Curating Conversations

Professional development programme aimed at those committed to a career in the visual arts. For our 2nd edition, we are based at AutographABP, 9th-16th October 2015. #CuratingConversations

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The New Black + Panel

Friday 27 November / 20:30 /  Hackney Attic /  £5

Excited to present The New Black with Fringe Film Fest this week. This compelling award- winning documentary accompanies a collective of passionate civil rights activists dedicated to empowering Black LGBT people and a host of other characters in their resolute fight for victory in the Marriage Equality Referendum in Maryland, USA. The New Black unflinchingly explores the highly schismatic issue of homophobia in the black community's institutional pillar—the black church and exposes the Christian right wing's insidious strategy of exploiting this phenomenon in order to pursue an anti-gay political ideology. The New Black screening will be followed by a panel discussion. Speakers include:

Jay Bernard, a writer from London, film programmer at BFI Flare and a regular columnist at Diva Magazine.

Dr Edson Burton has written drama & poetry for Radio 4, theater and screen. He is a regular guest on local and national radio programs and combines a successful writing career with storytelling, curating, and research.

Jide Macaulay is the founding Pastor and CEO of House Of Rainbow CIC. He is an Anglican and has been a Christian minister since 1998, focusing his ministry on inclusion and reconciliation of sexuality, spirituality and human rights.

@newblackfilm | The New Black | The New Black on Facebook

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Day 8 - Talk with Johny Pitts and Karen Alexander

Johny Pitts is a photographer, TV writer/presenter, founder of Afropean and published author. He won a Decibel Penguin Prize for new writers for a short story about his mixed race heritage. His photographs have appeared on the front covers of The Journal of Postcolonial Writing and Harvard University’s W.E.B DuBois Institute Transition magazine.

Pitts recently published a photo essay titled 'The Thames Path' (photo above) with Café Royal Books.

Presented by Curating Conversations 2015 in partnership with Autograph ABP. #CuratingConversations

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Day 8 - Funding workship with Holly Tebbutt (Deputy Director at Autograph ABP). Presented by Curating Conversations 2015 in partnership with Autograph ABP. #CuratingConversations

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Day 7 -  Watershed and Spike Island visit (Bristol)

Today we toured the Watershed cinema and cultural centre, and the Spike Island artist studios. Presented by Curating Conversations 2015 in partnership with Autograph ABP. #CuratingConversations

Photo credit: @MaddyProst

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Day 6 - National Portrait Gallery

Today we toured the National Portrait Gallery with Helen Whiteoak who is Head of Participation. Presented by Curating Conversations 2015 in partnership with Autograph ABP. #CuratingConversations

Photo credit: @Vanessaptrsn

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Day 6 - Artist's Presentation : James Barnor

In the early 1950s, Barnor’s photographic studio Ever Young was visited by civil servants and dignitaries, performance artists and newly-weds. During this period, he captured intimate moments of luminaries such as Kwame Nkrumah as he pushed for pan-African unity, and commonwealth boxing champion Roy Ankrah. Barnor documents societies in transition: Ghana moving towards its independence, and London becoming a multicultural metropolis during the ‘swinging 60s’. His extensive portfolio of street and studio portraiture spans over 60 years and different continents, many commissioned by Drum magazine, Africa’s first Black politics and lifestyle publication.

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Day 6 - Framing the Curatorial Today, we have with us, curators Jareh Das and Morgan Quaintance. 

Quaintance is a London-based writer, musician, broadcaster and curator. He is a regular contributor to  Art Monthly, Art Review, Frieze, Rhizome.org and a number of curatorial sites. He is a contributing editor for E-Flux’s online publishing portal Art Agenda, is a founding member of the curatorial collective DAM PROJECTS, and is the 2015/16 curatorial fellow at Cubitt Gallery, London. His latest exhibition Software, Hard Problem runs from 8 October – 15 November 2015.

Das’ recently curated exhibitions and events include: Koscmica x Astroculture with Kapwani Kiwanga, London, Performing Memetics at SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin and Ubi Sunt, a group exhibition of emerging and established artists which created an experiential environment in a disused chapel in South London. Her research explores through a series of artists case studies, audiences visceral response to body art and how current neuroscience research (dealing with neurotechnologies) could potentially contribute to new understandings of performance art.

Presented by Curating Conversations 2015 in partnership with Autograph ABP.  #CuratingConversations

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Day 5 - Acme Studios visit  : Graham Ellard & Stephen Johnstone.

Graham Ellard and Stephen Johnstone have collaborated since 1993, when they made ‘Passagen’, commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella and included in the group exhibition ‘V-topia’ at Tramway, Glasgow. Interested in the relationships between pre-cinematic spectacle and digital technology, cinematic spectacle and abstract film their work exists at the intersections of architecture and cinema and is preoccupied with the conventions and effects by which space is represented and ‘produced' in the projected image.Their work, includes large scale video installations, architectural light-works, and drawing.

16mm film, UK,  2011 6 minutes    B&W, 1:1.33, Silent

Ellard and Johnstone shared with us some 16mm film footage from Things to Come produced as part of a gallery exhibition at Site Gallery in Sheffield. Working over a period four weeks Ellard and Johnstone built a large, highly abstract, metal and glass model in the gallery space. The film consists of abstract synchronised movement across and around this model to create a dynamic play of light, shadow, reflection, parallax, depth, surface and prismatic special-effects. The film is formed predominantly from extreme close-ups and abstract details. These are intercut with extracts from ‘set-piece’ takes, which occured in the gallery.

Screening : Thursday 15 October 2015 - London Film Festival

For an Open Campus, UK/Japan,  2015 16mm. colour, sound, 29 mins

Shot over four weeks in November 2014 on the campus of Aichi University of the Arts, Nagoya, Japan. The film explores the remarkable architecture of this 'campus world' through the camera and through a collaborative project with students. Official Selection BFI London Film Festival 2015 - Experimenta Strand - World premiere.

New Publication -  Anthony McCall: Notebooks and Conversations

Book; hardback, 192 pages, 160 colour illustrations. March 2015. Published by Lund Humphries, in association with Kunstmuseum St Gallen, Switzerland.

Formed from a series of discussions that took place over the last decade between McCall and artists Graham Ellard and Stephen Johnstone, the book charts the development of Anthony McCall's studio practice. With an introductory essay 'Thinking in Notebook Form' the book includes numerous facsimile reproductions of pages from McCall's extensive archive of notebooks.

Buy it here.

Presented by Curating Conversations 2015 in partnership with Autograph ABP.  #CuratingConversations            

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Day 5 - Acme Studios visit  : Gayle Chong Kwan

Gayle Chong Kwan creates mise-en-scenes, fantastical landscapes, and environments, made out of arrangements of sensory waste, found materials and documentary sources. Her work explores myths, collective and contentious histories and the ambiguous relationship between reality, appropriation, fictional contemporary mechanisms, and latter day myths, to focus on the impact of contemporary developments in tourism, planning and urban development upon the landscape.

Wastescape, 2012 © the artist

Theatre Royal ,The Obsidian Isle, 2011, © the artist

Recent works include an international touring exhibition which explores historic fictional models of the moon, 'Blind Vistas' (2013), and 'Memory Trace' (2012), a large-scale photographic installation which layers taxi drivers' navigational markers, neurological pathways in the brain, and archive images of the hippocampus from the Wellcome Collection, developed with Prof Eleanor Maguire and  commissioned by the Wellcome Trust.

Presented by Curating Conversations 2015 in partnership with Autograph ABP.  #CuratingConversations

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Day 5 - Acme Studios visit  : Ewa Axelrad

Axelrad was born in Gliwice and lives and works in London and Silesia. By creating spaces that restrict and coerce the viewer’s movement and gaze, confusing the observer with the observed, and the subject with the object, Axelrad uses photography and site-specific installations that insinuate themselves into the existing architecture. A state of heightened vigilance increases a viewer’s awareness and challenges his behaviour, both inside and outside of the space. 

Photo: Fetor. Greetings from series Plague, 2014, Postcard, posted from various locations, 26x9.5cm, edition of 30. © the artist

Presented by Curating Conversations 2015 in partnership with Autograph ABP.  #CuratingConversations                                            

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Day 5- Art In the Public Realm with Michaela Crimmin & Dr. Michael Prokopow

This morning, we discussed the practicalities of working with art & artists in the public domain.

Michaela Crimmin is a curator with over 30 years experience of commissioning art in the public domain. She co-founded and co-directs Culture+Conflict, a not-for-profit agency focusing on the role of art within conflict and post-conflict situations across the world. At the Royal College of Art, her teaching centres on the working relationship between curators and artists, and on commissioning art both within galleries and off site. Her current research consists of aggregating and debating theory and practice in the context of war, in its memory, its current reality and its aftermath, and considers art’s relationship to other sectors with interests in this area.

Dr. Michael J. Prokopow is a cultural historian and curator. His areas of expertise include material culture, aesthetics and design history. He has written widely about material life and domesticity and is currently working on a project on middle class taste in North America between 1940 and 1975. Between 2004 and 2008, he was curator of the Design Exchange, Canada's only museum of 20th century industrial design. Currently, he is working on an exhibition on the roles of Scandinavian aesthetics in Canadian design culture between 1920 and the present and a project for the New York Times on prison architecture and the aesthetics of incarceration. 

Presented by Curating Conversations 2015 in partnership with Autograph ABP.

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Day 4 - Curatorial Routes

Today we were joined by a panel of emerging curators who discussed their different approaches to exhibition making.

Mariam Zulfiqar (Film and Video Umbrella)

Film and Video Umbrella commissions, curates, produces and presents artists’ moving-image works that are staged in collaboration with galleries and other cultural partners across the UK.

Sunil Shah

Shah is an artist, photographer and curator based in Oxford, UK. He is interested in the politics of photographic representation and conceptual post-documentary practices with relation to history, memory and identity. He also attended our first edition of Curating Conversations.

Photograph of Raven Row by Marcus J. Leith

Elizabeth Stanton (Raven Row / Culture + Conflict)

Stanton is Research and Development Associate for Culture+Conflict and a freelance curator and writer currently also at Raven Row.

Presented by Curating Conversations 2015 in partnership with Autograph ABP. 

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Day 4 - Curating Cultural Change.

Syd Shelton : Rock Against Racism / Free Exhibition 2 October - 5 December 2015 Rivington Place   London, UK 

Today, Dr. Carol Tulloch co-curator of this exhibition talks us through the process of curating it. Syd Shelton’s photographs document the volatility of a country divided across race, class and gender. They expose the ferocity of cultural difference being hammered out on Britain’s streets through the late 1970s, at a time when racist skinheads danced to Jamaican ska, punks embraced reggae and black kids reached out to punk. Shelton also took contextual social and cultural images that informed the politics of the movement across England and Ireland.

Photo credit: Ash Kotak

Photo Credit: Gaynor Tutani

Artist’s Talk: Syd Shelton

Sat 5 Dec, 14:00 - 15:00 Free event, no booking necessary

An informal artist's talk with Syd Shelton, whose Rock Against Racism photographs feature in Autograph ABP’s current exhibition and new book.

Shelton’s photographs captured one of the most intriguing and contradictory political periods in British post war history. Between 1976 and 1981, the movement Rock Against Racism (RAR) confronted racist ideology in the streets, parks and town halls of Britain. RAR was formed by a collective of musicians and political activists to fight fascism and racism through music.

Rock Against Racism revisits the energy of RAR, the creative entanglement of black and white musicians, designers, writers, actors, performers and supporters who produced effective counter-narratives to whiteness as superior and blackness as alienated. Shelton’s photographs remind us that RAR was a particular treatise on belonging in Britain.

Presented by Curating Conversations 2015 in partnership with Autograph ABP.

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Day 3 - ‘No Colour Bar’  exhibition tour with Chila Kumari Burman

Burman is a British artist who uses art to explore the experiences and aesthetics of Asian femininity through paintings and installations, photography and printmaking, video and film. Challenging stereotypical assumptions of Asian women, her work is informed by popular culture, Bollywood, fashion, found objects, the politics of femininity the celebration of feminity; self-portraiture exploring the production of her own sexuality and dynamism; the relationship between popular culture and high art; gender and identity politics. 

Presented by Curating Conversations 2015 in partnership with Autograph ABP. 

Photo credit: Ash Kotak

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Day 3 - Exhibition tour : No Colour Bar

No Colour Bar focuses on Black British cultural heritage explored through the lens of the Black Art Movement of the 1960s to the 1990s –a flowering of popular as well as fine art, music, poetry and literature which came out of what were then called Black and Third World migrant-settler communities – African-Caribbean, continental African, Asian and Latin American. 

The centrepiece of No Colour Bar is the stunning six-month exhibition at Guildhall Art Gallery which takes place from July and followed by a touring exhibition in 2016.

Presented by Curating Conversations 2015 in partnership with Autograph ABP. 

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Day 3 - In The Frame : Artist’s panel with Leslie Hewitt, Sonia Boyce and Ajamu.

Presented by Curating Conversations 2015 in partnership with Autograph ABP. 

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In The Frame : Artist’s panel with Leslie Hewitt, Sonia Boyce and Ajamu.

Sonia Boyce

English painter, draughtswoman and multi-media artist. She studied art at East Ham College and Stourbridge College of Art until 1983. Boyce's early works were large chalk-and-pastel drawings that show her interest in depicting friends, family and childhood experiences. In themm she often included depictions of wallpaper patterns and bright colours associated with the Caribbean and experienced through her own particular background. She also examins her position as a black woman in Britain and the historical events in which that experience is rooted.

Ajamu

Ajamu is an acclaimed London based fine art photographer specialising in black and white analogue large format portraiture, nudes, erotica and kink imagery.His work has been shown in galleries , museums, and alternative spaces worldwide and his photographs are held in numerous private and public collections. 

Leslie Hewitt

Working with photography, sculpture, and site-specific installations, Leslie Hewitt addresses fluid notions of time. Her work oscillates between the illusionary potential of photography and the physical weight of sculpture. In her photographed arrangements, she isolates personal ephemera and the residue of mass culture to consider the fragile nature of quotidian life. She has recently joined the faculty of Barnard College in the department of Art History.

Presented by Curating Conversations 2015 in partnership with Autograph ABP.

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Artwork (top to bottom): "She Ain't Holding Them Up, She's Holding On", Sonia Boyce 1986. From the “Circus Master” photography series, Ajamu, 1998. Riffs on Real Time, Leslie Hewitt, 2008.