A collaborative project with the School of Music and Fine Art and the 2016 Whitstable Biennale has produced an innovative series of Four Artist Walks, which aim to test the proposition that a walking journey with an artist could be as valuable as hearing them address a lecture theatre, and that sharing a range of sights and sounds could reveal something that slides and video clips do not.
Information about the artists and the politics, history and imaginative potential of the landscape being walked through will be disseminated before/after in a document in order to keep the walk itself as ‘present’ as possible. Walkers will be invited to mix and mingle during the walks, with an emphasis on informal conversation. Midway through the walks, students will present a set of questions to the artists which later will be collated, with the artists’ responses, in the Whitstable Biennale’s online journal.
Each route will culminate at a point along the Medway estuary or river Swale, forming a string of reference points between which the connections between the walks can be contemplated.
Walk 2, on Saturday 27th February, 10:15am—1pm approx, with Ruth Ewan, will take in Kingsferry Bridge, Iwade, Ridham Dock and the strange “elephants’ graveyard” of decaying Thames barges in the mouth of the Medway. The walk will start and end at Swale Station. An artist’s pamphlet will be provided to each walker.
The walks will be largely off-road. Participants are recommended to wear waterproof walking boots and warm outdoor clothing. Please also note that access to drinking water and toilet facilities will be limited.
Artist Walks is a collaborative project organised by the School of Music and Fine Art in the University of Kent in partnership with Whitstable Biennale and supported by Kent County Council, taking place between Chatham and Faversham.
On 24th February at 6pm, artist and pioneering experimental filmmaker Tony Hill will be visiting the School of Music & Fine Art to talk about his film practice. Organised and funded by 51zero/voyager – an ongoing series of events, projects and touring activities, organised by 51zero, that engages directly with the communities of Medway, Kent, Northern France and further afield – the celebrated filmmaker will present and discuss his pioneering films and groundbreaking filmmaking techniques. Internationally renowned, Hill makes experimental short films that are somewhere between sculpture and cinema. To create his visually challenging and timelessly beautiful imagery, he often develops his own camera rigs, ingeniously using mirrors and unusual lenses, and sometimes humorous vantage points to make us rethink our assumptions about perspective, gravity, scale and movement.
Born in London in 1946, Tony Hill studied Architecture and Sculpture and has been working as an independent film-maker since 1973, he also works with installations, photography and sound and has presented his work at many galleries and in film festivals worldwide. His award winning films have been broadcast on network television in many countries and published in the UK and Japan, with commercial work including directing music videos and TV commercials. He taught film and video from 1982 until 2002 at the University of Derby becoming Professor of Film and at Plymouth College of Art from 2004 until 2011.
The Artist Talk starts at 6.00pm and will explore Tony Hill’s unique film production techniques highlighting the formalistic qualities and contexts at play in his work, followed by a discussion with curator Keith Whittle exploring Hill’s aesthetic and conceptual approach and the research and production processes involved in the making of his films. The event closes with an informal opportunity to meet the artist from 8pm until 9pm.
On Tuesday 26th January, 2016 in the stunning Royal Dockyard Church, The Historic Dockyard Chatham, from 6.15pm to 8pm, the School of Music and Fine Art is thrilled to welcome Jaki Irvine, an artist working in mixed media, but mainly film, video and writing. She is represented by Frith Street Gallery, London.
Originally Dublin based but now living in Mexico City, she represented Ireland at the 1997 Venice Biennale. Overheard conversations and human incidents, casually observed, often form the starting point for Jaki Irvine’s work. She weaves these real events with fictitious narratives to produce haunting films and videos. Her work makes use of the potential discontinuity between moving image, musical score and narrator to undermine any sense of linear narrative. Irvine’s work suggests the fragmented mysterious and often absurd nature of the human condition.
The talk is part of an exciting series of visiting artists, writers, filmmakers, curators and performers who will talk about their work. Each speaker is renowned in their own field and uses imagery, materials and processes differently to pose distinct and searching questions to address the urgent concerns of our age. Our guests will provide a detailed presentation of their work, share their experiences of making work and also their involvement in navigating the complex multifaceted artworld.
Our Visiting Artists have national and international profiles, many are multi-award winners and their practices include multimedia installation, moving image, sound, photography, performance, socially engaged practice, painting, sculpture, publishing and curating.
The School of Music and Fine Art’s MAAST (Music and Audio Arts Sound Theatre) is delighted to participate in events organised by fig-2 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London, between Monday 30 November and Sunday 6 December 2015.
The MAAST sound system will feature in recent works by London based composer-performer, writer and occasional curator Seth Ayyaz.
A new configuration of work is presented, which marks the fourth and final expansion of the project fig-2 into the premises of the ICA Theatre and the ICA Studio. Seth Ayyaz brings together three significant strands of his practice into a new formulation: an installation of his multi-channel AAdM Listening system using part of the MAAST, two electroacoustic concerts with the entire MAAST diffusion system, a specially commissioned publication, as well as supporting events.
Born in 1970, Ayyaz has presented his work internationally including: Cafe Oto, London; Kunsthalle Luzern, Switzerland; Irtijal Festival, Beirut; Maerz Music, Berlin; the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology, Finland; and the Haus Für Elektronische Künste in Basel, Switzerland. Ayyaz also writes on sound and has been published in The Wire, Organised Sound, and most recently in, On Listening. Live work includes the Usurp Chance Tour 2014 — Cage and Beyond. He also curated the MazaJ Festival of Experimental Middle-Eastern Music, London.
For his first solo exhibition, Ayyaz connects two distinct spaces, unfolding two different experiences of listening. Transforming the ICA Theatre into a forest of sounds, he uses the AAdM system to carve paths for the audience to walk through and immerse themselves in the experiences of listening. In the Studio, Ayyaz provides an alternative experience of using the same self-regulating system, which responds to the change of architecture and acoustics. The installation will be active during the week, complemented by two performances of a triptych of electroacoustic works.
Wednesday 9th December, 11.15am – 6pm Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), The Mall, London, SW1Y 5AH
Sponsored by the University of Kent and organised by Dr Andrew Conio, Programmes Director, Fine Art and Event and Experience Design, School of Music and Fine Art, this cross-disciplinary forum creates a provocative encounter between philosophy, geography, psychoanalysis, high finance, film, economics, art and activism. With papers from Professor Philip Goodchild, Professor John Russell, Oliver Ressler, Angus Cameron, Anastasios Gaitanidis, James Buckley, Georgious Papadopoulos and films from Ami Clarke and Hillary Koob-Sassen, the symposium at the Institute of Contemporary Art on 9th December investigates the flows of life, money and art and the axiomatics that bind them together.
Every society in history has created economic, social and political systems to channel flows into things, functional processes and systems. This symposium asks; to what extent do the Quadrillions of dollars channeled through markets every day determine the ontological horizons and conditions of possibility of life. How are the flows of money and life’s imminent flows consiliant or forced into disjunctive relation, how does the artist capture these flows?
The School of Music and Fine Art is proud to be working with the Institute of Contemporary Art, London’s foremost multi-disciplinary arts centre. Founded in 1947 by a group of artists, poets and radicals, the ICA is an essential meeting place for anyone interested in contemporary culture. Designed as a playground for ideas, the ICA has worked with a litany of inspired artists and writers, including T.S. Eliot, Cartier-Bresson, Francis Bacon, Jacques Derrida, Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Richter, Jeff Koons, Yoko Ono and Slavoj Žižek.
Composer, producer, sound design practitioner, lecturer and researcher Richard Lightman, Lecturer in Popular Music, in the School of Music & Fine Art, has written the music for Tear Me Apart, the debut movie from Cannibal Films. Described as a post-apocalyptic cannibal love story set on the English coast, and directed by Alex Lightman, the film was shown recently at the International Ravenna Nightmare Horror Film Festival , at the Palazzo del Cinema e dei Congressi, Largo Firenze, Ravenna, Italy after its World Premiere at the annual Austin Film Festival in Texas on 31 October.
Founded in 1993, Austin Film Festival (AFF) was the first organisation of its kind to focus on the writers’ creative contribution to film. Past participants of the Festival & Conference include Sydney Pollack, Wes Anderson, James L. Brooks, Joel & Ethan Coen, Russell Crowe, Barry Levinson, Robert Altman, Lawrence Kasdan, John Landis, and Oliver Stone.
Set in the wasteland of post-apocalyptic rural England, Tear Me Apart tells the story of two young brothers who turn to cannibalism to survive, only to fall for their prey, a teenage girl, and possibly the last girl alive.
Hailing from Montreal, Canada, Richard has composed for a myriad of artists, films and television series including Eldorado, America’s Most Wanted and The Big Miracle, news and current affairs programs, TV and radio commercials, and contributed to the sound design of a number of Hollywood films including An American Werewolf in London, Herbie Goes Bananas, Superman II, III & IV, Flash Gordon and Michael Jackson’s Thriller.
As the Chief Executive Officer of the Music Producers Guild, Richard has produced over 35 albums, covering a wide spectrum of music including Heavy Metal, Reggae, Blues, Bollywood, Bhangra, Rock and Roll, New Age, Jazz, Pop and Garage, and played on over 170 recordings and performed in 28 countries on 5 continents.
Work by two award winning artists and lecturers in the School of Music & Fine Art will be shown in a thought-provoking film programme in India. Settlement by Adam Chodzko, Senior Lecturer in Fine Art, and The Whale from filmmaker and Associate Lecturer in Fine Art, Stephen Connolly, will be featured in a film screening programme called Postcard Views on Tuesday 24 November at 1 Shanthi Road Gallery, Bangalore, an art space founded by Suresh Jayaram that nurtures creativity and cutting edge art practice, situated in the centre of the city. Artists explore landscape from the context of ‘man-made’ environments driven by regeneration processes, political spatial division and wasteland management. Allowing a dialogue between different geographical locations – India and Europe – the programme raises notions, still relevant today, concerning imperial gestures and globalisation, where colonial powers’ seem to come along in disguise of rich investors. How do we interact with public space made available by the state or a colonial power structure? How do we become aware of these strategies of power? The artistic approach seems to help trace, reveal and re-evaluate those strategies within a landscape’s or a city’s layered residues.
The Studio/Gallery at 1 Shanthi Road provides space for slide lectures, small conferences, installations, performances, screenings and informal gatherings. It is administered by a not- for- profit trust Visual Art Collective and since its inception in 2003, has grown to house artists from diverse countries in its residency programmes. To date, the space has hosted and shown artists from every continent (and virtually every country) in the world.
Context for Postcard Views:
German landscape architect GH Krumbiegel (1865-1956) went to London in 1888 in order to help design Hyde Park and the Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew, London. He subsequently settled in India at the beginning of the 20th century and designed major botanical gardens in Ooty and Bangalore after the model of British parks. A system of ‘park’ was thus transplanted to India and other countries, and landscape architecture became part of the British colonial programme. Bangalore is said to be both the ‘new Silicon Valley’ and a ‘Garden City’, yet is trying to come to terms with large areas of inner city wasteland. In Postcard Views, the artists map out situations where control and power seem to be firmly encoded within landscape and where parks and monuments seem to reveal or memorialise certain cultural values. Our human instinct to consistently reorganise nature and landscape ac- cording to cultural perspectives and political control is laid bare.
Programme for Postcard Views:
Mike Marshall, Days like these, 2003, 3.24 mins., UK
Johanna Domke, Stultifera Garden, 2008 11.35 mins., D
Adam Chodzko, Settlement, 2004, 10 mins., UK
Robert Crosse, The Speed of Change, 2015, 2.40 mins., UK
Stephen Connolly, The Whale, 2005, 9.15 mins., UK
Matthew Murdoch, Being There, 2006, 4.30 mins., UK
Ann Donnelly, Political Landscape, 2007, 7 mins., IE
Claudia Kapp, You lose, 2011, 4 mins., D
Semiconductor, All the Time in the World, 2005, 4.42 mins., UK
Michelle Deignan, Ways to Speculate, 2014, 4.20 mins., UK
Genevieve Staines, Ruins in Reverse, 2005, 5.50 mins., AU
Daniel Beerstecher, Mas Continua a Vida, 2014, 5.18 mins., D
Stephen Connolly is an artist filmmaker. His award winning single screen work explores the interface between spectatorship, material culture and subjectivity, and has been widely screened at film and media festivals internationally since 2002. His work is distributed by the LUX and has been acquired by the Artist Moving Image Collection of the British Film Institute and a number of US Universities.
Stephen is a PhD candidate in Fine Art, a Graduate Teaching Assistant and Kent 50 Scholar. His doctoral practice as research looks at the representation of capital as material environment in artists film and video and the use of ‘assemblage’ and an Actor Network framework can further this audio-visual exploration. Recent conferences as a contributor include In Media Res at Harvard US; Besides the Screen at USP São Paulo BR; and Critical Topographies at Kingston UK.http://www.bubblefilm.net/projects/sketches.htm
Adam Chodzko’s art explores the interactions and possibilities of human behaviour. Exhibiting internationally since 1991, Chodzko works across media, from video installation to subtle interventions, with a practice that is situated both within the gallery and the wider public realm.
After studying the History of Art at the University of Manchester and Fine Art as a Masters at Goldsmiths College London, Chodzko has exhibited at numerous venues around the world. These include the Tate Britain, Venice Biennale, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Istanbul Biennial and locally at the Folkestone Triennial. He was shortlisted for the prestigious Jarman Award in 2015. http://www.adamchodzko.com/
Acclaimed contemporary visual artist and Senior Lecturer in Fine Art in the School of Music and Fine Art, Adam Chodzko’s new film Deep Above will premiere at the Watershed Cinema, Bristol on Friday November 20 at 1pm, followed by a conversation with the artist and psychoanalyst and editor of Engaging With Climate Change, Sally Weintrobe. The film is commissioned by Invisible Dust and produced in association with Watershed and Shambala Festival and is funded by the Wellcome Trust
Adam Chodzo works across media, ranging from large-scale installations to de-materialised interventions. Whilst exploring the poetic spaces between documentary and fantasy, conceptualism and surrealism, public and private, Chodzko’s work provokes our collective imagination by wondering how, through the visual, we might best understand and re-form our encounters with the society and environment that surround us.
He has been exhibited extensively in international solo and group exhibitions including: Tate, Tate St. Ives; Museo d’Arte Moderna, Bologna (MAMBo); Istanbul Biennale; and Venice Biennale. He is recipient of awards from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation and The Foundation for Contemporary Arts and is currently shortlisted for the Jarman Award.
In Deep Above, Chodzko uses moving image and sound to explore, short-circuit and abstract our slippery self-deceptions regarding climate change. What is the psychological gap where we understand that climate change occurs yet remain paralysed from taking action? With world focus on the imminent UN Climate Change Conference in Paris, Deep Above attempts, through art, to loosen our mental blocks about environmental catastrophe.
Artist and Reader in Fine Art at the School of Music and Fine Art, Shona Illingworth is on the Judging Panel for FACT and Channels: The Australian Video Art Festival 2015 Artist Bursary. Her fellow judges are Soda Jerk, an art collective working with video installations and experimental film, currently in residence at FACT, Rory MacBeth, Practicing artist and Head of Fine Art at Liverpool John Moores University and Sarah Tutton, Senior Curator, at Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI).
Channels is an international biennial based in Melbourne, that showcases contemporary video practice from around the world. Provoking curiosities and critical dialogues around video art and its digital future, Channels will present a 10-day festival in September 2015. FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, based in Liverpool, UK) and Channels Festival, as part of an international competition to support video artists and filmmakers, are looking for artists to submit innovative moving image work which explores contemporary issues around Memory, Time, Space and Identity.
The overall winner will have their work showcased simultaneously at the Human Futures Forum – an international symposium on Place hosted at FACT Liverpool in November 2015, and MPavillion, part of the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia. The winner will also receive a bursary of £2,000 to support the production of a new piece of work that will be showcased on National Media Arts Player and UK multi channel network for the arts Canvas and be put forward for exhibition in Hong Kong as part of ISEA 2016 . The winner will also be invited to join the selection panel for the following year’s competition.
Shona’s exhibition Lesions in the Landscape will be on display at FACT during the Human Futures Forum.
British Forum for Ethnomusicology: Annual Conference 2016 14–17 April 2016
The BFE invites proposals for its 2016 conference, which will be hosted by the School of Music and Fine Art in Chatham Historic Dockyard from April 14-17th, 2016. The British Forum for Ethnomusicology (BFE) is an association formerly known as the International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM, UK Chapter). As an Affiliate National Committee to the ICTM, the BFE aims to advance the study, practice, documentation, preservation and dissemination of traditional music and dance, including folk, popular, classical, urban, and other genres, of all countries. BFE is a body fiscally autonomous from any other organisation, and membership is open to anyone interested in the study of music and dance from all parts of the world. The BFE, in association with Routledge, publishes the scholarly journal Ethnomusicology Forum (formerly the British Journal of Ethnomusicology).
Proposals on any current research are welcome; papers having a nautical theme would be particularly appropriate, given the surroundings.
Proposals are invited for:
Papers (20 minutes with 5–10 minutes for questions)
Organised sessions (3 or 4 linked papers around a theme, totalling 1.5 or 2 hours)
Round table discussion sessions (3 or 4 shorter presentations, around 15 minutes each, followed by a chaired discussion, totalling 1.5 or 2 hours)
Poster or other material for digital display.
Proposals should be submitted in the following formats to enable them to be reviewed anonymously:
Paper proposals: include the name and email address of the proposer, paper title, and abstract (the latter not exceeding 300 words). The name of the proposer should not appear in the abstract. Organised session proposals: include the names and email addresses of the proposer and the other participants, an overall abstract for the session (not exceeding 300 words), and abstracts for each contributor (no more than 300 words each). Abstracts should not include the names of any of the participants. Roundtable proposals: include the names and email addresses of the proposer and the other participants (the proposer will be assumed to be the chair unless stated otherwise), an overall abstract for roundtable (not exceeding 300 words), and abstracts for each contributor (no more than 300 words each). Abstracts should not include the names of any of the participants. Poster/digital display proposals (digital displays will allow research to be shared using electronic posters as well as videos and other media). Include the name and email address of the researcher, a description of the material to be presented (not exceeding 300 words), and a brief description of your technical requirements. The name of the proposer should not appear in the descriptions.
DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS IS 1 NOVEMBER 2015. Successful applicants will be notified in December.
Please note that all presenters must be members of the BFE. Proposals should be submitted by email to: bfeconference2016@outlook.com
