Nottingham Contemporary

An opportunity to hear the artist discuss A Hand Of Cards – and to address issues in her work, research and production.

Dr. James Riley is a researcher whose interests range from Beat poetry to ufology, and who is currently collaborating in the organisation of Peter Whitehead’s archives. This illustrated lecture will explore the apocalyptic imagery that permeates the representation of certain late-sixties events and artefacts. With excerpts of film music and visual art, Riley will discuss the symbolic status of 1969 as a terminal point at which the decade’s earlier optimism gives way to death, violence and ‘bad craziness'.

One of the most arresting figures produced for A Hand of Cards is Upritchard’s ambiguous incarnation of Maid Marian in her sculpture Liar, the female protagonist of the Robin Hood legend, one of a number of figures recalling the medieval myths of Nottingham. Over time, the figure of Marian has moved from her appearance as a bawdy cross-dressing May Day character to the virginal companion to a gentrified Robin Hood. Departing from Upritchard’s Marian, distinguished folklorist Juliette Wood will trace these and other guises, considering how they reveal changing attitudes towards femininity. She will be joined in a discussion led by professional storyteller and folklorist Simon Heywood.

Coverage of Olympic Games has traditionally been tightly controlled in order to maintain a spectacle of positivity and success. Andy Miah, author of the recently published Olympics: The Basics will consider how the growth of social media journalism may threaten to topple the power of accredited journalists, capturing what happens in Olympic grey zones and potentially subverting the international view of the London 2012 Games.

Nottingham Contemporary’s public programme is jointly funded by Nottingham Trent University and The University of Nottingham.

A day of international sports activity as part of the Wasteland Twinning network’s ongoing action-research into land use and classification. Appropriating the wasteland as adventure playground, recreation space and dangerous play area; you are invited to join a team for a friendly rounders tournament and open conversation around key questions raised by the project.

For more information and to join a team Wasteland Twinning http://wasteland-twinning.net/news/

Drawing from diverse examples - responses to unrest in the UK, and the Fukushima nuclear plant explosions in Japan. The TV show 24, and Civil Contingencies planning exercises.

Artist and researcher María Ruido’s documentary essay Amphibious Fictions focuses on two Spanish cities in the industrial belt surrounding Barcelona. Ruido researched the social, economic, and emotional changes produced by new conditions imposed on the traditional textile sector, focusing particularly on the lives of female factory workers.

A post-screening discussion will situate this film in relation to a global process - the shift from centralised factory production to systems of flexible, information-based labour - while also considering the specificity of the Spanish context where critical responses to economic change have been sustained by artists and researchers such as Ruido and Morandeira, together with activist collectives, notably the Precarias a la Deriva (Precarious Female Workers Adrift) group, with whom Ruido has collaborated.

Julia Morandeira is a researcher, curator and organiser.

Maria Ruido is an artist, filmmaker, researcher and cultural producer.

Nottingham Contemporary’s public programme is jointly funded by Nottingham Trent University and The University of Nottingham.

Bringing the political legacy of Gillray and eighteenth-century caricature up to the present day, renowned comics creators Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie will reflect upon the relationship between art, underground publishing and radical politics.

Best known for his pioneering work on graphic novels like V for Vendetta, Watchmen, From Hell and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Moore’s work has consistently pushed the boundaries of various media and genres (including prose, performance art, poetry and music), questioning the assumptions that structure our relationship to our environment and to each other. A prominent artist in the underground comix scene, Gebbie has contributed to several politically and erotically charged titles, as well as her own solo book, Fresca Zizis. Frequent collaborators, Moore and Gebbie’s most innovative and controversial work, Lost Girls, explores the multiple facets of human sexuality, making explicit the links between sexual freedom and artistic innovation, as well as between sexual repression and militaristic violence. Both have also been regular contributors to Moore’s alternative magazine, Dodgem Logic, a project that inhabits the cultural space formerly occupied by, among others, Gillray’s contemporaries, Thomas Paine and William Blake.

Chaired by Matt Green, Associate Professor, University of Nottingham Nottingham Contemporary’s public programme is jointly funded by Nottingham Trent University and The University of Nottingham.

Including keynote addresses by three of the most acclaimed new graphic novelists working in Britain today - Karrie Fransman, Nicola Streeten and Mary Talbot - this symposium will explore representations of the body within contemporary comics.

With work published previously in The Times and The Guardian, Fransman’s new graphic novel, The House that Groaned, explores bodies and the spaces they inhabit in a manner that interweaves humour, pathos and the macabre. Co-founder of both the Beacon art project and Laydeez do Comics, Streeten’s graphic memoir Billy, Me &You, redefines the parameters of the medium, providing a harrowing, yet compelling and at times very funny account of grief and recovery. An internationally renowned scholar who has published widely on language, gender and power, Talbot is the author of the graphic novel Dotter of her Father’s Eyes, which delves into social expectations, gender politics, and thwarted ambitions through an interweaving of personal memoir with the tragic biography of Lucia Joyce, daughter of James Joyce.

Convened by Matt Green, Associate Professor, University of Nottingham. Nottingham Contemporary’s public programme is jointly funded by Nottingham Trent University and The University of Nottingham.

Including keynote addresses by three of the most acclaimed new graphic novelists working in Britain today - Karrie Fransman, Nicola Streeten and Mary Talbot - this symposium will explore representations of the body within contemporary comics.

With work published previously in The Times and The Guardian, Fransman’s new graphic novel, The House that Groaned, explores bodies and the spaces they inhabit in a manner that interweaves humour, pathos and the macabre. Co-founder of both the Beacon art project and Laydeez do Comics, Streeten’s graphic memoir Billy, Me &You, redefines the parameters of the medium, providing a harrowing, yet compelling and at times very funny account of grief and recovery. An internationally renowned scholar who has published widely on language, gender and power, Talbot is the author of the graphic novel Dotter of her Father’s Eyes, which delves into social expectations, gender politics, and thwarted ambitions through an interweaving of personal memoir with the tragic biography of Lucia Joyce, daughter of James Joyce.

Convened by Matt Green, Associate Professor, University of Nottingham. Nottingham Contemporary’s public programme is jointly funded by Nottingham Trent University and The University of Nottingham.