Vestibule
- Written byInternal Communications
- Published date 05 January 2023
Our next exhibition in the Central Saint Martins Lethaby Gallery will be Vestibule, which reconsiders the exhibition not as an enclosed space that hosts works of art and visitors but instead as a system whose growth can be exponential and unpredictable. The exhibition is not a conclusion but rather a process, shifting and in flux.
Over the course of the exhibition, the gallery will function as a storeroom, an archive, a making space, a showroom, and a classroom. A new configuration of works and events will be platformed each day. The boundaries that traditionally separate curatorial, education and research have been collapsed with multiple activities taking place simultaneously within the space.
Events
The following events are open to all on a first come, first served basis. Additional events are available for CSM Art programme students to sign-up for via Moodle.
Monday 16 January
MRes Art: Moving Image Writing Exchange, 2–4pm (40 seats, first come, first served)
MRes Art: Moving Image is pleased to host writer, curator and theorist Mathilde Roman who will read from her new book Swimming with Laure Prouvost / Nager Avec Laure Prouvost (Paris Manuella Editions 2022). The Writing Exchange is intended to act as a platform for sharing new approaches to critical writing on the moving image. Mathilde will discuss her book in dialogue with Duncan White who will also read from his book, A Certain Slant of Light (Holland House Books, 2021).
Tuesday 17 January
Imagining Futures, 10–11.30am (40 seats, first come, first served)
Mick Finch, Elena Isayev, Aoife McNiece, Olufemi Adetunji, Elizabeth Wright
The Imagining Futures (IF) Network aims to facilitate the opening-up and sensitive use of existing archives to create new ones, and articulate methods for egalitarian archival practices that respect multiple and divergent narratives. Archives are embraced as intrinsically constructed and multi-vocal. This is crucial as legacies are addressed from difficult and contested pasts. The London Lab aspect of the project is working with an Adventure Play Hub in London, developing inter-generational strategies that focus on play towards IF’s objectives and for the construction of activity templates that can be applied in other contexts. This work will be presented in the session.
T-factor, 11.30am–1pm (40 seats, first come, first served)
T-factor Mick Finch, Adam Thorpe, Jo Wheeler
T-Factor’s mission is to bring forward novel approaches to urban regeneration, focussing on the key role that temporary uses can play in creating inclusive, sustainable and thriving urban areas. We argue that the time factor in urban regeneration can become a strategic asset when it is used as a means of collective placemaking and learning – prototyping places and experiences that can inform longer term interventions. This presentation will give general background to the T-Factor project and as well as narrating the Euston Pilots’ specific activities.
Wednesday 18 January
Disruptions: power dynamics of aquisition, 10.30am–12.30pm (40 seats, first come, first served)
Anjalie Dalal Clayton, Sara David, Esi Eshun, Lennon Mhishi, Louisa Minkin, Raksha Patel, Judy Willcocks, Siyan Zhang
This conversation will explore the power dynamics of acquisition in museums and galleries. From researching existing collections, to surface bias, to working with acquisition selection panels, commissioning new work and working for restitution and reparation. What is a collection? What does it mean to have your work accessioned? We will reflect on the power dynamics of selecting student work for the UAL collection and how they have been overturned, as well as situating this work of disruption within its broader, urgent and ongoing political context.
Prisoners of Love: Affect, containment and alternative futures, 2–2.45pm (40 seats, first come, first served)
Louisa Minkin, Lennon Mhishi, Esi Eshun , Joseph Ijoyemi, Dawn Liburd, Grace Nwankwo, Rabiya Nagi, Rihanata Bigey, Charles Nyiha.
Connecting UK museum collection items with home and diasporic communities through virtual visits and art practices. A conversation about Prisoners of Love, Concepts Have Teeth and Mootookakio'ssin research projects, with work and thoughts from students who have been part of the projects. Art practices embedded in a web of relations between de/colonial histories, technologies and digital media.
Thursday 19 January
Meet & Greet, 12:30–2:30pm (40 seats, first come, first served)
We welcome Prof Henri Kalama Akulez, the chancellor of Académie de Beaux-Arts de Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, Prisca Tankwey and Cedrick Nzolo. All artists and educators from Kinshasa. They are joining Afterall Research Centre as institutional editorial partners and will be here to for conversations and to share knowledge on art education in the Global South.
Monday 23 January
Reassemblage – An Viet: Screening, 2–4pm (40 seats, first come, first served)
British Artists Film and Video Study Collection and MRes Art: Moving Image are pleased to host a screening of films by George Clark, made as part of Clark’s expanded archive film project Handle with Care. Rooted in expanded notions of archives and inspired by Trinh T. Minh Ha’s concept of ‘speaking nearby,’ the project aims to explore means of articulating memories from the personal to the collective, creating new ways to care for history and engaging with distinct collections, their pasts, presents and potential futures. Rather than approaching the archive through conventional notions, the project aims to encourage an understanding of the archive as a living being, a character with its own memories, dreams and desires.
Wednesday 25 January
Digital Archive of Artists' Publishing, 11am–12.30pm (40 seats, first come, first served)
The Digital Archive of Artists Publishing (DAAP) is an interactive, user-driven, searchable database of Artists’ Books and publications, that acts as a hub to engage with others, built by artists, publishers, and a community of producers in contemporary Artists’ Publishing, developed via an ethically driven design process and open-data methodology. DAAP is committed to challenging the politics of traditional archives that come of issues regarding inclusion and accessibility, from a post-colonial, critical gender and LGBTQI perspective. The project will work to ensure an equitable and ethical design process occurs throughout the archive development.
MRes Art: Moving Image: Research in Progress Screening, 2–4pm (40 seats, first come, first served)
This screening event will showcase current MRes Art: Moving Image Research. Students on the pathway will share their practice-based research through a lively screening programme highlighting the diversity and depth of new work being produced. Fragmentary moments from works in progress exploring themes such as disaster; atmospherics; catharsis; space navigation and memory. Working in collaboration, students from across the pathway will act as a collective to share, organise and frame the unfinished, the lived and the ongoing conditions of contemporary Moving Image Research.
Graham Ellard and Stephen Johnstone: Working from Archives, 5.30–7pm (40 seats, first come, first served)
Graham Ellard and Stephen Johnstone have worked together since 1993 and since 2007 exclusively in 16mm film. Their work often draws on archives, collections and historical research but takes a speculative and associative approach as atuned to coincidence and serendipity as it is to scholarly objectivity. They will present two films, Things to Come (2011) and FOSSIL (2019), which centre on things lost and things discovered - respectively; a special effects sequence shot by Lazlo Moholy Nagy, and collection of plaster casts revealed after fifty years hidden behind stud walls at the Royal Academy Schools. The films will be screened from 16mm prints and discussed as an open Q&A.
Thursday 26 January
Poor poor School Dean Kenning & Owen Parry, 2–4pm (40 seats, first come, first served)
Poor poor school is run by artists and writers Dean Kenning & Owen Parry. It is an inflatable school. A diagram of a possible school. A school within a school. A 3d model of a school hollowed out of cheap polystyrene. Dean is curator of the forthcoming Poor Things exhibition along with Emma Hart – a show at The Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh exploring sculpture and social class, which asks questions about aesthetic composition, taste and availabilism. Owen runs a ‘PooR Theory’ seminar at Central Saint Martins and makes things up. He says ‘despite its name, PooR theory is not necessarily a “bad theory” or a “low theory”, although it can and often does challenge or undermine hierarchies of value and taste. Instead, PooR theory forms and spreads through experimental, open-ended, idiosyncratic, and sometimes super-natural processes – it is a theory in search of a theory – a language in search of a form and can thus be particularly generative for art practice.’
Friday 27 January
Listening In (and Out of) Place. Angus Carlyle Sound Workshop, 2–4pm (40 seats, first come, first served)
This session will take as its focus a long term (and still live) project called Zawawa that began in 2011 with the ambition to address the auditory lives under military flight paths on the island of Okinawa, where the echoes of history are palpable. With anthropologist Rupert Cox and scientist Kozo Hiramatsu, our work together evolved into an installation, a sixty minute film and various diaristic and scholarly texts, with a collaborative book, an audio album, an archive and photographic scheduled for 2023. Exploring some of the methods involved in creating Zawawa will suggest the diverse ways of listening in place (and how sonic relations might simultaneous reveal the out of place): how fieldwork is constituted at a distance but also in the very proximate; how field recordings can capture what is distinct yet also lose that uniqueness through becoming a musical or cinematic resource; how archival materials such as still photography and moving images can be become transformed through a pacificist / anti-war aesthetic; how experimental writing practices might create new ways of working with testimonies.
Exhibition opening times
Thursday 12 January – Wednesday 1 February:
Mondays: UAL students and staff only
Tuesday–Friday: 11am–6pm
Saturday–Sunday: Closed
Please note, on Saturday 21 January the gallery will be open to the public 12–5pm