Category Archives: Events

Visiting Artists in collaboration with Kent Paris centre

This week students at the University of Kent Paris School of Arts and Culture visited the studio of Alice Gauthier and Rob Miles, our Visiting Artists.

Alice Gauthier and Rob Miles are a Franco-British couple who work with drawing, painting and print making in Paris. They are well known for their work with stone lithography. They shared their techniques, creative processes and local knowledge of the Parisian art scene with the students. This was following an introductory workshop with the students which took place earlier on in the term.

Alice and Rob met at the Royal College of Art in London, while studying their Masters in Fine Art: Printmaking in 2014. Find out more about their artwork here. They also play music, performing original compositions with their band Rob Miles & Les Clés Anglaises.

Paris MA Film student celebrates documentary premiere

Congratulations to former MA Film student at the University of Kent Paris School of Arts and Culture Ece Ger who has recently celebrated the world premiere of her documentary, Meeting Jim, at the Edinburgh International Film Festival.

Meeting Jim is a feature length documentary about Jim Haynes, an extraordinary 83-year-old man and his legendary Sunday dinners in Paris that are free and open to the public.

It takes you on a journey back to his lifetime, a man who grabbed with heart and soul the spirit of the 60s and continued to carry it throughout his life. This journey becomes also a physical one when he takes a train from the city of Paris, where he lives, to London and Edinburgh, the cities where he left his unique mark. A journey that will not only bring out his past and memories, but also his carefully preserved collection of human interconnections.

Find out more about the film here.

Find out more about the Edinburgh International Film Festival here.

MA Festival: Revolutions

To mark the 50th anniversary of the May 1968 student protests and general strikes in France, the University of Kent Paris School of Arts and Culture presents the third annual MA Festival and Conference: REVOLUTIONS.

The events of 1968 began in the Latin Quarter of Paris with students protesting an outdated university system and insufficient employment opportunities after graduation. Following a demonstration at the Sorbonne on 3rd May where students were arrested in their hundreds, courses at the university were suspended and students then took their protest to the streets as a result. Barricades were built and the number of student protestors in the city rose to 40,000. Rioting began on 10th May and lead to the arrest and hospitalisation of hundreds. After this day, wildcat general strikes swept the whole country involving several million workers. Authorities feared a radical socialist revolution as the Latin Quarter lay in ruin and industry in France came to a standstill. Violence and strikes continued throughout May and into June of 1968.

Based at Reid Hall in Montparnasse, just a stone’s throw away from the Latin Quarter, the University of Kent finds itself at the heart of the lively left-bank of Paris. Since the 1890s, Reid Hall has been a space for intellectuals and creatives, with an intermission during the First World War where the building was used as a hospital for French and American officers, the building has since returned to its academic roots and today houses universities from America and the United Kingdom.

From 4th – 8th June 2018, students of the Paris School of Arts and Culture will host an interdisciplinary programme of events dedicated to history, film, literature, visual arts and music, to remember not only May 1968 but moments of protest, resistance and innovation throughout history.

We will be highlighting the different events in the upcoming weeks and you can discover the entire festival programme here.

Follow the festival news on Twitter and Facebook.

David Hockney: transatlantic artist

Politics of Translation: Translation of Cultures

David Hockney: transatlantic artist

Presented by Martin Hammer,

Professor of History and Philosophy of Art at the University of Kent.

With the major Hockney show coinciding with his 80^th birthday about to arrive at the Pompidou, having attracted huge visitor numbers in London, this is a good moment to offer fresh thinking about what made his early art so distinctive, but also what concerns and attitudes he may have shared with his 1960s contemporaries. This talk will focus in particular on a comparative discussion of the work of Hockney and Ed Ruscha, born within a few months of one another, friends and fellow Los Angeles residents, who have both tended to be categorised as Pop Artists, and now number amongst the most famous painters on the planet. What, then, can we learn about well-known Hockneys such as Tea Painting in an Illusionistic Style (1961) and A Bigger Splash (1967) from juxtaposing them with Ruscha’s current production as painter and maker of photobooks?

Tuesday 23 May 2017

6:30 pm at Reid Hall in the Grande Salle

4 rue de Chevreuse, Montparnasse, Paris 75006

All welcome.

Lee Ann Brown – Creative Writing Reading Series

Creative Writing Reading Series

Wednesday 22 March 2017

6.30pm at Reid Hall, in the University of Kent in the Kent Paris Seminar Room

4 rue de Chevreuse, Montparnasse, Paris 75006

All welcome.

Lee Ann Brown

“To paraphrase Lee Ann’s version of her own poetic genealogy: enthusiasm is the mother (‘We are the daughters of enthusiasm’), excitement the sister (‘Where are my excitement sisters’). Sappho, Emily Dickinson, and Gertrude Stein are among the many innovative godmothers who grace her work with their influential kisses. As a woman writer myself, I am grateful to Lee Ann for the way she unabashedly connects gender to knowledge. In her poems, knowing is knowing as a woman. Knowledge is pleasure. The life of the mind is refreshingly erotic. What was once deemed too trivial here shines.”

– Elaine Equi

Lee Ann Brown was born in Japan and raised in Charlotte, North Carolina. She is the author of several works, including Other Archer, which also appears in French translation by Stéphane Bouquet as Autre Archère, In the Laurels, Caught, which won the 2012 Fence Modern Poets Series Award, and Polyverse, which won the 1996 New American Poetry Competition, selected by Charles Bernstein. In 1989, she founded Tender Buttons Press, which is dedicated to publishing experimental women’s poetry. She currently divides her time between New York City, where she teaches at St. John’s University, and Marshall, North Carolina.

Abdulrazak Gurnah: Rendered into English

Politics of Translation: Translating Cultures

Thursday 30 March 2017

7:00 pm at Reid Hall, in the University of Kent in the Grande Salle

4 rue de Chevreuse, Montparnasse, Paris 75006

All welcome.

Abdulrazak Gurnah: Rendered into English

A reflection on the implications of ‘rendering’ into English concepts and beliefs which derive from another culture and language, from the perspective of writing fiction and the issues that arise in this process.

Abdulrazak Gurnah was born in Zanzibar and is now best-known as a novelist. His fourth novel Paradise was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1994. His latest novel is The Last Gift (2011). His main academic interest is in postcolonial writing and in discourses associated with colonialism, especially as they relate to Africa, the Caribbean and India. He has edited two volumes of Essays on African Writing, has published articles on a number of contemporary postcolonial writers, including Naipaul, Rushdie and Zoe Wicomb. He is the editor of A Companion to Salman Rushdie (Cambridge University Press 2007).

Laurent Binet – Creative Writing Reading Series

Creative Writing Reading Series

Laurent Binet

Thursday 9 February 2017

6.30pm at Reid Hall, in the Salle de Conférence

4 rue de Chevreuse, Montparnasse, Paris 75006

All welcome.

Award-winner French author Laurent Binet will be reading from and talking about his book ‘The 7^th function of language’ (2015), a story about Roland Barthes and the power of language. Binet’s novel starts with Barthes’ death, and assumes the death is an assassination. In the political and intellectual world of the time, everyone is a suspect…

“A brilliantly erudite comedy that recalls Flaubert’s Parrot and The Name of the Rose—with more than a dash of The Da Vinci Code—The Seventh Function of Language takes us from the cafés of Saint-Germain to the corridors of Cornell University, and into the duels and orgies of the Logos Club, a secret philosophical society that dates to the Roman Empire. Binet has written both a send-up and a wildly exuberant celebration of the French intellectual tradition.” – Macmillan Publishers

Laurent Binet was born in Paris. His first novel, ‘HHhH’, was named one of the fifty best books of 2015 by The New York Times and received the Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman. He is a professor at the University of Paris III, where he lectures on French literature.

Anna Schaffner – Our Age of Exhaustion?

Warmly invite you to

Politics of Translation: Translating Cultures

Thursday 2 February 2017

6.30pm at Reid Hall, in the Grande Salle

4 rue de Chevreuse, Montparnasse, Paris 75006 (métro: Vavin)

All welcome

Anna-Katharina Schaffner:

Our Age of Exhaustion?

“The spectre of exhaustion appears to dominate our age. A particularly virulent form of cultural pessimism is evident in debates on the future of politics and the sustainability of both our economic and our ecological systems. Depression (which counts physical and mental exhaustion among its core symptoms) and burnout are now frequently diagnosed ailments. Depression affects more than 1 in 10 people in the Western world at some period in their lives and burnout is one of the three most commonly diagnosed complaints in the workplace. But is exhaustion really the bane of our age, a phenomenon intimately bound up with modernity and its discontents, or have other historical periods also seen themselves as the most exhausted? This lecture explores parallels and differences between past and present medical, theological and psychological discourses on exhaustion, paying particular attention to the ways in which theories of exhaustion tend to be combined with critiques of modernity.”

Anna Katharina Schaffner is Reader in Comparative Literature and Medical Humanities at the University of Kent. She has published on the histories of sexuality, psychology and medicine; modernism and the avant-garde; David Lynch; and Franz Kafka. Her most recent monographs are Exhaustion: A History (Columbia University Press, 2016) and Modernism and Perversion: Sexual Deviance in Sexology and Literature, 1850-1930 (Palgrave, 2012). She has also published a novel entitled The Truth About Julia (Allen & Unwin, 2016).

Fariba Hachtroudi: Creative Writing Reading Series

Thursday 26 January 2017

6.30pm at Reid Hall in the Grande Salle. All welcome.

4 rue de Chevreuse, Montparnasse, Paris 75006 (métro: Vavin)

Fariba Hachtroudi

Fariba Hachtroudi is a French-Iranian novelist, polemicist and political campaigner. Born in 1951, Fariba is the daughter of the prominent dissident Mohsen Hachtroudi and has continued her father’s struggle for freedom of expression and religious tolerance in Iran. She has written extensively on feminism and Islam, including the prize-winning Iran — Rivers of Blood. Her novels are informed by her political thought and personal experience, and explore themes of exile, torture and dissent. She will be speaking about her extraordinary life and her brilliant new novel, The Man Who Snapped His Fingers, in which the dictator of an unnamed Middle-Eastern country goes to horrifying lengths in order to control the population.

Click here to read more about other speakers in our Spring ’17 Creative Writing Reading Series

Spring Term: Politics of Translation – Translating Cultures

in association with:

University of London Institute in Paris

Columbia Global Centers Paris

American University of Paris

Presents:

Politics of Translation – Translating Cultures

Spring Term 2017

All seminars are at Reid Hall

4 rue de Chevreuse, Montparnasse, Paris 75006 (métro: Vavin)

2 February 2017 Anna Schaffner Grande Salle

‘Our Age of Exhaustion’

16 February 2017 Claire Joubert Grande Salle

‘Saussure the ethnographer: Peoples, the popular, and non-identity in Europe’

11 March 2017 Ensemble Quintitus Grande Salle

‘Soufflé Coupé : A Minute at Noon’, Chamber Music concert

30 March 2017 Abdulrazak Gurnah Grande Salle, 7 pm

‘Rendered into English’

23 May 2017 Martin Hammer Grande Salle, 6:30pm

‘David Hockney: transatlantic artist’

— free and open to all —