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Peltz Gallery celebrates successful first year

Gallery has hosted material and digital displays, performances and lectures

The Peltz Gallery in Birkbeck’s School of Arts is celebrating a highly successful first year, which included material and digital displays, performances and lectures. The venue was refurbished in 2013, thanks to the generous support of Birkbeck alumnus Daniel Peltz (MA Renaissance Studies, 2009) and his wife Elizabeth.

The gallery opened with a major exhibition entitled Touching the Book, curated by Dr Heather Tilley of Birkbeck’s Department of English and Humanities and exploring the history of embossed writing systems. A second exhibition in this series, called How We Read: Sensory history of books for the blind, will be held in the Peltz Gallery from 15-23 November 2014, and will examine the role of technology in helping blind people to read.

Other major exhibitions so far have included East and West: Visualising the Ottoman City, which supported a conference funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, in June 2014; Sally Heathcote, Suffragette: Remembering Female Suffrage, which looked at the retelling of the story of the first wave of feminism; The Space Between, an exhibition exploring the stories of four women academic refugees, which was organised by Birkbeck’s HR department in partnership with the Council for Assisting Refugee Academics; and Family Ties: Reframing Memory, which addressed the representation of family memory through the photographic, video and sound works of six artists, and coincided with a major conference on family in media, narrative and memory.

These exhibitions and events showcase the ways that research at Birkbeck intersects with the work of diverse artists, writers and organisations and plays an important role in making the College’s research accessible to the broader public.

Professor Hilary Fraser, Executive Dean of the School of Arts, said:

“This beautiful purpose-built exhibition space has created new opportunities for research by academics and students at Birkbeck to have visibility and impact both within and beyond the academic community.

“With a year of successful operation and dynamic programming under its belt, the Gallery is now at the centre of our plans to grow and enhance Birkbeck’s reputation for practice-based research by enabling visual artists, writers, film-makers and performers to develop and exhibit their artistic practice in a critically supportive environment. My colleagues and I are immensely grateful to Daniel and Elizabeth Peltz for making it possible for us to realise our vision for the School of Arts, and to build upon and expand our reputation as a world-leading centre for arts education and research.”

Professor Annie Coombes, Director of the Peltz Gallery, said:

“The Peltz calendar is already almost full for the new academic year (2014-15). This is testimony to its success as a thriving centre for creative practices and dialogue. There are exciting plans for the future. We believe that the experimental interdisciplinary nature of much of the research within the School, provides an ideal environment for hosting artists-in-residence and that the creation of residencies will stimulate a dynamic intellectual exchange that will be of mutual benefit to both academics and artists/performers.”

To find out more about exhibitions at the Peltz Gallery visit the website, follow the Gallery on Pinterest or sign-up for the Peltz Gallery newsletter.

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