Birkbeck Arts Week events
We will be hosting three events as a part of Birkbeck Arts Week.
‘Eighteenth-Century Performances’ (23 May, 6-7.30pm)
Michael Dobson and Mark Darlow share their latest research on private and public performances in Eighteenth-Century England and France.
Speakers:
- Michael Dobson, Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Birkbeck. His Shakespeare and Amateur Performance: A Cultural History is coming out in the Spring
- Mark Darlow is a Senior Lecturer in the French Department at Cambridge. His Cultural Politics and the Opéra de Paris, 1789-1794 is coming out this year
Followed by: ‘Romantic Technologies’ (23 May, 7.30-9pm)
This panel offers a multisensorial approach to Romantic Culture through three short presentations on literature at the exhibition, photography, and technologies of the uncanny.
Speakers:
- Silke Arnold de Simine works on memory, trauma, nostalgia, and intermediality
- Luisa Calè works on Romantic Literature and Visual Culture
- Patrizia di Bello works on nineteenth-century photography, art and the senses, and material culture
Promiscuous Assemblage, Friendship, & The Order of Things': reconstructing an Enlightenment friendship, in objects (24 May, 7:30-9:30pm)
In 2006 the artist Jane Wildgoose was commissioned by the Yale Center for British Art to devise "a cabinet in celebration of the friendship between Mrs. Delany (1700-1788) and Margaret, Duchess of Portland (1715-1785)", to accompany the exhibition 'Mrs. Delany and her Circle'. Taking the sale catalogue to the Duchess's magnificent 'Portland Museum' (sold in 1786) as a primary reference, the artist set about configuring a "memory theatre" - neither a literal nor a strictly historical re-creation, but a poetic celebration of the passion for beauty, order, scientific investigation, and decorative embellishment that informed and underpinned the enduring friendship of two extraordinarily inquiring, skilled women. 'Promiscuous Assemblage, Friendship, & The Order of Things' was exhibited at the Yale Center for British Art in 2009, and at Sir John Soane's Museum, London, in 2010.
