Nottingham Contemporary

Dick Geary: The Contradictory Legacy of Haiti for Slave Revolt in Brazil

Nick Nesbitt: Legacies of 1804: Anti-slavery, Decolonization and the Critique of Violence

I offer a context for refiguring our understanding of the supernatural, a recognition of attentiveness that asks:  What could we feel if we could feel what we experience sufficiently? What I once called Marie Vieux Chauvet’s ‘literary fieldwork’ becomes a way to think anew about the making of fiction and the meaning of ritual. With vodou practice-and the threats now against its very existence-as my prompt, I go beyond the borders of academic decorum to substantially political encounters. In asking what remains alive, vivid, and unsettling outside our conventions and characterizations, I question the meaning of 'justice' and the reach of 'cruelty,' as well as the uses of 'reason.'  By reshuffling our conceptual schemes, my objective is to give the claims of spirit the color and shape of matter.  Finally, I want to breach the gap between body and mind, dead and living, human and non-human. How else can we work and think through this time of extinctions?

With John Cussans (Undead Uprising: An Insurrectionary Grimoire, forthcoming), Mark Fisher (Capitalist Realism, 2009) and Peter Fleming & Carl Cederström (Dead Man Working, 2012).

Presented in collaboration with The Centre for Critical Theory (University of Nottingham) Visiting Talks series.

Post-colonial theorist David Scott is a professor of anthropology at Columbia University, New York City, and Editor of the journal Small Axe, a platform for Caribbean focused social, cultural and political criticism. Scott’s Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (2004), a significant reference for this lecture, explored the political implications of how the past is conceived in relation to the present and future through a reconsideration of C. L. R. James’s masterpiece of anti-colonial history, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. Post-lecture discussion will be moderated by Christian Høgsbjerg. Christian Høgsbjerg is a historian who teaches at Leeds Metropolitan University and is editor of C.L.R. James's 1934 play about the Haitian Revolution, Toussaint Louverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History (Duke University Press, 2013).

Using still and moving images Leah Gordon will discuss the rituals, ceremonies and symbols that honour and perform the pantheon of Vodou spirits in Haiti. She will also give a brief history of the roots of Haitian Vodou, and its relationship to the former plantation system and the slave led revolt that led to Haiti's 1804 independence.

A writer, musician, filmmaker, and contributing editor of Mute Magazine, Benedict Seymour was amongst the first to review Francis Upritchard’s work in the context of the Bart Wells Institute - an artist run space in a Hackney squat, founded by Upritchard and Luke Gottelier in 2001. At the time, Hackney was an area that he considered to be a 'wild west' pioneer zone of art/gentrification - and he read Upritchard’s handmade mummy figures as icons of “post-industrial undeath and (ambiguous) resurrection”.

Seymour's discussion of regeneration and gentrification will draw on films made with The London Particular. The intention of the event is to provoke a discussion of relevance to our immediate urban environment - addressing creative regeneration, gentrification, land use and urban occupation in Nottingham.

The presentation is followed by an open discussion with responses from people with different stakes in this debate, including: Nick Ebbs - developer, lecturer and Nottingham Contemporary Board member Owen Hatherley - journalist and writer Adrian Jones - blogger, planner and urban designer Chris Matthews - designer, historian and lecturer Wasteland Twinning Nottingham - artist-researchers Alex Vasudevan - cultural geographer

With Anthony McCall, Andrew Tyndall, Jane Weinstock and Ivan Ward, Pajaczkowska was responsible for an iconic film made in 1979 New York - Sigmund Freud's Dora. The film explores Freud’s account of his first case study (the failed analysis of an 18-year-old woman), the marginal position of women in language and the representation of female sexuality in advertising and pornography. As a prelude to a screening of this celebrated film, Claire Pajaczkowska analyses Alfred Kubin’s troubling representation of female sexuality, in drawings which anticipate Freud’s identification of unconscious drives.

With Anthony McCall, Andrew Tyndall, Jane Weinstock and Ivan Ward, Pajaczkowska was responsible for an iconic film made in 1979 New York - Sigmund Freud's Dora. The film explores Freud’s account of his first case study (the failed analysis of an 18-year-old woman), the marginal position of women in language and the representation of female sexuality in advertising and pornography. As a prelude to a screening of this celebrated film, Claire Pajaczkowska analyses Alfred Kubin’s troubling representation of female sexuality, in drawings which anticipate Freud’s identification of unconscious drives.

Art historian and curator Gemma Blackshaw will discuss the work of Kubin in light of the 'Madness & Modernity' exhibition she curated at the Wellcome Collection (London, 2009) and the Wien Museum (Vienna, 2010).