Nottingham Contemporary

The next installment of a series of Cafe Bar conversations convened by Wasteland Twinning Nottingham coincides with the opening of their exhibition, Recreation Ground, on 18 October at One Thoresby St. As Nottingham's Creative Quarter takes shape, geographer Andrew Harris (Urban Laboratory, UCL) and artist-researcher Will Schrimshaw (Edge Hill University) offer critical considerations of the relationship between creativity and urban regeneration.

The novels of Abdulrazak Gurnah are concerned with experiences of migration and displacement, invoking the sea as a potent site of postcolonial experience. He will read from his own work before being joined by Claire Chambers (University of York) and Jenni Ramone (NTU) in a conversation exploring the resonances of the sea in the postcolonial

imagination.

In Collaboration with the Centre for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, NTU.

Philip Hoare will speak on the subject of his new book The Sea Inside, a personal memoir and travelogue that reflects his rediscovery of the vast wilderness of the sea, its myths, and its creatures - from Southampton to the Azores Archipelago.

Philip Hoare is a writer, cultural historian, broadcaster, and author of the award winning Leviathan or The Whale (2008).

In the catalogue that accompanies Leckey’s exhibition, Erik Davis describes a world exploding with technologies, products, and material processes that challenge our conceptual categories with their apparent intelligence and animation. Davis will question whether we are witnessing the emergence of a new animism – a spiritual or mystical reading of nature, objects and machines.

Erik Davis is a writer and lecturer based in San Francisco who has written extensively on technoculture, music, and spirituality. Every week he explores “cultures of consciousness” on his online podcast Expanding Mind.

Following his presentation Erik Davis will be joined in conversation by Mark Leckey

Discussion: With Graham Harman, Michelle Kasprzak and Francis Halsall.

With responses from Kevin Love (Nottingham Trent University) and Andrew Goffey (University of Nottingham) What does it mean to imagine that everything exists equally in the world, and that human beings have no more status than atoms or alpacas? Object-oriented ontology (“OOO”) puts things (rather than human beings, science or social relations) at the heart of studying what it means to exist. It is a new philosophical movement that has had a decisive influence on the work of both artists and exhibition-makers. A discussion with philosopher Graham Harman, curator Michelle Kasprzak and lecturers Francis Halsall, Kevin Love and Andrew Goffey will address implications for the artwork as object.

19 June 2013

Nottingham Contemporary

Artist David Raymond Conroy examines how our experiences of images, from online advertising to Hollywood cinema, affect our interactions with objects and each other. How do these experiences become indistinguishable from what we used to imagine was the real world? Conroy is an artist whose work spans performance, sculpture and video, questioning modes of representation.

Mike Jay discusses the case of James Tilly Matthews, an “incurable lunatic” confined to Bedlam in 1797. Matthews insisted his mind was being controlled by a machine. He is regarded as the first person to present clear symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia, and the Air Loom was an example of paranoid delusion now known as “the influencing machine.” What seems to be delusion, might alternatively be understood as a heightened ability to read technological change. Author, historian and curator Mike Jay has written widely on the cultural history of drugs, and psychiatry.

Turner Prize winner Mark Leckey discusses the processes of collecting objects, artworks and artefacts that led to his exhibition The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things.

This talk is hosted by Nottingham Trent University Fine Art Course, as part of their 'Live Lecture' series of talks

The Small Collections Room displays rare archive materials from ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives in Los Angeles. Founded in 1952, ONE is the oldest collection of its kind in the world and the oldest archive LGBTQ organisation in the US.

The Cabinets will be filled with an eclectic display of materials from the archives. These include artworks and personal papers, some never seen before, by poet and painter Sidney Bronstein (1921--1967). Bronstein worked in Los Angeles from the 1950s onwards where he became actively involved in the city's gay life. He drew and painted portraits of muscle-bound men in uniform who he met while cruising downtown Los Angeles. He meticulously recorded information about these encounters with servicemen in a 1950s accountants' ledger, which was later used in the controversial studies on human sexual behaviour carried out by Dr. Alfred Kinsey. While given very few opportunities to exhibit his work, Bronstein continued to paint throughout his life.

Bronstein was also an early volunteer at ONE Magazine, the first widely distributed magazine for homosexuals in the US -- a landmark publication recognized internationally by the LGBTQ activist community. For years issues were sold hand-to-hand, and for many ONE was the only connection to a wider gay community during the repressive McCarthy era in the United States. Copies of ONE Magazine and selfpublished zines from ONE will be on display. Radical topics include Are Homosexuals Reds? (1953), Are Homosexuals Neurotics (1955), Men who Find Lesbians Desirable (1959), Homosexual Marriage? (1953) and The Homosexual Villain (1955), authored by the journalist and novelist Normal Mailer.

Sheet music from the Collection of Ralph W. Judd, who gathered materials reflecting America's changing sensibility toward cross-dressing in the 20th century, is also on display. With over 1000 different scores, titles include songs such as My Regular Girl is a Regular Feller, I Only Want a Buddy... Not a Sweetheart and I Want a Girl (Just like the Girl that Married Dear Old Dad). The display will also include a number of materials related to Julian Eltinge, a well-known female impersonator who performed in American vaudeville performances and was one of the highest paid actors during the early 20th century