Past Series: 09-18

The Transmission lecture series takes as its theme for 2017 to 2018 the idea of the mutable artist. By this we intend a number of meanings or interpretations, including changeability, volatility, inconstancy, resilience, versatility, and mobility. We ask what characteristics determine artistic production, or even––following last year’s question of ‘who is an artist’ ––determine the production of an artist as subject or agent. Deriving from the Latin mutabilis,from mutare––to change, mutability suggests the capacity to move, to adapt to new conditions, to possess a value that is changeable. There is sense of uncertainty, as opposing forces of change may meet, matching or negating each other, offering twists and turns. Identity may be unstable, forming in relation to other identities, unfixed or invented. There may be monstrous forms and images (mutations), or heroic ones, through and beyond the self. Mutability allows the imagination and its constructs to roam and reassemble. The artists invited this year work in multiple capacities.

DOWNLOAD the programme for 2017 here.

The Transmission lecture series for 2106 to 2017 asks who is an artist. This is not a faint echo of Joseph’s Beuys’s famous statement, reiterated endlessly, that everyone is an artist (by which in any case, Beuys intended to suggest that everyone could apply a bit of creative thinking in whatever field they work, rather than that sort of thinking belonging solely to those who call themselves artists). We ask if it is an act of self-identification to name oneself an artist, or if it is exteriorised, that one is named as such by others. We ask if one learns to call oneself an artist, or if the title precedes the act, even produces it, as though an autopoesis, in response to or as part of an environment or system (or what might occur or be invested beyond this). We ask if to be an artist is more than a business term, one produced by and subject to market forces; if it is more than a job or less than a job or something unlike a job. We ask if it demands a measure of skill, of technical competence, and to what extent this is contingent on cultural determination (and likewise, we suppose, for terms such as beauty). We ask what lies in a name and in a title.

DOWNLOAD the programme for 2016 here. For 2017 here.

This year’s transmission lecture series takes up the places of art, its various locations and possibilities for location, which may be more than the linear trajectory of studio, gallery, collection. Perhaps art happens anywhere, everywhere, in the many interstices and detours between site of production and valorisation by institution. Place, the place of art, may be as unpredictable as its form or content. Art may happen in language or in silence, in gardens or bedrooms, in public exchange and political engagement; we may be obliged to look for it, even finding it where it is not.
DOWNLOAD the programmes for 2015 here and 2016 here.

At the end of Gustave Flaubert’s great novel about love and history, A Sentimental Education, from which we shamelessly steal part of our title, the protagonist Frédéric Moreau and his oldest school friend Deslauriers reminisce about their adolescence. They remember going to a brothel together, the anticipation and excitement. Once there, thinking that the laughing prostitutes were making fun of him,Frédéric bolted from the place. But in the unconsummated experience, there lies the possibility of fantasy and happiness:

‘That was the best we ever got!’ saidFrédéric.
‘Yes, perhaps so, indeed! It was the best time we ever had,’ said Deslauriers.

Could this be the model for learning how one becomes an artist: A lack of satisfaction that provides a drive? An expectation of knowledge that is never fully imparted? The imaginative reconstruction of the past?
We asked how artists become and why, how this is learnt (and unlearnt), how it is imagined and exemplified. In an era where the ‘artist as personality’ may no longer be thought to be of interest or instruction to understanding art, we look at the external forces and inner structures that produce artist-figures and artistic capacity. What type of fantasy is at work here and how much does the decision to become an artist count in becoming one? Though our students may grumble now at certain of the things we expect them to do, they will soon go on to say (joining every other former art school graduate): ‘Oh, how I miss art school, how I miss the crits – it was truly the best time of my life!’

DOWNLOAD the full programme and biographies for 2014 here and 2015 here.

From October 2012 to March 2013 Sheffield Hallam’s Fine Art Transmission Lecture Series was a platform to address the theme of AGENCY (Labour, Work, Action), developed in collaboration with Art Sheffield 2013.

The economic value of work, labour and art have been much discussed throughout the last three centuries and have been critical drivers in the thinking around Art Sheffield festivals over the last decade. The last four years have accelerated new interests in these discussions as a restructuring of international financial interests intersects with communities lived experience across the globe. Sheffield is not unique, nor is it the same as anywhere else. People, place, and history in relation to shifting economic values remains a central interest for the curatorial team developing Art Sheffield and the collaboration with the Transmission Lecture Series is a marrying of concerns and conversations in our developing understanding of work and labour.

Each session was hosted by an artist currently teaching in Fine Art, Sheffield Hallam University, or a member of the Art Sheffield consortium.

AGENCY (Labour, Work, and Action)
The political theorist Hannah Arendt refused to be called a philosopher, for philosophy, she said, deals with the singular, while she addressed the plural, that humans not man inhabit the world. She proposes that freedom is constructed in community, in common space, and it is associative, performative, and public (which we saw in the events of Tahrir Square in Egypt, for example, and we may also look to models such as the Paris Commune of 1871). In her book The Human Condition (1958), she develops her theory of political action, drawing out the distinctions between what is social and what is political, and that which lies at the heart of our lecture series: what is labour, what is work, what is action (and thus, how is agency achieved, the capacity to act, to make choices, undetermined by supposedly natural forces).

Arendt proposes three important human activities: labour, work, and political action. She is as materialist as Karl Marx: labour is a biological activity, a vital necessity operating under constraint. The goal of production is to produce, and there is a constant exchange of objects. It is never-ending, consumed quickly, making a slave of the labourer. Work may be thought of differently, most usefully with the term ‘œuvre’: as what lasts or remains, as ‘technique’ and poiesis, as what is not spent or wasted and is transmitted; a ‘common world’ where life unfolds and objects endure beyond the act of their making. Transmission, in Arendt’s sense, is a struggle against death, and thus already a form of liberty. It is, one might say, the distinction between what is kept and what is thrown away. Yet this freedom is only partial, for work is still instrumental, determined by causes and ends. While Arendt has been criticised for overly restricted characterisations, her distinction between praxis and poiesis (between action and making) may help to lead us to new formulations of identity and meaning. To work and labour, then, like Arendt, we will add an essential action, when ‘something new is started which cannot be expected from whatever happened before’, and frame these by AGENCY, asking what role might be played by the artist or work of art.

Spring 2013
DOWNLOAD the full Spring 2013 programme and biographies HERE

29/03/ 2013: Guest: Susan Collis, Host: Julie Westerman

05/02/2013: Guest: Margarita Gluzberg, Host: Lesley Sanderson

12/02/2013: Guest: Ella Gibbs, Host: TC McCormack

19/02/2013 Guest: John Smith, Host: Rose Butler

26/02/2013 Guest: Lucy Reynolds, Host: Michelle Atherton

05/03/2013 Guest: Patricia Lyons, Host: tbc

PLEASE NOTE THAT THE ABOVE IS A PROGRAMME CHANGE

Patricia Lyons works with live and recorded sound, music and performance. She is the founder and director of the art and music label LoveHowlMuse. She writes and lectures on art, performance, punk and digital activism. In 2010 Lyons choreographed May 28 at Marka Studios in Florence, Italy. She has written and performed soundtracks, scores and voice-overs for films, including a series of science films for the Wellcome Trust on genetic research (2009); a music portrait of Rainer Werner Fassbinder for Camden Arts Centre and the Arnolfini (2006–7); and in Look What They Done to My Song Matt’s Gallery (2008) and Love in a Cold Climate (2005), both by Michael Curran. She is currently working on an album entitled Refugees of the Opium Wars for release in 2012.

12/03/2013 Guest: Chris Kraus, Host: Jaspar Joseph-Lester, with Alison J. Carr and Dale Holmes
Autumn 2012
DOWNLOAD the full Autumn 2012 programme and biographies HERE

16/10/ 2012: An introduction to Transmission, Art Sheffield, Site Gallery, and Fine Art staff

23/10/ 2012: Guest: Megan Cotts.Host: Alison J. Carr

30/10/ 2012: Guest: Francesco Finizio. Host: Sharon Kivland

13/11/2012: Guest: Arnaud Desjardin. Host: Chloë Brown

20/11/ 2012: Guest: Armin Chodinski. Host: Jaspar Joseph-Lester

27/11/2012: Guest: Pavel Büchler. Host: Hester Reeve

4/12/2012: Guest: Mikhail Karikis. Host: Laura Sillars

2011-12 Transmission: CATASTROPHE
We will consider the grand narratives of history and angels, death and destruction, brutal acts and events, memory, magic, and cruelty, ruins, resistance, and remorse. We will ask in what times we live and how works of art may address our present belonging; what are contemporary tendencies in art production and how may artistic invention disrupt and reframe our present – or its dominant descriptions; and in what some call the end times (ecological crisis, social ruptures, economic inequality), how can artists – or works of art – confront the future, ‘to begin from the beginning, over and over again’.

We may wish to write it differently, but ‘time is too short. And I have run out of paper.’ (Peter Weiss, The Aesthetics of Resistance)

19/10/2011: Introduction to Transmission: Jaspar Joseph-Lester and Sharon Kivland
Screening: Renzo Martens, Episode 3: Enjoy Poverty (2008).
26/10/2011: Guest: John Cussans. Host: Jaspar Joseph-Lester
09/11/2011: Guest: Terry Atkinson. Host: Hester Reeve
16/11/2011: Guest: Zoë Beloff. Host: Laura Sillars
We would like to acknowledge the support and collaboration of Site Gallery, Sheffield, for this lecture. Zoe Beloff’s new commission and exhibition,The Infernal Dream of Mutt and Jeff, will be premiered at Site Gallery, 18 November 2011 to 21 January 2012. Please go to www.sitegallery.org/exhibitions-events for more information, including opening times.

23/11/2011: Guest: Federica Bueti. Host: Jaspar Joseph-Lester
30/11/2011: Guest: Giorgio Sadotti. Host: Sharon Kivland
07/12/2011: Guest: Ian Saville. Host: Sharon Kivland 25/01/2012: Guest: Mark Fisher. Host: Jaspar Joseph-Lester
01/02/2012: Guest: Eva Weinmayr. Host: Nick Thurston 08/02/2012:Guest: Terry Atkinson. Host: Hester Reeve
22/02/2012: Guest: Emma Stibbon. Host: Julie Westerman 29/02/2012: Guest: Kerstin Honeit. Host: Alison J. Carr
07/02/2012: Guests: Harrison & Wood. Host: Chloë Brown
14/03/2012: Guest: Giorgio Sadotti*. Host: Sharon Kivland
21/03/2012: Guest: Diann Bauer. Host: Gary Simmonds

• Following each lecture, a smaller, more informal discussion took place, chaired first by MA Fine Art student Keith Barley, then taken over by PhD student Bryan Eccleshall. Some of our guest have kindly agreed that we may publish these recordings (which are unedited) on the Audio/Visual page.

Catastrophe Biographies
Wednesday 19th October 2011

Screening: Renzo Martens, Episode 3: Enjoy Poverty (2008).

Renzo Martens is a Dutch artist based in Brussels. His first feature Episode 3: Enjoy Poverty (2008) opened the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam and is now circulating in both the film festival and gallery circuits. Martens travelled around the Congo for two years filming the Western ‘poverty industry’. In the film he launches an emancipation programme in which he makes the Congolese aware of the economic value of their most lucrative export product: filmed poverty.

Sharon Kivland has described her practice as one of stupid refinement, trapped in archives, libraries, the arcades, and the intersection of public political action and private subjectivity. She paid her son an enormous amount of money to fill old school exercises books with the indexical references to mother/son relations in Freud’s works, a work exhibited at the Freud Museum, London, this summer. At the moment, she is completing a set of appendices to Freud’s holidays, on his weather, dining, hotels, and shopping. She is also working her way through the twenty novels of Zola’s Rougon-Macquart cycle. Kivland is represented by DomoBaal, London, and Galerie Bugdahn und Kaimer, Düsseldorf, and will have solo exhibitions at the latter and at Galerie des Petits Carreaux, Paris, next year.

Wednesday 26 October 2011
John Cussans has a multi-disciplinary arts practice which combines video and image making, critical and creative writing, and alternative arts pedagogy. He completed his doctoral thesis, Revolting Subjects and Epidemic Disorder: Georges Bataille, Heterology, and Broadcast Horror, at the Royal College of Art in 1995. In 2009 he participated in the first Ghetto Biennale in Haiti where he produced a video work entitled Invisible Mirrors, which documented how UN troops ritualistically bound an effigy of a boar in the downtown area of Port-au-Prince after the 2004 ousting of President Aristide. Following the massive earthquake that struck Haiti in January 2010 he sent a flip-cam and microphone to Ti Moun Rezistans (a collective of young artists from the Grand Rue area of Port-au-Prince), so that they could document their experiences of life after the quake and share them internationally via the Internet. In December 2011 he will be participating in the 2nd Ghetto Biennale working in collaboration with Ti Moun Rezistans.

Jaspar Joseph-Lester’s work explores the role that images play in determining urban planning, social space, and everyday praxis. Recent work has focused on the conflicting ideological frameworks embodied in urban regeneration projects. 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. He is currently developing a new photo essay titled ‘Some Berlin Casinos’ for the next issue of Collapse. He is author of Revisiting the Bonaventure Hotel (Copy Press, 2009), co-editor of Episode: Pleasure and Persuasion in Lens-based Media (Artwords, 2008), a director of the Curating Video research group, and Reader in Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University.

Wednesday 9 November 2011
Terry Atkinson was a founding member of ‘Art and Language’ (1968), widely considered to be one of the first, most influential and controversial conceptual art groups (Joseph Kosuth was also a member and the group was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1986). Atkinson, whose solo works are shown internationally, including inthe Venice Biennale 1984, is generally regarded as a painter but his practice is first and foremost that of an artist critically engaged with the foundations of our cultural assumptions about what art is,creatively breathing oxygen into the much overlooked and contentious issue of the ‘artist subject’.

Hester Reeve navigates her complex relationship as an artist with the world through her conceptual persona HRH.the. Her practice encompasses drawing, live art, philosophy and sculpture. Public showings of her work include former Randolph Street Gallery, Chicago, LIVE Biennale, Vancouver,The Art Center of Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok and most recently the Women’s Library Gallery, London. She has co-authored three publications, most notablyLibkovice: Zda? B?h(DIVUS 97), a three-year dialogic exposé of post-revolutionary Czechoslovakia. Reeve also collaborates with Olivia Plender under the auspices of the Emily Davison Lodge and is Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University.

Wednesday 16 November 2011
Zoë Beloff works with a wide range of media including film, video, installation and drawing. Sheconsiders herself a medium, an interface between the living and the dead, the real and the imaginary.Her work has been featured in international exhibitions and screenings; venues include the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Freud Dream Museum in St. Petersburg, and the Pompidou Center. Her most recently completed work is the exhibition, The Infernal Dream of Mutt and Jeff, which will premiere at Site Gallery. This project continues her exploration of what might be called ‘the dream life of technology’.She teaches at Queens College in New York.

Laura Sillars is Director at Site Gallery and Honorary Senior Research Fellow (CAVA) at University of Liverpool. Before taking on her role at Site last March, she was Senior Curator for the Collaboration Programme at FACT, Lecturer at The Open University and curator for Public Programmes at Tate Liverpool.

Wednesday 23 November 2011
Federica Bueti is a Berlin-based writer, curator, and researcherinterested in practices of resistance and improvisation that enable new forms of imaginative political representation. Bueti is founder and editor-in-chief of …ment. journal for contemporary culture, art and politics (http://www.journalment.org).Curated projects include: Wasteful Illuminations, a performance by Tris Vonna-Michell, Marino Marini Museum, Florence; Camere #10 VOCATION, RAM, Radio Arte Mobile, Rome in collaboration with CAC Brétigny/City Musem Lubjljana/De Vleeshal Museum, Middelburg; The Jerusalem Syndrome, Al-Ma’mal, Foundation for Contemporary Art, Jerusalem, 2009, co-curated with Jack Persekian and Nina Möntmann. Bueti has published extensively on contemporary art and related philosophical issues. Bueti is currently studying for a PhD in the Curatorial Knowledge Programme at Goldsmiths College.

Wednesday 30 November 2011
Giorgio Sadotti is a conceptual artist based in London. Sadotti’s practice includes sculpture, sound, performance, collage, and photography. He seems to defy the conventions of art world, and in the past has opted to be anonymously referred to as ‘The Artist’. He has exhibited recently at Tate Britain London, Milton Keynes Gallery, and Amden Switzerland. His works range from compiled found audio samples, naked male and female performers, a horse trainer whip-cracker, a ten-metre-high bare Christmas tree, the partially carpeted floor of a gallery, pages from a book laid out on a gigantic light box, and a new design for a useable font. His work is held in the collection of the Tate and the British Council Art Collection. In 2003 he won a Paul Hamlyn Award for visual arts. Sadotti says, ‘I want things to be easy. Simple. By utilising the skills, techniques and abilities of others it allows me a sort of freedom; to do nothing.’
Wednesday 7 December 2011
Ian Savilleis a ‘socialist magician’, among other things. He says of his act, ‘whereasDavid Copperfieldis content with little tricks like making theStatue of Libertydisappear, I aim at the much more ambitious goal of making International Capitalism and exploitation disappear (though I haven’t quite succeeded yet)’. He was born in London’s East End andbegan conjuring at the age of 11. He studied Drama at Exeter University and has worked in political, community, and forum theatre. He started developing ‘socialist magic’ in 1979. One of his shows features a ventriloquist’s dummy of Bertolt Brecht. He has a PhD fromCity University, Londonfor his thesis on political theatre in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s, and teaches part-time on theatre courses atMiddlesex University.

Guest: Mark Fisher
Mark Fisher writes regularly for Frieze, New Statesman, Sight & Sound, and The Wire, where he was acting deputy editor for a year. A founder member of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, he now teaches at Goldsmiths University and the City Literary Institute in London. Mark Fisher has been writing an acclaimed blog as k-punk, focusing on culture, especially music and literature, and politics. He is author of Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative? (Zero Books, 2009).

Host: Jaspar Joseph-Lester
Jaspar Joseph-Lester’s work explores the role that images play in determining urban planning, social space, and everyday praxis. Recent work has focused on the conflicting ideological frameworks embodied in urban regeneration projects. 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. He is currently developing a new photo essay titled ‘Some Berlin Casinos’ for the next issue of Collapse. He is author of Revisiting the Bonaventure Hotel (Copy Press, 2009), co-editor of Episode: Pleasure and Persuasion in Lens-based Media (Artwords, 2008), a director of the Curating Video research group, and Reader in Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University.

Guest: Eva Weinmayr
Eva Weinmayr’s practice as artist, lecturer and co-director of AND publishing takes many forms, from sculpture and installation to writing, film, and editing and publishing conceptually driven artists’ books. She is interested in systems of direct communication and in the way that re-contextualisations of appropriated materials can have a subversive effect. Currently she is collaborating with artist Andrea Francke on The Piracy Project, an international exhibition and publishing project exploring acts of cultural piracy and creative modes of reproduction. Recent projects include The Piracy Project, Miss Read, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, New York Art Book Fair, MoMA PS1, The Institute of Mental Health Is Burning, Newport Museum, all in 2011.

Host: Nick Thurston
Nick Thurston is the author of Reading the Remove of Literature (2006), Historia Abscondita (An Index of Joy), and co-author of a third (pocket)book, THE DIE IS CAST (2009), plus numerous journal articles and artists’ pages. He has exhibited and performed internationally, and his editions and art works are owned by public and private collections around the world, including Tate, London, the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, and the Bibliothèque Nationale (Paris). Since 2006 he has been editor of the independent artists’ book publishing imprint information as material, with whom he is currently Writer in Residence at the Whitechapel Gallery, London.

Guest: Terry Atkinson
Terry Atkinson was a founding member of ‘Art and Language’ (1968) widely considered to be one of the first, most influential and controversial conceptual art groups (Joseph Kosuth was also a member and they were nominated for the Turner Prize in 1986). Atkinson, whose solo works are shown internationally, including the Venice Biennale 1984, is generally regarded as a painter but his practice is first and foremost that of an artist critically engaged with the foundations of our cultural assumptions around what art is, and creatively breathing oxygen into the much overlooked and contentious issue of the ‘artist subject.’

Host: Hester Reeve
Hester Reevenavigates her complex relationship as an artist with the world through her conceptual persona HRH.the. Her practice encompasses drawing, live art, philosophy, and sculpture. Public showings of her work include former Randolph Street Gallery, Chicago, LIVE Biennale, Vancouver,The Art Center of Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok and most recently the Women’s Library Gallery, London. She has co-authored three publications, most notablyLibkovice: Zdar Bu?h(DIVUS 97), a three-year dialogic exposé of post-revolutionary Czechoslovakia. Reeve also collaborates with Olivia Plender under the auspices of the Emily Davison Lodge and is Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University.

Guest: Emma Stibbon
Emma Stibbon’s most recent work concerns the dialogue between two periods; that of Ancient Rome and Mussolini’s Fascist plans for the city. She addresses how architecture is appropriated to lend credibility to new regimes. Recent solo exhibitions include: the Stadtmuseum, Berlin; upstairs berlin; R O O M, London; and the Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge. Other projects include the Stiftung Federkiel residency at the Spinnerei, Leipzig, the 4th International Gyumri Biennale, Armenia. Emma Stibbon was Derek Hill scholar at the British School at Rome in 2010. She is Senior Lecturer Fine Art Printmaking at the University of Brighton.

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. The enquiry lends a cool detachment to the approaching apocalyptical events. Recent projects include working with Stephen Hüsch for LoBe Berlin, developing work in the gallery for Drawing Space 2010. Commissions include: Thinly veiled, Grand Opera House, Belfast; Illuminated Carpet, ‘Enlightenment’, Durham. Exhibitions include: ‘Inter…’, Harris Museum and Art Gallery, 2004; and ‘Afterwards’, Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre, 2009.

Guest: Kerstin Honeit
Kerstin Honeit lives and works in Berlin. She has shown her video and installation work internationally since 2006. In 2010 she received the Master-Student title (Meisterschülerin) from the Weißensee international solo exhibition Ambiguity is my Weapon at Gallery 400, Chicago. She is this year’s scholarship holder of the Berlin artist postgraduate programme: Goldrausch Künstlerinnenprogramm.

Host: Alison J. Carr
Alison J. Carr is an artist, PhD student, and lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University. She completed her MFA at the California Institute University in 2001. She works in photography, video, performance, and writing. Her research, How do I look?, is lead by her showgirl desire.

Guests: Harrison & Wood
John Wood and Paul Harrison have been working collaboratively since 1993, producing single screen and installation-based video works. Their work investigates the relation between the human figure and architecture, developed through short form video (20 seconds – 3 minutes) with particular emphasis on actions formulated and resolved within a given duration. Each work holds to an internal ‘logic’, action related to duration. In this ‘logical world’ (architectural space, the gallery space, the business office, the laboratory), action is allowed to happen for no logical reason. A tension exists between the environment and its inhabitant, play is encouraged and influences are intentionally mixed – art history, slapstick, Open University instruction, drawing, science. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at the Contemporary Arts Museum,Houston, Gallery Martine Aboucaya, Paris, and Von Bartha, Chesa, Switzerland, in 2011.

Host: Chloë Brown
Chloë Brown uses film, found objects, sculptural objects, and taxidermy to make work that is a precarious balance between threat and vulnerability. Recent exhibitions include: The Hum, LoBe Gallery, Berlin, and Sheffield Institute of Arts Gallery, Sheffield (2010–11), films and sound pieces made collaboratively with Ines Lechleitner during their residency at the Tiergarten Berlin; The International Seminar on Art and Nature, Goethe Institute, Sao Paulo, Brazil, (2011); The Animal Gaze, Unit 2 Gallery, London, The Roland Levinsky Gallery, Plymouth and Sheffield Institute of Arts Gallery, Sheffield (2009–11); AbbaraCadabra at the Mardin Biennial, Turkey (2010); Tier-Perspektiven at Georg-Kolbe-Museum, Berlin (2009;) and Tier-Werden at NGBK, Berlin (2009). She was commissioned to make a film, The Hyperborean, for the Sheffield Pavilion at the Istanbul Biennial (2009). She is Course Leader of Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University and a member of The Research Group for Artists Publications.

Guest: Giorgio Sadotti
Giorgio Sadotti is a conceptual artist based in London. Sadotti’s practice includes sculpture, sound, performance, collage, and photography. He seems to defy the conventions of art world, and in the past has opted to be anonymously referred to as ‘The Artist’. He has exhibited recently at Tate Britain London, Milton Keynes Gallery, and Amden Switzerland. His works range from compiled found audio samples, naked male and female performers, a horse trainer whip-cracker, a ten-metre-high bare Christmas tree, the partially carpeted floor of a gallery, pages from a book laid out on a gigantic light box, and a new design for a useable font. His work is held in the collection of the Tate and the British Council Art Collection. In 2003 he won a Paul Hamlyn Award for visual arts. Sadotti says: ‘I want things to be easy. Simple. By utilising the skills, techniques and abilities of others it allows me a sort of freedom; to do nothing.’

Host: Sharon Kivland
Sharon Kivland has described her practice as one of stupid refinement, trapped in archives, libraries, the arcades, and the intersection of public political action and private subjectivity. She paid her son an enormous amount of money to fill old school exercises books with the indexical references to mother/son relations in Freud’s works, a work exhibited at the Freud Museum, London, in 2011. At the moment, she is completing a set of appendices to Freud’s holidays, on his w in 2011. eather, dining, hotels, and shopping. She is also working her way through the twenty novels of Zola’s Rougon-Macquart cycle. Kivland is represented by DomoBaal, London, and Galerie Bugdahn und Kaimer, Düsseldorf, and will have solo exhibitions there, and at Galerie des Petits Carreaux, Paris, in 2011.

Guest: Diann Bauer
Diann Bauer lives and works in London and Berlin. Solo exhibitions include Necrotroph-Optopolis, Paradise Row, London, 2007 and Bludgeonerator, The Showroom, London, 2006. Commissions include Sabine Descent, a site-specific wall drawing commissioned through the Contemporary Art Society Consultancy for Pictet Collection, London, 2009, and Harlow Temple of Utopias, in collaboration with Roman Vasseur, sited in Harlow, Essex, 2008.

Host: Gary Simmonds
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: formal abstraction, beauty, decoration, and disorder. He has exhibited work both nationally and internationally, including solo shows at Laure Genillard, London, De March and Solbiati, Milan, One in the Other, and Primo Alonso, London. Group shows include ‘ Fabric ’, Abbot Hall, and his work was selected to be part of ‘unpicked and dismantled’, an exhibition representing the UK in the Textile ’07 Lithuania.

Following each lecture (with one exception, when the interview took place at a later date) guest and host were interviewed by Keith Barley, then an MART student in his final year, who has been working on the archive and dialogue. An edited version of each interview may be downloaded from here and printed to fold into an attractive double-sided pamphlet. The pamphlets are designed by Jamie Crewe.

06/10/2010: Guests: Juneau Projects. Host: Alison J. Carr
13/10/2010: Guest: Maxa Zoller. Host: Jaspar Joseph-Lester
20/10/2011: Guest: Tony White. Host: Penny McCarthy
27/10/2010: Guest: Mark McGowan / Host: Becky Shaw
10/11/2010: Guest: Thomas Thwaites. Host: Jerome Harrington
24/11/2010: Guest: Craig Richardson. Host: Andrew Sneddon
08/12/2010: Guest: Marcia Farquhar. Host: Hester Reeve
13/12/2010: Guest: Sally O’Reilly. Host: Michelle Athert Sally O’Reilly’s film A Rolling Stone: The Dynamics of Cliché,
introduced by Michelle Atherton, was screened at Sheffield Hallam University on 17/11/2010.
02/02/2011: Guest: Laurent Tixador. Host: Sharon Kivland
09/02/2011: Guest: Ian Rawlinson. Host: Julie Westerman
16/02/2011: Guest: Oliver Zwink. Host: T C McCormack
23/02/2011: Guest: Oriana Fox. Host: Chloë Brown
09/03/2011: Guests: Cornford & Cross. Host: David Cotterrell
16/03/2011: Guest: WITH™. Interviewer: Keith Barley
23/03/2011: Guest: John Jordan. Host: Rose Butler

Provocation Biographies
Click on a date to view author biographies.

 Guest   Host     

2010

6 Oct Juneau Projects Alison J Carr
13 Oct Maxa Zoller Jaspar Joseph-Lester
20 Oct Tony White Penny McCarthy
27 Oct Mark McGowan Becky Shaw
10 Nov Thomas Thwaites Jerome Harrington
17 Nov Sally O’Reilly Michelle Atherton
24 Nov Craig Richardson Andrew Sneddon
1 Dec Phil Collins Yuen Fong Ling
8 Dec Marcia Farquhar Hester Reeve

2011

26 Jan Craig Fisher Gary Simmonds
2 Feb Laurent Tixador Sharon Kivland
9 Feb Ian Rawlinson Julie Westerman
16 Feb Oliver Zwink TC McCormack
23 Feb Oriana Fox Chloë Brown
9 Mar Cornford & Cross David Cotterrell
16 Mar WITH Lesley Sanderson
23 Mar John Jordan Rose Butler

Wednesday 6th October 2010

Guests: Juneau Projects
Juneau Projects was formed in 2001 by Philip Duckworth and Ben Sadler. Most of their work has participatory elements and involves projection, sound, music, animation, and installation. They are particularly interested in the rapidly increasing speed of technological development, its associated obsolescence, and how this sits with notions of handmade objects and artefacts. The proliferation of social networking websites has become important in their research, offering increased possibilities for the promotion and production of collaborative live works and performances. Juneau Projects had their first solo show in 2004 at The Showroom, London. In 2005 their work was selected for ‘British Art Show 6’ and they have subsequently exhibited at venues including: Tate Britain, London; Ikon Gallery, Birmingham; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; and Frankfurter Kunstverein. Juneau Projects were Stanley Picker Fine Art Fellows at Kingston University in 2007/8 and Wheatley Fellows at Birmingham City University in 2008/9.

Host: Alison J. Carr
Alison J Carr is a Fine Art PhD researcher at Sheffield Hallam University. She completed her MFA at the California Institute of the Arts in May 2009 and BA (Hons) Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University in 2001. She works in photography, video, performance and writing. Her research, How do I look?, aims to weave a narrative between feminism and femininity, new viewing strategies, the voice of the viewed, the relevancy of glamour, while trying to reconcile her personal desires to be a ‘showgirl’ and a ‘theorist’.

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Wednesday 13th October 2010
Guest: Maxa Zoller
Maxa Zoller is a lecturer in moving image art at Goldsmiths College, Sotheby’s Institute of Art and Kingston University. Maxa has a keen interest in marginal and interdisciplinary film practices, which focus around issues of the body, expanded cinema, the practice of female filmmakers, and experimental film from former Socialist countries. Since completing her Ph.D. on European experimental film in 2007 she has been organising workshops on moving image art at no.w.here, FACT, and Oslo Academy of Art. In her capacity as a film curator Maxa Zoller has presented experimental film screenings at Tate Modern, Tramway Glasgow, Berlin Kunstverein, Rekord Gallery in Oslo, and an exhibition of Chris Welsby’s work at Central St Martin’s. She is a regular contributor to Art Monthly. Her research is published in a number of academic journals and books, including the exhibition catalogue X-Screen: Film Installations and Actions in the 1960s and 1970s (MuMoK Vienna 2003). She has recently curated her first object-based exhibition All that Remains… The Teenagers of Socialism at Waterside Project Space in East London.

Host: Jaspar Joseph-Lester
Jaspar Joseph-Lester’s work explores the role that images play in determining urban planning, social space, and everyday praxis. Recent work has focused on the conflicting ideological frameworks embodied in urban regeneration projects. 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. Recent exhibitions include ‘Afterwards’ at the Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre, and ‘The Mortar of Distribution’, LoBe, Berlin. He is author of Revisiting the Bonaventure Hotel (Copy Press, 2009), co-editor of Episode: Pleasure and Persuasion in Lens-based Media (Artwords, 2008), and a director of the Curating Video research group. www.jasparjosephlester.com

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Wednesday 20th October 2010

Guest: Tony White
Tony White’s publications include the novels Foxy-T (Faber and Faber, 2003), and Charlieunclenorfolktango (Codex, 1999), two novellas and the travelogue Another Fool in the Balkans (Cadogan, 2006). He has undertaken writing residencies at the Science Museum, London (2008), and the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies (2009). He founded artists’ book imprint Piece of Paper Press in 1994 and worked for Arts Council England from 1999 to 2007, producing the Pioneers in Art and Science DVD series (with Ken McMullen, Gustav Metzger, and John Berger), and managing the Arts Council/AHRC Arts and Science Research Fellowships. Tony White is currently collaborating with Blast Theory on an interactive SMS drama for Channel 4. He is acting chair of the board of directors of London’s art radio station Resonance 104.4fm.
Tony White’s blog http://pieceofpaperpress.wordpress.com

Host: Penny McCarthy
Penny McCarthyworks with drawing and text. Recent works have appropriated texts that describe scientific discovery, historic travels, and the fictions of Borges. For the past few years her work has explored the imaginative space of the book in a series of pencil-drawn copies of texts. Her work has been exhibited extensively in Britain and abroad and supported by the Wellcome Trust, Arts Council England and the AHRC. Most recently she has exhibited work at the South London Gallery in the exhibition ‘Nothing is Forever’. She is Course Leader for the MA and M.Art in Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University.

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Wednesday 27th October 2010

Guest: Mark McGowan
According to JJ Charlesworth, Mark McGowan’s work ‘takes the ghost of performance art and uses it to haunt the mass media, and the art world, with their own bad faith. Thumbing his nose at those artists who affect an interest in social issues, without stepping too far out of their comfortable enclave, McGowan intentionally grabs at whatever constitutes public discussion at any given time, forcing us to reconsider the hypocrisy and self-flattery that underpins contemporary art’s indulgence of both the media and the ordinary public’. Live actions include leaving the tap running for a year at House, Camberwell, the ‘re-enactment’ of the London tube bombing, and eating a corgi.

Host: Becky Shaw
Becky Shaw’s work explores the relation between objects and people, and ideas of objectivity and subjectivity. Recent works include Getting Warm, a collection of drawings for the Korean International Art Fair 2010, and A: The Christmas Party, a durational radio work made with readers from Roehampton University, commissioned by Sheffield Contemporary Art Forum. An ongoing work, Aggregate, explores the materials to be used in the new Firstsite building, Colchester. New works stubbornly refuse to respond to place or external requirements, and involve myopic study of single objects including an extraordinary inlaid marble table and a secondhand vintage classics t-shirt.

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Wednesday 10th November 2010

Guest: Thomas Thwaites
Thomas Thwaites is a designer whose work examines how technology, science, and economics interact with trends, fictions, and beliefs, to shape our present society, and possible futures. As an undergraduate he studied economics and biology at University College London, and this training informs his design work. He completed his Masters in Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art in 2009, and his work has since received several awards and is exhibited internationally. His first book, The Toaster Project, is to be published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2011. Based in London, he is currently working on a commission from the Wellcome Trust.
www.thomasthwaites.com/

Host: Jerome Harrington
Jerome Harrington is an artist based at S1 Artspace in Sheffield. His practice is interdisciplinary in nature and draws from his background in glass making. This is manifest in a wide range of outputs including the production of new objects, critical writing and projects that involve collaborative dialogues and curatorial roles. He is currently undertaking a practice based PhD at Sheffield Hallam University, which explores our relation to objects and to the making process that produces objects. It focuses specifically on how we encounter the making process through film, photograph, and image. He studied at Edinburgh College of Art (1998) and the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam (2004). Recent exhibitions include: ‘A Conference for The Glass Archive’, Site Gallery, Sheffield; ‘Making fact Making fiction’, National Glass Centre, Sunderland; and ‘What Happens If…?’, Storey Gallery, Lancaster.
www.jeromeharrington.net

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Wednesday 17th November 2010

Screening: A Rolling Stone: The Dynamics of Cliché a film by Sally O’Reilly
A documentary that posits the generative uses of cliché, as well as its negative associations and operations, drawing on examples from visual art, theatre television and cinema. Includes clips from Samuel Beckett, Martin Creed, General Hospital, David Lynch, The Two Ronnies and Gary Stevens.
Sally O’Reilly is a writer, contributing regularly to many art and culture publications, including Art Monthly, Cabinet, Frieze, Art Review, and Time Out, and has written many essays for international museums and galleries. Her book The Body in Contemporary Art was published by Thames & Hudson in 2009, and she was co-editor of the thematic, interdisciplinary broadsheet Implicasphere (2003-8). She has also curated and produced numerous performative events and is co-curator of the Hayward Touring Exhibition ‘Magic Show’. She is currently writer in residence at the Whitechapel Art Gallery.

Host: Michelle Atherton
Michelle Atherton’s work explores the way we move and are moved in our everyday life. Her recent work, Dreams of Flying, was exhibited at RAF Museum Cosford, 2009 and will be at Zepplein Museum, Germany 2011. This video installation, supported by the AHRC, explores what is considered, or at least marketed as, one of the ultimate flying experiences of the twenty-first century, taking a ride in a fourth generation military jet fighter. Other 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.

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Wednesday 24th November

Guest: Craig Richardson
Craig Richardson is an artist, writer, and curator. He has recently published in Visual Culture in Britain, Map magazine, and The Journal of Visual Culture. Recent catalogue essays include texts on the artists Tracey MacKenna, Wong Hoy Cheong, and Christine Borland. His recent curated exhibition Ross Sinclair versus Sir Edwin Landseer was at Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museum in 2007. Notable publications include Face On: Photography as Social Exchange (with Mark Durden) and a forthcoming monograph Scottish Art Since 1960 (Ashgate, January 2011). He is currently Director of Postgraduate Taught Programmes in the School of Arts and Humanities, Oxford Brookes University.

Host: Andrew Sneddon
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).
www.andrewsneddon.com

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Wednesday 1st December 2010

Guest: Phil Collins
Phil Collins lives and works in Berlin. Recent solo exhibitions include: Tramway, Glasgow (2009); Aspen Art Museum, Colorado (2008); Dallas Museum of Art, Texas (2007); Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2007); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA (2006); Tate Britain, London (2006–7); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2006). Recent group exhibitions include: ‘The Making of Art’, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2009); ‘Acting Out: Social Experiments in Video’, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston(2009), ‘Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality and the Moving Image. Part II: Realisms’, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington (2008); ‘Life On Mars’, 55th Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh(2008);‘Double Agent’, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2008). Collins was nominated for the 2006 Turner Prize.

Host: Yuen Fong Ling
Yuen Fong Ling is an artist based in Manchester. He is currently completing his PhD by Practice at the University of Lincoln (2007–ongoing) and previously studied on the MFA programme at Glasgow School of Art (2005–07). Recent works were presented as part of the ‘Art School: Inventions, Invectives and Radical Possibilities’ conference, University College of London (June 2010); and ‘China: Birth and Belonging’ conference, Wellcome Collection, London (February 2010). Recent group exhibitions include: ‘Triple Base’, San Francisco (2009); Transmission Gallery, Glasgow (2009); Gasworks, London (2007); Tramway, Glasgow (2007), Artnews Projects, Berlin (2007), The Central Academy of Fine Art Beijing touring throughout China, Denmark, Australia , and UK (2007–8); and Urbis, Manchester (2007).

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Wednesday 8th December 2010

Guest: Marcia Farquhar
Marcia Farquhar is an artist working in performance, photography, video, and object-making. Her practice revolves around the stories and interactions of everyday life, particularly in relation to the meaning and histories of objects. Engineering unexpected social interactions in which the distance between audience and performer is frequently breached, Farquhar probes the nature of biographical and autobiographical storytelling as a strategy that is forever renegotiating its relationship with truth. Her site-specific events have been staged and exhibited internationally in museums and galleries, as well as in lecture theatres, kitchen showrooms, pubs, parks and leisure centres. Among her recent works are The Horse is a Noble Animal at the Tatton Park Biennial (2010), the 30-hour live-in performance The Omnibus at the National Review of Live Art, Glasgow (2010), and the 12 Shooters project (2007), for which she revisited a number of live works from her past in a series of short-film collaborations with thirteen different artist-filmmakers. Her website is www.marciafarquhar.com.

Host: Hester Reeve
Hester Reeve navigates her complex relationship as an artist with the world through her conceptual persona HRH.the. Her practice encompasses drawing, live art, philosophy, sculpture, and works for camera. Public showings of her work include former Randolph Street Gallery, Chicago, LIVE Biennale, Vancouver, Site Gallery, Sheffield and most recently The Art Center of Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok. She has co-authored three publications, most notably Libkovice: Zdař Bůh (DIVUS 97), a three-year dialogic exposé of post-revolutionary Czechoslovakia. Reeve is Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University.

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Wednesday 26th January 2011
Guest: Craig Fisher
Craig Fisher makes large-scale sculptural installations using fabrics, questioning representations of violence and disaster. He is particularly interested in playing with boundaries, mixing techniques of art and craft, referring to both ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, and juxtaposing the pictorial with the sculptural as potential spaces of slippage, which allow for discoveries beyond confined fields of art production. Fisher has exhibited his work nationally and internationally including recent solo exhibitions Foolish Act, Viewpoint Gallery, Plymouth College of Art (2009) and Hazardous Materials, Millais Gallery, Southampton Solent University, Southampton (2008). Group exhibitions include ‘Nothing is Forever’, South London Gallery, London (2010), ‘Threadbare’, Rochester Art Gallery, Rochester (2010), ‘A Comedy of Errors’, Artspace, Sydney (2007) and ‘Ultrasonic International 1’, Mark Moore Gallery, Los Angeles (2006). Craig Fisher is a senior lecturer in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University.
www.craig-fisher.com

Host: Gary Simmonds
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 formal abstraction, beauty, decoration and disorder. He has exhibited work both nationally and internationally, including solo shows at Laure Genillard, London, De March and Solbiati, Milan, and One in the Other, London. Group shows include: ‘Nothing is Forever’, South London Gallery, ‘Die Panke’ LoBe projects Berlin, ‘Fabric’, Abbot Hall, and his work was selected to be part of ‘unpicked and dismantled’ an exhibition representing the UK in the Textile ’07 Lithuania.

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Wednesday 2 February 2011
Guest: Laurent Tixador
Tixador’s projects have a utopian proposition and are often extreme. In 2005 he undertook several expeditions to Greenland, becoming the first artist to reach the North Pole. In 2009, in Total symbiose 4: 1 he immersed himself in a world at once ordinary and mysterious, that of the business enterprises in the heart of La Défense in Paris. In the same year for FIAC, Paris, Tixador presented Jumping Beans, a suspended wooden structure built by the Chapuisat brothers, in which Tixador was to be enclosed during the exhibition. The slightest movement caused the structure to move, like the Mexican beans of the work’s title. In his last docu-fiction film Au bout de 8 jours, filmed in an abandoned army barracks, three squatters play at soldiers with old military equipment, buildingdefensive structures, and are joined by a film crew, which adopts their paranoid utopia. At Galerie du Dourven in 2010 he constructed an immense concrete bunker, on which the gallery appeared to have been built. Tixador lives and works in Nantes.
www.laurenttixador.com

Host: Sharon Kivland
Kivland’s work is at the intersection of public political action and private subjectivity. Recent works for exhibition include amateur watercolours, copied from memory from postcards; photographs of the smoke of steam trains, the limpid waters of mountain lakes, and the snow on Alpine peaks; and painstaking sketches of women modelling lingerie. Recently she has paid her son an enormous amount of money to fill old school exercises books with lines, as though it were a punishment. The lines are the indexical references to mother/son relations in Freud’s works. Kivland is represented by domoBaal, London, and Galerie Bugdahn & Kaimer, Düsseldorf.
www.sharonkivland.com

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Wednesday 9th February 2011
Guest: Ian Rawlinson
The work of Nick Crowe and Ian Rawlinson is a poetic exploration of cultural values. Their work addresses questions around faith, politics, national identity, and the environment. Works like The Fireworks, The Carrier’s Prayer or The Four Horsemen operate though an unravelling of the social and ideological consequences of an action in regard to its apparent spectacle. This interest in consequence is reflected in the aesthetics of spectacle and excess that lie at the heart of their practice. They have exhibited throughout the UK and internationally; their most recent solo show was at Ceri Hand Gallery, Liverpool and they have forthcoming group exhibitions with the British Council in India and at the Herzilya Museum in Israel.

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. The enquiry lends a cool detachment to the approaching apocalyptical events. Recent projects include working with Stephen Hüsch for LoBe Berlin, developing work in the gallery for Drawing Space 2010. Commissions; Thinly veiled, Grand Opera House, Belfast; Illuminated Carpet, ‘Enlightenment’, Durham and exhibitions; ‘Inter…’, Harris Museum and Art Gallery, 2004; and ‘Afterwards’, Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre, 2009.

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Wednesday 16th February 2011
Guest: Oliver Zwink
Oliver Zwink’s drawings, collages, films, photographs, and installations approach the urban terrain by re-creating and simulating a work-process, in which randomness and planning, construction, and destruction generate complex imagery and fragile physical shapes. Influenced by Post Marxist/Situationist thinking, his work crosses between anti-utopian and poetic transformation; highlighting the interdependence of mental and architectural space. Since completing his MA at Goldsmiths College in 1998, Zwink has been based in Berlin. He has exhibited his work nationally and internationally, including a solo exhibition at The Showroom, London (2000). Recent exhibitions include ‘City is forever, not me’, Stephen Lawrence Gallery, London (2010), ‘Splendid View’, Universal Cube, Leipzig (2010) and Final disasters and beautiful forest landscapes, Galerie Meinblau, Berlin (2009). In addition, his work was presented in ‘Drawing On Space’, inThe Project, Dublin (2002), ‘Animated Drawing’, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (2005), and ‘Archipeinture’, Le Plateau, Paris (2006). Zwink is a Visiting Professor for Drawing at the Department of Applied Arts of the University of Applied Sciences, in Mainz, Germany.

Host: TC McCormack
TC McCormack works both collaboratively and individually. His practice exhibits social, political, and behavioural attributes of place, referring to design to consider the architectonics of community. He is currently researching the phenomenon of resistance space and the possibility of language to delineate the relational affinities of forms, while acknowledging the shifting nature of subjectivity. Two current works, Beyond these things and Dumb Fixity are examples of a desire to measure abstract phenomena and the malleability of resistance space. His book Dumb Fixity, co-authored with Martin Ghent and Esther Leslie, was published by Artwords Press in 2010. He is currently pursuing the premise that things can speak, and is listening to what they [things] are trying to say.

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Wednesday 23rd February 2011
Guest: Oriana Fox
Oriana Fox is an artist who uses performance, sculpture, painting, and video to make reference to and critique the representation of women in contemporary media and the iconic feminist artists of the 1970s. She does this with a knowing sense of humour, the portrayal of women in popular culture and feminist art both attracting and repelling her simultneously. She graduated from Washington University in 2000 and Goldsmiths College in 2003. Recent exhibitions include: ‘Happiness Happenings’ with the Hayward Huddle, Royal Festival Hall, London; ‘Performance Matters: Performing Idea Forum’, Whitechapel Gallery, London; ‘Let’sPaintTV’, Los Angeles; ‘Going Public’, Tate Britain, London; and ‘Art in the Archive: Living with Make’, Tate Modern, London, in 2009.

Host: Chloë Brown
Using film, found objects, sculptural objects, and taxidermy Chloë Brown makes work that has strong links with current debates in the field of Animal/Human Studies. Recently she made a series of works during a residency at the Zoologische Garten Berlin with the artist Ines Lechleitner. Recent exhibitions include: The Hum, LoBe, Berlin, (2010); ‘AbbaraCadabra’ at the Mardin Biennial, Turkey (2010); ‘The Animal Gaze’, Unit 2 Gallery, London and The Roland Levinsky Gallery, Plymouth; ‘Tier-Perspektiven’ at Georg-Kolbe-Museum, Berlin; ‘Tier-Werden’ at NGBK, Berlin; and ‘The Sheffield Pavilion’ at the Istanbul Biennial (all 2009). She is Course Leader of Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University and is also a member of the Research Group for Artists Publications.

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Wednesday 9 March 2011
Guest: Cornford & Cross
Matthew Cornford and David Cross began collaborating while studying at Saint Martin’s School of Art in 1987, and graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1991. They maintain that a key function of contemporary art is to test concepts, assumptions, and boundaries. Each work makes a critical engagement with a particular context, which includes the site, the social situation and the historical moment. As their interventions are often disruptive to the flow of everyday life, realising them demands intensive interaction with the organisations and people who occupy places and influence events. They held an Arts Council residency at the London School of Economics and a British Council residency at Vitamin Creative Space in Guangzhou, China. They have exhibited internationally and nationally. In addition to many site-specific projects in England, since 2006 they have held solo exhibitions at Aspex Gallery, the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Exchange Gallery, Pump House Gallery, and Wolverhampton Art Gallery. In 2009 Black Dog published a 192-page book on their work, which includes artists’ texts, photographs, and critical essays by John Roberts and Rachel Withers.
www.cornfordandcross.com

Host: David Cotterrell
David Cotterrell works with video, audio, interactive media, artificial intelligence, device control, and hybrid technology to produce work that exhibits political, social, and behavioural analyses of environments and contexts. Recent exhibitions include: ‘Reversed Images’ at Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; ‘Eastern Standard’ at MASS MoCA, Massachusetts; ‘War and Medicine’ at the Wellcome Collection, London; and ‘Map Games’ at the Today Museum of Modern Art, Beijing and Birmingham City Art Gallery. Cotterrell is Professor of Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University and is represented by Danielle Arnaud contemporary art, London. www.cotterrell.com

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Wednesday 16th March 2011
Guest: WITH
WITH is an art collective which has created a number of Solutions at the website www.withyou.co.uk. On commissioning a Solution, clients have a life experience either invented or lived on their behalf by a member of the collective. WITH have exhibited internationally including projects at the ICA, Tate Britain, Hayward Gallery, the V&A, and the British Council, New Delhi. WITH was created by artist Alasdair Hopwood in 2002 and is represented by Rokeby, London.

Host: Lesley Sanderson
Lesley Sanderson has worked in collaboration with Neil Conroy as Conroy/Sanderson since 1998. Their drawings, photographs, and videos explore culture and place to reflect on a shifting globalised world, where subjectivities are contingent, the body is vulnerable, and visibility is called into question. Recent group exhibitions include ‘Negotiable Values’, Manchester and Chongqing, China (2010) and ‘East-South: Out of Sight’, Guangzhou Triennial, China (2008). Solo exhibitions include Out of nowhere, Chinese Arts Centre, Manchester (2006) and Here we are, PM Gallery, London (2005). Sanderson is a director of Sheffield Contemporary Art Forum.

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Wednesday 23rd March 2011
Guest: John Jordan
John Jordan’s work merges the imagination of art and the radical engagement of activism, developing new forms of creative civil disobedience. Co-director of social art group Platform (1987–1995) he then went on to work in the direct-action collective ‘Reclaim the Streets’ (1995–2000). In 2003 he co-edited We Are Everywhere: the irresistible rise of global anti-capitalism (London: Verso). Senior lecturer in Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University (1994–2003), he abandoned academia to work on the film ‘The Take’ with Naomi Klein. Stupidly, in 2004, he formed the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army from which he is now AWOL. Co founder of The Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination (www.labofii.net) he was recently labelled a ‘domestic extremist’ by the metropolitan police, but feels his lack of ironing skills make him unsuitable for the title.
www.labofii.net

Host: Rose Butler

Rose Butler works with video, photography, audio, animation, interactive media, and multi-screen display. Her work examines our sense of location both temporally and spatially through our interaction, use and understanding of new medias. Work was exhibited in last year’s Manchester International Festival and is distributed on Host Artist Group’s C.D Otherliness, which was launched at Vane Gallery. She has exhibited work internationally and was short-listed in collaboration with Kypros Kyprianou for the Jerwood Prize for Moving Image.

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Transmission: Host: The Friend
Guest Host
2010 17 March Sound Threshold Jaspar Joseph-Lester
10 March Hollington & Kyprianou Rose Butler
3 March Neville Gabie David Cotterrell
24 February James Pyman Lesley Sanderson
17 February André Stitt Hester Reeve
10 February Lindsay Seers Chloë Brown
3 February Taconis Stolk TC Mccormack
27 January Kate Davis Julie Westerman
2009 2 December Juan Cruz Sharon Kivland
25 November Amanda Beech Jaspar Joseph-Lester
18 November David Bate Michelle Atherton
11 November Jane Harris Gary Simmonds
28 October Kelly Large Becky Shaw
21 October Roderick Buchanan Andrew Sneddon

14 October Tim Etchells Penny McCarthy
7 October Bevis Martin & Charlie Youle Sharon Kivland & Jaspar Joseph-Lester

Wednesday 17 March

Guests: Sound Threshold
‘Sound Threshold’ was established in 2007 by Daniela Cascella and Lucia Farinati, as a long-term research project which explores the relation between site, sound, and text. The project is grounded on a shared background in literature, experimental music, art history, and on over a decade of experience in writing and in curating visual and sonic arts projects. Since its inception, Sound Threshold has developed a programme of events, talks and artists’ commissions in collaboration with international organisations: Music and Sound Through The Landscape, Italy 2007/08; The Listening Project, London, forthcoming, 2010.

Host: Jaspar Joseph-Lester
Jaspar Joseph-Lester’s work explores the role that images play in determining urban planning, social space, and everyday praxis. Recent work has focused on the conflicting ideological frameworks embodied in architecture and urban planning. 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. Recent exhibitions include ‘Afterwards’ at the Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre, and ‘Epidermis’, Kaohsiung Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan. He is author of Revisiting the Bonaventure Hotel (Copy Press, 2009), co-editor of Episode: Pleasure and Persuasion in Lens-based Media (Artwords, 2008), and a director of the Curating Video research group. www.jasparjosephlester.com

Wednesday 10 March

Guests: Hollington & Kyprianou
The social and political implications of manned flight in the twentieth century were the subject of Goodbye Vile Earth!, SHP (2008), combining archive and anecdote from a former secret military research establishment. The trope of ‘when science goes wrong’ in The Invisible Force Field Experiments, Artsway, 2003, was extended for lovers of conspiracy theory as The Invisible Force Field Experiments Accident Report, ICA, London and Mop Projects, Sydney, 2005, and ‘New Forest Pavilion’, Venice Biennale in 2005. The Nightwatchman, Arts Catalyst/Scan, London, 2008, charted the changing public perceptions of the nuclear power industry, contrasting with how the industry sells itself to the nation.

Host: Rose Butler
Rose Butler works with video, photography, audio, animation, interactive media, and multi-screen display. Her work examines our sense of location both temporally and spatially through our interaction, use and understanding of new medias. Work was exhibited at this year’s Manchester International Festival and is distributed on Host Artist Group’s CD Otherliness, which was launched at Vane Gallery. She has exhibited work internationally and was short-listed in collaboration with Kypros Kyprianou for the Jerwood Prize for Moving Image.

Wednesday 3 March

Guest: Neville Gabie
Born (1959) in Johannesburg, Neville Gabie studied at the Royal College of Art. Working in a range of mediums from sculpture to film and photography, rabie’s work has been manifested as a series of temporary interventions made in response to specific locations or situations. His work has been exhibited widely around the world in galleries such as the Tate Modern in London, the Tate Gallery in Liverpool, the Metropolitan Museum of Photography in Japan, and also as part of touring exhibitions in Germany, Japan, Macedonia, Portugal, South Korea, and South Africa. www.nevillegabie.com

Host: David Cotterrell
David Cotterrell works with video, audio, interactive media, artificial intelligence, device control, and hybrid technology to produce work that exhibits political, social, and behavioural analyses of environments and contexts. Recent exhibitions include: ‘Reversed Images’ at Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; ‘Eastern Standard’ at MASS MoCA, Massachusetts; ‘War and Medicine’ at the Wellcome Collection, London; and ‘Map Games’ at the Today Museum of Modern Art, Beijing and Birmingham City Art Gallery. Cotterrell is Professor of Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University and is represented by Danielle Arnaud contemporary art, London. www.cotterrell.com

Wednesday 24 February

Guest: James Pyman
James Pyman’s work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions since 1994 including ‘EASTinternational 2003’, ‘Cult Fiction’, and at Cabinet, London and Susan Inglett, NYC. He self-published a series of comics books called Nine Panel Grid (1994-1997), and other publications include Drawing Newham (2002) and Wilf – A Life In Pictures (2004). In 2008 he completed a series of drawings for a new edition of Dracula published by Four Corners Books. Recent projects are at www.creativetime.org and in the current issue of Esopus Magazine. James Pyman studied at Sheffield and works in London and Sheffield.

Host: Lesley Sanderson
Lesley Sanderson is a Sheffield-based artist who works collaboratively with Neil Conroy as Conroy/Sanderson. Their drawings and photographs draw on observation of social structures and human behaviour, and the relation between place and subjectivity. Recent 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). Conroy/Sanderson will be showing new photographic work in ‘Negotiable Values’, in Manchester and Chongqing in 2009-10. They are working on a long-term narrative drawing project that may become a graphic novel.

Wednesday 17 February

Guest: André Stitt
André Stitt is considered one of Europe’s foremost performance and interdisciplinary artists; a predominate theme in his artistic output is that of communities and their dissolution often relating back to Belfast and the period of civil conflict known as the ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland during his upbringing. Recent work includes: Venice Biennale 2005, Baltic Contemporary Art Centre, Chapter, Cardiff, The Drawing Centre, New York, Artspace, Sydney, Asiatopia, Bangkok, Spacex Gallery and MCAC, Northern Ireland. In 2008 he was awarded the prestigious Creative Wales Award. Stitt is Professor of Performance and Interdisciplinary Art at the University of Wales Institute and is the director of the Centre for Fine Art Research at Cardiff School of Art & Design.

Host: Hester Reeve
Hester Reeve navigates her complex relationship as an artist with the world through her conceptual persona HRH.the. Her practice encompasses drawing, live art, philosophy, sculpture and works for camera. Public showings of her work include former Randolph Street Gallery, Chicago, LIVE Biennale, Vancouver, Site Gallery, Sheffield and most recently The Art Center of Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok. She has co-authored three publications, most notably Libkovice: Zdar Buh (DIVUS 97), a three-year dialogic exposé of post-revolutionary Czechoslovakia. Reeve is Principal Lecturer in Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University.

Wednesday 10 February

Guest: Lindsay Seers
Drawing on theories of perception, Lindsay Seers creates highly personal narratives, interweaving concepts of science, philosophy and photographic theory in an ongoing investigation into how cinematic and photographic technologies shape us. These narratives are punctuated by incredible plot devices that mimic the rupture at the heart of image production, creating a dramatisation of selfhood in all its melancholy and failure. Recent exhibitions include ‘Altermodern. Fourth Tate Triennial’, Tate Britain, 2009; It has to be this way, Matt’s Gallery, London, 2009; and Swallowing Black Maria, Smart Project Space, Amsterdam (2007).

Host: Chloë Brown
Chloë Brown uses film, found objects, sculptural objects and taxidermy to create work that is a precarious balance between threat and vulnerability, producing a kind of contemporary memento mori. She is Course Leader of Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University and a member of The Research Group for Artists Publications (RGAP). Recent exhibitions include ‘The Animal Gaze’, Unit 2 Gallery, London and The Roland Levinsky Gallery, Plymouth (2009); ‘Tier-Perspektiven’ at Georg-Kolbe-Museum, Berlin (2009); and she was commissioned to make a film for the Sheffield Pavilion at the Istanbul Biennial (2009).

Wednesday 3 February

Guest: Taconis Stolk
Taconis Stolk is a conceptualist and a meta-modernist. He graduated in conceptual media arts and intermediary composition from the Royal Conservatoire and the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague, Netherlands. Since 1993, he has been working on WLFR, a body of projects focusing on conceptual structures in society and minimalist aesthetics in (physical and theoretical) nature. Projects include PIA (interactive musical performance for magnetic cards), 1993; fZone (online composition programme for music based on weather conditions), 1994; BuBL Space (pocket device to block mobile phone signals, with Arthur Elsenaar), 2002; Gradually Zero (performance theatre on the beauty in numbers, with Sanne van Rijn), 2003; Genetic Design (media campaign on virtual education in artistic DNA manipulation), 2004; and PWf (omni-disciplinary research project based on Planck-time and Planck-length), 2008-2009. WLFR projects have been exhibited, performed and published worldwide.

Host: TC Mccormack
TC Mccormack works both collaboratively and individually. His practice exhibits social, political, and behavioural attributes of place, referring to design to consider the architectonics of community. He is currently researching the phenomenon of resistance space and the possibility of language to delineate the relational affinities of forms, while acknowledging the shifting nature of subjectivity. Two current works, Beyond these things and Dumb Fixity are examples of a desire to measure abstract phenomena and the malleability of resistance space. He is currently pursuing the premise that things can speak, and is listening to what they [things] are trying to say.

Wednesday 27 January

Guest: Kate Davis
Kate Davis is a London based Artist who works with objects, drawing, text-based works, video and photography which often exist together in one sculptural installation. She is currently working on a Dockland Light Railway commission with Modus Operandi to site four new works at Langdon Park Station. Davis has received numerous awards, including the Sydney Water Sculpture Prize, 2002; the Jerwood Drawing Prize, 2001; the Sargant Fellowship, British School at Rome, 1998; and Young Artist of the Year, Whitechapel Gallery, 1988. She is represented by Fred, London and is Tutor in Sculpture at The Royal College of Art.

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. The enquiry lends a cool detachment to the approaching apocalyptical events. Recent commissions include Thinly veiled, Grand Opera House, Belfast; ‘Garden Journeys’ Polesden Lacy, National Trust Gardens; Illuminated Carpet, ‘Enlightenment’, Durham. Exhibitions include ‘Inter…’, Harris Museum and Art Gallery, 2004, and ‘Afterwards’, Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre, 2009.

Wednesday 2 December 2009

Guest: Juan Cruz
Juan Cruz is an artist whose recent work comprises installations of projected images and text. Previous works incorporate a broad range of forms including books, performances, installations, and recordings. Much of his work engages with translation, and employs it both as a metaphor for visual representation and as an embodied and performative process. Recent exhibitions include a project for the Edinburgh Festival 2009, curated by Juliana Engberg; a solo show at the Galeria Elba Benitez, Madrid, 2008; ‘Squatters’, curated by Nicholas Bourriaud, Murcia, Spain, 2008; and solo shows at Remise Bludenz, Austria, 2007, and Peer, London, 2005. In 2006 Juan Cruz a translation of Niebla (fog) by Miguel de Unamuno was published by Forma, Newcastle and he was included in The Alpine Fantasy of Victor B. and Other Stories, eds Jeremy Ackerman and Eileen Daly (London, 2007). He is represented by Matt’s Gallery, London and Galeria Elba Benitez, Madrid.

Host: Sharon Kivland
Sharon Kivland is an artist and writer, living in London and France. Her publications include the series Freud on Holiday (information as material, 2007, 2008). Projects in 2008 included solo exhibitions at Bastart, Bratislava, where she addressed Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ideas on natural education; Sleeper, Edinburgh, for which she worked hard on her cross stitch and her worst traits; and CHELSEA Space, London, where she continued her exploration of revolutionary moments in the history of France. Kivland curated the exhibition ‘Afterwards’ for Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre, in 2009. There will be solo shows of her work at CIAC, Pont-Aven, France (curated by Ctaherine Elkar); Galerie Bugdahn & Kaimer, Düsseldorf, in 2009; and at DomoBaal, London, in 2009 and 2010. She is included in ‘Elles’ at the Centre Pompidou, Paris. She is Visiting Fellow in the Institute for Germanic and Romance Studies, University of London. Her work is represented by DomoBaal, London, and Galerie Bugdahn & Kaimer, Düsseldorf.

Wednesday 25 November 2009

Guest: Amanda Beech
Amanda Beech makes artworks, writes, and collaborates on curatorial projects. Her work explores the relation between democracy and violence in neo-liberalism by scrutinising the forceful rhetoric in narratives of freedom, which play out in philosophy, politics, literature, and popular culture. Constructing narratives that take in particular biographies, sites, social mythologies and mixing them with the bounds of philosophical inquiry, her work operates as a space of seductive power, will and force – a world that emphasises decisiveness as its guiding principle and that deals with our share in it. Recent exhibitions include ‘Commonwealth’, MGK127 Gallery, Toronto, Canada, 2009; ‘Let Us Pray For Those Now Residing in the Designated Area’, DNA Gallery, Berlin, and Harlow, Essex, 2008-9; and ‘Image-Force’, Urbanomic Studio, Falmouth 2009. Recent writing and editorial work has included ‘We Never Close’ in Episode: Pleasure and Persuasion in Lens-based Media (Artwords, 2008); ‘Matters of Freedom’ in The Institute of Pyschoplasmics (exhibition cat, eds Pil and Galia Kollectiv, 2008) and co-organiser of the conferences On Liberty and Art, 2007 and Pleasure and Persuasion in Lens-based Media, 2008, both held at Tate Britain. Her most recent work is part of a residency and solo work for Spike Island, Bristol, Jan 2010. Beech is Course Director of MA Critical Writing and Curatorial Practice at Chelsea College of Art, a director of the Curating Video research group, and a member of the steering committee of The Political Currency of Art research group. She is represented by MOT International, London,

Host: Jaspar Joseph-Lester
Jaspar Joseph-Lester’s work explores the role that images play in determining urban planning, social space, and everyday praxis. Recent work has focused on the conflicting ideological frameworks embodied in architecture and urban planning. 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. Recent exhibitions include ‘Afterwards’ at the Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre, and ‘Epidermis’, Kaohsiung Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan. He is author of Revisiting the Bonaventure Hotel (Copy Press, 2009), co-editor of Episode: Pleasure and Persuasion in Lens-based Media (Artwords, 2008), and a director of the Curating Video research group. www.jasparjosephlester.com

Wednesday 18 November 2009

Guest: David Bate
David Bate is an artist, writer and teacher. His photographic works have been exhibited alongside Janet Cardiff, Fischli & Weiss, Jo Spence, and Jeff Wall, amongst others. His most recent exhibitions were in Warsaw, London, Chicago, and the Istanbul Biennale. Once a student of Victor Burgin and Griselda Pollock, his writings on photography, art history and theory include Photography and Surrealism (IB Tauris, 2004), Photography: Key Concepts (Berg, 2009) and the forthcoming Photography After Postmodernism (IB Tauris). He is also co-editor of the new Photographies journal (Routledge) and Course Leader of the MA Photographic Studies at the University of Westminster, London, UK.

Host: Michelle Atherton
Michelle Atherton’s work explores the way we move and are moved in 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. She recently exhibited Dreams of Flying, RAF Museum Cosford, a film supported by the AHRC, exploring what is considered, or at least marketed as, one of the ultimate flying experiences of the twenty-first century, taking a ride in a fourth generation military jet fighter. Other 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.

Wednesday 11 November 2009

Guest: Jane Harris
Jane Harris makes paintings that are at once highly controlled and wildly disorienting. Harris revels in entertaining opposites: abstract/figurative, flat/spatial, cerebral/decorative, and contrived/playful. These dichotomies are manifested in paintings that are rigorously intellectual, physically commanding, and potently spiritual. She has exhibited world wide, including solo shows at Angel Row Gallery, Nottingham; the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Connecticut; and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. Jane Harris has recently been invited for two residencies: at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Connecticut, USA, and Two Rooms Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand, both to be taken up in 2010. She lives and works in the south of France.

Host: Gary Simmonds
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: formal abstraction, beauty, decoration and disorder. He has exhibited work both nationally and internationally, including solo shows at Laure Genillard, London, De March and Solbiati, Milan, and One in the Other, London. Group shows include ‘ Fabric ’, Abbot Hall, and his work was selected to be part of ‘unpicked and dismantled’, an exhibition representing the UK in the Textile ’07 Lithuania. Forthcoming projects include exhibitions at the Post Methodists in Newark and Primo Alonso Gallery, London.

Wednesday 28 October 2009

Guest: Kelly Large
Kelly Large is plagued with anxiety about her lack of visibility in the art world. As a result much of her work is preoccupied with ideas of presence and circulation in contemporary culture. Recent projects include: Our Name is Legion for Beacon Art Project, a video work and a spectacle of mass participation in a small, rural Lincolnshire town, 2009; Me, Myself and I, exploring the function of the artist-in-residence, New Art Gallery, Walsall, and Announced & Alarmed, two announcement works for Eastside Projects, Birmingham, 2008. Strategic Questions: What is Comprehension? is a publication recording readers’ interactions with the British Library catalogue for the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007.

Host: Becky Shaw
Becky Shaw’s work explores the relation between objects and people, and ideas of objectivity and subjectivity. Recent works include a three-part print exploring fashion prediction, Local Colour, for Incertainplaces, and The ILVA Tree at the Manchester Festival, where she set the Islington Mill Art Academy the task of making posters out of two trees found dying in a disused mall. The ongoing, Aggregate, explores the materials to be used in the new Firstsite building, Colchester. New works stubbornly refuse to respond to place or external requirements, and involve myopic study of single objects including an extraordinary inlaid marble table and a second-hand vintage classics t-shirt.

Wednesday 21 October 2009

Guest: Roderick Buchanan
Roderick Buchanan graduated from Glasgow School of Art in 1989 and University of Ulster in 1990, and is now based in Glasgow. He uses film, video, photography, and sculpture to question collective and individual identity. He was awarded the Becks Futures Prize, 2000, and the Paul Hamlyn award, 2004, and contributed to the Taipei Biennial in 2008. He is currently working on a commission for the Imperial War Museum in response to the Troubles and their legacy, and spends much of his time maintaining open channels of communication with Black Skull Corps of Fife and Drum and Parkhead Republican Flute Band, two of Scotland’s prominent Loyalist and Republican flute bands. Having spent much of the 90s on a group-show circuit that took him all over the world, he now finds himself returning to questions of his own situated self, the push and pull of what he sees going on around about him.

Host: Andrew Sneddon
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).
www.andrewsneddon.com

Wednesday 14 October 2009

Guest: Tim Etchells
Tim Etchells has worked in a wide variety of contexts, notably as the leader of the world-renowned performance group Forced Entertainment and in collaboration with a range of visual artists, choreographers, and photographers. His work ranges from performance to video, photography, text projects, installation and fiction. He has developed a unique voice in writing for and about performance, principally in his widely-acclaimed monograph Certain Fragments (Forced Entertainment and Contemporary Performance) (Routledge, 1999). Etchells’ fiction includes Endland Stories (Pulp Books, 1998) and The Dream Dictionary (for the Modern Dreamer) (Duck Editions, 2000). These were followed by his first novel The Broken World (Heinemann, 2008). He has exhibited work at Sketch Gallery, London; Netherlands Media Art Institute Amsterdam; Sparwasser HQ, Berlin; ‘ArtFutures’, Bloomberg SPACE, London; Exit Art, New York; Kunsthaus, Graz; and ‘Manifesta 7’, 2008. He is currently Legacy: Thinker in Residence (2009-2010) at Tate Research and LADA in London.

Host: Penny McCarthy
Penny McCarthy works with drawing and text. Her research is taken from sources such as eighteenth-century maps, transcripts from the Apollo missions, and diagrams of snowflakes. Recent works have appropriated texts that describe scientific discovery, historic expeditions, and the fictions of Jorge Luis Borges. For the past few years her work has explored the imaginative space of the book in a series of pencil-drawn copies of texts. She is captivated by the peculiar geography of the torn page, the carefully designed index, the marginalia left by an anonymous reader. Encyclopaedia of Dust (RGAP 2001) and Shadow Book (RGAP 2004) are volumes that bring together her images and writings. Her work has been exhibited extensively in Britain and abroad and supported by the Wellcome Trust, Arts Council England, and Arts and Humanities Research Counci

Wednesday 7 October 2009Guests: Bevis Martin and Charlie Youle
Bevis Martin and Charlie Youle make work together that takes subjects as its subject and examines how meaning is clumsily stuck onto objects. They met while studying art at Sheffield Hallam University in 1997 and moved to Nantes in France together when Charlie joined the Multipoint Groupe de Recherche in 2003. They have worked collaboratively since their first joint show, Rain and Tears at Borderline, Nantes in 2004. After diverse projects, including murals and a New Age cassette, they have developed a practice of sculpture and installation that represents a struggle to make sense of the world and aligns itself with the awkward status of visual tools, copies, and grey areas of creativity, such as shop windows, text books, and carnival floats. In 2007 they participated in ‘Estuaire’, the Nantes-St.Nazaire Biennial, with Rêve Municipal, an installation of hundreds of municipal objects, and have since made a recurrent strategy of reusing or borrowing objects. They have recently worked on ceramic pieces that give physical form to their vague ideas of subjects of general knowledge, arranging them as educational displays of questionable utility. www.martinandyoule.com

Hosts: Sharon Kivland and Jaspar Joseph-Lester
Jaspar Joseph-Lester and Sharon Kivland are artists and writers, and accomplished hosts. Their collaborative hospitality includes an issue of the on-line journal art-omma; a conference panel ‘Is art a form of debate?’ in Venice Agendas, during the Venice Biennale in 2007; and an issue of Angelaki. Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 2007. They have convened the lecture series Transmission: Host from 2007 to 2010, and are editors of the forthcoming journal, Transmission: Annual (Hospitality).

Past Series: 2001-02 to 2008-09