Physical Information: FREE TALKS EVENT
22nd Apr 2017 1:00pm-6:00pm
Bloomberg Auditorium
39-45 Finsbury Square,
LONDON, EC2A 1PQ
Admission Free / Booking Required
Bloomberg SPACE is pleased to announce a special public event on Saturday, April 22nd as part of our current exhibition programme. Three keynote speakers and two artist interventions will explore material culture from the perspectives of art history, anthropology, and fiction:
· Art historian Alex Potts will examine how temporality is central to experiences of sculpture;
· Anthropologist Haidy Geismar will explore how digitization effects the experience of objects and collections; and
· Novelist Tom McCarthy will read an extract from a new manuscript.
In addition, artist David Musgrave will present a new digital animation and artist Karin Ruggaber will deliver a specially commissioned printed edition.
Part of the current exhibition programme PHYSICAL INFORMATION, the event is concerned with re-imagining the possibilities of material encounters, exploring how physical objects can generate alternative experiences in an increasingly abstract world.
The event will coincide with the final day of Florian Roithmayr’s exhibition ir re par sur, and will conclude with a drinks reception in the gallery.
Admission is free, but booking is essential. Please click the Eventbrite link below:
https://physical-information.eventbrite.com
About the contributors
Haidy Geismar is an anthropologist teaching at UCL where she is also curator of the UCL Ethnography Collections. Her research focuses on museums and collections, especially in the South Pacific countries of Vanuatu and New Zealand. Recently she has been researching the digitization of cultural collections, the incorporation of indigenous protocols into museum databases, and the interpenetration of contemporary art and ethnographic collections. She is in the early stages of a book looking at new practices and forms of digital photography. Recent publications include Treasured Possessions: Indigenous Interventions into Cultural and Intellectual Property (2013), and Moving Images (2010). Geismar is also founder and chief editor of the Material World blog as Chair of the Royal Anthropological Institute Photography Committee recently founded a new open access journal, Anthropology and Photography.
Tom McCarthy is a novelist. In 2013 he was awarded the inaugural Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction by Yale University. His collection Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish (to be published by NYRB this June) gathers essays that have appeared over the last decade in publications such as The New York Times, The London Review of Books, Harper’s and Artforum, with themes ranging from Franz Kafka and James Joyce to David Lynch and Sonic Youth. His first novel, Remainder, won the 2008 Believer Book Award and was recently adapted for the cinema. His third, C, was shortlisted for the 2010 Booker Prize, as was his fourth, Satin Island, in 2015. McCarthy is also author of the 2006 non-fiction book Tintin and The Secret of Literature.
David Musgrave is an artist who gives the abstractions of experience concrete form. His drawn and sculpted figures are palpably suspended in their materials and structures, while his novel Unit, narrated by an artificial being, is a sustained reflection on the layered codes that make fiction and language work. Musgrave has exhibited widely in venues that include Kunstverein Freiburg; Tate, London; CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux; and the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis. He will take part in the forthcoming show Space Force Construction, which places contemporary artists in dialogue with Constructivist works, at the V-A-C Foundation, Venice.
Alex Potts is Max Loehr Collegiate Professor at University of Michigan. His work on art and artistic theory covers a number of areas including sculptural aesthetics and the history of sculpture. In addition to the book The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist (2000), his work on sculpture includes a co-edited anthology of texts on modern sculpture, The Modern Sculpture Reader (2007; reissued 2012), and articles on David Smith, Alberto Giacometti and other twentieth-century sculptors. Recent publications include the book Experiments in Modern Realism: World Making, Politics and the Everyday in Postwar European and American Art (2013).
Karin Ruggaber is an artist who makes sculpture as well as producing artist's books. Her work centres on ideas around figuration, ornamentation, aspects of touch and the relationship to architectural scale. Her books are material investigations of a sensory experience with architecture and public space. She is interested in the translation of pictorial principles into sculpture and in the ground as an arena for material thinking, composition and making. Her work has been exhibited at: PEER, London; Tate Britain; MUDAM, Luxembourg, Museo Marino Marini, Florence, Artists Space, New York; Nottingham Contemporary; Hayward Gallery, London. Ruggaber exhibited alongside Rene Daniels at Bloomberg SPACE in 2002.
Please check your availability and commitments before signing up to this event. Booking and then cancelling may deny opportunities to others and also wastes money, food and other resources.