The School of Arts is the home the History of Art department shares with the departments of Film, Media and Cultural Studies, Cultures and Languages, and English and Humanties. Arts Week is the annual showcase for the amazing range of discovering, thinking, creating and debating that goes on there. Every evening next week, you can come along to talks, screenings, panels, walks, workshops and more. You can even take part in a social media competition for the best arts-related pun. Here’s a message about that from our social media czar Oliver Chinyere:
We’ve launched our Arts Week pun contest and are looking for submissions! If you’re on social, please feel free to share with your audiences and/or participate yourself! (Twitter / FB). Winner wins a £25 gift card…and bragging rights.
Do browse through all the listings, but here for your convenience are the art/art history/museums-related events:
Monday 20 May
Accidental gardens: Natura Urbana | 5.45- 7.20pm | Book your ticket
Cinema, 43 Gordon Square. Natura Urbana: The Brachen of Berlin (dir. Matthew Gandy, 2017) explores the ecology of ‘accidental gardens’ flourishing in post-war Berlin. The changing vegetation serves as a parallel history to war-time destruction, geopolitical division, and the newest phase of urban transformation.
Jews, money, myth | 6:00-7.20 | Book your ticket
Room 122, 43 Gordon Square. How can museums best confront the stereotypes that feed anti-semitism? Explore the challenges of exhibiting difficult histories and shaping the stories objects tell with Sarah Thomas, Anthony Bale, Marc Volovici and curator of the current exhibition at The Jewish Museum, Joanne Rosenthal.
Thinking (about) automata in Descartes, Shaftesbury, and Diderot | 6.00-7.20pm | Keynes library, 43 Gordon Square. What was the soul and what was the body? From Descartes to Diderot, the automaton crystallised this problem. Dr James Fowler discusses this Enlightenment crisis in how philosophers imagined non-human and human animals as ‘bêtes-machines’, clockwork and living statues.
Tuesday 21 May
Victorian dolls and fashion: exhibition and workshop | 12-7pm | Book your ticket
Room 122, 43 Gordon Square. This exhibition brings nineteenth-century dress to life on a small scale. Costume designer Claudia Vogt shows replicas of dresses and reproduces works from the Bedale’s Costume Collection. Join us to learn Victorian dress-making techniques for yourself.
Bridging the distance: a collaborative photography research project | 6-7.20pm | Book your ticket
Keynes library, 43 Gordon Square. Members of Ph: The Photography Research Network discuss their collaborative exhibition project with diverse works on environment, portraiture, surveillance and resistance. Explore hierarchies between theory and practice and how photography might bridge these distances. Guest chair and speaker Kathy Kubicki (Kingston, Goldsmiths).
Wednesday 22 May
Platform KX: a tour of the new King’s Cross | 2-4.00pm | Book your ticket
Meet at London King’s Cross Station. North of King’s Cross Station, once home to gasworks, railways and industry, one finds KX: a ‘creative quarter’ of flats, offices, shops, galleries, and restaurants. Join Birkbeck’s Scott Rodgers on a tour exploring KX and its platforms including Facebook and Google.
Female Human Animal: on surrealism, film, and fantasy | 5.30-7.20pm | Book your ticket Cinema, 43 Gordon Square. Josh Appignanesi’s psycho-thriller evokes the atmosphere of Leonora Carrington’s work, raising fascinating questions about gender, sexuality, and the inner life. The director joins Birkbeck’s Katherine Angel, Catherine Grant and Mark Blacklock.
Euston twilight: hotels, boarding houses and luxury squats in the post-war era | 7.40-9pm | Book your ticket Meet outside the School of Arts. A twilight walking tour visits the ghosts of Euston’s grand hotels and down-at-heel boarding houses. Uncover the history of residential hotels and other defunct forms of private rented accommodation, and learn about their subsequent history.
Thursday 23 May
Renaissance Women: learning from images | 2-5.00pm | Book your ticket
Meet at the front entrance National Portrait Gallery. What can an image tell us about the women of the past? Join our team of Birkbeck investigators as we mine the National Portrait Gallery’s unrivalled collection of portraits of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century queens, poets and patrons for stories of women’s worlds.
Patrons and Lovers of Art: nineteenth-century collecting and the wealth of empire | 6-7.20pm | Book your ticket Room B03, 43 Gordon Square. Pieter Christoffel Wonder’s Patrons and Lovers of Art (1830) commemorates the foundation of the National Gallery (1824). Sarah Thomas (Birkbeck), Catherine Roach (VCU), and Susanna Avery-Quash (National Gallery) discuss the painting from different perspectives within the context of British cultural history.
But are you doing anything? Curating, producing and managing as practice research | 6-9.00pm | Book your ticket Keynes library, 43 Gordon Square. How do thinking, talking and meditating rate as work? What is productivity in curating? This event is co-organised by the Arts Management programmes and Corkscrew, School of Arts Practice Based Research Group.
Friday 24 May
Architecture and dust: a discussion with Teresa Stoppani | 6-7.20pm | Book your ticket
Cinema, 43 Gordon Square. Dust can be a fragment, fragmented, or an accumulation. Teresa Stoppani (Architecture Association) discusses the idea of dust in relation to architecture, the body and the city. An Architecture, Space and Society Centre event with a response by Birkbeck’s Joel McKim.
And not to miss…
Last night music | 7.40-9.00pm | Book your ticket Room G10, 43 Gordon Square. Some of the School’s finest performers play live. Featuring contributions from The Bluegreen Trio (Louise Owen, Tony Fisher and Neil Livingstone) and Anthony J Shepherd. Acoustic jazz, folk and soul to celebrate Arts Week.
Hope you enjoy all the events, and the buzz around the place that always accompanies Arts Week!
And in other news…
Sean Willcock, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, has been awarded a Visting Scholarship for a month in 2020 at the Yale Centre for British Art in the US – many congratulations to him!
Sarah Thomas, Lecturer in the department, is giving a talk entitled ‘Slavery, Patronage and the Love of Art: Slave-ownership and the Politics of Collecting in Early Nineteenth-century Britain’ at a conference on Art Institutions and Race in the Atlantic World, 1619–1833 at The Courtauld Institute, May 24 & 25, 2019
The Arts Employability event featuring Dr Katy Barrett, Birkbeck Alumna and Curator of Art Collections at the Science Museum, speaking about careers in museums, has been rescheduled for 12 June, 6pm – so if you missed the first date, you have another chance to attend this very useful and interesting event.
And last but very much not least, for those of you starting out, or battling through to the end of your degrees (exams, anyone?), some inspiration. Here are some of our MA graduates (and supporters) at last month’s graduation ceremonies. It was lovely to see them looking so happy and relaxed!
