Alessandra Campoli: Edges

Mon 5 Dec 2011 - Mon 30 Jan 2012


Mon-Sat: 12 noon - late (Opening night: Mon 5th Dec from 6-8pm) Free // Please join us for the opening night on Monday 5th December from 6-8pm //


Edges is a visual reflection on boundaries and limits, on visible and invisible lines that soundlessly change our subconscious perception of the space around us.


Part of a wider artistic project devoted to the notion of “edges” in different European and Asian urban contexts, this exhibition is the result of a series of physical and visual explorations of Glasgow’s cityscape, combining analogue and digital photography performance, photomontage and GPS Art.


About Alessandra Campoli 


Born in Rome, Alessandra is a visual artist, performer and researcher. She has had her work displayed in collective and solo exhibitions in Europe and Asia including Fahreneith 451, Rome; White Space Gallery, Bangkok and Area Privata Gallery, Perugia.


She is currently completing a practice-based PhD in Media Arts at the University of the West of Scotland (School of Creative and Cultural Industries).

Sensory Worlds

Samantha Clark, Lecturer in Digital Art, will present a paper at the Sensory Worlds Conference organised by the Institute for the Advanced Study of the Humanities (IASH) at the University of Edinburgh on 7th December entitled "Nothing Really Matters: Sartre, Negation and Nature." Full details of the programme and associated public lectures by Iain Borden and David Abrams can be found here. 

"Sensory Worlds ...[considers].. 'worlds' in a particularly ecological light in order to ask: what contribution can a sensorially-engaged Humanities make to environmental thinking and action? The conference will examine the multi-sensory and will reflect upon the historical, contemporary and possible future relations between the senses (from balance to taste to the haptic and beyond). It will be an interdisciplinary, interrogative and exploratory meeting that will make space for sensorially-engaged scholarship and practice, and will facilitate discursive and constructive meetings between a variety of scholars working on themes related to embodiment, ecology and value. Contributions are invited from those working within the humanities, arts and social sciences. We are interested in contributions that will themselves embody alternatives to the presuppositions common to Western twentieth century engagement with the world such as anthropocentrism, mind-body dualism, and isolated subjectivity".

Markko Maetamm: art in a changing society

Dr Katarzyna Kosmala will introduce the artist and lead a Q & A session: 

Estonian society has undergone very rapid political and economic changes

since the beginning of the 1990s. How does Estonian art reflect these

transformations?

Marko Mäetamm is one of the most fascinating and internationally renowned

young Estonian artists who works with a wide range of media – including

photography, sculpture, animation, painting and text. Mäetamm portrays the

family as a little society, relaying through dark humour the petty moments of

daily life and exploring the way our society manipulates family dynamics

through the macrocosms of economy, consumerism, and “quality-of-life”

standards. Inspired by his own private life and the recurring feeling that he

could fail to preserve the balance of his existence, Mäetamm’s work explores

the grey area where ambiguous feelings of being in control and being

controlled merge.

Tuesday 22nd November, 6pm, University of Edinburgh

Lecture Room 1, Minto House, 20 Chambers St, Edinburgh

Place, home, and place-making

Understandings of place, home and place-making: Part of the ESRC Festival of Social Science

Dr Katarzyna Kosmala was a part of co-ordinating group for a collaborative research event in association with the ESRC Festival of Social Science and the AHRC network Translating Cultures at the University of Glasgow 31st October 2011.

The event was organised in collaboration with Street Level Photoworks and the Scottish Storytelling Centre and focused on exploring understandings of place/home amongst school children from Glasgow with a specific focus on those originally from and with family in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Students produced posters and photographic collages representing their ideas of 'place' and 'home'.

Cultural Hijack: Rethinking Intervention

Ben Parry, UWS doctoral researcher has edited this book, shortly to be published by Liverpool University Press.



Cultural Hijack is about the tactical practitioner in the urban everyday, it chronicles diverse disciplines and imparts knowledge about the procedures, tools and tactics which make-up the interventionist’s toolkit. It positions the artist as narrator, and in the telling expounds the thinking as well the process, to reveal how the city, from Liverpool to Glasgow, Paris to New York, becomes the playground, stage and instrument for unsanctioned artworks, informal creative practices, activist interventions, political actions and situations. The interventionist becomes a catalyst for a ‘user-generated’ city, whose insertions, interventions and disruptions in everyday life are reinventing the way in which art is encountered and experienced, empowering people to act and think differently about the world around them. Here, the everyday becomes the opportunity, the apparatus and location, material and purpose. Ordinary life becomes the new space of urgency, as the terms of reference expand, by which artists are making art politically.


This insight into the work and the life of the artist - which is rarely articulated in writing about art - aims to illuminate our understanding of the creative process; how artists are developing new tools in the arsenal of critical resistance, both emancipating and expanding the spaces of art / cultural production. Cultural Hijack draws on series of essays, personal testimonies and original interviews, from Tatsuro Bashi, BGL, Gelitin, Michael Rakowitz, Krzysztof Wodiczko and others.


246mm x 168mm, 288pp, Paperback
Publishing 30 November 2011