University of Cambridge

Adam King & Renee Spierdijk Exhibitions

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5 April – 29 June 2018

Exhibition Opening, Thursday 5 April 2018 from 6:00-8:00pm

Adam King: New Suburbia Flowers

In the spring of 2016, Adam King returned to the area south of Norwich, Norfolk, where he grew up. The semi-rural landscape is currently undergoing considerable road and housing development. Over a period of 14 months, King produced a series of constructions, along with related regular format drawings, to explore and make sense of the changes in the identity of a once-familiar landscape.
Adam King was born in 1971 in Norwich, Norfolk. He received a BA (Hons) Painting from Brighton University (1994) and an MA in Drawing from Wimbledon School of Art, London (2003).

@Adam King
Adam King

Renee Spierdijk: Imposed Transitions

Renee Spierdijk’s work responds to images of young women in formal settings, mainly from found photographs. Spierdijk’s current work is largely set in 19th century America during the civil war and its immediate aftermath; a time of upheaval when many were forced to search for a new identity or had a new identity imposed on them. This is an experience which is both timeless and in an era of continued forced migration as contemporary as ever.
Renee Spierdijk is a Dutch artist, born in Amsterdam, who came to England in 1977. She studied Fine Art at the Byam Shaw School of Art and Goldsmith’s College, and now lives and works in Cambridge.

© Renee Spierdijk
Renee Spierdijk

Visions of Plague: Photographs of the Third Plague Pandemic

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15 February – 2 March 2018

The exhibition extends over all floors of the building.

The third pandemic of plague (in its bubonic and pneumonic clinical forms) struck the globe with devastating results between 1894 and 1959. It was the first time that plague would reach and establish itself in all inhabited continents. It was also the first time that any epidemic would be photographed. As plague spread from harbour to harbour, and amongst cities, towns and villages, so did photographs of the pandemic through reproductions in the daily and illustrated press. The exhibition Visions of Plague showcases for the first time this founding moment in epidemic photography. Showing photographs collected and digitized from across the world by the ERC-funded project Visual Representations of the Third Plague Pandemic, the exhibition takes us from the frozen steppes of Manchuria to San Francisco, Brazil, India and Madagascar, where epidemics of plague challenged colonial and national forms of government, reshaped the urban environment and generated new ways of understanding infectious diseases.

Visual Representations of the Third Plague Pandemic is an ERC project held at the University of St Andrews’ Social Anthropology Department and the University of Cambridge’s CRASSH, and led by medical anthropologist Dr Christos Lynteris. The project and the exhibition is funded by a European Research Council Starting Grant (under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme/ERC grant agreement no 336564).

The exhibition Visions of Plague: Photographs of the Third Plague Pandemic was realised with the cooperation of the Wellcome Library, the San Francisco Public Library, the Institute of Experimental Medicine, the Hong Kong University Library Special Collections, the Centre for South Asian Studies (Cambridge), the Joseph Needham Research Institute, the New York Academy of Medicine Library, and the Institut Pasteur Archives.

You can follow the project on Twitter @visualplague

PLEASE NOTE: THIS EXHIBITION CONTAINS IMAGES OF A MEDICAL NATURE

ARTIFICIAL THINGS

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PHOTOGRAPHY EXHIBITION

3 NOVEMBER 2017 – 19 JANUARY 2018

EXHIBITION RECEPTION & ARTIST TALKS, 30 NOVEMBER 2017, 5.30-8PM

There will always be a question over the photographic image as to whether it can ever truly capture reality. ‘Artificial Things’ explores this idea further, bringing together photographic artists who use the medium to explore and merge the boundaries of the fake, the real, and the in-between.

Artist talks start at 6PM
The More That is Taken Away – Ben Altman
Liquid Images – Clara Turchi

This exhibition has been organised and curated in collaboration with Shutter Hub.

Clara Turchi, Persistency of Death
Clara Turchi, Persistency of Death

Becky Probert
Ben Altman
Charlotte Morrison
Christopher Sims
Clara Turchi
Ethan Lo
Gavin Smart
Georgina Howard
Jacqueline Thow
Jo Stapleton
Joanne Coates
Luke Harby
Lynn Fotheringham
Olli Hellmann
Paul Hart
Rachel Wright
Theo Ellison
Victoria Ahrens
Will Webster

 

What is Art? The Search is Over

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Panel Discussion & Book Launch

Thursday 19 October 2017, 5 – 8PM
Rooms SG1&2, Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road, Cambridge CB3 9DT

Help artist Robert Good celebrate the launch of A New Dictionary of Art – a new approach to an old problem.

Robert will be joined by philosopher Professor Derek Matravers, artist John Clark and designer Jane Glennie for a lively and informative discussion about his project to collate over 3000 definitions of Art from the Internet. Includes a short reading, book signing, and refreshments.

Please book a place for this event via Eventbrite

A New Dictionary of Art – One word: 3,000 definitions.

“Both splendid and splendidly bonkers” – Professor Derek Matravers, philosopher

Robert Good, A New Dictionary of ArtThe definition of ‘Art’ has exercised philosophers, artists, and art-lovers for centuries, yet we are no nearer a consensus of what in fact it is. The one term not found in most dictionaries of art is the term ‘Art’ itself.

A New Dictionary of Art takes a refreshingly alternative approach, allowing you to take your pick from over 3,000 definitions compiled from the internet via chat-rooms and discussion forums as well as from more established authorities, artists and institutions. Passions run high as formal sits alongside informal, jocular alongside vulgar: all are left to fight it out on the page.

Each entry is carefully alphabetised and has been valiantly edited and annotated for accuracy and completeness to the point of absurdity. By retaining the format and formality of a dictionary in this way, A New Dictionary of Art acknowledges with humour our continuing desire for absolute knowledge and certainty.

 “Weirdly but powerfully provocative… one of the most useful things I’ve read in a while” – John Clark, painter

Panelists:

  • Robert Good is an artist based in Cambridge UK and Masters graduate from Cambridge School of Art, ARU
  • Derek Matravers is a philosopher of aesthetics at the Open University and a former Research Fellow at Darwin College, Cambridge.
  • John Clark is a painter and maker based in Cambridge UK.
  • Jane Glennie is an artist and typographer and founder of Peculiarity Press.

[vimeo 231847106 w=640 h=360]

Radical/Basic/Actual

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1970s Experiments in Print Media

Felipe Ehrenberg, Latin American Artists and the Beau Geste Press

10 October – 14 November 2016

In Association with Cambridge University Library and Trinity College

Curator: Erica Segre

The Mexican mixed media, conceptual and performance artist Felipe Ehrenberg and Martha Hellion co-founded the Beau Geste Press collective in Devon (1970-1976) with English artist and art historian David Mayor. It became one of the most influential avant-garde independent presses of the post-war period and is regarded by art historians and contemporary artists as one of the most significant transnational collaborative projects of the 1970s.

This exhibition showcases a collection of these provocative and original limited editions often made using unconventional materials and ‘arte povera’ techniques of production and distribution in an unusual variety of small-scale formats. It explores the legacy of indiscipline of the BGP’s uniquely communal and discrepant artefacts.

Flowers of Earth and Blood

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Lala Meredith-Vula

3 October – 23 December 2016

Lala Meredith-Vula is showing a series of photographs that mark her personal journey of rediscovering her roots and her own identity during the past 25years, including the aftermath of war in Bosnia and Kosovo. Lala will also feature works from the blood feud reconciliation movement in Kosova from 1990 – 1991 and the incredible time in the Kosovar history when people decided to bring an end to blood feuds and to stop the killing which lasted for over a hundred years and sometimes until all men of the two involved families were killed. The blood feuds were often influenced by the fifteenth-century canon of Lek Dukagjini, a set of traditional Albanian laws.

Lala Meredith-Vula was born in Sarajevo in 1966, to an Albanian father and English mother, and came to Britain in the 1970s. She studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths’ College, London University (1985/88) and was awarded a Yugoslav scholarship at Pristina University, Kosova (1988/90). Her first show was in Damien Hirst’s landmark exhibition “Freeze”, London (1988) that is famous for launching the YBA Young British Artists. She has exhibited at the Venice Biennale (1999 and 2007) representing Albania, as well as nationally and internationally with many solo shows including at the Photographers’ Gallery London, in Germany, Italy, Albania, and in numerous group shows in the UK, USA, and China.

Bond steel NATO BASE 2006
Bond steel NATO BASE 2006

This exhibition is accompanied by the Festival of Ideas symposium Politics through the Archives of Photography, Film and Art which takes place on 22 October 2016 from 2-3pm in the Alison Richard Building.

 

 

 

New Exhibitions

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Peter Hawksby – Personal Space

‘Object Object’ group installation

Both exhibitions run from 11 July – 25 SEPTEMBER 2016
The Private Views for both exhibitions take place on Wednesday 13 July from 5.30 – 7.30PM

Peter Hawksby‘s exhibition ‘Personal Space’ is showing works which mark a return to a style he first adopted in late 1960’s, using acrylic paint on watercolour paper, applied with a blade. The works explore the spatial tensions between the illusion of the design and the paper as object. The colour schemes are an intuitive response to the design and evolve as the work progresses until they are in harmony with the structure.

Peter Hawksby

Object Object brings together objects, made and found, to reflect the everyday lives of its seven participating women artists. Working in isolation from each other, the women came together to curate the objects, in the expectation that shared concerns and experience would lead to common themes, and it is these that have informed the grouping of objects. The artists have been brought together by Jane Hellings.

On Saturday 10 September Object Object will host a multi-disciplinary symposium; Objectification and Gendered Violence, bringing together frontline workers from Women’s Aid and Cambridge Rape Crisis, with visual artists, performers, poets, filmmakers and musicians to explore the role played by objectification, in the perpetuation of gendered violence. Further details will be available on our website shortly.

Jill Eastland‘s work is research based, usually growing from a social, political or environmental issue. She enjoys collecting things and these collections are often incorporated into her work. Jill is founder of Rebel Arts, presents on Rebel Arts Women’s Radio and organises Eastern Bloco Arts Area at Strawberry Fair.

Jane Hellings often works collaboratively, sometimes with Up t’Arts women artist’s collective and also with Rebel Arts, on acts of creative resistance.  From her studio at home, she uses low-tech processes and everyday materials to make work about daily life. She has a first class honours degree in textiles from Bretton Hall, Leeds University and an MA in Print from Cambridge School of Art.

Susie Johnson graduated from Cambridge School of Art with a first class honours degree in fine art. From her studio at Cambridge Artworks she creates clever, quirky work in which she explores the taxonomy of shape, the mathematical treatment of movement and the tension between nomothetic and idiographic views of the world.

Alison O’Neill has a BA in Fine Art from Falmouth College of Art and an MA in Feminist Theory from Leeds University, where she studied with Griselda Pollock. Her concerns are class, gender and motherhood and her work incorporates drawing, installation and video.

Eirini Kartsaki is teaching fellow at Queen Mary University of London. Eirini writes and devises performances which she shows nationally and internationally and is currently working on a book entitled Repetition in Performance: Returns and Invisible Forces. She also makes things, primarily, but not exclusively, as performance props.

Jane Waterhouse graduated from Cambridge School of Art with a first class honours degree in fine art, she then added to this, a distinction in MA Print. Jane combines traditional techniques with her own innovative processes to make exquisite prints. Her subject matter; daily soundings, wayfaring, belonging, tokens, imbue her work with a poetic quality.

Rachel Wooller is interested in the power of materiality. She likes to juxtapose materials to create visual metaphors, which explore the structures we are bound by. She is drawn to issues of power, yearning and the intangible.

“365 POR LOS 43”

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Leaflet Installation
Room 204, Centre of Latin American Studies
Alison Richard Building
24 November – 31 March 2016

This exhibition can be visited by appointment only, please contact Julie Coimbra (jac46@hermes.cam.ac.uk) if you wish to see it.

This installation brings together two poetic, political, and print projects resulting from the recent re-inauguration of La Casa del Hijo del Ahuizote in Mexico City. Today transformed into an exhibition space for the archive of anarchist Ricardo Flores Magón and a print workshop, La Casa del Hijo del Ahuizote was once the editorial office of an iconic satirical magazine from late nineteenth-century Mexico, known for its stand against the Porfirio Díaz dictatorship (1884-1911). Lending continuity to the critical praxis of this much-persecuted publication (whose contributors were often imprisoned and even murdered), today’s La Casa del Hijo del Ahuizote has joined the local and international movement of solidarity with the 43 disappeared students from the teacher-training school “Raúl Isidro Burgos” in Iguala, Guerrero. The photographs on display here have been taken by five photojournalists (Italians Giulia Iacolutti and Valentino Bellini, Mexicans Mauricio Palos and Heriberto Paredes, and Canadian Brett Gundlock) who have closely followed the aftermath of the “Iguala events”. To mark a year after the disappearance of the students, these pictures were reproduced, and then exhibited horizontally for people to take copies, at La Casa del Hijo del Ahuizote using a modern version of the mimeograph, called the Risograph, that allows cheap mass-scale image reproduction. Alongside these photographs, the poetic and textual works exhibited here have resulted from the decontextualized quotation of some of the writings of the original founders of the magazine El Hijo de Ahuizote. In light of the human rights situation in contemporary Mexico, these texts are likely to have deeply unsettling resonances for today’s publics.

Fulcrum Group

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8 FEBRUARY –  1 APRIL 2016
ALL FLOORS OF THE ARB
PRIVATE VIEW 5 FEBRUARY 2016, 6.00 – 8.00 PM

‘Fulcrum’ presents the work of three painters from Cambridge. Their work ranges from the abstract to the figurative, from the gesture to the construct. Together they balance on the tipping point between representation and abstraction. Here we find more or less painterly ways of working, experiments in pictorial possibility that test the image against the abstract potential of the material and history of paint. In bringing the work together in one show we hope to provide an opportunity for viewers to explore this territory with us.

HELEN LATHAM
MIRANDA BOULTON
JOHN CLARK

Mella Shaw – Force Majeure

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15 January – 1 April 2016, ARB atrium
Private View 5 February 2016, 6.00 – 8.00 pm

Force Majeure, French for a superior or irresistible power, is a term used in the writing of legal contracts, to free both parties from obligation in the face of extraordinary natural events or disasters, from war to hurricanes or earthquakes.

The ceramic work Mella Shaw is showing in this exhibition is concerned with moments of transition, tipping points, thresholds and edges. All the work is painstakingly hand-built from small component parts of colourfully stained porcelain. Shaw exploits porcelain’s material quality of pyroplasticity, where the clay body sags, warps or bends in the kiln when fired at high temperature. She is particularly interested in the moment when clay vitrifies into ceramics, where an object loses its order and momentarily gives way to chaos and chance, in the dark behind the closed doors of a kiln. The resulting forms are reminiscent of otherworldly ruins, caught on the verge of collapse.

Mella is Exhibitions Manager at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, a role she combines with her own practice as an artist/maker, and with teaching and writing about ceramics. In 2013 she graduated with Distinction from the MA Ceramics and Glass, Royal College of Art, London, and was profiled in Crafts magazine, Ceramic Review and Axisweb. Residencies include three months at Konstfack in Stockholm, Sweden, and a year as artist-in-residence and tutor at University of the Creative Arts, Farnham. Recent exhibitions include a solo exhibition at Kaolin Gallery, Stockholm, showing at both London and Milan Design Weeks and by Sarah Myerscough Gallery at STRARTA Art Fair, Saatchi Gallery, London. Mella exhibited at the British Ceramics Biennial 2015 as one of 11 artists selected to represent the best of contemporary British ceramics in their centrepiece AWARD show. She has recently been featured in Wallpaper* magazine and on BBC news as well as being selected by Culture24 as one of “10 artists you should be collecting now”.

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