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 8 Oct
Host: Gary Simmonds
Guest: Lee Triming
Lee Triming studied at Loughborough C.A.D. and Goldsmiths College, London, and has been exhibiting both nationally and internationally since 1997. London correspondent for Flash Art International since 2000, he also writes freelance, and has taught Fine Art since 1999. His work is generated by the practice of drawing: ‘Through drawing I play games with structure and dissipation or collapse. When you stir a blob of cream into hot coffee, there’s an almost indeterminable point where it has neither quite lost nor quite maintained its integrity. I feel that point is somehow formally similar to the structure of our experience of living in the world as human subjects. That’s the point of experience I’m looking to play out in my work.’
Gary Simmonds is an artist based in London. His practice is concerned with abstract painting’s relation to domestic ornamentation and decoration. He makes paintings that flirt with decoration and disorder at the same time as setting out possibilities for ‘abstraction’. He studied Fine Art at UCE, Birmingham and Goldsmiths College, London. He has exhibited work both nationally and internationally. He has had solo exhibitions at Laure Genillard, London (2000), De March and Solbiati, Milan (2000), and One in the Other, London (2002 and 2004/5). Group shows include: ‘This Season’, at Laure Genillard (1999); ‘Fabric’, Abbot Hall (2002), and ‘unpicked and dismantled’, representing the UK in Textile ’07, Lithuania.
Wednesday 15 Oct
Host: Nick Thurston
Guest: Caroline Bergvall
Caroline Bergvall is a writer and poet. Her latest collection of texts is entitled FIG (Salt, 2005). Her work is frequently multilingual, performative, and collaborative. She has developed audio-works, visual textwork, net-based pieces, and live performances in Europe, Scandinavia, and North America. Recent works include the sound-text installation Say: ‘Parsley’ (Liverpool Biennial, 2004), re-sited at MuKha (Antwerp, 2008), and the text cycle Shorter Chaucer Tales (DIA Arts Foundation, 2008) and MOMA (2008).
Nick Thurston is based in West Yorkshire. He is author of Reading the Remove of Literature (2006) and Historia Abscondita (An Index of Joy, 2007). He has exhibited or performed in New York, old York, and Haarlem (Holland) in the last year. Since 2006 has been co-editor of the independent artists’ book imprint information as material. Conceptualist reading performances are the crux of Thurston’s poetical and editorial work. He has contributed to numerous periodicals including The Happy Hypocrite (Bookworks, 2008) and parallax (Routledge, 2008).
Wednesday 22 Oct
Host: Andrew Sneddon
Guest: Jeremy Millar
Jeremy Millar is an artist based in Whitstable, and AHRC Research Fellow in the Creative and Performing Arts, Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, University of Oxford. He has exhibited in or curated exhibitions and screenings around the world, most recently Safn, Reykjavik, Inverleith House, Edinburgh, Hauser and Wirth, London; and Tate Modern. He is currently developing new works for the Royal Academy, National Maritime Museum, and, with Chris Marker, the Pitt Rivers Museum. His writings have been included in many international publications, and his most recent books are Place (London, 2005) and The Way Things Go (London, 2007). His exhibition on the visual art of John Cage, the largest ever held, will open at Baltic in May 2010. www.jeremymillar.org
Andrew Sneddon is a Scottish artist now living and working in Sheffield. He studied at the British School in Rome and holds an MA in Fine Art from Glasgow School of Art. He has exhibited nationally and internationally and is currently engaged in a practice-led PhD at Edinburgh College of Art. His practice is concerned with exploring our complex relations with space and place, in particular how place influences the decision-making process of the artist. He has recently completed a residency at Yorkshire Sculpture Park and co-authored The slender margin between the real and the unreal, with Gavin Morrison and Kiyoshi Okutsu, (Artwords Press, 2007).
Wednesday 29 Oct
Screening of Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask, dir. Isaac Julien, writtne by Isaac Julien and Mark Nash, Arts Council of England, 1996 (52 minutes).
Interviews, reconstructions and archive footage tell the story of the life and work of the highly influential anti-colonialist writer Franz Fanon, author of Black Skin, White Mask and The Wretched of the Earth, and his professional life as a psychiatric doctor in Algeria during its war of independence with France. The impetus for the film project was to restore to academic and artistic discourses a recognition of both the originality and contradictory nature of this major thinker. It was initially conceived as a reflection on the revival of interest in Fanon’s ideas in black visual and performance arts. The black arts movement in Britain and North America had sought a more substantial basis for reflection on the black body and its representations. In development, the film’s mandate became broader to include other aspects of Fanon’s influence and legacy.’
Wednesday 12 Nov
Host: Becky Shaw
Guest: Mel Jackson
Melanie Jackson is interested in the effects science and technology have on industry, aesthetics and politics. She is attracted to stories of work and migration, and the circulation of ideas and people alongside products and raw materials. Her work often starts with news stories, tales that describe inventive means of getting by, of survival beyond the odds: and she uses a combination of animation, drawing, sculpture, film, video and printed matter. Recent works have been exhibited in Centro Cultural de Lagos Portugal, Arnolfini, Bristol, Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, and Videotage, Hong Kong, and also included in Art Futures and the Jerwood Drawing Prize (winner). Jackson is represented by Matt’s Gallery London and is currently Head of Undergraduate Sculpture, Slade School of Art.
Becky Shaw makes work that explores the relation between objects and people. Works before 2006 included live, photographic and written responses to large organisations including schools, universities, workplaces, hospitals and galleries, for commissioners including New Art Gallery Walsall, Grizedale Arts and Kunstprijs Amstelveen. Current works are less responsive to place, focusing more on objects that move through space via production. This includes an exploration of supply and demand and time-lag in high street fashion (Incertainplaces, 2008), and new work focused on the relationship between a contemporary aggregate floor tile and a Roman mosaic (Firstsite Newsite 2009). In 1998 she received a doctorate, and continues to work across academic and art production. Shaw was co-director of Static Gallery, Liverpool until 2006.
Wednesday 19 Nov
Host: Jaspar Joseph-Lester
Guest: Wouter Davidts
Wouter Davidts is postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Architecture & Urban Planning of Ghent University (UGent). He was a British Academy Visiting Research Fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2006, and he will be a Visiting Research Fellow at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds in November 2006. In recent years he has published on the museum, contemporary art, and architecture in journals such as Architectural Theory Review, Afterall, De Witte Raaf, Footprint, Kritische Berichten and Parachute, and in books and exhibition catalogues. His reviews have appeared in Artforum, Sculpture and OPEN. He curated the Show Philippe Van Snick: Undisclosed Recipients at BK SM in Mechelen and Beginners & B at Extra City in Antwerp. He is currently working on a book on size and scale in contemporary art and architecture.
Jaspar Joseph-Lester’s work explores the role that images play in determining urban planning, social space and everyday praxis. He has exhibited widely in the UK and abroad with solo exhibitions at Asprey Jacques Gallery and The British School at Rome. His video work was nominated for ‘Pilot: 1’ in 2004 and selected for ‘All for Show: an international retrospective of UK Video’, 2005-6. Forthcoming exhibitions include ‘Epidermis’, Kaohsiung Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan. He is author of Revisiting the Bonaventure Hotel (Copy Press, 2008), co-editor of Episode: Pleasure and Persuasion in Lens Based Media (Artwords Press, 2008). He is a founding member of the Curating Video research group.
Wednesday 26 Nov
Host: Michelle Atherton
Guest: Pil and Galia Kollectiv
Pil and Galia Kollectiv are London-based artists, writers, lecturers, and curators working in collaboration. Their ar work is primarily film and performance-based and explores the utopian discourses of the twentieth century and the way they operate in a changing landscape of creative work and instrumentalised leisure. They use choreographed movement and theatrical ritual as both an aesthetic and a thematic dimension, reading Dada and the Bauhaus backwards through punk and new wave. They are currently artists in residence at S1 Artspace, Sheffield, and have recently performed No Haus Like Bau at the fifth Berlin Biennale. Other projects include The Institute of Psychoplasmics, Pump House Gallery, London (2008) and Asparagus: A Horticultural Ballet, The Showroom, London and the Biennale de Montreal (2007).
Michelle Atherton’s work explores the way we move and are moved within our everyday life. She quite literally uses different transport systems as case studies for investigating contemporary concerns, preoccupations, and obsessions (that are often taken for granted), as a means to talk about the complexities of relations and their representation. Recent exhibitions include Cancelled: One in a series, Whitstable Biennale Satellite Programme (2008), Missed the Boat II, Dagmar de Pooter Gallery, Antwerp, and Linnagalleri, Tallinn Estonia (2006-7). She is currently researching the role of humour in contemporary art practice and working on the project Dreams of Flying, supported by the AHRC, researching what is considered, or at least marketed as, one of the ultimate flying experiences of the 21st century, taking a ride in a fourth generation military jet fighter.
Wednesday 3 December
Host: Sharon Kivland
Guest: Marko Maetamm
Marko Mäetamm is a multimedia artist from Estonia. He graduated from the Estonian Academy of Arts and currently holds the position of Dean in the Faculty of Fine Arts there. He started his a career working mainly in lithography and painting. After 2000, when he started to combine different mediums, working with video, drawing, books, and objects, his career became international. He represented Estonia in the Venice Biennale in 2007, and his project A Loser’s Paradise articulates not only the ways he is completely useless to the system, but how he, step by step, distances himself from the semi-fascist orthodoxy that everything in our daily life world must be products we sell, trade, buy, steal, confiscate, recycle and throw away. At times he presents himself as pathetic loser; at others, he is a cold-hearted and cynical murderer.
Sharon Kivland is an artist and writer, currently working on a series of books, Freud on Holiday; Volume I, Freud Dreams of Rome, is published by INFORMATION AS MATERIAL, 2006. Volume II, A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis is published by information as material and cubearteditions, 2008. A second series takes up a number of themes: Freud and stairs, Freud and the gift of flowers, Freud and real estate, and the reason Freud changed hotels in Paris in 1885. Solo exhibitions in 2008: Bastart, Bratislava, where she addressed Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ideas on natural education; Sleeper, Edinburgh, for which she embroidered an abécédaire of her worst traits; and Chelsea Art Space, where she continues her exploration of revolutionary moments in the fashion and history of France.
Wednesday 10 Dec
Host: Michael Corris
Guest: Nancy Hwang
Born in 1971 in Seoul, Korea, Nancy Hwang currently lives in New York City. She received her MFA in sculpture from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, in 1996, and her BA in studio art from the University of Maryland at College Park, in 1994. She has participated in national and international exhibitions and events, including projects at White Columns, New York; Project Space Sarubia, Seoul; The Kitchen, New York; Sculpture Center, Long Island City; and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City. Most recently, she participated in the group exhibition Something from Nothing curated by Dan Cameron at the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans; and presented her first solo museum project, This is not a couch, at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri. .
Dr Michael Corris is Professor of Fine Art at the Art and Design Research Centre. His art work may be found in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), the Victoria and Albert Museum (London), Le Consortium (Dijon), MaMCO (Geneva), Staatsgalerie (Stuttgart), and the J. P. Getty Museum and Research Institute (Los Angeles). Corris’s most recent publications include Conceptual Art: Theory, Myth and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), and Ad Reinhardt (London: Reaktion, 2008).
Wednesday 28 Jan
Guest: John Timberlake
John Timberlake is an alumnus of Brighton Polytechnic and the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. His work, which principally focuses on histories and fictions associated with landscape, is held in collections in Britain, Europe and the US. He co-edited Everything magazine from 1996 until its demise in 2002. His book Bussard Ramjet is published by Artwords Press, in association with Artis Den Bosch, Holland (2000). Timberlake teaches on the Fine Art Programme at Middlesex University.
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, ‘Garden Journeys’, Polesden Lacey National Trust Gardens, ‘Inter …’, Harris Museum and Art Gallery, ‘Distance’, Galerie 5020, Saltsburg, and Barely There, Phoenix Gallery, Belfast.
Wednesday 4 Feb
Guest: William Hunt
See http://www.williamhunt.net for details Host: T.C. McCormack
T.C. McCormack works both collaboratively and individually. His practice incorporates video, drawing, installation, and live art. Born in Belfast, Ireland and now living in London, he has lived and worked in Vienna and Sheffield. His films have been screened at the ICA London, FACT, Liverpool, Purescreen, Goethe Institute New York, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Kunstnernes Hus, Olso, and Platform, Istanbul. Collaborative projects have been exhibited at the Biennial Of Moving Images Geneva, Cork Capitol of Culture, av-arkki, Helsinki, Foro artistico, Hanover, and OBG Gallery Ireland.
Wednesday 11 Feb
Guest: Snæbjörnsdóttir and Wilson
Bryndis Snæbjörnsdóttir and Mark Wilson have been collaborating since 2001. Their work, characteristically rooted in the North, explores issues of history, culture, and the environment in relation to both human and non-human animals. They use installation, text, photography, and video, using the relation between humans and selected animals to posit questions on cultural and individual location between domesticity and wilderness. Recent exhibitions include Big Mouth Tramway, Glasgow 2004; nanoq: flat out and bluesome, Spike Island, Bristol, plus London, Oxford, Reykjavík, Copenhagen, Oslo, Cambridge and Melbourne, 2004 –8, and (a)fly, Reykjavík Arts Festival, 2006. Their publications include Big Mouth (Glasgow: Tramway); (a)fly, (National Museum of Iceland); nanoq: flat out and bluesome, (London: Black Dog).
Host: Chloë Brown
Chloë Brown uses film, found objects, crafted sculptural objects, and the taxidermic animal to make works held in precarious balance between threat and vulnerability, as contemporary memento mori. She has shown her work nationally and internationally, and is a founder member of the international artist group Flasch, exhibiting in Salzburg, Leicester, London, and Stockholm. She is a member of The Research Group for Artists Publications (RGAP) and co-organises the annual Small Publishers Fair in London. Forthcoming exhibitions include: ‘The Animal Gaze’, a city-wide exhibition in Plymouth in March 2009, ‘Tier-Perspektiven’ at Georg-Kolbe-Museum, Berlin, April 2009, and will be presenting a new film for the Sheffield Pavilion at the Istanbul Biennial in September 2009. Brown lives in Sheffield and is a senior lecturer in Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University.
Wednesday 18 Feb
Guest: Olivia Plender
Historical research is at the core of Olivia Plender’s practice. Her works investigate idiosyncratic pockets of forgotten history that sit awkwardly with the way we live now. Recent solo exhibitions include: Art in General, New York, 2008; Marabou Parken, Stockholm, 2007; Art Now Live, Tate Britain, 2007; The Folly of Man Exposed or the World Turned Upside Down, Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt, 2006; and The Medium and Daybreak, Castlefield Gallery, Manchester, 2005. Recent group shows include: ‘Not Quite How I Remember It’, The Power Plant, Toronto, Canada, 2008; ‘Tate Triennial, Tate Britain, 2006; and Busan Biennial, Busan, South Korea, 2006. A Stellar Key to the Summerland was published by Bookworks in 2007 and Plender received a Paul Hamlyn Award in 2006.
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 25 Feb
Guest: Gordon Cheung
Guest: Gordon Cheung
Gordon Cheung is of Hong Kong origin and was born in London 1975, where he lives and works. Cheung’s multi-media paintings capture the hallucinations between the virtual and actual realities of a globalised world, oscillating between Utopia and Dystopia. Spray paint, oil, acrylic, pastels, stock listings, and ink collide in his works to form epic techno-sublime vistas. Cheung graduated from the Royal College of Art, 2001 and exhibits internationally. He was selected for ‘The British Art Show 6’, ‘The John Moores Painting 24’, and was commissioned for the ‘Laing Art Solo Award’ (Selected by Susan May) July 2007. In 2009 solo shows will be at Jack Shainman Gallery, New York, Volta NYC, New York, and The New Art Gallery, Walsall.
Host: Lesley Sanderson
Lesley Sanderson is a Sheffield-based artist who has been collaborating with Neil Conroy as Conroy/Sanderson since 1998. Their practice results from an observation of social structures and human behaviour, and questions accepted values and beliefs. Their work explores the relation between place and subjectivity in a manner that bridges the gap between identity politics and poetics. Exhibitions include: ‘East-South: Out of Sight’, Guangzhou Triennial (2008); ‘Cruel/Loving Bodies’, Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong (2004/2006); ‘Strangers to Ourselves’, London & Maidstone (2003/2004); ‘EAST International’, Norwich (2000). Solo exhibitions include Out of nowhere, Chinese Arts Centre, Manchester (2006); Here we are PM Gallery, London (2005); Elsewhere, Crawford Museum & Art Gallery, Ireland (2003). They will be on a two-month residency in Chongqing, China, 2009.
Wednesday 4 March
Guest: Breda Beban
Breda Beban is an artist, curator and a creative producer. Describing life simply and without obvious elaborations, her productions are invested with the profundity of human emotion. Recent exhibitions include: Tate Britain, London; Aline Vidal Galerie, Paris; Visninsrommet USF, Bergen (2008); New Centre for Contemporary Art, Louisville, Kentucky; Nuova Icona, Venice Biennial, Venice; D.U.M.B.O. Art Centre, New York (2007); Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Rijeka, Croatia (2006); National Museum Reina Sofia, Madrid; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb (2005). Since 2005 she has been a curator/creative producer of imagine art after, a multi-stage exhibition for gallery and broadcast whose first edition was on show at Tate Britain (Oct 2007– Jan 2008). The imagine art after second edition will take place from 2009-2012 in partnership with Tate Britain. Born in Serbia, raised in Macedonia and Croatia, Beban lives and works in London and Sheffield where she is a Professor of Visual Arts at Sheffield Hallam University.
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 travelled 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 11 March
Guest: Tom Dale
Tom Dale does things. He does things to things with which we are familiar, to make them strange. The work for him is the consequence of these actions. For him, making work that forces an interpretation as well as a consciousness of that process, is one of the principal motivations of his practice. His work is featured in ‘Videonale 12’, a survey of European video art at the Kunst Museum in Bonn. Recent exhibitions include: ‘This is the Future Before it Happened’, Outpost contemporary art, LA, 2009; Kings Island, Plymouth Art Centre, 2008; Six Flags, Centre for Contemporary art Warsaw, 2008; Template, Union Gallery, London 2007; and ‘Reckless Behavior’, Getty Museum LA, 2006. His first publication, Towards and Absolute, with texts by Tom Morton and Glenn R. Phillips is distributed by Art Data.
Host: Rose Butler
Rose Butler works across varied mediums including video, photography, animation, interactive media, and multi-screen display. Her work examines a sense of location both temporally and spatially through interaction with the moving image and the resulting visceral experience. She has exhibited work nationally in gallery spaces, cinemas, festivals, and in the public realm, and has received commissions from FACT, Site Gallery, V&A and Millennium Galleries. She received an award at the Becks Futures Student Prize for Digital Video 2004 for the multi-screen animation Platform, exhibited at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Glasgow, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, London. Her one-minute short Box, originally produced as part of the Host Artists Group Cinema Project, was recently selected by AZYL, Slovakia, and last year was chosen to represent Western Europe in the One Minute Awards, Amsterdam, and was screened at a number of venues, including Site, Sheffield, and Cornerhouse, Manchester.
Wednesday 18 March
Guest: Guido van der Werve
Guido van der Werve constructs possible scenarios and imaginary realities where various geographies collide in order to generate momentary sensations of unusual, dream-like intensity. Trained as a pianist, the artist aims to create a visual and conceptual language that manifests a similar directness to the one that is typical in music. His performance-based film, Nummer acht. Everything is going to be alright , depicts an unusual journey that the artist undertakes, walking fifteen metres in front of an icebreaker in the dramatic landscape of the Finnish Gulf of Bothnia. He studied at the Rietveld Academie, and his films are regularly screened in exhibitions and at film festivals. In 2003 he was the laureate of the René Coelho Award (Netherlands Media Art Institute, Montevideo/TBA). In 2004 he was nominated for the NPS prize for short film, and in 2005, for the Prix de Rome.
Host: Carol Maund
Carol Maund is dircetor of Site Gallery where Guido van der Werve will have his first major UK solo show.
Wednesday 25 March
Guest: Victor Mazin
Victor Mazin is a curator, art critic, philosopher, translator, and author, who lives and works in Saint Petersburg. He is the editor-in-chief of the arts and science journal Kabinet, Head of the Department of Theoretical Psychoanalysis at East-European Institute of Psychoanalysis, and founder of Freud’s Dreams Museum in St. Petersburg. He is co-editor of Psychoanalysis (Ukraine), Associate Editor of Journal for Lacanian Studies, and the author of numerous articles and books on the theory of psychoanalysis, deconstruction and visual arts, such as: Cabinet of the deep experience: Freud, Moses, Michelangelo, with P. Pepperstein (St. Petersburg: Inapress, 2000); Introduction to Lacan (Moscow: Pragmatica Kultury, 2004); The Mirror Stage of Lacan (St. Petersburg: Aleteya, 2005); The interpretation of dreams in the era of mass communication (Moscow: NLO, 2005). He has translated from French and English, works by Slavoj Zizek, Renate Salecl, Felix Guattari, Louis Althusser, and Jean-Francois Lyotard, among others.
Host: Sharon Kivland
Sharon Kivland is an artist and writer, currently working on a series of books, Freud on Holiday. Volume I, Freud Dreams of Rome, is published by INFORMATION AS MATERIAL, 2006. Volume II, A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis is published by information as material and cubearteditions, 2008. A second series takes up a number of themes: Freud and stairs, Freud and the gift of flowers, Freud and real estate, and the reason Freud changed hotels in Paris in 1885. Solo exhibitions in 2008: Bastart, Bratislava, where she addressed Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ideas on natural education; Sleeper, Edinburgh, for which she embroidered an abécédaire of her worst traits; and Chelsea Art Space, where she continued her exploration of revolutionary moments in the history of France.