Author: jw571

Zanzibar’s Story: Remembering the past, Securing the future

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Zanzibar, Christ Church Cathedral and the last slave market

A new Sideshow! exhibit at the Centre of African Studies, 3rd floor of the ARB, from 10 November to 15 December 2015

WMFB Zanzibar posterChrist Church Cathedral in Stone Town, Zanzibar, was built in 1879 on the site of the last permanent slave market in East Africa and is a site of international cultural and historic significance.

The slave market was closed in 1873 amid increasing pressure to abolish the East African slave trade. The Universities’ Mission to Central Africa purchased the site and built the cathedral under the leadership of passionate abolitionist Bishop Steere. Known as the ‘Slave Market Church’, the high altar was positioned over the whipping post.

Zanzibar’s tropical climate took its toll on the building and by the time World Monuments Fund Britain (WMFB) became involved the cathedral was in danger of collapse. In 2013, the Anglican Diocese of Zanzibar and the Zanzibar Government asked World Monuments Fund to help protect this site of conscience.

The cathedral and the former slave market were included on the 2014 World Monuments Watch, WMF’s biennial advocacy programme for global heritage at risk. WMF Britain was awarded a grant of €743,000 from the European Union to conserve the cathedral and create a heritage and education centre at the site commemorating the abolition of slavery.

Zanzibar’s Story: Remembering the Past, Securing the Future is a touring exhibition created to raise awareness of this internationally significant site and the reconciliation and tolerance WMFB’s project is helping to promote in Zanzibar, and to help raise additional funds to complete work at the site. To find out more or to pledge your support, visit: www.wmf.org.uk.

Forthcoming venues: Dr Johnson’s House, London, January – March 2016

This World Monuments Fund Britain project is funded by the European Union in partnership with:

Anglican Diocese of Zanzibar
Christian Engineers in Development
Zanzibar Stone Town Heritage Society

With support from:
US Ambassador’s Fund for Cultural Preservation
Government of Zanzibar

Inside Snowden’s Suitcase

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A new Sideshow! project at the ARB, located in the foyer until the end of Michaelmas Term

This Portable Snowden Surveillance Archive is a replica of the Snowden Digital Surveillance Archive – created and maintained by Canadian Journalists for Free Expression and researchers at the University of Toronto. The suitcase here is two tools in one: it is an autonomous wi-fi network and web server that enables one to search all of the until-now published Snowden documents; and is a surveillance demonstration tool, replaying the Internet Protocol conversations that occur between the user’s smartphone, tablet, or laptop and the tiny server inside the suitcase.

It is the Creation of Dr. Evan Light, FRQSC postdoctoral Fellow at the Mobile Media Lab, Concordia University, Montreal, where he is a member of the ACT project studying communication tools and ageing.

Accessing the archive:

Connect to the Snowden Archive wi-fi network and browse to https://www.nsa.gov and explore.

Exhibited in association with the Ethics of Big Data Research Group at CRASSH and the Snowden Digital Surveillance Archive

Read Clare Dyer-Smith’s blog post about the suitcase

 Inside Snowden's Suitcase

New exhibition by Jenny Langley

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Threads of Life

Exploring and celebrating the structural diversity of proteins through embroidery and printing

5 October to 23 December 2015, exhibition opening Thursday 8 October from 6-8pm

Join our Facebook event

Jenny Langley has a degree in Chemistry and gained a diploma in embroidery in 2005. Using textiles as a creative medium, her scientific past surfaces in her textile art. She has had solo exhibitions around the country and worked with seven museums to create bespoke tactile story mats as an educational resource, the latest one being for the Polar Museum in Cambridge.

This exhibition has developed from the artist’s interest in chemistry, in particular proteins. It is a celebration of their structural diversity and the crucial roles they play in building our bodies and enabling the chemical reactions that keep us all alive. The exhibition has developed slowly over time and contains pieces using different textile techniques including taking collograph prints directly from embroideries. Many of the pieces are made from silk and wool; proteins themselves. On show for the first time are felted vessels exploring the hidden, protected and precious nature of the active sites of enzymes.

Jenny will give a guided tour of her exhibition for the Festival of Ideas on Tuesday 20 October 2015 at 6pm.

Enzyme Activity

Jenny Langley: Active SiteJenny Langley: Active Site - blue II

New exhibition by James Faure Walker

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6 JULY – 27 SEPTEMBER 2015

PRIVATE VIEW THURSDAY 9 JULY FROM 6-8PM

JOIN THE PRIVATE VIEW FACEBOOK EVENT and download a poster for this exhibition

Born in 1948, James Faure Walker studied at St Martins (1966-70) and the Royal College of Art (1970 to 1972). He had already exhibited widely in the seventies (the Hayward Annual 1979) and eighties (a solo exhibition at Manchester’s Whitworth in 1985), and was one of the founders of Artscribe magazine in 1976, which he edited for eight years. He has exhibited eight times at SIGGRAPH in the USA, won the ‘Golden Plotter’ prize at Computerkunst, Gladbeck, Germany in 1998, and featured in ‘Digital Pioneers’ at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2009. His book, ‘Painting the Digital River: How an Artist Learned to Love the Computer’, was published by Prentice Hall (USA) in 2006, and awarded a New England Book Show Award. He was one of the five English artists commissioned to produce a print for the 2010 South African World Cup. Till 2014 he was Reader in Painting and the Computer at Chelsea, University of the Arts. In 2013 he won the Royal Watercolour Society Award.

Critics have commented on the lyricism and exuberant colour of Walker’s paintings, surprising given that since the eighties computer graphics has been central to his work, alongside oil paint and watercolour. They have also mentioned his independent stand, using photos of pedestrians, birds, shops, at the same time as having developed an ‘abstract’ language. As Stuart Morgan wrote in 1985, “His doubt may lead to one of those careers which bridges older and newer practice, and which opens more doors than it closes”.

www.jamesfaurewalker.com

Lapwings
Lapwings, © James Faure Walker
Train ticket to Milan
Train ticket to Milan, © James Faure Walker

Sideshow!

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Art at the ARB are expanding their exhibition activities and have created Sideshow! These are small exhibitions by staff, academics and students who are based in the Alison Richard Building, as well as by invited artists working in connection with conferences held in the ARB. They take place in the atrium and seminar rooms SG1&SG2 on the ground floor of the Alison Richard Building. Accessibility for visitors will vary due to the use of the rooms, please contact us if you wish to visit at a particular time.

The first of the Sideshows consists of works selected to accompany the conference Objects in Motion: Material Culture in Transition, taking place from 18-20 June 2015. Jane Watt is exhibiting cyanotype prints in the seminar rooms until 4 September and has her ‘Cabinet of Curiosities’ caravan stationed on the Sidgwick Site from 18-19 June. Christopher McHugh is showing ceramic works in the atrium.

From 8-10 July the conference Sound Studies: Art, Experience, Politics will be accompanied by a sound installation by Caitlin Shepherd, situated in the atrium.

Find out more about the Sideshow! exhibitions:

Jane Watt: The Cabinet of Curiosities

Christopher McHugh: The George Brown Series

Caitlin Shepherd: Sanctuary

‘Journeys’ an exhibition of paintings by Paul Janssens

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7 April – 25 June 2015

Exhibition opening Thursday 16 April 2015, 6 – 8 pm

Cambridge based artist Paul Janssens’ exhibition ‘Journeys’ features a selection of his paintings and sketchbooks from the last 20 years. During that time he travelled extensively, to destinations as diverse as Morocco, New Zealand, Australia, Malaysia, the Iberian Peninsular, Italy, Turkey, Ireland and around Great Britain. His Sketchbooks, a key part in recording these travels, became both a means of documenting the places experienced as well as a source for producing larger paintings later on.

Recently Janssens has started to explore the use of collage on the surface of his paintings, using documents and correspondence such as old maps, postcards and materials collected, giving the paintings a greater sense of place and human presence.

Paul Janssens studied at Chelsea School of Art and graduated in 1985. He later moved to New Zealand and Portugal from where he travelled across to central Australia, Malaysia and explored both Portugal and Spain, drawing inspiration from architecture and landscape. In 2000, Janssen returned to Cambridgeshire with his family but continues to travel and draw around the UK and Europe.

Paul Janssen

VIRAL – PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE AGE OF SOCIAL MEDIA

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Exhibition by CRASSH and United Photo Industries

9 February – 14 March 2015
Ground and 1st floor of the ARB

A reception and academic colloquium will take place on 19 February 2015 from 5.00 – 6.30 pm

The colloquium is free to attend and open to all, but please register via email to plague@crassh.cam.ac.uk.

The colloquium Virulence: visualising the African body as a vector of epidemics and the photographic exhibition Embodied Memories by Ashley Ouvrier will discuss how recent public health crises such as the Ebola epidemic in West Africa and the plague epidemic in Madagascar have been represented in ways that visualise the African body as a vector of infectious disease epidemics. Speakers will approach the issue from a medical anthropological perspective that underlines the pervasiveness of visual pathologisation in the post-colonial world.
Speakers

Speakers:

  • Ann Kelly, University of Exeter
  • Christos Lynteris, University of Cambridge
  • Ashley Ouvrier, CERMES3-Paris
  • Branwyn Poleykett, University of Cambridge

 

        

Concrete Poetry International Exchanges

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Concrete Poetry Exhibition & Symposium

Exhibition: a token of concrete affection

Works from the personal collection of Stephen Bann relating to close exchanges between Cambridge and Brazilian poets in the 1960s.

Situated in the atrium and Centre of Latin American Studies, Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road, Cambridge CB3 9DT. Open to the public on weekdays for viewing by appointment until 1 March 2015. Please email Julie (jac46@cam.ac.uk).

About this exhibition

This show has been designed to mark the 50th Anniversary of the first international exhibition of concrete, kinetic and phonic poetry held in the Rushmore rooms, St Catharine’s College, Cambridge from 28 November to 5 December 1964, organised by Stephen Bann, Reg Gadney, Philip Steadman and Mike Weaver.

Among over ninety works shown at the week-long exhibition were poems sent from Brazil by Ronaldo Azeredo, Augusto de Campos, Haroldo de Campos, José Lino Grunewald and Décio Pignatari of the Noigandres group and from Edgard Braga, Luiz Angelo Pinto and Pedro Xisto.

Works by the Noigandres group and other Brazilian poets were included within the remarkable avant-garde journal FORM which Bann, Steadman and Weaver co-edited between 1966 and 1969 and in the Brighton Festival of Concrete Poetry which Bann curated in 1966. A half century after the first exhibition, the Centre of Latin American Studies has worked closely with Stephen Bann and curator Bronaċ Ferran on an exhibition of rarely seen material from Bann’s collection. The exhibition’s title is drawn from a letter written to Bann by Xisto in 1967 and on display in this show.

Symposium

Hosted by the Centre of Latin American Studies

14 February 2015  11.30am – 5.00pm

Seminar Room, Ground Floor, Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road, Cambridge, CB3 9DT

To register for the symposium and and for a programme click here.

The symposium will be followed by drinks reception & visit to the exhibition Beauty and Revolution. The Poetry and Art of Ian Hamilton Finlay curated by Stephen Bann at Kettle’s Yard.

This symposium explores the active cross-fertilisation, exchange of ideas and regular correspondence between poets and curators living internationally during the late 1950s and 1960s including Stephen Bann, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Edwin Morgan in the UK, Ernst Jandl in Austria and Brazilian poets such as Edgard Braga, Augusto and Haroldo de Campos and Pedro Xisto. Presentations from speakers Stephen Bann, Viviane C. da Annunciação, Vanessa Hannesschläger, Eduardo Kac, Drew Milne and Greg Thomas will contextualise these transnational exchanges in the light of broader developments internationally within literature and the visual arts of the period reflecting on networks and movements within concrete poetry, its critics and its lineage.

This event is part of a series of exhibitions in Cambridge coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the first international exhibition of concrete, kinetic and phonic poetry held in Cambridge in late 1964 including Beauty and Revolution. The Poetry and Art of Ian Hamilton Finlay, Kettle’s Yard, curated by Stephen Bann; a token of concrete affection, Centre of Latin American Studies, curated  by Bronaċ Ferran and Graphic Constellations: Visual Poetry and the Properties of Space, The Ruskin Gallery, curated by Bronaċ Ferran and Will Hill.

Concrete Poetry – International Exchanges is supported by the AHRC Digital Transformations Theme Fellowship; Arts Council England Grants for the Arts; the Centre of Latin American Studies, University of Cambridge; Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge and Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for the History and Theory of Biography, Vienna.

Call for Entries: Viral – Photography in the Age of Social Media

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A juried photography exhibition Viral: Photography in the Age of Social Media will be hosted at the Alison Richard Building. An opening reception and academic colloquium to mark the launch of the exhibition, Virulence: visualising the African body as a vector of epidemics, will take place on 19 February 2015.

The convenors are currently seeking entries to the exhibition on the theme of ‘viral’.

In our age of emerging infectious diseases and “epidemic” information sharing, becoming viral has come to be seen as an indispensable part of 21st century social life.

From Ebola to social media, internet memes, and online videos, what “goes viral” has come to underscore the potentials and dangers of our interconnected world.

Both vital and lethal, things viral are the subject of the new collaboration between United Photo Industries and CRASSH.

Shared, tweeted, liked, appropriated, manipulated: photography and short-form videos have become the undisputed visual language of our generation, a powerful communication tool at a time of shortening attention spans and simmering visual saturation. No longer able to imagine (or care to remember) a time unmediated by the social/digital experience, we have willingly surrendered our understanding of the world to the filtered collective-consciousness of the feed. In the words of conceptual artist Joan Foncuberta, “Images don’t represent the world any longer – images compose the world”.

Artists are invited to submit photographic images and short videos reflecting, questioning, and expanding on the notion of “viral” and its impact on everyday life and our understanding of the world. The call for entries is juried by

For more information on how to submit to this exhibition, please visit the United Photo Industries website. Deadline for submissions 9 January 2015.