. ‘Neoliberal ideas’ Hall, Massey and Rustin remind us ‘have sedimented into the western imaginary and become embedded in popular “common sense”’ to include “naturalised” economic theory of the free market; continued corporate ownership of the media; ‘competitive individualism', ‘commercialisation of “identity” and the utopias of self-sufficiency (Hall, Massey, Rustin, 2013, 17 – 19). ‘ To this end our panel Cultural interventions in neoliberal times was concerned with the notion of autonomous thinking, cultural projects, technologies and activism. This included Ashwani Sharma’s proposed concept of subtraction of blackness as integral to his notes for a manifesto associated with futurism and Michael Berrie’s paper Dot-art (.art) detailing ways in which imminent internet domain development will effect us as artists/researchers. 

credit: Karen Roswell

And lastly the third element was to consider the production and practice of knowledge as artists and cultural researchers. I/we wanted us to consider research process, art objects and histories as central foundations for cultural knowledge and cultural politics. It is I argue, only through our knowledge of what has gone on before that we might create radical and highly imaginary projects in the present and future. To this end, contributions included Kabe Wilson’s creative storytelling art object that re-frames and re-tells a story embedded with a knowledge and history of the black power movement using Virginia Woolf’s writings; and we heard of Tahera Aziz’s sound installation [re]locate that sonically re-imagined the documentation from the Stephen Lawrence murder and subsequent enquiry. Set within the context of the Stuart Hall Library and Iniva, the contributions continue a legacy of the library, the archive and the building itself as art objects/media that socially intervene and contribute to socially and politically astute knowledge and experience. 

 

Kabe Wilson’s 'Olivia N'Gowfri - Of One Woman or So', assembled from Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own and rearranged to write a new novel. Photograph credit: Karen Roswell 

We ended the day in conversation with Ashwani Sharma and Layal Ftouni – to provide a focus on the continued Arab protest and uprisings and more specifically Lebanon, focusing on ways in which Arab/Middle Eastern artists provided other ways to provoke debate, thought and action. 

For all those who attended and contributed – A Big Thank You.

From the feedback and what I saw and heard there is great value in forming a network – a body of people who feel some sense of being, of coming together and exploring each other’s work and perspectives. Most folk ‘felt’ the building and the Stuart Hall Library as the appropriate space – physically and metaphorically to continue to focus on the dialogue and conversations necessary for us. 

The SHL Animateur role, which now comes to an end, provided an opportune moment to explore and become familiar with contemporary visual work and get a sense of the depth of research entailed in creating, exploring, critiquing and examining current projects. Our thoughts for coming years and the future are to continue the Research Network – beginning again in the autumn.

To think and act autonomously – independent of political and cultural pressures that conform to an agenda of economics and current politics - and yet collectively sustain and develop new ways of thinking and acting is not easy and requires much effort. I feel confident that we are teaching and reminding ourselves of just what it will take to continue practising as good scholars, artists and critics who have valuable contributions to make to the present and the future.



Tahera Aziz - http://taheraaziz.com/projects/relocate/

Christopher Cozier - http://christophercozier.blogspot.co.uk/

Dark Matter Journal - http://www.darkmatter101.org/

Hall, Massey, Rustin (2013) ‘After neoliberalism: analysing the present’ Soundings, 53, pp. 8-22. See: http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/journals/soundings/pdfs/s53hallmasseyrustin.pdf

Roshini Kempadoo - http://www.roshinikempadoo.com

Late night opening on July 4th until 20:00

Still taken from Oh Adelaide (2010)

. © Sonia Boyce, courtesy the artist.

Sonia Boyce: Scat

Next Thursday, July 4th, we will be open until 20:00 to celebrate Iniva's current exhibition, Scat: Sound and Collaboration, by Sonia Boyce. Come and visit our section of the exhibition which includes books, films, magazines and other items from Sonia Boyce’s archive.

Cover girls is a spread of popular magazines with Black British female music artists. There are also articles relating to Sonia Boyce’s long-term archive collection project, Devotional.
Find books on pop music culture amongst the artists’ books, group exhibition catalogues and critical theory volumes on the Library shelves.
Films and documentaries will be available to watch with headphones:
An Audience with Shirley Bassey:  ‘50 minutes of showbiz magic’
Top of the Pops, 40th Anniversary, 1964-2004
The Story of Lover’s Rock, Melenik Shabazz’s documentary on British ‘romantic reggae’

International Zine Month

We also invite you to celebrate International Zine Month in the Stuart Hall Library. On the evening of July 4th we'll display a selection of some of our favourite zines, so please drop by and have a browse, and feel free to donate your zines! 

Photo by Sheena Balkwill