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LRS Seminar – Power and Objects in Portraiture 6 December 2019

Paris Early Modern Seminar & London Renaissance Seminar

Power and Objects in Portraiture

Keynes, Birkbeck School of Arts, 43 Gordon Square (am) and National Portrait Gallery (pm)

6 December 2019 – 9.30am – 5.00pm

9.30-13.00 PART 1: Portraits: Manufacture, Meaning and Money

9.30-10.25 PANEL 1: Making the portrait: Images and things

9.30-9.50: Robert Maniura (Birkbeck), ‘What can (Renaissance) portraits do?’

9.50-10.10: Anne-Marie Miller-Blaise (Sorbonne nouvelle), ‘Expanding arenas of influence: Spheres, perspective, surfaces and the painter’s instruments’

10.10-10.20 Discussion

10.20-11.35: Panel 2: Men in Meetings

10.20-10.40: Matt Dimmock (Sussex),  ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls: Robert Cecil’s Portrait in the NPG’

10.40-11.00: Karen Hearn (UCL, London) ‘Men in Black and a Turkey Carpet: Images of the 1604 Somerset House Conference’

11.00-11.20 Ladan Niayesh (Paris Diderot), ‘Evolutions of the oriental carpet motif in state portraits: Tudor to Stuart’

11.20-11.35 Discussion

11.35-12.00pm COFFEE

12.00-12.55 PANEL 3: Representation: Inside and outside the gallery

12.00-12.20 Anne-Valérie Dulac (Sorbonne Université), ‘The Lustre of Power in Nicholas Hilliard’s ‘Phoenix’ Portrait of Elizabeth’

12.20pm-12.40

Mathilde Alazraki (Paris Diderot), ‘Euro-Persian Self-Staging and Feminine Power in Teresa Sherley’s Portraits (1622-4)’

Respondents & discussion 12.35-12.55/13.00

13.00-14.30 – LUNCH and walk to NPG

14.30 Convene upper foyer National Portrait Gallery (to left of ticket desk)

(times include presentations of 10 minutes followed by discussion with the group)

WALK 1 14.30-15.35 Portraits and power: presentations and discussion

14.35 pm-14.50 ROOM 2

Eva Lauenstein (Birkbeck),  ‘‘“Death painted on their houses”: Female lineage and the portrait of Sir Henry Unton’

14.50-15.05 ROOM 2

Béatrice Fuga (Sorbonne nouvelle), ‘Henry Lee’s Fickle Harmony: Of Knots and Spheres’

15.05-15.20: ROOM 2

Nicholas Thibault, ‘John de Critz’s portrait of Sir Francis Walsingham between shadow and light’

15.20-15.30 pm SHORT BREAK

WALK 2: 15.30-16.30 The image abroad: courts, places and power

15.30-15.45 ROOM 4

Clare McManus (Roehampton), ‘Death by Fashion: John Fletcher’s Portrait and the Performance of Gender’ John Fletcher by an unknown artist from c. 1620 (hanging in room 4 – NPG 6829).

15.45-16.00 ROOM 4

Torben Lund (Birkbeck), ‘Anne of Denmark, Royal Consort’

Anne of Denmark (12 December 1574 – 2 March 1619), Queen of Scotland (1589- 1619) and Queen of England (1603-19)’ John de Critz the Elder, Oil on Panel, 1605-10.

16.00-16.15 Lauren Working (Oxford), ‘Anne of Denmark’s Imperial Gaze’

16.15-16.30

ROOM 5 Fanny Morasin  (Sorbonne nouvelle), ‘Anne Clifford’s Ornamented Hair and the Assertion of Filial Legitimacy’

16.30-: Discussion, Tea break in NPG café & free time (NB NPG is open late on Fridays).

 

The London Renaissance Seminar (LRS) is a forum for the discussion of all aspects of early modern history, literature, and culture. It meets regularly at Birkbeck School of Arts, 43 Gordon Square. Anyone with a serious academic interest in the Renaissance is welcome and no registration is necessary.

For further information about this seminar contact Sue Wiseman: s.wiseman@bbk.ac.uk and Eva Lauenstein: lauenstein.eva@gmail.com . To join the LRS mailing list, please contact Tom Healy: t.f.healy@sussex.ac.uk. Twitter: @LondRenaissance

 

 

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Anna Konik: A Screening and Artist’s Talk for Refugee Week – Wednesday 27 June 2018, 6-7.30pm

Anna Konik, In the Same City, under the Same Sky…: A Screening and Artist’s Talk for Refugee Week

Wednesday 27 June 2018, 6-7.30pm, followed by a reception
Cinema, School of Arts, Birkbeck

Internationally-recognised video artist Anna Konik is visiting Birkbeck from her bases in Berlin and Warsaw to speak to us about her work involving migrant and refugee stories and to develop a new project with students on Birkbeck’s award-winning Compass Project. Konik has exhibited in numerous Polish and European galleries and museums over the past two decades. In the Winter Semester of 2017-18 she was Rudolf Arnheim Associate Professor at the Department of Art and Visual History, Humboldt University, Berlin; she is currently a fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center.

She will introduce and screen extracts from her project In the Same City, under the Same Sky…, which has been exhibited in Germany, Poland, Sweden and Romania.

In Anna’s words: ‘In the Same City, under the Same Sky… is a response to the reluctance shown towards immigrants and the tragedies that befall them on their way to Europe. These testimonies of immigrant women from Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Burma, Palestine, Turkey, Kurdistan, Congo, Romania, Chechnya, Ingushetia, Somalia, Nigeria, Cameroon, Ecuador, and Roma communities, form an authentic record of their plight. The first part was recorded in the Swedish capital, Stockholm, in 2011; the second in Białystok, near the eastern border of Poland in 2012; the third in Romania, mainly Bucharest, in 2013; the fourth part, recorded in Istanbul, started in parallel with part three and was completed in 2014, and the most recent one was created in Nantes in 2015. In each city where a new episode was filmed, I engage native local residents (Swedish, Polish, Romanian, Turkish and French women, respectively) as mediums. Sitting comfortably in their homes, they retell the immigrant women’s stories, always in the first person, as if they were recounting their own experiences. This important gesture sheds a new light on a seemingly distant problem. Women from ‘here’ identify themselves with the burden of memory and painful experiences of the Others. What is more, they not only lent them their faces and voices, but above all set in motion a mechanism of empathy that suggests a path towards understanding. Perhaps it leads through the crack that appears in the viewer’s perception when the contents of the stories are combined with the images shown on screen.’

Anna Konik’s visit has been made possible by support from the Polish Cultural Institute in London.

Link to event here. All welcome – no booking necessary.

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Murray Seminar: Emmanuele Lugli – Tuesday 13 February 5pm

Dear Student,

I’m writing with details of next week’s Murray Seminar on Medieval and Renaissance Art at Birkbeck. These advanced research seminars are open to all, and attract interested members of the public, staff and students from other London colleges and beyond.  They are an opportunity to hear and contribute to cutting-edge research, often at the very early stages of work in progress.  The timing allows you to attend and still go to classes on the same evening.  All this term’s seminars take place in the History of Art Department at Birkbeck (43, Gordon Sq., London WC1H 0PD) in Room 114 (The Keynes Library) at 5pm.  Talks finish by 5.50pm (allowing those with other commitments to leave) and are then followed by discussion and refreshments.  We hope to see you there.

Emmanuele Lugli  Tuesday 13 February

Chasing Absence: The Body of Christ and the Measures to Enter in Touch with it

This talk focuses on the singular devotion for the ‘mensura Christi,’ or the act of praying with objects that reproduced the height of Christ. It explores the reasons for its phenomenal success, from its diffusion in the twelfth century up to its ban in the seventeenth, and the motives for its marginalization in historical accounts today. The talk asks questions about what turns an orthodox veneration into a mere superstition, an inversion that is all the more puzzling given that the ‘mensura Christi’ relies on measuring, one of the methods to fight credulity. The lecture thus reconsiders the relationships of measuring practices, visual belief, and religious orders, thus contributing to discussions on representations, faith, and material studies.

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Murray Seminars – Summer Term 2017

Please see details below:

Murray Seminars Summer Term 2017

10 May Joanna Cannon

Second Thoughts: Redating the Frescoes by the Maestro di San Francesco at Assisi

The mid-thirteenth-century murals in the Lower Church of San Francesco at Assisi mark a key moment in the construction of the narrative of the life of St Francis.  But when, precisely, was that moment? Joanna Cannon revisits her often-quoted article of 1982, ‘Dating the Frescoes of the Maestro di San Francesco at Assisi’, to argue against some of her earlier conclusions, and to explore the implications of this change of mind.  Were the Franciscans always the artistic innovators in thirteenth-century Italy, or did the Dominicans sometimes lead the way?

7 June   Dorigen Caldwell

‘”There is nothing better than to live after death”: seeking immortality in cinquecento Rome’

Dorigen Caldwell will examine debates in literary and artistic circles in mid sixteenth-century Rome around portraiture and the encapsulation of the individual. Taking as her point of departure a portrait bust of Pope Paul III, she focusses in particular on the highly erudite circles which gathered around the Farnese court, exploring themes of paragone, materiality and the perpetuation of memory.

28 June Robert Maniura

Jaume Huguet, decoration and innovation in fifteenth-century Iberian art

Art in the Iberian peninsula in the fifteenth century is still neglected, especially compared to the Italian and Netherlandish traditions which remain the benchmark for the standard narratives of artistic development. Robert Maniura considers the output of Jaume Huguet, the most prominent painter in Barcelona in the later fifteenth century, whose elaborate and heavily gilded works conspicuously depart from these familiar patterns. He argues that his paintings reveal a sensitivity to and creative exploitation of his materials every bit as noteworthy as that of his more famous contemporaries.

All this term’s seminars take place in the History of Art Department at Birkbeck (43, Gordon Sq., London WC1H 0PD) in Room 114 (The Keynes Library) at 5pm.  Talks finish by 5.50pm (allowing those with other commitments to leave) and are then followed by discussion and refreshments.  We hope to see you there.

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Photographing the rituals of healing and dying in Latin America – Wed 22 March 2017

Peltz Gallery talk: Photographing the rituals of healing and dying in Latin America – Wed 22 March 2017

Photographing the rituals of healing and dying in Latin America

Wed 22 March 2017, 19:00-20:00

Peltz Gallery, 43 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PD

To accompany the exhibition ‘Decolonizing “witchcraft”: Portraits of traditional healing in Bolivia’ at the Peltz Gallery, ‘Photographing the rituals of healing and dying in Latin America’ considers some of the visual and ethical challenges of documentary photography. Join Patrizia di Bello, Senior Lecturer in History and Theory of Photography at Birkbeck College, and photographers David Green and Marcel Reyes-Cortez, as they explore the themes of ritual, community and cultural memory raised by the exhibition. The evening will reflect on Green’s experience working with communities of indigenous health practitioners in Bolivia and Reyes-Cortez’s work documenting the cultural practices of death and mourning in Mexico.

Dr Patrizia di Bello is Senior Lecturer in the History of Photography and co-director of the History and Theory of Photography Research Centre in the Department of History of Art at Birkbeck, University of London. She is the author of Women’s Albums and Photography in Victorian Britain: Ladies, Mothers and Flirts (Ashgate 2007); editor of Art, History and the Senses: 1830 to the present (Ashgate 2009), with Gabriel Koureas; and of The Photobook from Talbot to Ruscha (IB Tauris, 2012), with Colette Wilson and Shamoon Zamir. Her next monograph, Sculptural Photographs from the Calotype to the Digital, will be published by Bloomsbury in December 2017.

David Green is a born people watcher. ‘The challenge of relaxing a subject and capturing their essence is endlessly compelling to me and keeps me passionate about portrait photography.’ An American, who’s made his home in North London, David has been working as a freelance photographer for several years, shooting a wide range of people, from Noble Prize winners to comedians, authors, actors, CEOs, TV news readers, and most recently “witches” in Bolivia and robot camel jockeys in Oman. His work has appeared in Timeout London, the Guardian, Hackney and Islington Gazettes, Artenol magazine in New York, The Times of Oman, the Southbank Centre, Barcelona Metropolitan to name a few – even the FBI website (that’s the Feminist Bureau of Investigation, of course): http://www.feministbureauofinvestigation.co.uk

Marcel Reyes-Cortez is a Visual Anthropologist and photographer living and working in London. In 1993 he graduated with a BA (Hons) in photography from the London College of Printing and in 1995 he gained an MA in Social Anthropology from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Marcel returned to academia and in 2006 he gained an MRes in Visual Anthropology. His doctoral research (2007-10) became the first to be awarded a PhD from Goldsmiths, University of London in ‘Visual Anthropology’.

‘Decolonising “witchcraft”: Portraits of traditional healers in Bolivia’ is on at the Peltz Gallery, School of Arts, Birkbeck College 3-25 March 2017.

All welcome

To book your FREE ticket go to

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/photographing-the-rituals-of-healing-and-dying-in-latin-america-tickets-31962861780

If you have any additional access requirements please get in touch elizabeth.johnson@bbk.ac.uk

 

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CILAVS and The Vasari Centre Present: Early digital art in Argentina: re-examining the Victoria and Albert Museum collection

The Centre for Iberian and Latin American Visual Studies, CILAVS, and the Vasari Research Centre for Art and Technology, warmly invite you to:

Early digital art in Argentina: re-examining the Victoria and Albert Museum collection

Melanie Lenz (V&A Museum)

The V&A holds over 700 objects from Latin America. Little known amongst them are the holdings of early digital art made in the late 1960s by Argentine artists associated with the Centro de Arte y Comunicación (CAyC). Research on early computer art practices has largely focused on the West, yet beyond this geographical sphere innovative art and technology networks also developed. This talk considers a small but intriguing number of digital artworks in the V&A’s collection in relation to their Latin American cultural context and explores the role of CAyC in facilitating the use of the computer as an experimental and creative design tool.

Wednesday, 15 February 2017, 6.00-7.30pm, Keynes Library, 43 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PD

All welcome but booking is required: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/early-digital-art-in-argentina-re-examining-the-victoria-and-albert-museum-collection-by-melanie-tickets-31515169721

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Conventions of Proximity in Art, Theatre and Performance. 5 & 6 May 2016

Thursday 5 May 1-6pm & Friday 6 May, 10am-6pm
School of Arts, Birkbeck College, 43 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PD
Booking: http://bit.ly/1YiQzYJ

Immersive and curatorial strategies are highly current in contemporary theatre, visual art and exhibition culture – bringing audiences into close and often interactive relationships with artistic work. But how else do art, theatre and performance engage ideas of proximity, and how have they done so in the past?

 

Conventions of Proximity in Art, Theatre and Performance investigates forms of nearness and distance from numerous perspectives: dramaturgical, curatorial, affective, social, conceptual, virtual, geographical. Over a day and a half, artists and writers will share their work on proximity as an idea and as a practice. From the early modern to the contemporary, in examples drawn from southeast Asia to the global north, the symposium explores proximity in relation to a diverse range of topics, including digital networks, architectural design, home, public space, cinema, loneliness, friendship, listening, darkness, museum display, and music.

Conventions of Proximity combines papers, workshops from guest artists in the School of Arts’ studio space, film screenings in Birkbeck Cinema, performance installation, and an exhibition of contemporary art in the Peltz Gallery.

On Thursday 5 May, researchers and practitioners will share their work in parallel panel presentations, from which attenders can make a selection.

On Friday 6 May, film screenings, panel presentations, workshops and a performance installation will run in parallel, from which attenders can make a selection.

Contributors include:
Silke Arnold-de Simine (Birkbeck, University of London)
Maaike Bleeker (University of Utrecht)
Fiona Candlin (Birkbeck, University of London)
Fourthland
Sheila Ghelani
Alison Green (Central Saint Martins)
Peader Kirk & Teoma Jackson Naccarato
Nicholas Ridout (Queen Mary, University of London)
Victoria Walsh (Royal College of Art)

Conventions of Proximity takes place on Thursday 5 May, 1-6pm and Friday 6 May, 10am-6pm. It is free of charge to attend but places are very limited, and booking is essential. The schedule can be seen here.

Booking: http://bit.ly/1YiQzYJ

Co-hosted by Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre and Birkbeck Interdisciplinary Research in Media and Culture, and supported by Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities and Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image.

Birkbeck Centre for Contemporary Theatre

http://www.bbk.ac.uk/english/our-research/bcct/events

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Call for Papers: Othello’s Island 2017, deadline 1 January 2017

Othello’s Island 2017

The 5th annual multidisciplinary conference
on medieval and renaissance studies
and their later legacies

Venue: Centre for Visual Arts and Research (CVAR)
Nicosia, Cyprus, 6 to 8 April 2017
with optional historic-site visits on 9 April

Advance Notice CALL FOR PAPERS

a collaborative event organised by academics from
Sheffield Hallam University, SOAS University of London
University of Kent, University of Sheffield and the University of Leeds

www.tiny.cc/othello2017

Convenors

  • Emeritus Professor James Fitzmaurice, Northern Arizona University (USA)
  • Professor Lisa Hopkins, Sheffield Hallam University (UK)
  • Dr Sarah James, University of Kent at Canterbury (UK)
  • Dr Michael Paraskos, SOAS University of London (UK)
  • Benedict Read FSA, University of Leeds (UK)
  • Dr Rita Severis, CVAR (Cyprus)

We welcome applications from researchers to present papers at the 2017 edition of Othello’s Island.

First held in 2013, Othello’s Island now a well established annual meeting of academics, students and members of the public interested in medieval and renaissance art, literature, history and culture.

Othello’s Island is growing in size and stature every year. In 2016 over seventy academics from across the world presented papers at the conference, whilst also experiencing the medieval and renaissance art, architecture and historical sites of Cyprus.

This experience ranged from the island’s material culture, such as the French gothic cathedral of Nicosia, through to the remarkable living culture of the island that is still deeply affected by its medieval and renaissance past.

In 2017 we are interested in hearing papers on diverse aspects of medieval and renaissance literature, art, history, society and other culture.

Papers do not have to be specifically related to Cyprus or the Mediterranean region and do not have to be connected to Shakespeare.

It is worth looking at the range of papers from past conferences to see that previous speakers have covered topics ranging from slavery in medieval Cyprus and Malta, to the impact of Italian Renaissance art on Cypriot Byzantine painting, to the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf and Margaret Cavendish.

That said, given our location, Cyprus, the Levant and the Mediterranean do impact on the conference, not least because for anyone interested in medieval and renaissance history Cyprus is real gem, full of architectural and other material culture relating to the period. This includes museums filled with historic artefacts, gothic and Byzantine cathedrals and churches and a living culture that has direct links to this period.

Othello’s Island has developed a reputation as one of the friendliest medieval and renaissance studies conferences in the world today, and it is also genuinely interdisciplinary. In part this is due to the relatively small size of the event, which generates a true sense of community during the conference.

For more informaton and submission deadlines please visit

www.tiny.cc/othello2017

All information here is subject to confirmation and possible modification

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