Events

If you'd like to be included on our mailing list, please send an e-mail to l.martins@bbk.ac.uk

CILAVS Seminar Series

‘Look here, upon this picture, and on this.’ Velázquez, Picasso and Las Meninas

Marjorie Trusted (Victoria and Albert Museum)                                                                                   

Birkbeck Arts Week, Tuesday, 15 May 2012, 6.00 to 7.30pm, Room 101, Clore Management Centre, 25-27 Torrington Square, London WC1

In 1936 Picasso was appointed Director of the Museo del Prado. He was living in Paris at the time, and in fact was never to return to Spain after his visit of 1934, because of his disgust with the Franco régime, though he retained his Spanish nationality throughout his life. But there is no doubt that, questions of politics aside, the paintings in the Prado, above all those of Velázquez, provided Picasso with an infinite body of inspiration during his entire career. In this seminar, Marjorie Trusted examines the relationship between two great Spanish artists, Velázquez and Picasso, focusing on the 20th-century master’s interaction with Las Meninas (1656). She will look at the nature of one painter being inspired by another, what this means in terms of notions of originality and painters’ practices, and the idea of the artist as outsider. Perhaps most complex of all, she shall try to discuss the concept of Spanishness, national identity, as seen through the art of both Velázquez and Picasso.

Dr Marjorie Trusted FSA is Senior Curator of Sculpture at the Victoria and Albert Museum, where she has been based since 1979. She has published widely on sculpture, and on Spanish and Latin American art; her book, The Arts of Spain: Iberia and Latin America 1450-1700, appeared in 2007, and the study she co-wrote with Giuseppe Schembri Bonaci on Velazquez and Picasso's Las Meninas was published in 2010. She is currently completing a catalogue of the baroque and later ivories at the V&A, and is lead curator on the renovation of the V&A's Cast Courts.

This event is organized in collaboration with ARTES.

Free entry: first come, first seated.

CILAVS Film Screening

Mozambican Film Screening in London

Saturday, 4 February 2012, Birkbeck Cinema, 43 Gordon Square, London, WC1H 0PD

2.30pm: Chikwembo (Feitiço, Júlio Silva, 65 min). The film is in Changana with Portuguese subtitles

A fiction feature film, covering topics such as abortion, obscurantism, witchcraft and shamanism. It also discusses the wealth wildlife in the game reserve of Limpopo and Banhine.

3.30pm: Q&A with film director Júlio Silva

4.00pm: Drinks reception

This event is organized by the Mozambique High Commission in collaboration with CILAVS.

Free entrance, but places are limited.

BOOKING IS ESSENTIAL

To reserve a place, please email hanifa@mozambiquehc.co.uk or carla@mozambiquehc.co.uk

CILAVS Conferences and Lectures

  Creating imperial histories: the iconography of Inca colonial wooden beakers (qeros)

Cristiana Bertazoni (Centro de Estudos Mesoamericanos e Andinos, Universidade de São Paulo)

Friday, 2 March 2012, 6.00 to 7.30pm, Birkbeck, Room G15, Malet Street, London  WC1E 7HX (Entrance via Torrington Place)

This paper presents an iconographical analysis of Inca colonial beakers (qeros) in order to offer an insight into Inca visual culture. In particular, it analyses one of the media of expression the Incas used in order to disseminate their values and ideology. A significant number of qeros portray scenes of battle between Incas and western Amazonian Indians (Antis), often with Amazonian fauna and flora forming a backdrop. It seems that from all the four corners of the Inca Empire, the Antisuyu (the Amazonian part of Tahuantinsuyu) is the quarter that holds a special place when it comes to the imagery displayed on Inca qeros. Bearing this in mind, the iconography of some of these wooden vases will be studied in order to better understand the images of the Antisuyu and its inhabitants which the Incas chose to represent through this particular medium.

Dr Cristiana Bertazoni is a founder member and researcher at the Centro de Estudos Mesoamericanos e Andinos at the Universidade de São Paulo (CEMA - USP). Her main research interest is on Pre-Columbian and Colonial Andean History, with special focus on the ways of interaction that the Inca Empire developed with the indigenous groups of Western Amazonia. She holds a PhD from the Department of Art History and Theory at the University of Essex where she has worked as a curatorial advisor for the University of Essex Collection of Latin American Art and also as one of the editors for the academic electronic journal Arara (Art and Architecture of the Americas). Cristiana is currently working on the publication of her PhD thesis entitled Antisuyu: An Investigation of Inca Attitudes to their Western Amazonian Territories. At the moment she works as curatorial assistant for the Americas Section at the British Museum and since October 2011 is an Associate Research Fellow at the Department of Iberian and Latin American Studies, School of Arts, Birkbeck.

Free entry: first come, first seated.

International Conference: Textiles, Techne and Power in the Andes

Thursday, 15 to Saturday, 17 March 2012, The Senate Room (Senate House, First Floor) and the Stevenson Lecture Theatre,  British Museum, London

This Conference arises from the AHRC-funded project Weaving communities of practice. Textiles, culture and identity in the Andes, based at CILAVS in collaboration with the Instituto de Lengua y Cultura Aymara (ILCA) in La Paz, Bolivia. The Conference aims to expand the scope of the ideas developed during the project, by sharing ideas with more than 30 leading international experts in the field, including textile scholars and curators from a variety of overseas and UK museums. This conference seeks to generate an Andean contribution to current debates on history, materiality and technology. Through specific thematic approaches, the conference will explore the ways woven products served as records of technological knowledge, and socio-cultural  and productive relations. Textiles are examined here as historical and contemporary media where power relations - political, class or gender relations - are expressed and played out, whether in dress or other hierarchies of social categories. The conference also explores textiles as expressions of world-view and the sacred, as well as a part of a regional and a world heritage.

Keynote speakers:            Ann H. Peters (Univ. of Pennsylvania Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology, USA)

                                           Tom Zuidema (Anthropology, University of Illinois, USA)

Conference convenors:    Denise Y. Arnold and Luciana Martins

Topics include: Textiles as documents; textiles and interrelated semiotic practices; textile technologies and social consequences; textiles and social identity; woven complexity and social complexity; the textile productive chain; woven networks; iconographic studies, textile techniques and structures; technique, technology and image; weaving languages, patterns, and symmetries.

A roundtable on the history of Andean textiles and contemporary art chaired by Valerie Fraser will explore textiles as a form of artistic expression. Confirmed artists include Susie Goulder (Warmi), Cecilia Vicuña and Elvira Espejo.

Simultaneous interpretation in English and Spanish will be available, with the exception of Tom Zuidema's keynote lecture at the British Museum, which will be delivered in English.

Please click here to download the updated Conference Programme and here for the Conference Poster .

Places are limited, so please book your place in advance to avoid disappointment. To register, please click on Registration Form.

For more details please e-mail m.dediego@bbk.ac.uk.

This conference is supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), with the collaboration of the Institute for the Study of the Americas, the British Museum, the History Workshop Journal, the Peruvian Embassy and Birkbeck School of Arts.