Tuesday Talks

Tuesday Talks at Whitworth Art Gallery 

(These events have now finished)

The Whitworth as we know it is closing on September 1st to be extended and transformed. We re-open in Summer 2014.

To find more details about the coming changes follow our Capital Development blog.

Ongoing live information can also be found on facebook and twitter.

 

 

 

Tuesday Talks continue at MMU…

PLEASE NOTE NEW VENUE!!

MMU All Saints Campus, New Art & Design Building, Lecture Theatre 403

12pm – 1.30pm, free, no booking necessary

The Tuesday Talks series are a collaboration between the Whitworth Art Gallery and Manchester Metropolitan University, and as the Whitworth transforms into a 21^st century gallery in the park, the talks will be held at MMU.

The Tuesday Talks  invites leading artists, thinkers and curators to explore the driving forces, influences and sources of inspiration within contemporary art and is programmed by Professor Pavel Büchler and Bryony Bond.

8 October

Juan Cruz 
Juan Cruz joined Liverpool John Moores University as Head of Art in 2008 and was appointed Director of the School of Art and Design in 2012. He studied Painting and Art Theory at Chelsea College of Art and Design in London. Following a period of working independently as an artist and critic he took up a year-long fellowship with Kettle’s Yard at the University of Cambridge which led to an academic post in the Department of Art at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2000. Juan has exhibited his work internationally and continues to practice as an artist from a studio at the Bluecoat in LIverpool. His research comprises the production of artworks and exhibitions, generally involving the use of various forms of text in relation to the visual, as well as writing about his own work, the work of other artists and related issues. His recent exhibitions include Terminal Convention, Cork, Ireland 2011; Sound Art at No Longer Empty, Liverpool Biennial 2010; Translating: Chapter 3, Centre for the Study of World Civilisations, Tokyo Institute of Technology 2010; On Second Reading, Galeria Estrany de la Mota, Barcelona 2009; Translating: Chapter Two, Crate, Margate 2009 and Mensch, Edinburgh International Festival 2009. He is represented by Matt’s Gallery, London.

15 October

Eddy Rhead

Eddy Rhead is one of the co-founders and trustees of The Manchester Modernist Society. He is a long time campaigner for, and champion of, 20th century architecture. He writes regularly for the The Modernist, a quarterly magazine set up by the MMS, and is mainly interested in buildings everyone else hates.

22 October

Dean Hughes

Dean Hughes was born in Salford in 1974 and studied at Chelsea College of Art and Design between 1993 and 1996. He was included in the British Art Show 5 in 2000 and his work was featured in Phaidon’s 2005 book Vitamin D: New perspectives in Drawing. Recent exhibitions include Big Minis at CAPC, Bordeaux; Lonely at the Top, MUHKA, Antwerp; Graphology at the Drawing room, London and Newspeak British Art Now, Saatchi Gallery, London. He is Director of Undergraduate studies at Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh.

29 October

Paul Nesbitt

Is Director and Curator of Exhibitions at Inverleith House in the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, where he has organised major exhibitions by some of today’s leading artists based especially in the UK and North America. These have included: Karla Black, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Luke Fowler, Mark Leckey, Richard Hamilton, Thomas Houseago, Douglas Gordon, Lucy McKenzie, Richard Wright and Cerith Wyn Evans; Carl Andre, Louise Bourgeois, William Eggleston, Philip Guston, Agnes Martin, Joan Mitchell, John McCracken, Robert Rauschenberg, Ed Ruscha, Robert Ryman, Rudolf Stingel, Richard Tuttle, Cy Twombly, Lawrence Weiner and Franz West. He is currently working on the first UK Museum exhibition by the American artist Dan Colen (b.1979) which opens on 12 October 2013. He trained as a plant ecologist and also has a professional interest in the relationship between art and science.

5 November

Peter Liversidge

Every element in an exhibition of work by Peter Liversidge begins at the artist’s kitchen table with Liversidge sitting alone writing proposals on an old manual typewriter. These hand-typed pages, present an array of possible and impossible ideas for performances and artworks in almost every conceivable medium. Liversidge has said: “… the process is also about the notion of creativity: it’s important that some of the proposals are actually realized, but no more so that the others that remain only as text on a piece of A4 paper…”.

Liversidge has exhibited throughout Europe and the USA, including the Tate Gallery, Liverpool; The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and the National Gallery of Finland. A major solo exhibitiondoppelgänger at Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh as well as new public art commission, Flags for Edinburgh, launched in August as part of the 2013 Edinburgh Art Festival.

12 November

Maria Fusco

Maria Fusco is a Belfast-born writer based in Edinburgh. She is a Chancellor’s Fellow at Edinburgh College of Art, Scotland and was Director of Art Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work is published internationally and is translated into more than seven languages, and she has been awarded as one of Canongate’s Future 40.

She is the founder and editorial director of The Happy Hypocrite, a semi-annual journal for and about experimental art writing. In 2009-10, she was the inaugural Writer in Residence at Whitechapel Gallery in London, and in 2008-9, the Critic in Residence at The Kadist Art Foundation in Paris, and has been awarded as a Jerwood Creative Catalyst. She wrote the screenplay for GONDA, a film by Ursula Mayer based around Ayn Rand’s 1934 play Ideal, commissioned by Film London, and published as a ciné-roman by Sternberg Press.

This year Fusco is Writer-in-Residence at the Lisbon Architecture Triennale and a Hawthorden Fellow, Scotland. She is currently working on a new book about Donald Sutherland.

19 November

Sally Tallant

Sally Tallant is the Director of Liverpool Biennial – The UK Biennial of International Contemporary Art. From 2001 to 2011 she was Head of Programmes at the Serpentine Gallery, London where she was responsible for the development and delivery of an integrated programme of Exhibitions, Architecture, Education and Public Programmes. She has curated exhibitions in a wide range of contexts including the Hayward Gallery, Serpentine Gallery, Hospitals, Schools as well as public commissions. She has developed commissioning programmes for artists in a range of contexts and developed long-term projects including The Edgware Road Project, Skills Exchange and Disassembly. She has also curated performances, sound events, film programmes and conferences including initiating the Park Nights series in the Serpentine Gallery Pavilions and co-curating the Serpentine Gallery Marathon series with Hans Ulrich Obrist. She is a regular contributor to conferences nationally and internationally

26 November

JJ Charlesworth

JJ Charlesworth has been writing about contemporary art since he left Goldsmiths College London in 1996, where he did a degree in art. He is associate editor at the leading contemporary art magazine ArtReview and writes regularly on art for magazines such as Art Monthly, Time Out London and the US website Art Agenda. He is currently researching a doctoral thesis at the Royal College of Art, on British art criticism in the 1970s.

 

 

 

Previous talks include;

Stefan Brüggemann

Artist Stefan Brüggemann works predominantly with language, and is currently exhibiting, alongside Lawrence Weiner and Carey Young, at the Holden Gallery, Manchester Metropolitan University. He frequently uses references from mass media, such as advertising, music and fashion, and inserts them into a contemporary art context. Combining high and low culture, he exposes the impossibility to distinguish one from another. Recent exhibitions have included wallpaper made from the repeated phase “Conceptual Decoration’ and a volume of over one thousand possible exhibition titles. Brüggemann was born in Mexico City, and is based in London.
Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt
Having worked as a curator of international contemporary art for more than a decade, Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt receded from direct participation to embark upon an extensive interrogation of the European cultural field. Increasingly deploying an investigative methodology, she has exposed the endemic corruption in commercially derived approaches to culture, most recently as Researcher-in-Residence at the Centre for Contemporary Art, Derry, in relation to UK City of Culture 2013. Seeking alternatives to the prevailing model of cultural organisation, Rebecca spent five months in the libraries and archives of Havana, tracing the socially inflected approaches to culture that emerged in the wake of the 1959 Cuban Revolution. It is this research she will present at this talk, in the context of broader trends in cultural policy and their effect on the production of art.

 

John Smith

Described by Michael O’Pray in Art Monthly as “One of the most talented filmmakers of the postwar generation, he [John Smith] has attracted admirers from way beyond the narrow confines of the Avant Garde. His reputation rests on a quite unique sensibility which has successfully married three traits – humour, documentary and formal ingenuity – into an indissoluble whole.” Drawing upon the raw material of everyday life, Smith’s meticulously crafted films rework and transform reality, playfully exploring and exposing the language of cinema. John Smith studied film at the Royal College of Art, and since 1972 has made over fifty film, video and installation works that have been shown in cinemas, art galleries and on television around the world.

 

Richard Long

One of Britain’s most well-known artists, Richard Long established his international reputation in the 1970s with sculptures made as the result of epic walks. From 16 February two of his stone sculptures, White Onyx Line and Tideless Stones, will be shown alongside text works in the Whitworth Art Gallery. For this talk Long will be in conversation with Pavel Büchler. Richard Long represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale in 1976 and won the Turner Prize in 1989.

 

Samson Kambalu

Artist and author Samson Kambalu has co-curated the exhibition Tattoo City: The First Three Chapters with Castlefield Gallery’s in house curator Clarissa Corfe. The exhibition includes Kambalu’s work interspersed witha selection of art inspired by Rudolf Steiner’s esoteric philosophy of freedom – anthroposophy, as well as newly commissioned and existing works by guest artists including Joseph Beuys and Jochem Hendricks. Kambalu’s first book The Jive Talker or How to Get a British Passport, published by Random House, Simon & Schuster and Unionsverlag in 2008, is a memoir of his upbringing in Malawi and the influence of Nietzsche in shaping his own art practice and quasi-religion ‘Holyballism’, centred around a sculpture of football wrapped in pages of the Bible. Born in Malawi, Kambalu has exhibited widely, including exhibitions at the Whitechapel Gallery, Tokyo International Art Festival, Brooklyn Institute of Contemporary Art, New York and the Museum der Bildenden Künste Leipzig. He is currently a PhD candidate at Chelsea College of Art and Design.

 

Adrian Searle

 

Adrian Searle has been chief art critic for The Guardian since 1996. He began writing in 1976, for Artscribe magazine. Publications include monographs on Peter Doig, Roni Horn, Juergen Teller and Steve McQueen. In 2010 he edited The Writings of Juan Muñoz. He has curated several exhibitions, including Unbound, an international survey of painting at London’s Hayward Gallery in 1994; the first retrospective of Brazilian sculptor Lucia Nogueira, for the Serralves Museum  in Portugal in 2007 and Julião Sarmento: Close Distance, at the Casa Encendida in Madrid in 2011. He has taught at numerous art schools in Britain and Europe, including De Ateliers in Amsterdam and the Royal College of Art. A Turner Prize juror in 2004, he currently serves on the jury of the Kurt Schwitters Award in Hanover.

 

Emily Pethick

Emily Pethick has been the director of The Showroom, London, since 2008. From 2005-2008 she was the director of Casco, Office for Art, Design and Theory, in Utrecht, The Netherlands. From 2003-2004 she was curator at Cubitt, London. She has contributed to numerous catalogues and magazines, including Artforum, Frieze, The Exhibitionist, anddot dot dot, and edited books, such as Casco Issues X: The Great Method (with Peio Aguirre), and Casco Issues XI: An Ambiguous Case (with Marina Vishmidt and Tanja Widmann), and Circular Facts (with Mai Abu EIDahab and Binna Choi), pub. Sternberg Press).

 

Mike Bouchet

Since the early 1990s, American artist Mike Bouchet, a resident of Frankfurt since 2004, has been producing art in a variety of forms including paintings, sculptures, installations, actions, performances, and videos. His artistic practice focuses on social and political issues such as ownership, consumerism, capitalism, architecture and sex, yet also explores his own role as an artist. In 2009, for Frieze Projects, Bouchet hired a motivational speaker to speak to the gallerists about sales attitudes, cultivating relationships with potential collectors, projecting the confidence to sell more challenging works of art, and maintaining inviting body language in a competitive sales environment. Bouchet was included in the 5th Berlin Bienale, 2006, the 53^rd Venice Biennale, 2009, and has had solo shows in Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; MOCA, Los Angeles, Cobra Museum, Amsterdam and Palais de Tokyo, Paris.

 

Daniel Sturgis

British painter Daniel Sturgis has said, “One of the big problems for painting is the idea of history. That is the biggest burden painting has, because now if you’re an artist you know that history has already been written… if we can’t contest those writings, where does that leave us? What can we do, and how do we continue to make work that still has an element of criticality?” His paintings have been shown throughout the UK and Europe with recent exhibitions including Plastic Culture: Legacies of Pop 1987-2008, Harris Museum, Preston, 2009; Invisible Cities, Jerwood Space, London, 2009; and the solo exhibition Possibilities in Geometric Abstraction, Galerie Hollenbach, Stuttgart, 2008. He  recently curated The Indiscipline of Painting at Tate St Ives.

 

Lisa Le Feuvre

Head of Sculpture Studies at the Henry Moore Institute and co-curator of the British Art Show 7, Lisa Le Feuvre is one of Britain’s leading curators and writers on contemporary art. Her recent publication Failure, published by Whitechapel gallery and MIT Press ‘establishes failure as a central concern in contemporary cultural production’. She has also recently curated exhibitions by Sarah Lucas, Helen Chadwick, John McCracken and Michael Dean.

 

Swetlana Heger

Swetlana Heger was born in the Czech Republic and is currently based in Berlin. Stuart Comer has described her work as treading “the porous boundaries between art, commerce and corporate patronage, teasing out the double bind that exists between these systems”. She has documented the fate of public sculptures in Berlin, melted down andremodelled according to the changing political climate, and collaborated with well-known brands such as Hermès and Adidas to create a series of self-portraits.

 

Rasmus Nielsen

SUPERFLEX is an artists’ group founded in 1993 by Jakob Fenger, Rasmus Nielsen and Bjørnstjerne Christiansen. SUPERFLEX describe their projects as Tools. A tool is a model or proposal that can actively be used and further utilized and modified by the user. Recent projects include an urban park project in Copenhagen in which people from the area was asked to nominate specific city objects such as benches, bins, trees, playgrounds, manhole covers and signage from other countries, which were either produced in a 1:1 copy or bought and transported to the site. Other projects include Flooded McDonald’s, a film of a McDonald’s interior gradually flooding with water, Power Toilets, recreations of toilets from the UN or European Union buildings and Free Beer, the recipe and branding elements of a beer that anyone can use to brew and sell. SUPERFLEX are also included in this year’s Liverpool Biennial.

 

Brian Griffiths

Since graduating from Goldsmiths College in the late 1990s Brian Griffiths has been making sculpture and installations of over blown theatricality and pathos. His work has been exhibited extensively in the UK and internationally. He has had solo shows at Camden Arts Centre, Arnolfini, A Foundation, Vilma Gold, Galeria Luisa Strina and internationally has shown work at numerous museums including Tate Britain, The Groninger Museum in the Netherlands, The Mattress Factory Museum in Pittsburgh, CAPC museum in Bordeaux, Mostra D’Arte Contemporanea in Milan and Belém Museum of Modern Art, Brazil. He was shortlisted for the Fourth Plinth commission in 2011 and was included in the British Art Show 7 and a first monograph is was published by Koenig in 2011. Griffiths is presently working on a curated show ‘Bill Murray’. 

 

Rob Tufnell

Rob Tufnell runs a commercial gallery in central London and also works as a freelance curator and writer. Exhibitions he has curated include ‘Altogether Elsewhere’ which explored notions of psychedelia in contemporary art practice, ‘The Writing on Your Wall’ which looked at printmaking as a socially concerned, democratic media designed to disseminate radical ideas, and he also co-curated ‘Savage Messiah’ which took the eponymous 1972 film by Ken Russel as starting point to explore how Vorticism might remain a dynamic force in the art of the present. He has previously been the Curator of Turner Contemporary, Margate and has also worked at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge and at Dundee Contemporary Arts. He has also worked as a Director of Ancient & Modern and Modern Art, London and at the Modern Institute, Glasgow.

 

Jane and Louise Wilson

Acclaimed British artists Jane and Louise Wilson are currently exhibiting a series of works inspired by the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster at the Whitworth. The exhibition includes the new work, The Toxic Camera, which is inspired by the film Chernobyl: A Chronicle of Difficult Weeksmade by Ukrainian filmmaker Vladimir Shevchenko in the days immediately following the accident. Upon processing the film, Shevchenko noticed portions of it were heavily pockmarked and affected by static interference, coinciding with the sound of measuring radiation from the Geiger counter, thus realising that radiation was effectively ‘visible’ on the film material itself. Jane and Louise Wilson began working together in 1989. They have exhibited at major galleries throughout the world and were nominated for the Turner Prize in 1999.

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