A series of artists’ talks organised by Sheffield Hallam University in association with Site Gallery and Showroom Cinema. Changing format this Autumn, each week a host from Sheffield selects and introduces a guest artist to speak about their work.
Wednesday 10 October
Host(s): Jaspar Joseph-Lester and Sharon Kivland
Guest: Professor Michael Corris
Michael Corris is Professor of Fine Art at the Art and Design Research Centre. His most recent publications include Conceptual Art: Theory, Myth and Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2004) and Ad Reinhardt (Reaktion Books, London, forthcoming 2007).
Wednesday 17 October
Host: Nick Stewart
Guest: Matthew Noel-Tod
Matthew Noel-Tod is a video artist. He has consistently worked with existing material, textual, visual, and aural. Foreign Actors, his most recent work, is a perceptual puzzle that constitutes an experimental re-structuring of Polish film history.
Wednesday 24th Oct
Host: Paul Haywood
Guest: Professor Steve Hawley
Steve Hawley is an artist working with film and video.His work has been shown extensively in both the United Kingdom and abroad. He is Head of the School of Art at Manchester Metropolitan University, and was previously Head of Art and Design at Sheffield Hallam University.
Wednesday 31 October
Host: T.C. McCormack
Guest: Torsten Lauschmann
As an artist, filmmaker and live performer, Torsten Lauschmann celebrates glitches and out-takes, bits in between and images that might be easy to ignore. Solo shows and performances include Transmission Gallery, Glasgow and Independent Studio, Glasgow (2004), Wackerfabrik, Darmstadt and Pistolas Sexuales, Catalyst Gallery, Glasgow (2002). In 2003 he was selected for ‘Zenomap’, the Scottish Participation at the Venice Biennale and in 2004 nominated for ‘Pilot: 2’, London.
Wednesday 7 November – NB -plase note change of venue: Room 6620, Adsetts Building Sheffield Hallam University Library
Host: Sharon Kivland
Guest: Cesare Pietroiusti
Cesare Pietroiusti’s art practice focuses on problematic and paradoxical situations that are hidden in common relationships and ordinary acts. He has exhibited in the Aperto section of the Biennale of Venice, 1990, the Serpentine Gallery, 1992, Tirana Biennale, 2005, and Ikon Gallery, 2007.
Wednesday 14 November
Guest: Christine Borland
Christine Borland’s work is associated with the systems and processes that underpin society, including forensic science and medicine. She is in the middle of a three-year NESTA Fellowship exploring the incorporation of humanities in medical education; she is also a researcher at Glasgow School of Art. Her work has been exhibited extensively throughout the world and in 1997 she was nominated for the Turner Prize. She is based in Argyll, Scotland.
Host: Julie Westerman
Julie Westerman’s current research uses technologies and software more commonly associated with design and animation to make physical sculptural works. Moving between the digital and the material, the final forms combine the intangible, the transitory or the ephemeral, with the monumental and the sculptural. Recent commissions and exhibitions include Thinly Veiled, Grand Opera House Belfast and ‘Garden Journeys’, Polesden Lacey National Trust Gardens, ‘Inter …’, Harris Museum and Art Gallery, ‘Distance’, Galerie 5020, Saltsburg, and Barely There, Phoenix Gallery, Belfast.
Wednesday 21 November
Guest: Paul Morrison
Paul Morrison’s black and white landscapes, botanical paintings, and wall drawings mix imagery appropriated from high and low culture drawn from popular and classical sources. He creates imaginary landscapes and botanical specimens that force a questioning of perception and representations of nature. Morrison’s solo exhibitions include: Bloomberg Space, London; The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu; Alison Jacques Gallery, London; Cheim & Read, New York; Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Bergamo; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, amongst others. He is represented by Alison Jacques Gallery, London, and Cheim & Read, New York. He lives and works in Sheffield.
Host: Lesley Sanderson
Lesley Sanderson works in the collaboration Conroy/Sanderson. After a series of exhibitions that predominantly used photo and video, they are returning to drawing as their main focus. Mixing representational modes of drawing, they continue their interest in both real and fictionalised experiences of displacement. With poet, playwright, and critic, Gabriel Gbadamosi, Conroy/Sanderson are co-authors of Sun-Shine, Moonshine (London: Artwords, 2005). They have shown in ‘EAST International’, Norwich, ‘Cruel/Loving Bodies’, Duolun Museum of Modern Art, Shanghai, 798 Space, Beijing, and the Hong Kong Arts Centre, ‘Strangers to Ourselves’, London & Maidstone, ‘The Biggest Draw’, Millennium Galleries, Sheffield. Recent solo exhibitions include Out of Nowhere, Chinese Arts Centre, Manchester, here we are, PM Gallery and House, London, and Elsewhere, Crawford Museum and Art Gallery, Cork.
Wednesday 28th November
Guest: Brian Catling
Brian Catling was born in London in 1948. He is a poet, sculptor, and performance artist, currently working in video and live work. He has been commissioned to make solo installations and performances in many countries including Spain, Japan, Iceland, Israel, Holland, Norway, Germany, Greenland, and Australia His recent solo show Antix at Matt’s Gallery drew much critical acclaim. Four years ago he founded the international performance group The Wolf In The Winter, whose most recent manifestation was at The South London Gallery. His video work moves between gallery installation and narrative films made in collaboration with Tony Grisoni. Their most recent work The Cutting was released this year. They also produce the no- holds barred Cabaret Melancolique. Catling’s permanent monument for the site of execution at the Tower of London was unveiled in last year. Eight books of Catling’s poetry have been published and his work has been included in many anthologies. A new book, Bobby Awl has just been published by Etruscan Press, which is also producing a compilation of his poetry, A Court Of Miracles, later this year. Catling is currently working on his first novel. He is Professor of Fine Art at The Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, University of Oxford, and a Fellow of Linacre College.
Host: Hester Reeve
Hester Reeve’s practice combines live art, drawing, writing, lens-based mediums, and philosophical dialogue. International venues that have curated her work include former Randolph Street Gallery, Chicago, and LIVE Biennale, Vancouver. Her three-month performance Being & Time, for Manchester’s Text Festival (05) won critical acclaim and involved writing out by hand Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time in its entirety. Hester Reeve navigates her complex relation as an artist with the world through her conceptual persona HRH.the.
Wednesday 5th December
Guest: Phil Coy
Phil Coy’s work employs a range of mediums from video and photography to text-based and generative performance. Works have investigated the translation of different forms of representation, from the digital mapping of the entire surface of the earth to the picturing of land and cityscapes in the tradition of radical art practices from the 1960s, in particular Land Art, systems-based practices, and structural film. Recent work has been included in Hayward touring exhibition ‘Incommunicado’ at Cornerhouse Manchester (2004), ‘Real Estate’ at the ICA, London (2005), and ‘Test Signal’ at The South London Gallery (2006). His recent work Provincial Landscape (2007) was produced for a survey show of digital art in the Ars Nova Museum, Finland. He has recently received funding to produce the film Word Land, which is set against the backdrop of the village of Happisburg where people’s properties are fast disappearing into the North Sea. Coy has also produced a series of publications (Audio Guides) and performance lectures (Auto Lectures and Drum Lectures) that are edited from found and recorded language.
Host: David Cotterrell
David Cotterrell works across varied mediums including video, audio, interactive media, artificial intelligence, device control, and hybrid technology. His work exhibits political, social, and behavioural analyses of the environments and contexts, and has been extensively commissioned and exhibited in North America, Europe and the Far East, in gallery spaces, museums and in the public realm. He has been recently working in Shanghai, China on research into the impact of population expansion with the support of an Arts Council England and British Council award. He is a CABE appointed lead artist consultant to Richard Rogers Partnership masterplans in Cambridge and Chelmsford. He is investigating immersive environments through an Arts Council England Interact fellowship and will be travelling to Afghanistan’s Helmand Province with the Royal Army Medical Corps to develop work for exhibition by the Wellcome Trust in London and Dresden.
Wednesday 30 Jan
Host: Rose Butler
Guest: Host Artists’ Group
HAG are an artists’ group based in Sheffield, UK with an interest in curating and producing art in alternative spaces. Recent projects have included Slow Wave Sleep-an exhibition of installation work in a domestic space, ‘Cinema’, a screening project premiered at The Showroom Cinema, and ‘Beauty’ which was commissioned by SCAF for the Sheffield Pavilion 2007 publication, and was launched at the Venice Biennale and Documenta XII.
Wednesday 6 February
Host: Jeanine Griffin
Guest: Jan Verwoert
Jan Verwoert is a Berlin-based critic and art historian. He is a contributing editor of Frieze and writes for various publications including Frieze, Afterall and Metropolis M. He teaches at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam. His book Bas Jan Ader — In Search of the Miraculous was published in 2006 by Afterall Books/MIT Press. He is currently working with Sheffield Contemporary Art Forum on the forthcoming ART SHEFFIELD 08 festival for which he wrote the text which provides a conceptual framework for the event.
Wednesday 13 February
Host: Andrew Sneddon
Guest: Alec Finlay
Alec Finlay is an artist, poet & publisher. Born in Scotland in 1966, he now lives in the North-East of England. Publishing includes the pocketbooks series, platform projects, bookscapes, morning star and web-books and he has undertaken residencies ay Yorkshire Sculpture Park and Baltic.
Wednesday 20 Feb
Host: Carl von Weiler
Guest: Phyllida Barlow
Phyllida Barlow’s work incorporates an enormous range of mass produced materials including cardboard, fabric, paper, glue, paint, plastic, wood, rubber, hardboard, and adhesive tape. Barlow’s work questions the nature and role of the sculptural object in contemporary culture, utilising an extensive, fluid vocabulary and immense enthusiasm for engaging with the physical ‘stuff’ of the world.
Wednesday 27 Feb
Host: Jaspar Jopseph-Lester
Guest: Roman Vasseur
Roman Vasseur’s work acts out epic, often filmic, and political narratives via specific socio-economic realities. In 2000 the transportation of a crate of earth from Transylvania to Los Angeles via London and New York resulted in the merging of a gothic fiction and realities informed by that fiction. The works often question the role of ‘culture’ as component of these grand narratives and recently advocated the ritualized death of a mural artist as an alternative to the use of ‘art’ in urban regeneration. He has exhibited at Jeffrey Charles Gallery, London, the ICA, London, EAST International 06; Pilot:3 in Venice, and most recently at KX Gallery Hamburg in the group exhibition ‘One Way Street’. A paper given at the Tate conference John Stuart Mill Exterminates His Father will be published January 2008 in the first edition of Material, a Los Angeles and London-based journal of writings by artists. Vasseur is currently lead artist for Harlow New Town, Essex.
Wednesday 5 March
Host: Michael Corris
Guest: Charlie Gere
Charlie Gere is Director of the Institute for Cultural Research, Lancaster University. He has an MA in Computer Art and Design and a PhD addressing new means of representing artifacts made possible by new technologies and media. He is the chair of Computers and the History of Art (CHArt) and was director of the Computer Arts, Histories, Contexts, which was concerned with the history of early British computer art. He is the author of Digital Culture (Reaktion, 2002), Art, Time and Technology (Berg, 2006), co-editor of White Heat, Cold Logic (forthcoming, MIT, 2008) as well as many articles and papers on aspects of the relation between new media and culture.
From October 2007 the lectures series organised by Fine Art in collaboration with Site Gallery changes its form. While speaking and listening have founded the series from 2001 to 2007, and while speaking and listening will continue, the framing proposition changes to one of hospitality. Each week the person who chairs the event will have invited the guest speaker. The host selects, presents, and looks after his or her guest. A critical engagement between host and guest will be assumed; what exactly that relationship is will be made evident through discussion. There is an ethics of hospitality, of making the stranger welcome. A host has a standard of conduct, and historically, hospitality has been seen as a code, a duty, a virtue, and a law. There is a bond between host and guest, and in the lecture series, this bond is formed by the engagement in and the practice of art. Something is shared between host and guest, and this is shared with others, who are also guests in their way. The audience is also a host, with all the responsibilities that implies, receiving the stranger/guest with goodwill, liberality, and grace.