Library closure week 1-5 September

A reminder that the library will be closed next week, from the 1st to the 5th of September, for our annual stock take and housekeeping. We will reopen on Tuesday the 9th of September.

You can still contact us during the closure period on 020 7749 1255 or email library (at) iniva (dot) org

Stuart Hall Library Research Network Meeting
Thursday 18 September 2014 6:30pm. Free event.

Taey Iohe 'Restless 2 ', 2013                                                    Isabel Pinto, 2014

Join us for an evening of presentations followed by informal discussion and the opportunity to socialise over refreshments.

Artist and writer Dr. Taey Iohe will present her artwork and research around 'Sleep, Space and Motion'. She will show work from 'Flux of Sleepings'  a photographic series, video installation and performance project about the spatiality of sleep.

Dr. Isabel Pinto will present on 'Eighteenth-century censorship: the historical dynamics between cultural identity and imagined communities'. European censorship at this time not only relied on educational, moral and religious grounds, but also pursued the edification of a unique cultural identity

Read more

Stuart Hall Library, Iniva
1 Rivington Place
EC2A 3BA London
U.K.

Clothes, Cloth & Culture Group
Call for presenters

Iniva, Rivington Place,
London EC2A 3BA

The Clothes, Cloth & Culture Group is a monthly forum for creative practitioners and thinkers across the spectrum of artists, designers, curators, writers and activists working with cloth. Setting cloth into the wider contexts of material and visual culture, the Clothes, Cloth & Culture Group provides a space for conversations about the politics of cloth from a distinctively cross-cultural viewpoint. We are looking for exciting and engaging ways of uncovering your research. This might include individual presentations, presentations in pairs, in conversation/dialogue, or presenting a group project.

The meetings will take place in the Stuart Hall Library from 6.30 -9.00pm. Each presentation will be 20 minutes long (2 presenters per session). Suggested themes include;

-cultural translation and difference
-post-coloniality and globalisation
-movement and migration
-Diaspora; social and cultural perspectives
-cultural, racial and gendered identities
-social action and ethical concerns

We welcome contributions on these and other under-represented views and issues within textile cultures and fashion theory. If you are interested in presenting at a future Clothes, Cloth & Culture session, please send a 200 word proposal outlining your topic to the Library Manager.

All contributors will also be invited to contribute a reflection on a cloth based object, image or text that is both meaningful at a personal level and responds to the core themes of the group. These conversations or ‘textile narratives’ will be disseminated via the Iniva website. Where possible artefacts will be displayed in the library vitrines, alongside accompanying texts.

Co-convened by Dr. Christine Checinska, Iniva's second Stuart Hall Library Animateur.

More information                 Library@iniva.org

Stuart Hall Library
Closed week : call for volunteers

1 - 5 September 2014

One for your diary- the library will be closed to users for a week to enable us to carry out essential housekeeping, from 1-5 September 2014.

We are calling for volunteers to help us with stock-taking and other library-related tasks during the week.

If you are interested in volunteering, there is more information on our webpage.

Grayson Perry, the Vanity of Small Differences and the weaving of a community tapestry …

The last Clothes, Cloth & Culture Group meeting focussed on the theme of ‘Cloth and Social Action’. Françoise Dupré spoke of her work during the 1980s in collaboration with the Brixton Art Gallery, in particular the Patchwork of Our Lives banners created with a group of Soweto women at the height of the anti-Apartheid campaigns in 1986. She also spoke about Women’s Work, an arts organisation that she co-founded. She recalled the annual banners that they made, drawing on earlier political banner making traditions, for example, those worked by the Socialist Movement and by the Suffragettes. This stitching, piecing and embroidering was of course happening around the time of Rozsika Parker’s Subversive Stitch and the subsequent show at the Cornerhouse and Whitworth Art Galleries. This was the era during which the barriers between craft and art began to be torn down and the domestic space was shown to be the political space that perhaps it always was, particularly for working class women. Dupré went on to discuss her current work concerned with cosmopolitanism, with the plasticity and the sociability of textile crafts, with the use of textiles as a ‘portal’, and with the crafting of space through collaborative participatory social practice, that binds the haptic to the making of socially meaningful art objects. She reminded us of Stuart Hall’s notion of  ‘home’ as process; a concept that rests on ongoing engagement, i.e. something that needs to be ‘worked’.

The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine
Rozsika Parker. Cover Image © I.B. Tauris

These points were brought to life by Victoria Khur, Ruth-Marie Tunkara, the QSA ‘Knees Up’ knitting and crochet club ladies and Derek (currently the only male member of the club). Through a ‘vox-pop’ style film, Khur and Tunkara relayed tales of newly formed relationships that cross generational, economic, racial and cultural divides, stories of the sharing of knowledge and expertise, and accounts of the empowerment of the residents that attend the club. A project of Quaker Social Action, situated in London’s, Bethnal Green, ‘Knees Up’ uniquely promotes a belief in the possible by focusing on what is strong in communities, rather than what is wrong with communities. The title of their presentation, ‘Weaving a Community Tapestry’, neatly sums up the common ground between the two presentations and the content of the discussions that followed. At a certain level, Dupré, Khur and Tunkara’s talks were underlined by this notion of possibility, which is aligned to the idea of unity through difference.

Earlier on that Thursday, I had visited PROGESS at the Foundling Museum, Brunswick Square, London. Set out over three floors, the exhibition marks the 250^th anniversary of William Hogarth’s death by showcasing the responses of four contemporary artists - Yinka Shonibare MBE, Grayson Perry, David Hockney and Jessie Brennan – to his infamous series of etchings A Rake’s Progress, (1735). Grayson Perry’s the Vanity of Small Differences occupies the basement.

Grayson Perry, The Vanity of Small Differences, The Adoration of the Cage Fighters, 2012. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro Gallery, London © The artist

Perry’s the Vanity of Small Differences consists of six tapestries charting the progress of Tim Rakewell. These densely woven and richly coloured tapestries provide Perry with a means through which to explore issues around class and taste as the exhibition catalogue tells us. But, in my view, these intricate hangings also speak about today’s rapidly changing urban landscapes, or ‘social fabric’, to reference a previous Iniva project. Rakewell’s progress tells the story of not only the demise of a man but also the breakdown of communities that we all too often witness in this contemporary moment. Today’s fast-paced social upheaval could be said to parallel that of the 1980’s noted above: the unstable economic climate, the gentrification of former working class areas coupled with a dearth of affordable housing, the rise of far right political movements, the growing fragmentation of society. Biblical references, compositional strategies reminiscent of religious paintings and narrative structures based on Hogarth’s original Rake collide with recognisable symbols of wealth and lack of wealth in Perry’s series: a cafetiére, an allotment, a young ‘baby mother’, a smart phone, a copy of Hello magazine. The viewer is taken through the various stages of Rakewell’s journey from his working class roots to his rise to the upper classes. The last tapestry #Lamentation depicts our protagonist’s violent passing at the wheels of his Ferrari. His body, pulled from the wreckage and surrounded by capitalist markers of success, lies motionless at the centre of the scene. The whole is tweeted by onlookers positioned in the background of the piece, hence the Twitter hashtag in the title. Might this final act represent the ultimate rending of a community tapestry?

 

Grayson Perry, The Vanity of Small Differences, The Annunciation of the Virgin Deal, 2012. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro Gallery, London © The artist

Progress: William Hogarth, Yinka Shonibare MBE, Grayson Perry, David Hockney, Jessie Brennan

The Foundling Museum

6^th June – 7^th September 2014

Christine Checinska

Clothes Cloth and Culture Group, Stuart Hall Library 26 June 2014  Cloth and Social Action

Françoise Dupré, blouses de travail

Many thanks to our presenters Françoise Dupré, Victoria Kuhr,  Ruth Marie Tunkaraand  Knees Up members and to convenor Dr.Chistine Checinska for a very enjoyable and informative meeting last week. There was a lively question and answer session and the audience seemed reluctant to leave! Audio recordings are available at the bottom of this post.

Françoise Dupré

Françoise Dupré makes textiles-based sculptures and temporary installations for art and non-art spaces including shops, hospitals and libraries. Françoise talked about how her cross-disciplinary approaches to making and her multicultural and social art practice. She described how crafting practice can be transformative for people in the contexts of migration, post-conflict and health. Françoise brought along her mother's worn the blouses de travail apron/dresses. They were associated with the working-class and Françoise found similar aprons worn by women in Russia.

Françoise Dupré

Edna from Knees Up

Knees Up: Victoria Kuhr and Ruth Marie Tunkara are part of a team of staff and residents from Knees Up a community-building project in Bethnal Green, London. Victoria and Ruth explained how the project had been instrumental in bringing neighbours together. 

Ruth Marie Tunkara from Knees Up

Leyla from Knees Up

Victoria Khur from Knees Up

Communal space and activities have given residents the opportunity to exchange their skills in knitting and crochet and to make new friendships. In a film made by the project organisers, the residents shared their memories, and described how Knees Up has made a difference to their lives. 

Three audio recordings of the event 

PAUSE: Selected drawings by Barbara Walker

12  June – 13 July 2014 Curated by C&C Gallery, London

Reviewed by Dr. Christine Checinska

Barbara Walker, Pause, exhibition installation view, 2014,
 C&C Gallery. Photo. Liz Evans

Artist Barbara Walker makes drawings of people. She makes drawings of people using charcoal and a soft pencil. She makes drawings of men; huge, larger than life, floor to ceiling drawings rendered directly onto the wall. Each fold, crease, line and blemish of her sitters’ bodies and the clothes that enfold them are sensitively transcribed in the smallest of detail. But we never see her sitters’ faces. And each wall is wiped clean at the end of every show.

Barbara Walker,  Show and Tell : Subject G and Subject H, 2008
charcoal on paper. Photo. Liz Evans

Pause presents selected portraits from Show and Tell, the Dichotomy of Kenny, the Dichotomy of Sean and one new wall piece. It is impossible to view Walker’s work without first being astonished by the sheer scale and by the craftsmanship, by the quality of lines seemingly etched into the wall, or the paper, or the canvas, creating a three-dimensional, almost sculptural effect. It comes as no surprise that she sites Giacometti and Rodin as amongst her influences. Yet these soft charcoal drawings are deeply political. In Walker’s hand the methodical making of lines on a wall and the erasing of them is a form of quiet activism.

The untitled C&C wall piece – a portrait of Izzy, a dancer – heralds a turning point in Walker’s work. It is as though Walker’s voice is manifest with an unmistakeable boldness in the tension between the palm of Izzy’s outstretched hand and the silent snarling mouth of his printed t-shirt. The viewer is allowed a glimpse of the artist’s inner thoughts. Izzy’s hand is outstretched with the palm face up, but his fingers are not flexed in a manner one might expect if being signalled to ‘stop’. Instead his hand reaches out in an act of near supplication, yet read against the dog’s glistening teeth the viewer is forced to pause, to do a double take, to listen to what Walker is saying. Izzy’s gesture is not about pleading to be heard. It is about demanding to be heard. This metaphorical drawing in the sand shouts ‘enough’!

Walker elegantly explores issues around identity, voice, personhood, power and visibility through her practice. She understands the importance of clothes and cloth; the way in which each has the potential to bind and separate us to and from one another; the way in which clothes and cloth have the potential to speak and to signify, to reference Henry Louis Gates Jn. The aesthetic and the political gloriously meet in her soft pencil portraits.

Characteristically, since process is of equal importance as the finished piece, Walker will be removing the portrait of Izzy at the close of the C&C show.  See more drawings on Barbara Walker's website

Barbara Walker, Untitled, 2014, wall drawing.
Photo. Liz Evans

Guest blog post from Gitanjali Pyndiah

Gitanjali presented her research at the Stuart Hall Library Research Network meeting on 15 May 2014. She has kindly written about her research in more detail, for those of you who missed the event.

Sculpture by Nirmal Hurry, courtesy of the artist

Constructing a cultural memoriography

My research takes Nirmal Hurry’s later works as entry point to an engagement with art and memory where remembering events like Slavery and Indenture become an aesthetic exercise. Political art constitutes a category of memory that becomes at the same time an aesthetic category. Cultural scholar Jill Bennett calls it affective memory or sense memory. Sense memory operates through the body to produce a kind of ‘seeing truth’ rather than ‘thinking truth’, registering the pain of memory as it is directly experienced and communicating a level of bodily affect. I make a comparison with state historiographies which make us think truth, while art constitutes seeing and feeling truth. The art of sense memory might further be distinguished as a motivated practice where engaging in practical aesthetics gives rise to a conception of aesthetics inspired by real-world encounters.

What is memoriography?

‘a body of professional historical writings which deals with the way in which events are recalled and understood in the present’ (Carrier 2014). While historians tend to discard diaries, witness accounts, art and music which operate on the periphery of the discipline, memoriography considers several aspect of historical events which are not the focus of grand narratives. The study of Memory is not an alternative to historiography, nor a complement to it, but an extension to the broader field of enquiry which denounces the nomological (principles that resemble laws) imposition of historiography. An understanding of contemporary works reveals the fluid states of objects, in the reflection of Bruno Latour, which allow a practical aesthetics to rise from the encounter with an event. Japanese artist Chino Otsuka entitled her exhibition, at the British Library, ‘Memoriography' to depict her journey across time and locations. She photographs herself in the same places, that she visited and had been photographed when she was younger and superimposes the two pictures to have her childhood and adulthood intersect at a junction in memory. For her, memory is prospective, allowing her to bring the past forward in the present.


Nirmal Hurry

I met the sculptor, Hurry 10 years ago and have been fascinated by the memories infused into his political art. Hurry studied in France at L’Ecole des Beaux Arts and India at the Jamma Millia Islamia and is now an established visual artist in Mauritius. Many of Hurry,’s works, accompanied by satirical poetic pieces in vernacular creole, consist of a direct engagement with actual Mauritian politics. Many of his contemporary installations denounce a repressive state historiography and is transformed, in an affective way, into a ‘sensuous’ or ‘sensitive’ knowledge, as termed by Baumgarten. His works do not reproduce the world in a nomological documentative perspective, like History or the media for instance, but explore the nature of the event and its capacity to produce affect. I explore memory as an involving bodily responses that lie outside verbal-semantic-linguistic representations where the artwork evokes immediate affective experience. Last but not least my research will also attempt to understand the implication of languages on memories.

An audio recording of Gitanjali's presentation is available below.

Thanks to all at the Clothes, Cloth and Culture Group

The Chinese Dress : Dr. Wessie Ling

Many thanks to convenor Dr Christine Checinska, presenters Dr. Bharti Parmar and Dr. Wessie Ling for sharing their research, original thinking and artworks at our Clothes Cloth and Culture meeting on 27th May.
Bharti and Wessie addressed the theme of the first meeting; 'Cloth and the Archive', from different but equally fascinating viewpoints.

Some members of the audience were kind enough to send us their enthusiastic comments:

'The ... group was great tonight. Real Inspiration.'

'A great first meeting! Onwards and upwards, looking forward to the next one.'

'Amazing event! ... Really enjoyed the talks, can't wait till the next one.'

The audio recordings of the event should be available later this week

The next Clothes, Cloth & Culture meeting will be on Thursday 26th June 2014.

Watch this space!

Clothes Cloth and Culture Group first meeting

Thursday 29th May is the first meeting of new Clothes Cloth and Culture Group at the Stuart Hall Library. The event was fully-booked within the first couple of days, so there is obviously a great deal of interest in this area of research and art practice.

The Group is a monthly forum for creative practitioners and thinkers working with cloth. Each month two presenters will talk about their research. There will be an opportunity for informal questions and  discussion at the end of the evening.  Setting cloth into the wider contexts of material and visual culture, the Group will provide a space for conversations about the politics of cloth from a distinctively cross-cultural viewpoint. 

The theme for our first meeting is 'Cloth & The Archive'; presenters will be Dr. Bharti Parmar and Dr. Wessie Ling. Read more about their ideas and research on the Library webpage.

The meetings will be convened by Dr. Christine Checinska, who is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of East London.