Fine Art Research Seminars

Seminars and Events: 2024/25

Artists and Curators respond to the Climate Crisis 

Future Climates: Contemporary Artists and Curators in Conversation is a new series of talks developed in collaboration between Art Monthly and the School of Arts and Cultures, Newcastle University. The series brings together international artists, curators, writers to reflect on how cultural practices can respond to the climate crisis and its complex, societal, political, economic, historical entanglements with a specific focus on practices and thinking that go beyond aesthetic and conceptual engagement and set about making a real-life difference. 

To see the recording of the events please see following link: 

https://www.artmonthly.co.uk/magazine/site/events

MONDAY 28 October 2024 at 17.00, FILM SCREENING, Everybody in the Place: An Incomplete History of Britain 1984-1992s By Jeremy Deller

SYMPOSIUM/Day 1

Tuesday 29 October 2024,  2pm - 7pm, Fine Art Lecture Theatre

PANEL 1
14.00 Introduction (Chris McCormack and Uta Kögelsberger)

14.20pm Alona Pardo

Alona Pardo is Head of Programmes at the Arts Council Collection, UK, and was until recently a curator at Barbican Art Gallery in London for 15 years. With a focus on photography and film, she has curated numerous exhibitions including most recently RE/SISTERS: A Lens on Gender and Ecology (2023); Noemie Goudal: Phoenix (2022) as part of Les Rencontres de la Photographie, Arles; Masculinities: Liberation through Photography (2020); Trevor Paglen: From Apple to Anomaly (2019); Dorothea Lange: Politics of Seeing (2018); Vanessa Winship: And Time Folds (2018); Another Kind of Life: Photography on the Margins (2018); Richard Mosse: Incoming (2017) and Strange and Familiar: Britain as seen by International Photographers (with Martin Parr; 2016). She has a particular interest in work that operates at the intersection of gender, social and environmental justice.

14.40pm Maggie Murray

Maggie Murray was co-founder of the women-only photography collective Format Photographers. Maggie Murray is known for her photography of protest, especially the women-led anti-nuclear protest camp at Greenham Common. “Some of the most dramatic photographs that we got were of women using their bodies – lying in the road to stop the police and the army arriving, putting their bodies over the fences, through the fences, to try to make a point and to stop the nuclear weapons being delivered.” Murray adds: “It was all sorts of bodies – young, elderly, dicerent classes, races and cultures.”

15.00pm In conversation 1 (chair Fiona Anderson)

15.30pm - break

PANEL 2

15.45-15.50pm Introduction

15.50 Ajay Singh Chaudary

Ajay Singh Chaudary is the executive director of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and a core faculty member specializing in social and politicaltheory. He holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University and an M.Sc. from the London School of Economics. Ajay’s book, The Exhausted of the Earth: Politics in a Burning World, brings together both the science and the politics of climate change. He shows how a new politics particular to the climate catastrophe demands a bitter struggle between those attached to the power, wealth, and security of "business-as-usual" and all of us, those exhausted, in every sense of the word, by the status quo. Replacing Promethean, romantic, and apocalyptic fairytales with a new story for every exhausted inhabitant of this exhausted world, The Exhausted of the Earth outlines the politics and the power needed to alter the course of our burning world far beyond, far better than, mere survival.

16.10pm Jonas Staal

Jonas Staal is a visual artist whose work deals with the relation between art, democracy, and propaganda. He is the founder of the artistic and political organization New World Summit (2012–ongoing).  Together with Florian Malzacher he co-directs the training camp Training for the Future (2018- ongoing), and with human rights lawyer Jan Fermon he initiated the collective action lawsuit Collectivize Facebook (2020-ongoing). With writer and lawyer Radha D’Souza he founded the Court for Intergenerational ClimateCrimes (2021-ongoing) and with Laure Prouvost he is co-administrator of the Obscure Union. His work has been exhibited at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, the Gwangju Museum of Art, the V&A, London, as well as the Berlin Biennale, São Paulo Biennale, Taipei Biennale and Shanghai Biennale.

16.30pm In conversation 2 (chair Harry Weeks)

17.00 break 

PANEL 3

17.30pm Introduction

17.35pm Fiona Banner

Fiona Banner, also known as The Vanity Press, is a British artist. Her work encompasses sculpture, drawing, installation and text, and demonstrates a long-standing fascination with the emblem of fighter aircraft and their role within culture and especially as presented on film. She is well known for her early works in the form of 'wordscapes', written transcriptions of the frame-by-frame action in Hollywood war films, including Top Gun and Apocalypse Now. Her work has been exhibited in prominent international venues such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York and Hayward Gallery, London. Banner was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2002. Fiona will be talking about her collaboration with Greenpeace

17.55pm Filipa Ramos

Filipa Ramos is curator and art critic based in London. She is currently curator of Vdrome. She was Curator of Research Section dOCUMENTA (13), Associate Editor of Manifesta Journal, and Public Programmes curator at the Antonio Ratti Foundation in Como. She is the co-author of the book Lost and Found - Crisis of Memory in Contemporary Art (2009), has been guest curator on both public and private art spaces, and am a regular contributor for several international publications.

18.15pm Jay Jordan 

Jay Jordan Jay (formerly John) Jordan or JJ (they/them) is labelled a "Domestic Extremist" by the UK police, and “a magician of rebellion” by the French press. JJ has spent three decades applying what they learnt from theatre and performance art to direct action. They like spaces betwixt and between of all sorts, especially between art and activism, culture and "nature", the masculine and feminine, protest and proposition. They have performed in museums and International Theater Festivals, trained people in squats, co-organised climate camps, choreographed carnivalesque riots, written a BBC radio play for today, and an opera-for-one. Author, art activist, part-time sex worker and full time trouble maker, JJ inhabits the ZAD of Notre-Dame-des-Landes, with Isa, and co facilitates the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination.

18.25pm In conversation 3 (chair Jo Coupe) 

SYMPOSIUM/Day 2

Tuesday 26/11 15.00
Fine Art Lecture Theatre Newcastle University

PANEL 1

3.00pm Introductions

3.10-3.30pm Josephine Berry

Josephine Berry is an art theorist, writer and political thinker. Her latest book, Planetary Realism: Art Against Apocalypse (forthcoming, Sternberg Press 2024) investigates art's power to break with capitalist realism and, through foregrounding and sensitising to planetary phenomena, transform the very terms of realism at the end of modernity. She has previously written on art in the neoliberal context of creative cities (No Room to Move: Radical Art in the Regenerate City, 2010), and on the function of autonomous art within contemporary biopower (Art and (Bare) Life: A Biopolitical Inquiry, Sternberg Press 2018). She is Tutor at the Royal College of Art, London and lectures at Goldsmiths College. She edited London-based cultural politics magazine Mute for over a decade.

3.30-3.50pm Jonas Staal

Jonas Staal is a visual artist whose work deals with the relation between art, democracy, and propaganda. He is the founder of the artistic and political organization New World Summit (2012– ongoing). Together with Florian Malzacher he co- directs the training camp Training for the Future (2018-ongoing), and with human rights lawyer Jan Fermon he initiated the collective action lawsuit Collectivize Facebook (2020- ongoing). With writer and lawyer Radha D’Souza he founded the Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes (2021-ongoing) and with Laure Prouvost he is co-administrator of the Obscure Union. His work has been exhibited at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, the Gwangju Museum of Art, the V&A, London, the Berlin Biennale, São Paulo Biennale, Taipei Biennale and Shanghai Biennale.

3.50-4.20pm In conversation with Chris McCormack

Chris McCormack is a writer and associate editor of Art Monthly. He has devised and participated in numerous talks and events, including for Newcastle University as co-devisor of ‘The Producers’ and the Paul Mellon Centre in London. He is the editor of Charlie Prodger’s monograph (Konig), commissioning editor
of ON&BY Andy Warhol (MIT/Whitechapel), project editor of Talking Art 2 (Ridinghouse) and has written extensively on art, and contributed numerous essays for catalogues including James Richards’ Requests and Antisongs, Queer Spaces (RIBA) and the MIT/Whitechapel anthology Moving Image. He has also collaborated with artists including Hilary Lloyd, Oreet Ashery, Ursula Mayer and Jade Montserrat.

4.50-5.00pm Introductions

5.00-5.20pm Robert Zaho Renhui

Getting to grips with Robert Zhao Renhui’s work shapeshifts, a series of ecological inquiries you can read, watch, hang on a wall, and sometimes step inside. The Institute of Critical Zoologists, Zhao’s only-partially real moniker, publisher and research hub borrows from academic ecology while remaining firmly within conceptual image-making. Zaho Renhui represented Singapore in the 2024 Venice Biennale. His work has been exhibited at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art, Singapore National Museum of Singapore, Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Bergamo, Centre of Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, Australia, Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, Fukuoka, Japan. Singapore Biennale 2019. 

5.20-5.40pm John Kenneth Paranda

John Kenneth Paranada is a Filipino born, UK-based Curator, Researcher and Writer. He is the first Curator of Art and Climate Change at the Sainsbury Centre, University of East Anglia. His interdisciplinary practice focuses on experimental futures, hybrid forms and practices, with a focus on climate change, sustainability, historical entanglements, the Anthropocene, social sculpture, new media technologies and platforming climate narratives. 

5.40-6.10pm In conversation chaired by Olga Smith

Olga Smith is a historian of contemporary art, writer and curator based at Newcastle University. Her research spans topics such as ecocriticism and landscape, transnational identity, and histories of photography. Her publications include a monograph, Contemporary Photography in France (2022), edited volumes, such as Photography and Landscape (2019), and numerous articles and catalogue texts. Among her current projects is Methods for Ecocritical Art History (forthcoming in 2025), an edited book that shows how climate emergency is appraised and countered through methods and practices of art history.

Previous Seminar series:

12 March 2024, 5.30pm, Fine Art Lecture Theatre, Newcastle University. 

Amal Khalaf and Oliver Ressler, chaired by Neil Bromwich. Introduced by Chris McCormack and Uta Kögelsberger

Amal Khalaf is a curator and artist and currently Director of Programmes at Cubitt, Civic Curator at the Serpentine Galleries, and co-curator of the forthcoming Sharjah Biennial in 2025. Recent projects include Radio Ballads (2019-22) and Sensing the Planet (2021). She is a founding member of artist collective GCC, a trustee of Mophradat, Athens; not/nowhere, London and Art Night, London. In 2019 she curated Bahrain’s pavilion for Venice, in 2018 she co-curated an international arts and social justice conference called Rights to the City in 2016 she co-directed the 10th edition of the Global Art Forum, Art Dubai. 

Oliver Ressler is an artist and filmmaker whose installations and projects in the public realm address issues of democracy, racism, climate breakdown, forms of resistance and social alternatives. Ressler’s has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb; Neuer Berliner Kunstverein; MNAC – National Museum of Contemporary Art, Bucharest; SALT Galata, Istanbul; Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo, Seville; Museo Espacio, Aguascalientes, Mexico and Belvedere 21, Vienna and in more than 400 group exhibitions, including Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid; Centre Pompidou, Paris and the biennials in Taipei, Venice, Athens, Kyiv, Gothenburg, Istanbul and at Documenta 14, Kassel, 2017 amongst others. www.ressler.at

Chair: Neil Bromwich is part of the Glasgow based collaborative duo Walker & Bromwich and Senior Lecturer at Newcastle University. At the core of their practice is the exploration of the role art can play as an active agent in society, with a specific focus on climate justice. Walker & Bromwich have exhibited work at documenta-fifteen, SEA + Triennale Jakarta, Thessaloniki Biennale, Greece, MCA Sydney; Tate Britain; V&A London; Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art; Glasgow International; Edinburgh Art Festival, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki. Their most recent initiative sets about creating a new platform for the exchange and production of new work withing the context of climate justice in collaboration with the Indonesian non-profits arts organisation Rodha Among Karsa.

Lise Autogena and Maya and Reuben Fowkes chaired by Chris McCormack

30 April 2024, 17.30pm, Fine Art Lecture Theatre

Lise Autogena is a Danish artist and Professor. Since the early 90’s her collaborations with Joshua Portway have explored impacts of the economic, geographic, technological, and societal systems we have created. Projects include, for example, ‘Most Blue Skies’ that uses real-time changes in the atmosphere to visualize and locate the bluest sky in the world, Black Shoals; Dark Matter visualises the world’s financial markets as a night sky of constellations. Recent work has documented the question of uranium mining in Greenland and in 2020 Autogena established the non-profit organisation Narsaq International Research Station (NIRS), which hosts scientific and cultural research projects in South Greenland. Her projects have been exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide including Tate Britain and the Gwangju Biennial amongst many others. https://www.autogena.org

Maja and Reuben Fowkes are art historians, curators, and directors of the Postsocialist Art Centre (PACT) at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London. Their publications include Art and Climate Change (Thames & Hudson, 2022), Ilona Németh: Eastern Sugar (Sternberg Press, 2021) and Maja’s The Green Bloc: Neo-avant-garde Art and Ecology under Socialism (CEU Press, 2015). Recent curatorial projects include the exhibitions Colliding Epistemes at Bozar Brussels (2022) and Potential Agrarianism at Kunsthalle Bratislava (2021). Their Horizon Europe research project into the Socialist Anthropocene in the Visual Arts (SAVA) is supported by UKRI and they are co-founders of the Translocal Institute for Contemporary Art. www.translocal.org

Chair: Chris McCormack is a writer and associate editor of Art Monthly. He has devised and participated in numerous talks and events, including for Newcastle University as co-devisor of ‘The Producers’ and the Paul Mellon Centre in London. He is the editor of Charlie Prodger’s monograph (Konig), commissioning editor of ON&BY Andy Warhol (MIT/Whitechapel), project editor of Talking Art 2 (Ridinghouse) and has written extensively on art, and contributed numerous essays for catalogues including James Richards’ Requests and Antisongs, Queer Spaces (RIBA) and the MIT/Whitechapel anthology Moving Image. He has also collaborated with artists including Hilary Lloyd, Oreet Ashery, Ursula Mayer and Jade Montserrat.