Provoking Practice
The School of the Arts invited various artists, curators, cultural activists and provocateurs to present a talk, lead a discussion, make a performance or create an event with a view to instigating and generating critical debate, engendering experimental forms of practice and developing further collaborative projects.
The events were open to all staff and students in the School of the Arts and across the university. These events took place between Autumn (2008) and Spring term (2009).
Pil and Galia Kollectiv
Pil and Galia Kollectiv are London based artists, writers and curators working in collaboration. Their artwork is primarily film, video and performance based and explores the utopian discourses of the twentieth century and the way they operate in the context of a changing landscape of creative work and instrumentalised leisure and the role of politics and commerce in relation to the paradigms of modernism and the avant garde. They often use choreographed movement and theatrical ritual as both an aesthetic and a thematic dimension, reading dada and the Bauhaus backwards through punk and new wave to rescue the humour and critical vitality that have been subsumed by the canonisation and commodification of modernism, while finding new uses for the failed ideologies of the past. They have recently curated The Institute of Psychoplasmics at the Pump House Gallery in London and performed No Haus Like Bau at the fifth Berlin Biennale. They were also recipients in 2007 of the London Artists' Film and Video Award. Other projects include Asparagus: A Horticultural Ballet at The Showroom, London and the Biennale de Montreal (2007); Modern Lovers at Three Colts Gallery, London (2006); and DaDaDa: Strategies against Marketecture at temporarycontemporary gallery, London (2004).
Link
www.kollectiv.co.uk
Heath Bunting
Heath Bunting was born a Buddhist in Wood Green, London, UK and is able to make himself laugh. He is a co-founder of both net.art and sport-art movements and is banned for life from entering the USA for his anti GM work. His self taught and authentically independent work is direct and uncomplicated and has never been awarded a prize or been bought or sold. He is both Britain's most important practising artist and The World's most famous computer artist. He aspires to be a skillful member of the public and is producing an expert system for identity mutation.
Links
irational.org/cgi-bin/cv2/temp.pl
www.tate.org.uk/intermediaart/borderxing.shtm
Sally O'Reilly
Sally O'Reilly is a writer, contributing regularly to many art publications, including Art Monthly, Frieze, Art Review, Spike and Time Out, and has written essays on emerging and established artists for international organizations such as Tate Modern, London, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, and BALTIC, Gateshead. She is co-editor of the thematic, interdisciplinary broadsheet Implicasphere and a dean of Brown Mountain College of the Performing Arts, an itinerant platform for the production of performative events. She was also co-producer of the performance programme for Whitstable Biennale 2006 and curator of Beacon Art Project 2007.
Upcoming events
The exhibition Implicasphere: Smoke opens at the Pump House Gallery, London, on 4 October 2008 and Brown Mountain Festival of the Performing Arts will be in central London 16-18 October 2008.
Links
www.implicasphere.org.uk
www.brownmountain.org.uk
Holly Crawford
Holly Crawford, Ph.D. is an artist, art historian, behavioral scientist and economist. Her Ph.D. is in Art History and Theory from the University of Essex. She is the Director and Founder of AC [Institute Direct Unlimited Chapel] (www.artcurrents.org), a non-profit that is composed of a consortium of projects for the research, discussion and documentation of contemporary art such as, Critical Conversations in a Limo, 2006, 2007, 2008 (DVD), Outsourced Critics. Her art and poetry (www.art-poetry.info) give new meanings and draws categories themselves into question through transformative juxtapositions. Thinking about networks, institutions and behavior are some of the key elements in her work. Installations, interventions and performances include, Open Adoption for Art, May I have your autograph? Hospitality Suite, Tracking, 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, Offerings, Punctuation Performance, The Dinner Party, The Road: The Century Freeway, Offerings, Water!, Water$ Water? and Voice Over. She was born in California and now resides in the New York. Her work has been seen and heard internationally. Books: Attached to the Mouse, Disney & Contemporary Art, 2006, and Artistic Bedfellows, Histories, Theories and Conversations in Collaborative Art Practices an edited 2008, and catalogue essay, "Disney and Pop" in Once Upon a Time Walt Disney Studio, 2006.