Friday 25 September at the ICA, London, sees a book launch to celebrate the publication of Occupy: A People Yet to Come, a collection of essays by leading Deleuzian scholars about the nature and impact of the occupy movement. The book is available from Amazon, is open access from the Open Humanities Press and discounted copies will be available at the launch.

The Book Launch will feature presentations from contributors Nick Thoburn (Deleuze and Marx) and David Burrows (Head of Fine Art: Slade) and Dr Andrew Conio (Senior Lecturer and Director of Fine Art at the School of Music and Fine Art: University of Kent).

For the authors, the term Occupy is a synecdoche for the world-wide proliferation of struggles that fall outside of conventional and ‘vanguard’ politic and are based on new tactics, revitalised democratic processes and nomadic systems of organisation. This collection assesses the value of Deleuze and Guattari’s political ontology to the movement and looks at modes of organisation, economics, social and political forces, democracy, representation, occupation, resistance, aesthetics, leadership and so forth. Essays are written by Claire Colebrook, John Protevi, Ian Buchannan, Eugene Holland, Rodigo Nunes, Giuseppina Mecchia, Andrew Conio, Nicholas Thoburn, David Burrows and Verena Andermatt Conley.  The authors hail from USA, UK, Brazil and Australia and most had intimate experience of Occupy

In a review of the book Bert Oliver says ‘It should be abundantly apparent from Conio’s words that the invention of new words or concepts to grapple with the undeniably urgent issues raised by him, above, is a challenge to all the humanities. The incredibly creative work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari is indispensable in this regard, as the just published book, Occupy – A People yet to Come amply demonstrates.

Book launch time:  2 – 4pm, followed by drinks 4 – 6pm.
Location: ICA, The Mall, London SW1Y 5AH

Further details: www.ica.org.uk

As part of the Kantorbury Symposium on 18th and 19th September, with 23 UK and international speakers, performances and film screenings organised by the The European Theatre Research Network (ETRN) on the Canterbury campus, in which the life and work of Polish theatre director and visual artist Tadeusz Kantor is celebrated 100 years after his birth, the School of Music and Fine Art are providing support to enable a new performance work by visual artist (and previous Turner Prize nominee) Goshka Macuga, starting at Chatham Historic Dockyard on the afternoon of Friday 18^th September.

Led by Adam Chodzko, Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at the School of Music and Fine Art, the performance will involve 7  Fine Art and Event & Experience Design (BA and MA) students walking an enormous letter (over 10m long), as a group, dressed as Polish postal workers, from Chatham Historic Dockyard, in order to deliver it to Goshka at the symposium on the University of Kent’s Canterbury Campus.

The tapestry is a several meter long postal envelope made of textile, bearing the address of the Jarman Building, University of Kent. It refers to the famous happening by Tadeusz Kantor carried out in 1967, but also to the potential tensions occurring between art institutions and the society. At the heart of these tensions lies the censorship in Polish art after 1989, the period sometimes referred to as the cold war of artists against the society, and marked by attacks targeted at artworks, artists, curators, directors, and institutions, often committed on anti-Semitic grounds.

To document those difficult times, Macuga decided to embrace within the show also the hate mail addressed to Zachęta and its then director, Anda Rottenberg. The Letter is a testament to those struggles, as well as to the ongoing transformation in the society, which has to confront its fears and prejudices in order to fully accept artistic freedom. This is how the performance looked when staged in Poland
:  http://artmuseum.pl/en/kolekcja/praca/macuga-goshka-the-letter

About Goshka Macuga

Interdisciplinary artist, born in 1967 in Warsaw, Goshka Macuga is now based in London. In 2008, she was among the four nominees for the prestigious Turner Prize, awarded each year to the most outstanding young British artist.  Her practice moves beyond the artist’s traditionally perceived role into a form of ‘cultural archaeology’. Despite incorporating traditional media, such as sculpture, drawing, painting, photography and film, she creates installations in which she also appropriates the work of other artists, archive materials, ready-mades, combining them with objects of her own making. Macuga appropriates the techniques and tactics used by curators of exhibitions or archivists (because of this, her art is often compared to that of Marcel Broodthaers). Macuga has been exhibiting internationally at major museum and galleries since 1999.  In 2016 she has a solo exhibition at the New Museum, New York.

About Tadeusz Kantor:  http://www.cricoteka.pl/en/main.php?d=tkantor&kat=33&id=13

About the Kantorbury Symposium 18-19 September:  https://www.kent.ac.uk/arts/drama/news-summary.html?view=801

The film, Public House, by award winning artist, filmmaker, writer, curator and academic, Sarah Turner, Director of Research and Reader in Fine Art at the School of Music and Fine Art, University of Kent, has been shortlisted for the Grierson Award and is being screened at the 2015 BFI London Film Festival.

The hugely prestigious Grierson Award in partnership with the Grierson Trust, recognises documentaries with integrity, originality and social or cultural significance. Public House, a 120 minute film has been described as “A triumphant genre-blending documentary that turns community action to save the local pub from gentrification into an exhilarating participatory opera….this is not just a film about resistance; it is a film that itself refuses categorisation, reinventing documentary reality as a polyphonic clamour of musical subjectivities. (Helen de Witt on the BFI website).

Sarah’s feature films have been broadcast on Channel 4 and she has had scripts commissioned by the BFI, Film Four Lab and Zephyr Films.

Public House is funded by a production award from Film London Artists’ Moving Image Network (FLAMIN), a research award from the School of Music and Fine Art, University of Kent and is supported by Arts Council England.

Festival screenings take place across London. The film will be shown as follows:

Monday 12 October 2015 20:45, Picturehouse Central, Screen 1

Saturday 17 October 2015 15:20, Rich Mix Cinema, Screen 1

To order tickets for Public House click here: https://whatson.bfi.org.uk/lff/Online/default.asp?BOparam::WScontent::loadArticle::permalink=publichouse

Related news item: https://www.kent.ac.uk/smfa/news.html?view=1397

For info on the BFI London Film Festival go to: http://www.bfi.org.uk/lff