When: Fri, 11 Sep, ’09
Where: Main Lecture Theatre (EG02), COFA

Yang Shaobin, Blind Spot No. 6 (2008)

How has the everyday been transformed by the emergency: real, imagined or instigated? Across the spheres of public health, finance, media and government, ‘crises’ are a regular occurrence, generating levels of anxiety and panic. The rhetoric characterizing both the ‘global financial crisis’ and the ‘swine flu epidemic’ has fueled anxieties, which are themselves infectious, seemingly subject to transmission through media. What then is the role of media and aesthetics in crisis driven culture? The Infectious symposium brings together researchers, artists and curators to discuss practical and analytical methods and concepts that might lead us towards alternative responses to crisis – from the Intervention in the Northern Territory of Australia to global health epidemics to urban and industrial development in China. The symposium will also address artworks and themes raised in the exhibition REAL Emergency, (Ivan Dougherty Gallery, August 27 – September 20, curated by Jill Bennett and Anna Munster), which features video art and post-documentary work by internationally renowned artists such as Hito Steyerl and Yang Shaobin.

International speakers:
Jiang Jun, Chief Editor of Urban China Magazine and lecturer at Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts
David Teh, Curator of 5th Bangkok Experimental Film Festival and lecturer at the National University of Singapore
Zoe Butt, Director of The Long March Project, Beijing

Australian speakers:
Anna Gibbs (Cultural Theorist, Writing and Society Research Group, UWS)
Jennifer Biddle (Visual Anthropologist, CCAP, UNSW)
Niamh Stephenson (Public Health, UNSW)
Ross Harley (Media Arts, UNSW) and Gillian Fuller (EMPA, UNSW)

When: Fri, 28 Aug, ’09 – Sun, 20 Sep, ’09
Where: Ivan Dougherty Gallery, CoFA

What effects do crises – Hurricane Katrina, environmental catastrophes, war, for example – play in transforming aesthetics? Conversely, how have ‘real’ crises been reconfigured by a new visual language and sensibility in contemporary art practice? Emerging art forms and fields have arisen as responses to real world emergencies including post-documentary film, video and new media art. This exhibition highlights these new approaches with the Australian premiere of video and new media works by renowned international and national artists.

CURATORS: Jill Bennett and Anna Munster, with exhibition design by Adrian Davies

ARTISTS INCLUDE: Yang Shaobin, Hito Steyerl, Liza Johnson, Sharon Daniel, Michele Barker and Anna Munster, Atanas Djonov

OPENING: Friday August 28 at 5:30pm with drinks and special guests

Vernon Ah Kee, 'George Sibley' (2008), charcoal, crayon and acrylic on canvas, 180 x 240cm, private collection, image courtesy the artist and Milani Gallery, Brisbane

When: Fri, 1 May, ’09 – Sat, 2 May, ’09
Where: Main Lecture Theatre (EG02), COFA

Art and Appropriation Post The Apology draws together diverse voices — including those of artists, academics and curators — to discuss the issues surrounding Indigenous art and appropriation in the new context of the Australian government’s apology to the Stolen Generations, and nearly ten years after the decade-long formal reconciliation process.

Key questions will include:
• Have events in political, social and artistic realms changed the terrain of the debate, or are initial goals to be realised?
• With the increasing abundance of Indigenous imagery in contemporary Australian culture, what are appropriate ways for non-Indigenous artists and curators to engage with this material? Is it more acceptable for a non-Indigenous artist to draw inspiration from Indigenous artists if the resulting work may be characterised as abstraction rather than representation?
• The protocols for working with Indigenous artists and cultural products have been republished; but does the case for these protocols need to be remade?
• For what reasons would we privilege Indigenous art over that of other cultures whose cultural values might be transgressed or other religions who might find particular works blasphemous?

Keynote Speakers:
Dr Brenda L Croft, A/Prof David Garneau (Canada) and Prof Vivien Johnson

Additional speakers:
Vernon Ah Kee, Dr Jennifer Biddle, A/Prof Rex Butler, Felicity Fenner, Lisa Havilah, Djon Mundine OAM, Aaron Seeto, Abdullah Syed and Tamara Winikoff

When: Thu, 16 Apr, ’09
Where: Elwyn Lynn Conference Centre, College of Fine Arts, Selwyn St. Paddington

The Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics and the Centre for Cultural Research, UWS, are proud to present a seminar with Gerald Raunig, who will speak at the Elwyn Lynn Conference Centre, College of Fine Arts, on Thursday 16 April, 2009. Gerald Raunig is the author of Art and Revolution (Semiotexte, 2007). His book, A Thousand Machines, will be translated into English this year. He is a philosopher and art theorist who lives in Vienna and lectures at the University of Klagenfurt and the University of Luneburg. He is the co-director of the Vienna-based EIPCP (European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies), which publishes the journal Transversal, and he is coordinator of the transnational research project republicart.

When: Fri, 24 Oct, ’08 – Sat, 25 Oct, ’08
Where: EG02 Lecture Theatre, College of Fine Arts

Film still (detail), River of No Return (2008), directed by Darlene Johnson

FLASH brings Prof Laura U. Marks to Australia for the first time. Her groundbreaking work on intercultural cinema explores the disjunctions in space and time that characterise the contemporary conditons of exile, immigration, and displacement. Within these disjunctions intercultural cinema appeals to memory – along with other, non-visual forms of knowledge – to represent and transmit otherwise unknown and even disavowed versions of history and experience. In her recent work Marks has turned her attention to intercultural dynamics of a particular order,  tracing a history of aesthetic relations between Islamic philosophy, European modernism and new digital media art.

FLASH brings together film makers, ethnographers, artists, and cultural theorists in order to explore how memory and experience are made palpable and proximate by new visual techonologies – allowing us to experience in a flash what cannot be known otherwise.

When: Mon, 29 Sep, ’08
Where: Zendai MoMA, Shanghai, China

How do exhibitions serve as sites for the construction of networks and spatial relationships, and how might they present new models of social life?

This workshop, convened by CCAP Director Jill Bennett and Zendai MoMA Deputy Director Binghui Huangfu, seeks to understand how art constitutes our relationship to a changing social and physical world – a world that is itself ‘ under construction’. It will look, in particular, at exhibition models that reveal the way artists perceive, negotiate and respond to spaces in transition – spaces that are continually reconstructed in light of social and economic change, migration and movement, devastation and conflict.

Focusing on and comparing recent curatorial strategies, the workshop will look at how social connections are generated through curating, and at how curators materialise relationships between different works from different places. The focus will be on the interfaces between visual art and other practices and disciplines, and between art and community/cultural space. It will examine how artists work in relation to physical, cultural and disciplinary frameworks, and how artists and curators work in collaboration with other kinds of practitioners, including architects, who have an explicit concern with the relationship of human subjects to the built environment. The aim will be to identify the practical, constructive purpose of art and exhibiting practice in a broader arena.

Questions to be discussed:

1)     Exhibitions do not merely represent existing cultural groups but generate new social networks and possibilities.
2)     Contemporary art curating doesn’t conform to ethnographic principles but creates dynamic engagements between works from different locations.
3)     What are the means by which art acts as a conduit and forges connections rather than representing what already exists?
4)     How are conversations realised in aesthetic terms? What are the social entities that are forged in the dynamic space of an exhibition?
5)     Does interdisciplinary practice charge and subvert disciplines and the spaces in which they operate, or does it enlarge those disciplines?
6)     Is this a new way of connections art and general community or simply a ay for various forms of art culture to become more entrenched?

When: Sat, 21 Jun, ’08 – Sun, 22 Jun, ’08
Where: Elwyn Lynn Conference Centre, CoFA

Affect at the Interface brings together leading national and international scholars working in the burgeoning area of affect theory. The small, residential group format (30 invited participants) is designed to enable the kind of intensive exchange that larger conference formats generally preclude. The symposium series forms part of a collaboration between the Centre for Contemporary Art and Politics, the Writing and Society Research Group at The University of Western Sydney, and the Centre for Women’s Studies at UBC, Vancouver, which hosted the Decolonising Affect Theory conference in June 2006.

The broader aim of the symposium is to rethink the relationship between biology, culture, and the human, beyond the universalising reductionism of biology in relation to gender, ‘race’, ethnicity, and culture which were rejected in the latter part of the twentieth century, and the biologically incurious cultural constructivism that has resulted. Our specific focus is affect. If affect is emerging as the primary structural system through which we interface physically – that is, biologically and neurologically – with the social, then how to rethink the relationship between biology and culture?

The format of this symposium takes shape through an examination of key readings in affect theory Silvan Tomkins and Darwin, to be circulated in advance. These readings will provide the background for the symposium. No formal papers will be presented. Rather, a series of six workshop topics will be introduced by leading scholars, combined with short presentations of work in process case material for discussion. The major topics will be rethinking the human, language and affect, the maternal, the intercultural, aesthetics, and mimesis and contagion.

When: Mon, 23 Jun, ’08
Where: Bach Dang Restaurant, Canley Vale; Casula Powerhouse; Ivan Dougherty Gallery

Extra/Ordinary Cities: The Cultural Dynamics of Urban Intervention is a dynamic forum examining the relationship between art, politics and the built environment in Asia and Australia. Travelling from Sydney’s eastern suburbs to the city’s southwest, this day-long event centered at the Bach Dang Vietnamese Restaurant in Canley Vale/Cabramatta brings together leading international artists, architects and writers for a series of presentations and discussion panels, culminating with a reception at the Concrete Culture exhibition at the Ivan Dougherty Gallery. The forum explores complex crossings, transformations and challenges in relation to urban landscapes and a series of urban interventions by artists.

Participants include:

Asia
Neville Mars, Ou Ning, Map Office (Laurent Guttierrez & Valérie Portefaix), Ruangrupa (Ade Darmawan & Reza Afisina)

International (Biennale of Sydney)
Michael Rakowitz, Rene Gabri, Manray Hsu

Australia
Richard Goodwin, Alfredo & Isabel Aquilizan, Squat Space, Shakthidharan

When: Mon, 16 Jun, ’08 – Mon, 23 Jun, ’08
Where: CCAP, College of Fine Arts, UNSW

From mid- to late June, Jim Wilce, Professor of Anthropology at Northern Arizona University, will undertake a residency with the CCAP. Prof Wilce will participate, along with Sneja Gunew, Adam Franks, and Anand Pandian, in the CCAP ‘s Affect at the Interface symposium, to be held on June 21-22. Prof Wilce is the author of Eloquence in Trouble: Poetics and Politics of Complaint in Rural Bangladesh (Oxford UP, 2003), and the editor of Social and Cultural Lives of Immune Systems (Routledge, 2003). Prof Wilce has served as the editor of the Blackwell Studies in Discourse and Culture series since 2005, and is soon to publish two more books: Language and Emotion (under contract with Cambridge University Press), and Crying Shame: Metaculture, Modernity and the Exaggerated Death of Lament (in press with Blackwell Publishers).