We invite you to Late At Tate: The Lovers, the Dreamers and Me.
Produced by Arctic Circle with interventions from MA Critical Writing and Curatorial Practice.

While Arctic Circle presents the search for a lost lover in the halls and corridors of the Tate Britain through a musical journey, MA Critical Writing and Curatorial Practice propose a strange encounter with the self, temporarily transporting us from the spaces of the gallery into the idyllic country-side featured in Peter Land’sThe Lake (1999).

MA Critical Writing and Curatorial Practice, based at Chelsea College of Art & Design centres around the notion of curation as a critical practice. We often go through a process that critically interprets the contingent environments in which we work. At Late at Tate we aim to subtly intervene in the proceeds of the evening by designating a space for nonsensical pause (at least for the body) and then to follow the absurd journey of the self in the dream-like settings of Land’s work.

Please visit the Tate Britain website for more information.

Conference Friday 21 May 2010, 10.00 – 18.00
Tate Britain, Clore Auditorium
£20 (£10 concessions), booking recommended. Price includes drinks afterwards.
For tickets book online or call 020 7887 8888 | www.contingencyofcuration.org

A conference project led by MA curating students from Chelsea College of Art & Design, the University of Essex, and Sheffield Hallam University.

Despite the diverse processes that make up the curatorial, its presence in artistic culture and its power to organise the reception and distribution of art, curation seems to struggle to transform the conditions within which it operates. At this symposium, which is led by MA Curating students from Chelsea College of Art, Sheffield Hallam University and the University of Essex, invited speakers from a range of disciplines address the contingency of curation and its consequences for culture and society.

Contributors Include:
JJ Charlesworth, Emma Dexter, Susan Hiller, Simon Hollington and Kypros Kyprianou, Marie-Anne McQuay, Munira Mirza, Emily Pethick, Andrea Phillips, Sound Threshold (Daniela Cascella and Lucia Farinati), Roman Vasseur, Neil Webb, Ron Wright

MA Critical Writing and Curatorial Practice at Chelsea College of art are curating a conference at Tate Britain on the 21st May 2010 entitled The Contingency of Curation, working together with other MA Curating students from the University of Essex and Sheffield Hallam University.

To raise funds for this event we are holding this amazing RAFFLE at the Grosvenor pub just around the corner from both the Tate Britain and the Chelsea College of Art and Design campus. Join us on May 7th for an evening of fundraising, prizes and discussion at our local pub.

Prizes to include a print from artists boyleANDshaw and much more!

To find out where RAFFLE tickets are on sale please Email us here

Hope to see you there

Friday 21 May 2010, 10.00–18.00
Tate Britain Clore Auditorium
£20 (£10 concessions), booking recommended
Price includes drinks afterwards
Buy tickets

Join us for an evening of Live presentations, screenings, discussion and recording. Including a bespoke cocktail bar to prepare and fundraise for our upcoming conference “The Contingency of Curation” at Tate Britain.

Curated by MA Critical Writing & Curatorial Practice at Chelsea College of Art & Design, MA Curating at Essex University and MA Curating at Sheffield Hallam University

“Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of the universe which dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of world history. But nevertheless, it was only a minute”. — Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lie in the Extra-Moral Sense, 1873

Necessary Illusions constructs seven itineraries that discuss and interpret ongoing fine art projects by sixty-three artists. The fragmented condition of ‘works in progress’ is hence addressed by the superimposition of meanings that will temporarily articulate and determine the audience’s experience.

Shaping rational structures in order to categorize difference and commonality entails, as Nietzsche argues, arrogant ambitions and mendacious assumptions to create methods of knowing. Thus, the imposition of fictitious constructs is made transparent, it is a necessary illusion.

The elusive nature of an idea in course of development, of a narrative emerging from the process of thought, and, eventually, an artwork-to-be, are hence momentarily fixed in their present significance, here and now, perceptible and substantial…but only for a minute.
Different levels of lighting, restricted access to specific areas, and enforced flows of movement in particular directions, create fictional journeys along which meaning and interpretation overlap, fostering both the physical and the intellectual experience of ‘passage’. This sense of transition through the space, disrupted and recomposed by prescribed itineraries, traces trajectories that move across the fragmented narratives of the artworks, visualizing the assertion of meaning.

The necessary illusions that this exhibition produces materialize at the crossroads between rationality and pleasure, the imposition of structures of thought and the submission to temporal frameworks of signification.

Opening times: 11am-6pm / Admission: Free
Location: Bargehouse, Oxo Tower Wharf, Barge House Street, London SE1 9PH
Press contact: curate@criticalism.org / www.criticalism.org
Map: Here

‘In other words, you cannot observe a wave without bearing in mind the complex features that concur in shaping it and the other, equally complex ones that the wave itself originates.’ -Italo Calvino, Mr. Palomar 1983

Nine visual artists, poets and musicians have been invited to present their interpretations of an excerpted text, from “Reading a Wave” from Italo Calvino’s Mr. Palomar. During the course of the evening a series of events respond and reflect on the text in artworks and performances that range from the gestural and theatrical to musical, sound and image installations.

“Reading a Wave” focuses on the titular Mr. Palomar standing on the seashore observing the pattern of the waves. The text stresses the difficulty of identifying each individual wave: ‘Isolating each wave is not easy, separating it from the wave immediately following, which seems to push it and at times overtakes it and sweeps it away; and it is no easier to separate that one wave from the preceding wave, which seems to drag it towards the shore.’

A flow of performances which overlap in parts, reflect Mr. Palomar’s task. While some responses take the literal pattern of the waves as their inspiration, and use repetitive sequences to create new patterns, others focus on the analogies drawn and address the complexities of interpersonal communication and the limits of language. Whilst there may be infinite differences in how we may read a text, diverging from this point of reading, there may also be an infinite number of possibilities for different readings to come together, make conceptual or literal connections, converging.

The night is thus engaged in a hermeneutical task, where one text is continually transformed and retransmitted. The performances are situated in a mise-en-abyme of interpretation and knowledge; in trying to explore the difficulty in making distinctions between the individual phenomena from the phenomenon of which its part, this exhibition simultaneously and actively takes part in such acts, in order to better understand them.

Time: 18th January 2010 at 18.00-20.30

Location: University of the Arts London, Wimbledon College of Art
Merton Hall Road, London SW19 3QA
Map

List of practitioners
Alice Brooke-Smith
Josie Reich
Madge
Natalie Mcllroy
Rhiannon Armstrong
Stephen Mooney and Will Rowe
Taneesha Ahmed
Lizzy Whirrity

Press contact: curate@criticalism.org