MATTHEW DARBYSHIRE is an artist, exhibiting internationally but based in Rochester, Kent. Working across media, his ‘architectural interventions, installations and displays of consumer objects hone in on the gap between what is promised by those who shape our world and what is actually on offer.’

05th March, 2015

The Galvanising Shop
17.30-18.30
Free, everyone welcome!

He has had solo public exhibitions at Gasworks, London; The Hayward, London; The Zabludowicz Collection, London; Kettles Yard, Cambridge; Tramway, Glasgow; GAM, Turin; The FRAC, Dunkirk and The Hepworth, Wakefield. Darbyshire has exhibited in various major UK survey shows including Tate Britain’s Triennial Altermodern, curated by Nicolas Bourriaud in 2009, and the British Art Show 7 Days of the Comet, curated by Tom Morton and Lisa Le Feuvre 2010. His work has been exhibited worldwide at institutions including Bangkok Cultural Centre, Thailand; Fundacion Miro, Spain, Marco Museum, Spain and The FRAC pas de Calais, France.

He currently has a solo exhibition at Lisa Cooley Gallery, New York and is preparing a survey exhibition for Manchester Art Gallery. He is also in the process of realizing two large-scale public commissions – one for the Dutch government in Amsterdam and the other for Cambridge University here in the UK. Matthew is represented by Herald St Gallery in London and Jousse Enterprise in Paris.

JEREMY DELLER is an artist working across media with a multi-faceted practice that uniquely engages with our popular and traditional culture.

26th February, 2015

The Galvanising Shop
17.30-18.30
Free, everyone welcome!

Winner of the Turner Prize (2004) and represented Britain at the Venice Biennale (2013). Jeremy Deller is one of the UK’s most celebrated contemporary artists.

Five of our students, who are destined to do exceptional things and are a real credit to the School of Music and Fine Art have been awarded the £5000 students project grant scheme by the University of Kent for their project “Wetlands”!!!!

The project is based in the Hoo peninsular and works with the community of Watermen.  It’s got a real ethnographic feel to it.

Wetlands is a project initiated by a group of five artists graduating this year from the University of Kent, Medway, with a BA in Fine Art:

• Nadia Perrotta
• Ben Crawford
• Angela Ioannidou
• Georgina Wilcox
• Clarinda Tse

Medway and in particular, the Hoo peninsula, has always held a connection with water. Humans are beholden to the sea, perhaps as much as the land, and even though this relationship maybe more fractured now, people in this area still share a symbiotic bond. It is lived on, used for sustenance, always present. Through a series of participatory events and happenings Wetlands will interact with the local community, creating a connection between them, their maritime history and wetland landscape.

The time run of the project will be from February to June. In June we will run a series of events and activities leading to the closing main event: a site specific and interactive walking art tour in Hoo peninsula, where we would like to involve also other students from the School of Music and Fine Art.

Wetlands plan to create a series of 10 art events for 5 days in June 2015 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the University and its creative talents of the present, to inspire the future generations of the local community in Medway, with a particular focus on the areas in need of regeneration such as Hoo peninsula.

Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin are artists based in London. Their work, explores how truth is presented through our media, particularly via the photographic image. Working with photographic archives, often adopting and questioning techniques of photo-journalism, their practice incorporates text, montage, found-footage, photography and performance in order to reveal the hidden power relations that are used to manipulate apparently ‘reliable’ imagery.

19th February, 2015

The Galvanising Shop
17.30-18.30
Free, everyone welcome!

Together they have had numerous international exhibitions including The Museum of Modern Art, Tate Britain, Tate Liverpool, The Gwangju Biennale, the Stedelijk Museum, the International Center of Photography, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, The Photographers Gallery, Mathaf Arab Museum of Modern Art and Museo Jumex. Broomberg & Chanarin are Visiting Fellows at the University of the Arts London. Their work is represented in major public and private collections including Tate Modern, The Museum of Modern Art, the Stedelijk Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum, Musee de l’Elysee, The International Center of Photography, and the Art Gallery of Ontario.

In 2013 they were awarded the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize for War Primer 2, and most recently they were awarded the ICP Infinity Award 2014 for their publication, Holy Bible. Current and upcoming exhibitions include Conflict, Time, Photography at Tate Modern, the Shanghai Biennale 2014, and Cross Section of a Revolution at Lisson Gallery, London.

Sally O’Reilly is a writer. Her divergent subject matter contributes to an on-going investigation into how knowledge is generated, obtained and expressed.

12th February, 2015

The Galvanising Shop
17.30-18.30
Free, everyone welcome!

Contributing regularly to many art and culture publications, including Art Monthly, Art Review, Cabinet, Frieze and Time Out, O’Reilly has written many essays and short fiction for international museums and galleries. Her book The Body in Contemporary Art was published by Thames & Hudson in 2009 and she was co-editor of the thematic, interdisciplinary broadsheet Implicasphere (2003-8). She also makes video documentaries, has curated and produced numerous performative events and was co-curator of the Hayward Touring Exhibition ‘Magic Show’ (2009–10).

She was writer in residence at the Whitechapel Art Gallery (2010–11), and producer and co-writer of The Last of the Red Wine (2011), a radio sitcom based in the artworld. She is currently writing a novel, Crude, about academia and the oil industry, as well as an opera libretto, The Virtues of Things, exploring essentialism, which will premiere at the Royal Opera House in May 2015.