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

Samantha Clark, UWS Lecturer in Digital Art,  2005 work "Levitation" in this major exhibition at the Northern Gallery of Contemporary Art, Sunderland

The Wonders of the Visible World

Preview: Wednesday 26 October 6:00 - 8:00pm Exhibition dates: 27 October 2011 - 4 February 2012
Ulla von Brandenburg, Mark Wallinger, Yves Klein, Camillo Paravicini, Michael Crowe, Katja Mayer & Peter Chadwick, Chris Cornish, Samantha Clark, Georgina Mascolo, Susanne Ludwig, Victoria Jenkins, Natasha Caruana, Hannes Ribarits, Anton Corbijn, Tom Pope, Peter Watkins and Tereza Zelenkova, Michelle Hannah, Martin Kellett, Sophie Helas-Kwo, Jason Dee "Let us be witness to the unrepresentable".  Jean-Francois Lyotard, 'The Postmodern Condition' "Vision is the art of seeing the invisible." Jonathan Swift
'The Wonders of the Visible World' brings together 21 international artists who use photography and video to explore the relationship between the visible and the invisible worlds. The artists explore the ongoing potency of myth and illusion in the visual arts - finding that the world we imagine we know is far less secure than we might first believe. As all of the artists use lens-based media, they all capture physical phenomena that defy belief, or defy description. Here, the camera lens is a tool that allows us to see precisely what is not usually visible to the naked eye, and to have faith in the unimaginable. Many of the artists explore what might be described as imaginative archetypes. We become witnesses to the end of the world; to hair-raising experiments in new branches of the physical sciences; to our souls made into symbols; and to feats of levitation, self-combustion, magnetism and transubstantiation. We are asked what the limits of our beliefs are, and what the limits of our capacity to suspend disbelief are.

Samantha Clark's video animation 'Levitation' presents a visionary, apocalyptic scenario, recalling the end of days from the Book of Revelations: "Behold, he cometh with clouds; and every eye shall see him, and they also which pierced him: and all kindreds of the earth shall wail because of him."

Read More Journal Launch: Threshold Artspace, Perth

Launch of latest Read More Journal of Critical Writing: Issue 12. Katarzyna Kosmala on Wang YuYang and private view of works by women artists on Sunday 23rd October 11-2 pm at Threshold Artspace in Perth



The preview features:
Two new group exhibition collections : Works by Women Artists + Encounters


: Works by artists members of Perthshire Visual Arts Forum


Accompanying retrospective solo exhibition of Mare Tralla’s artist’s films and videos + Mare Tralla: Artist’s Talk




During the PV Read More Journal of Critical Writing: Issue 12
Katarzyna Kosmala on Wang YuYang will be launched




Brunch provided. Admission free. Family friendly. Children's treats. Free but booking is essential due to limited space. RSVP Iliyana Nedkova at inedkova@horsecross.co.uk

Shorelines Exhibition, Maclaurin Gallery, Ayr

Shorelines 13th November - 23rd December, Maclaurin Gallery, Ayr Alison F. Bell and Cathy Treadaway

This exhibition of paintings, prints, photographs and textiles by artists, Alison F. Bell and Dr Cathy Treadaway, is an ongoing collaborative research project, which investigates creative practice. The exhibits are a response to five coastal locations in England, Scotland, Wales and Australia, and result from two research field studies and three artist residencies. The locations at St Just, Cornwall, Lavernock, South Wales, Bora, near Helmsdale, in Scotland, and Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia, are linked by a common heritage in mining natural resources of coal, tin and precious metals. The artists created both collaborative works and personal pieces of work from their shared experiences of these specific places. Alison Bell is a doctoral researcher in the School of Creative and Cultural Industries at UWS and Cathy Treadaway is Reader in Creative Practice at University of Wales Insitute, Cardiff. The Shorelines project is supported by Cardiff School of Art and Design, University of Wales Institute Cardiff, University of Newcastle New South Wales, Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland, Bryons Veor Trust, and Timespan, Helmsdale, Scotland.

Shorelines: Place, Creativity and Wellbeing

Organisers: University of Wales Institute, Cardiff, and South Ayrshire Council Museums and Galleries, with the University of the West of Scotland.

Shorelines: place, creativity and wellbeing, Tuesday 15th November 2011.

This one day international academic symposium, to be held at the Maclaurin Galleries, Ayr, Scotland, is part of a wider SHORELINES Exhibition and Residency programme which will run in the Maclaurin Galleries, Ayr in November and December 2011.

Keynote Speakers: Dr. Ian McGilchrist BM, MA, FRCPsych author of The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Yale University Press, 2009)

Chris Drury, Land Artist

The Symposium will explore interconnections between creative spaces or locations and physical and emotional wellbeing. It will seek to bring together a multidisciplinary audience of researchers, academics and arts practitioners to present cutting edge research in their fields, fostering discussion and further understanding about the significance of place in the creative process and its potential to enhance the quality of human experience.

Academic papers and visual presentations have been invited to address the themes of the symposium, which are as follows:

Place: Stimulating natural locations, creative spaces, geographical inspiration

Creativity: creative process in the visual arts, music, literature, poetry and drama with focus on stimulation, inspiration, innovation and cognition related to physical spaces and location

Wellbeing: physical and mental health and connections with creative process and physical location, spaces or places.

For all registered participants in the symposium, here will be an evening reception on the Ayr campus, followed by a public lecture by Gideon Kossoff on Transition Design, on the evening on 14th November.

To download the full programme and to register, please follow this link.

Art, Resistance and Alternatives: a screening and discussion with Oliver Ressler and Katarzyna Kosmala

CCA Glasgow, 7.30 – 10.00pm, October 21st 2011

www.ressler.at

Oliver Ressler is an Austrian-born artist who produces projects in public space and films addressing forms of resistance and social alternatives. He has had solo exhibitions at Berkeley Art Museum, Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Centre, Istanbul; Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum, Egypt and The Bunkier Sztuki Contemporary Art Gallery, Istanbul. His films have been screened around the world.

Socialism Failed, Capitalism is Bankrupt – What Comes Next?

Oliver Ressler

19mins, 2010

Recorded in Armenia in Yerevan’s largest bazaar, the film follows the market traders’ struggle to survive the crisis of a post-Socialist reality that has closed many local factories and dissolved social safety nets.

Comuna under Construction

Dario Azzelini and Oliver Ressler

94 mins, 2010

In consejos comunales, the people of Venezuela collectively decide about the community’s concerns. These councils, built from the grassroots, aim to create a form of self-government, parallel to the institutional framework.

The screening will be followed by a conversation and Q & A exploring the role of politically engaged art in protest and human rights issues, led by Katarzyna Kosmala

Dr Katarzyna Kosmala is Reader in Visual Culture and Organisation at the University of the West of Scotland, a visiting research fellow at GEXcel, Insitute of Thematic Gender Studies, Linkoping University & Orebro University, Sweden, and a curator and freelance art writer.

Presented as part of Document 9: International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival