The Reading Group Returns, 11 April 2013

The library is hosting a reading group session in April, with more meetings to follow in May and June.

Keywords, New Keywords

On Thursday 11 April, 6.30-8pm we will meet to discuss the seminal text and inspiration for Iniva's latest exhibition, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976) by Raymond Williams, comparing it to a later title inspired by it, New Keywords: A revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society edited by Tony Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg and Meaghan Morris (2005).

We will read the introductions to both texts and compare their approaches, the contents, and the way in which these publications reflect changes in language use and culture.

Space in the library is limited. To book a place, email us.

Copies of the introductory chapters will be available in the library from 28 March.

More information to follow on the session in May.

Join us for our third Research Network meeting of talks and discussion.

Thursday March 28th, 6.30-8.30

Sabine El Chamaa is a Lebanese filmmaker currently in the finishing stages of an Audio Visual PhD at Goldsmiths, University of London's Media and Communications department. Her research started as a personal documentary filmed during 2006's war on Lebanon, analysing 24/7 live war media coverage from the perspective of a citizen residing inside a city being bombed, by means of a film-based installation and a theoretical text.

Maria Kheirkhah is an artist, curator and lecturer, and a second year PhD candidate at University of the Arts, Chelsea College of Art & Design. The focus of Maria's research is to investigate the ‘female Oriental Other' as perceived historically within Western social discourses and the extent to which this perception projects / impacts upon her voice and representation within contemporary visual culture today.

Maria will be focusing on performative practices:  Portraits of a Belly Dancer, and Strategies of Identification and Resistance.

Meetings take place monthly on Thursdays, 6.30-8.30 in the library, 2nd floor of Rivington Place.

Space is limited in the library, so if you have not already done so please contact us to book a place by writing to  library@iniva.org or calling 020 7749 1255.

Guest blog post: Jessica Carden, Stuart Hall Library Research Network member

Grace Ndiritu, Pole to Pole

At the end of last month I was invited by the Stuart Hall Library Research Network to present my doctoral research titled, Contemporary Visual Representations of the Non-White Figure in the Arctic Landscape: British Colonial Constructions of the ‘Heart of Whiteness’ and the Black-White Binary as Fetish. Since commencing my PhD studies in late 2012, I have become increasingly aware of the importance of exposing my research and entering into dialogue with fellow practitioners. Therefore, I was delighted to be provided with the opportunity to present my work within the relevant context of the Stuart Hall Library and its research network members.


My investigation is focused on three specific case studies of artist film and video - each from Black–British filmmakers– that use the Arctic landscape as a setting to discuss issues of ethnicity, memory and belonging. Framed in the context of the British colonial construction of the Arctic territories and their place in the public imagination, my aim is to unearth the significance of the artists’ appropriation of Arctic space. The case studies include John Akomfrah’s Mnemosyne [2010]; Grace Ndiritu’s Pole to Pole [2009] and Issac Julien’s True North [2004].

Isaac Julien, True North

Further to my presentation to the group, the evening’s respondent Dr Saer Maty Ba began to unpack the layers of my research and identified several key concepts and theories which will be integral to a thorough reading of the artist’s works, providing particular insight into the practice of John Akomfrah. As Roshini Kempadoo has stated in her earlier blog post, we anchored the discussion with the question why now; what is the significance of the artists appropriating Arctic space at this point in time and can the works be read in relation to current European anxiety surrounding nationalism and notions of purity? From this point we began to discuss the intricacies of the individual works including notions of racial binary; the seductiveness of the film footage and the ethics involved in the appropriation of ethnographic archive material.

The evenings’ group covered a diverse range of backgrounds from film historians to curators, artists and theorists, and as a result the discussion was both rich and provocative. The process of compiling my various strands of research into the form of a presentation was in itself a valuable experience. The evenings’ discussion remains one of the most productive conversations surrounding my work to date and one that will undoubtedly enrich my research at this crucial stage.

Jessica Carden is a 1st year PhD student at the University of the Arts London Transnational Research Centre for Art, Identity and Nation. Jessica is a curator and co-founder of Mother Tongue, a collaborative curatorial research-led project
www.mothertongue.se

Notes from the Stuart Hall Library – 2012_2013: No.6 From: Roshini Kempadoo (Animateur for SH Library) – 8th March

What may well become a valuable core group of researchers and artists, formed the SHL research network session on 28th February night to reflect on Jessica Carden’s study and Saer Maty Ba’s contribution of three contemporary black-british filmmakers who use the Arctic landscape as a space to discuss issues of race, migration and belonging. Their research was insightful and rigorous, critically exploring the filmmakers work (John Akomfrah, Isaac Julien and Grace Ndiritu).

Still from Akomfrah's new film, The Nine Muses.

One aspect we discussed was the question of why now  - why in the last decade or so, have films such as these been made making use of the physical and symbolic landscape of the north? In what ways do the films at this moment in time, reflect a European political climate of anxiety and tension – including climates changes and threats, of the perceived ‘problem’ of southern populations moving north, of the political state space of retreat, aggression and violence towards women and southern bodies from the majority world. The extract from The Nine Muses (2010) directed by Akomfrah, spectacularly seductive in form and aesthetics also prompted a series of questions around the institutional and aesthetics of film production – such as the relationship between historical archive footage and crystal clear and highly improved camera/screen-based technologies. So a exploratory but animated debate that provided me with much more insight into how we might consider such filmmaking.

Speaking of explorations of aesthetics and questions of location and space, I also contributed to a session in January to students from Slade School of Fine Art that Erika Tan arranged looking at the work of iniva and the library. In amongst other things I showed the work by Chris Cozier who is currently showing at David Krut Projects Gallery, New York (until March 16^th). Chris as an artist, curator, writer and critic has started an online forum around his work with patterned concrete bricks.

Concrete bricks I hear you say – well most of us are familiar with these things – these bricks that act as ventilation in concrete houses in tropical spaces – found in verandahs, at the top of walls – often painted in contrast to the colours of baby blue, or intense pink we have come to associate with ‘modern’ concrete houses built whether in Ghana, Trinidad or Malaysia.  They are redolent of something more – of tropicalisation, of a the familiar architectural stuff of the South, they speak of materiality and modernity – something mass produced and evoking ‘development’ as Cozier’s title suggests.

Christopher Cozier (2013) dpattern 

There are some interesting contributions so far – of artworks as photographs, illustrations, animated gifs, spray painted interventions, proposals for a Caribbean and videos. See:

P&E[ Pinky & Emigrante ] What Remains – Feb 16^th 2013

http://dpatterns2013.wordpress.com/2013/02/16/what-remains/

Nadia Huggins No Place Like Home – Jan 31^st 2013

http://dpatterns2013.wordpress.com/2013/01/31/no-place-like-home/

Ebony G. Patterson Obscuring spaces building borders… January 21st 2013

http://dpatterns2013.wordpress.com/2013/01/21/obscuring-spaces-building-borders/

Feel free to contribute as I am about to…whilst looking for the traces of breeze brick patterns in the artists work in the library to share and debate with Cozier…

Some References found in the library and elsewhere about the artists below:

John Akomfrah

http://www.smokingdogsfilms.com/

Grace Ndiritu

http://www.luxonline.org.uk/artists/grace_ndiritu/index.html

Isaac Julien

http://www.isaacjulien.com/installations/truenorth 

Erika Tan

http://www.luxonline.org.uk/artists/erika_tan/index.html

Chris Cozier

http://dpatterns2013.wordpress.com/2013/01/06/press-release-christopher-cozier-in-development/

Saer Maty Ba's publication De-Westernizing Film Studies (2012)

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Westernizing-Film-Studies-Saer-Maty/dp/0415687845

From the Artists' Book Collection

At Stuart Hall Library we have a great interest in texts and objects that will tell us more about culture and creativity. So we decided to start collecting artists' books, and have been doing so for the past three years. Some have been donated to us, others have been actively searched for and purchased.

We were impressed and beguiled by the beautiful books on display as part of Iniva's Peter Clarke exhibition Wind Blowing on the Cape Flats, and felt inspired to display some of our own artists' books in the library.

Each book has its own narrative of ideas, influences and processes of production. Much of this remains hidden to the viewer/reader. But we hope that visitors will enjoy the books as objects in their own right, as well as being aware of the power they have to tell a story about a wider artistic practice or project.

Photo by Christa Holka.

Natasha de Betak's Nightshade is a collection of photographs of individuals at rest, in dream-like poses. The book is hard-bound and made from handmade paper, with its own slip case. It arrived in the post from the artist wrapped in pink and purple tissue paper tied with a black ribbon, like a present.

Alongside Nightshade is Faye De Gannes' Inside the Coco, which has been discussed previously on the Stuart Hall Library blog. This book, a tribute to Faye's late mother, is handmade and concertinaed, with lush photography of the countryside in Trinidad.



Photo by Christa Holka.

Faye had visited the library to gain inspiration from the collection before making her own book. Hormazd Nariewalla 's Dead Man's Patterns (above) is one of the books that caught her eye. The book originates from Hormazd's residency at a Savile Row tailor's company.

These books are on open display to enable visitors to handle and explore them, in order to gain a sense of what the artist aimed to achieve.



Smaller books are on display in our cabinets: My Travel Journal by Yukina Narita is a small box of thirty-four individual cards with illustrations of places visited by the artist. Sofa, by Jessica Jane Charleston is a six-page, black and white photocopied booklet demonstrating the simple but effective aesthetics of a zine. Paul Salt's River Thinking: Prague One Year After the Floods of August 2002 reflects his interest in environment and landscape.




Shelagh Atkinson's Lost, Found and Kept series of '6-fold' small books are exploring, in her words, 'the playfulness of the English language', using red print in '12-point Helvetica bold, a typeface that wants to be read, neutral and functional'. Red Diaper 'explores the twin themes of identity and relationship through text and imagery', while Face It documents 'thoughts and ideas testifying to the imperfect beauty of the human'.

Leo Asemota's Testimony is part of a bigger project, The Ens Project, which is 'informed by the Igue ceremony to the Head practiced by the Edo people of Benin City, the Victorian age of invention, exploration and conquest and Walter Benjamin’s seminal treatise on art in the technological age'. The book, A5 and concertinaed in format, has an archival quality, which can be experienced by the beautifully filmed Reading of Leo Asemota's Testimony by Brendan McGinty in which the viewer watches the book being opened, and the pages turned.

Most artists' books at the library are not on the open shelves, but visitors are welcome to see them on request.

From the Artists' Book Collection will be on display until 31 March.

For more information, contact us.

Stuart Hall Library Research Network, second meeting, 28 Februrary 2013

Research Network meeting. Photo by Christa Holka.

Join us for our second Research Network meeting of talks and discussions.

Jessica Carden will present Contemporary Visual Representations of the Non-White Figure in the Arctic Landscape: British Colonial Constructions of the ‘Heart of Whiteness’ and the Black-White Binary as Fetish

'A recent British Film Institute review of John Akomfrah's Mnemosyne written by Sukhdev Sandhu [2010] stated, “Mnemosyne is part of a small but noticeable trend for black artists – among them Isaac Julien in True North (2004) and Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky) in Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctic (2009) – to mine the creative potential of spaces seen as literally and symbolically white.” Taking the BFI article as a catalyst for my investigation, I will present three contemporary artist film and video case studies - each from Black-British filmmakers - using the Arctic landscape as a space to discuss issues of race, migration and belonging. These include Isaac Julien's True North [2004], John Akomfrah's Mnemosyne [2010] and Grace Ndiritu's Pole to Pole [2009]. Framed in the context of the British colonial construction of the Arctic territory and its place in the public imagination, I aim to unearth the significance of the artist’s appropriation of arctic space'.

Jessica is a first year PhD student within TrAIN: Transnational Research Centre for Art, Identity and Nation at Chelsea, University of the Arts, London.

Dr Saër Maty Bâ will be a discussant for the evening, responding to Jessica’s presentation and contextualising it via a short discussion. Saër has taught film studies and visual culture at the universities of Bangor, East London, Portsmouth, Exeter, and St Andrews (UK). His research blurs boundaries between diaspora, film, media, race, and cultural studies. His articles and reviews have appeared in journals such as Film International, Studies in Documentary Film, Transnational Cinemas, Cultural Studies Review, Culture Machine, and Ecquid Novi: African Journalism Studies (forthcoming).
Space is limited in the library, so if you have not already done so please contact us to book a place.

Meetings will take place monthly on Thursdays, 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 us .

Stuart Hall Library Research Network, 31 January 2013

Research group. Photo by Christa Holka.

Thanks to all those who attended the first Research Network meeting at Stuart Hall Library. We had a great turn out of interested students, curators, academics and other curious visitors who listened to, then engaged enthusiastically with the presentations by Karinna Gulias and Kim Bagley.

Karinna Gulias. Photo by Christa Holka.

Karinna discussed her 'Avoiding an epistemological approach to reading poetry', demonstrating her method by presenting a close reading of Rainer Maria Rilke's A Woman's Fate, translated by Stephen Cohn.  The discussion raised issues relating to the processes of translation and interpretation, as well as the difficulty of placing language and meaning out of 'context'.

Ceramicist Kim Bagley's presentation of her work in progress, 'Africa and the West: a contested conversation in modern contemporary ceramics' focused on the 'extermination tents which sprung from observing a specific local extermination method ...which resonate with draped construction sites, tent cities and refugee camps...' in Durban, South Africa. Group members enjoyed seeing examples of Kim's work, both during the presentation and also by handling small versions of the works, being able to examine the shape and texture. The discussion of Kim's work was far-ranging, including concepts of the local and global as evidenced in the title of her presentation which used 'Africa' rather than the more local 'South Africa'.

Kim Bagley. Photo by Christa Holka.

The Stuart Hall Library Research Network is a meeting place for discussion of practice-based or more conventional forms of research that may include: curatorial practice; visual arts; global art; film and media; cultural studies; cultural activism; postcolonial studies; literary studies, including criticism and theory.

Next meeting: Thursday 28 February 2013, 6.30-8.30

For more information and to submit a proposal to present at a future meeting, email Sonia Hope and Roshini Kempadoo at  library@iniva.org

Stuart Hall Library Research Network first meeting, 31 January 2013

Join us for our first Research Network meeting of talks and discussion.

South African ceramicist Kim Bagley presents
Africa and the West: a contested conversation in modern and contemporary ceramics
Kim is currently researching representations of contemporary African identities that emerge in ceramics as a research student at UCA, Farnham.

Karinna Gulias explores language and imagery in
Avoiding an Epistemological Approach to Reading Poetry
Karinna is studying Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London.

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

Notes from the Stuart Hall Library - 2012: No.5 From: Roshini Kempadoo (Animateur for SH Library)

I returned to the library this week reeling with exhilaration in having attended and contributed to the conference BlackPortraiture[s]: The Black Body in the West (January 17 – 20, 2013).

Organised across three distinguished venues in Paris: École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts, Paris 7 University, culminating in the Musée du quai Branly, this seminal and historical conference literally overflowed with hundreds of us gathered to talk, listen and watch a mammoth range of material about the black figure in portraiture. The spirit of the event  - of the passion for our photographs and research, of collegiate and personal warmth and support for each other, of inter-generational connectivity that respected each individual, was brought about by Professor Deborah Willis with the added support of others.  

There were too many great things to say about this powerful sense of a collective project. As a conference free from privileging the few who could afford it, it allowed people to learn substantially about the now extensive range and breadth of persons – whether artists, theorists, curators or activists - involved in exploring how we might consider portraiture[s] as inextricably linked to signifying black folk. It allowed those who attended to take time out from the pressures (physical, mentally, socially, politically) we face at this moment of crisis (financial) and celebration (inauguration of President Obama to his second term). And it also allowed for us to recognise how a collective consciousness may energise us to into more action and momentarily focus our minds and bodies on the jobs that need to be attended to.

I highlight a couple of things here people said and did as a way of providing an insight into the variety of presentations of the conference.

The first day (Thursday 17th January 13) had to belong to the footballer Lilian Thuram (the most capped player in the history of the France national team). As a recent commissioner of the exhibition l’inventiondu sauvage (2011/12), and having written a Manifiesto por la igualdad (Manifesto for Equality), he was in conversation with Manthia Diawara and eloquently and quietly restated the interconnectivity between racism, sexism and homophobia. Through a familial story that introduced us to his Guadeloupian mother, his time in football and why he works against racism in France for his son’s future, he reminded us of our duty to be vocal as there were a lot of people who would like to maintain the status quo.

The first two panels that took place on Friday morning (18th) Memory & Nostalgia: The archive in the Black Body (chaired by CherylFinley, and including Pamela Newkirk, myself, Celeste Marie Bernier, Brendan Wattenberg, Renée Mussai and dedicated to the life and work of PetrineArcher-Shaw) and Black Bodies: Live and Uncensored (chaired by IsoldeBrielmaier and including Simon Njami, Carrie Mae Weems, Elizabeth Colomba, Jean-Ulrick Désert, Lyle Ashton Harris, Daniele Tamagni) contained details of inspiration, imagination, and insight into the historical and contemporary creative projects of black portraiture. Whilst on Saturday 19th the panelists continued to enthuse and titillate the audience through presentations including those in the panel Black Erotics: New Theories on Race and Porn with contributions from Carla Williams, and Mireille Miller-Young. Hank WillisThomas chaired the panel Contemporary Voices: naming and Branding the Black Body to include some of the younger generation of artists and theorists exploring the black body including Nana Adusei-Poku, Alexis Peskine, Misa Dayson and Aja Monet. Whilst the panel Out of Africa: Young Women Behind the Lens featured work by Zanele Muholi, Nandipha Mntambo and Ayana V. Jackson provided the emergent voices of women artists.

The conference required stamina from us all – both physically and mentally because of its sheer intensity and at times gruelling pace. But it was worth every effort. It is not that often that conferences inspire us – they are all too often a sounding box for egos and intellectual power show. But when orchestrated as a creative/intellectual project like this was, they are able to transport and propel us into action. Thanks to Deborah Willis, the conference organisers, sponsors and conference staff for making history.

Other Links:

Black Portraiture(s) Facebook page.

Conference Website, Tisch Photography and Imaging, New York University.

Next Future Website featuring Lilian Thuram foundation.
 Terrence Jennings Photographs of Black Portraiture(s) conference.

Stuart Hall Library Research Network - more information

The Stuart Hall Library Research Network is a new forum for researchers whose work resonates with Stuart Hall’s intellectual thinking and Iniva’s vision.


Monthly meetings will provide an opportunity to present an aspect of your work, followed by an informal discussion.

The proposal deadline for the 31 January presentation has been extended to
Friday 25 January.

The deadline for February presentations is Thursday 31 January.

The deadline for March presentations is Thursday 28 February.

For more information and to submit a proposal, email Sonia Hope and Roshini Kempadoo at

library@iniva.org

More information is also available on the Iniva website .


Meetings will take place monthly on Thursdays:

January 31, February 28, March 28 2013

If you would like to join in discussions by attending the meetings, please contact us to reserve a place.