Past events: 2011/12
CILAVS Seminar Series
Democratising Art: Success and Failure in Chile, 1950-1975
Valerie Fraser (University of Essex)
Tuesday, 25 October 2011, 6.00 to 7.30pm, Birkbeck, Room 255, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HX
Under the government of Salvador Allende the visual arts enjoyed extraordinary popularity in Chile. Between 1970 and 1973 the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes alone hosted over 50 exhibitions ranging from major loans from MoMA New York to popular Chilean craft. This paper will contextualise this boom by exploring developments during the preceding two decades, when ideas about the potential for art to engender social change took root in Chile (in part influenced by the writings of the English art critic, poet and anarchist Herbert Read). In conclusion Valerie Fraser will briefly address the change of direction after the coup of 1973.
Nemesio Antúnez, La Ronda, copper engraving, 4.3 x 12.7 cm, 1953
Valerie Fraser teaches art history at the University of Essex. She has published widely on aspects of the art and architecture of Latin America and is Director of the Essex Collection of Art from Latin America (ESCALA). She is currently directing an AHRC-funded research project entitled Meeting Margins: Art in Latin America and Europe, 1950-1978 in collaboration with colleagues at Essex and the University of the Arts London, which is investigating transnational exchanges between artists from Europe and Latin America, and within Latin America in the post-war decades. Her own research for this project focuses on art in Chile and this paper summarises some of the findings to date.
Free entry: first come, first seated.
Director in Focus
Karim Aïnouz on Cinema, Space and the Female Gaze
Saturday, 5 November 2011, 12.00 to 3.15 pm, Birkbeck Cinema, 43 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PD
Programme
- 12.00 - 12.15 pm Welcome and introduction
- 12.15 - 1.45 pm Screening of Suely in the Sky (O Céu de Suely, Karim Aïnouz, 2006, 90 min)
- 1.45 - 2.00 pm Refreshments
- 2.00 - 2.45 pm Screening of one episode of Alice (Karim Aïnouz and Sergio Machado, 2008, 45 min)
- 2.45 - 3.15 pm Q&A with Karim Aïnouz, chaired by Mariana Cunha (Oxford)
The Director
Karim Aïnouz is a Brazilian-Algerian filmmaker and visual artist. Aïnouz’s feature debut, Madame Satã, premiered in 2002 at the Cannes Film Festival, Un Certain Regard. His following films, Suely in the Sky, and Viajo Porque Preciso Volto Porque Te Amo (co-directed with Marcelo Gomes) premiered in the Venice Film Festival, Orizzonti, in 2006 and 2009. His films have received numerous international awards. In 2008, Aïnouz directed Alice, a 13 episode fiction series for HBO Latin America. His latest film The Silver Cliff (O Abismo Prateado, 2011) was reviewed at Cannes Film Festival (Directors' Fortnight) in May 2011. He is scheduled to go into production of his next feature, Praia do Futuro, in the winter of 2011, to be shot in Germany and Brazil.
His installations have been shown in the Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial (1997) and the São Paulo Biennial (2004).
The Discussant
Mariana Cunha holds an MA in Cultural and Critical Studies (2004) and a PhD (2010) from Birkbeck, University of London. Her PhD thesis focuses on the construction of cinematic landscapes in Brazilian cinema, particularly in films that portray rural-urban migration. She also studied documentary filmmaking at the Escuela Internacional de Cine y TV of San Antonio de los Baños, Cuba (2008). She is currently a sessional lecturer at the University of Oxford.
Free entry: first come, first seated.
This event is organized with the support of the Brazilian Embassy.
CILAVS Workshop
Scenes of Class Struggle in Portugal
Friday, 18 November 2011, 10.00 am to 8.00 pm, Birkbeck, Keynes Library (film screening in Room B04), 43 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PD
The Carnation Revolution of 25th April 1974 triggered a revolutionary process that for one year and a half would radically change the image of Portugal as a conservative country and the Portuguese as an obedient people. The status of this image was immediately perceived as a key issue within the revolution. Journalists, filmmakers, photographers and writers produced a set of representations that played an active role in the process. Any debate on the Carnation Revolution should thus be able to overcome the distinctions between politics and its images and texts and deal with the latter as political events in their own right.
The workshop Scenes of Class Struggle in Portugal, organized by Luís Trindade, brings together new researchers working on the Portuguese revolution, including keynote speaker Pedro Ramos Pinto (Univ. of Manchester). It will also host the screening of Torre Bela (Thomas Harlan, 1975). José Filipe Costa (IADE, Lisbon) and Ros Gray (Goldsmiths) will introduce the film.
Please click on Programme to download a copy.
For more details contact Luís Trindade
Film Screening and Talk
Numax Presenta... (Joaquim Jordà, 1980, 105 mins., English subtitles)
Thursday, 1 December 2011, 6.00 to 9.00pm, Birkbeck Cinema, 43 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PD
Financed with the contingency fund of the workers’ assembly at the Numax factory, this historical documentary is a bittersweet account of the partial successes and ultimate failure of the struggle for self-organisation of a group of workers in late 1970s Spain. Rather than speaking for the workers, late filmmaker Joaquim Jordà records the vivid discussions among them, allowing opposing views to unfold before the camera. The film traces a dramatic shift from the aspirations of self-management to defeat by self-exploitation, and the key role that women played in this movement.
The screening will be introduced by Mari Paz Balibrea (Birkbeck), followed by a talk by Carles Guerra (Chief Curator, MACBA) and roundtable discussion chaired by Issac Marrero (Birkbeck).
Before joining the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona (MACBA), Carles Guerra has been director at La Virreina Centre for the Image in Barcelona since 2009. During the course of his professional career he has also worked as an exhibition curator and art critic, as well as an analyst of cultural policy and visual production. His research work focuses on the dialogic aspects of contemporary visual culture. In 2011, he received the City of Barcelona Prize for Visual Art.
This event is part of All I Can See is the Management at Gasworks, curated by Antonia Blocker, Robert Leckie and Helena Vilalta. It is presented in collaboration with Gasworks and Spanish Cultural Action, AC/E.'
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.
Spaces of Dissent: An interdisciplinary workshop on Occupy London
Thursday, 23 February 2012, 2-5pm, Birkbeck Cinema, 43 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PD
A panel of academics from a range of disciplines will discuss Occupy London. They will focus on how urban space and politics intersect in the historically, politically and theologically charged context of St Paul's Churchyard and the City of London.
Short informal presentations will be followed by a round table discussion and an open discussion with the audience.
Programme:
Professor Derek Keene, Honorary Fellow and Professor (Metropolitan History), Institute of Historical Research
Medieval St Paul's: confrontation and occupation
Dr Christine Stevenson, Senior Lecturer, Courtauld Institute of Art
"My craz’d Arches": seventeenth-century St Paul’s assaulted, and protesting
Dr Mari Paz Balibrea Enriquez, Senior Lecturer in Modern Spanish Literature and Cultural Studies, Birkbeck
Invested in space: reflections on the location(s) of dissent
Sarah Lamble, Lecturer, School of Law, Birkbeck
Disciplining Spaces of Dissent: The rioter, the occupier and the regulation of resistance
Professor Julian Stallabrass, Courtauld Institute of Art
Photographing Occupy
Organised by the Architecture, Space and Society Network, Vasari Research Centre, Department of History of Art and Screen Media, Birkbeck
For more information and to book see http://assnbbk.blogspot.com/
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.
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 Department of Computer Science and Information Systems at Birkbeck and 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. This roundtable will be followed by the opening of Textile Sculptures, an exhibition of recent work by Warmi at the Peruvian Embassy.
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
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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.
Cecilia Vicuña: A Tongue within Tongues
Thursday, 22 March 2012, 7.30pm, Birkbeck, Room 153, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HX (Entrance via Torrington Place)
Cecilia will show the film "kon kon pi" for the first time in London. This 13 minute film was exhibited at MoMA New York in 2011. Followed by a performance.
Poet and artist, born in Chile, she performs and exhibits her work widely in Europe, Latin America and the US. She is also a political activist and founding member of Artists for Democracy. Since 1980 she lives in New York and Chile. For more information about her work visit http://www.ceciliavicuna.org/en_exhibition.htm
Jointly hosted by Birkbeck Contemporary Poetics Research Centre and CILAVS.
CILAVS Exhibition
Textile Sculptures: Recent work by Warmi
Monday, 19 to Friday, 30 March 2012, Embassy of Peru, The Portable Gallery, 52 Sloane Street London SW1X 9SP
Monday to Friday 10:00-13:00 15:00-17:00
I admire the sensibility and mathematics involved in the choice of colour by Peruvian embroiderers, who still challenge the viewers’ intellect and senses. They demand concentrated viewing: observation turning into contemplation.
Warmi 2012
Warmi (Susie Goulder) is a Peruvian artist who lives and works in London and Lima.
This exhibition forms part of the AHRC-funded project Weaving communities of practice. It is organized by CILAVS with the collaboration of the Peruvian Embassy and Valerie Fraser (University of Essex).
The representation of Brazil in the 1920s cinema: World Fair and scientific expeditions
Eduardo Morettin (ECA-USP)
Thursday, 26 April 2012, 6.00pm, Room B06, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HX (Entrance via Torrington Place)
The representation of the Brazilian nation in the cinema of the 1920s will be examined through three films: No país das Amazonas (1922), No Rastro do Eldorado (1925), both from Silvino Santos, and 1922: a Exposição da Independência (1970), from Arno Konder e Roberto Kahané. The first film was projected in the cinemas of the Brazilian Independence Centenary World Fair (1922-1923), while the third one was produced with documentary images about the exposition, shot by Silvino Santos. Finally, No Rastro do Eldorado, represents one of the most emblematic regions of Brazil, the Amazonia. These films offer us elements for an integral interpretation of Brazil, which was symbolically seeking his place in the global context. Please note that due to time constraints just selected clips of the films will be screened.
Discussant: Luciana Martins (Birkbeck)
Professor of Audiovisual History in the School of Arts and Communication (ECA) at the University of São Paulo, Eduardo Morettin is currently undertaking his Postdoctoral Studies at the Université Paris I. In 2010 he was Visiting Professor at the Université Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée. His numerous publications include the co-edited volume História e Cinema: dimensões históricas do audiovisual (2nd ed., 2011).