Doctoral degree show in Arts & Media Practice
Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM)
University of Westminster

1 - 5 February 2017

burning hearts of a thousand tiny matters

mirko nikolić with araucaria araucanas, carbon-dioxide, copper, Mynydd Parys, Duško Jelen, Isidora Spasović Lebović and Tuomas A. Laitinen

The exhibition is introduced with a text by Elina Suoyrjö, available in the gallery.

“Matter comes to matter”, Karen Barad invites us to think about the world's becoming. Through differences, bodies—inorganic, vegetal, animal—find modes to do things with one another, to ‘come to matter’ through shared practices. From these entanglements emerges a necessity to reconfigure what is deemed to be exterior or interior, the boundaries of the (human) body and of the social.

The doctoral degree show assembles two constellations of works developed in various locations throughout the research. The constellations address two complex techno-socio-economic networks: the European Union mechanism for trading with carbon emissions, and mineral mining complexes in Northern and Eastern Europe. Through a series of material and discursive performative acts, the works interpellate atmospheric, biospheric and lithospheric elements and processes, seeking to reproduce possibilities of common futures, before and beyond the historically determined figure of the ‘human’.

mirko nikolic’s art and research aims to re(con)figure power apparatuses that extract, capture and control life and non-life. His works develop through fieldwork along the frontiers of extraction, materialising on sites through different media, performative and philosophical elements. Recently he has developed site-specific and collaborative works in Southern Finland (with the Helsinki International Artist Programme), Saari (Saari Residency), Røst archipelago (Røst AIR), and Bor (Cultural Front GRAD, Belgrade). He is a member of Posthuman Art & Research Group; Frontiers in Retreat, a network on multidisciplinary approaches to ecology in contemporary art, and COST Action New Materialism. At the moment he is developing a long-term art and philosophy project in the Kainuu region, Finland with support from the Mustarinda Association.

CASEBOOKS: Six contemporary artists and an extraordinary medical archive

Jasmina Cibic, Federico Díaz, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Rémy Markowitsch, Lindsay Seers, Tunga 

17 March - 23 April 2017 

Private view: Thursday 16 March 6:30 - 8:30pm

Opening hours: Tue - Fri 11am - 7pm, Sat - Sun 12pm - 6pm. Closed Mondays. 

Please note that the exhibition will also be closed on Good Friday and Easter Monday. The exhibition will be open as normal on Easter Saturday and Sunday.

Ambika P3 and the Casebooks Project at the University of Cambridge present CASEBOOKS, a major exhibition engaging with one of the largest surviving sets of medical records in history. International contemporary artists Jasmina Cibic, Federico Díaz, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Rémy Markowitsch, Lindsay Seers and Tunga bring a diverse and radical range of practices to bear on the work of the Casebooks Project, which is editing the manuscripts of two seventeenth-century English astrologer-physicians Simon Forman and his protégé Richard Napier. The manuscripts document some 80,000 medical consultations, and are testament to the preoccupations of patients with questions of health, disease, fertility, stability and their place within wider natural and supernatural schemes.

CASEBOOKS presents six new works spanning sculpture, video and audio installation, live performance, robotics and artificial intelligence. The Casebooks Project worked closely with each artist to establish resonances between the artists’ own work and historically acute questions about the nature of the casebooks, the kind of medical practice they represented and their significance for our understanding of medicine and natural knowledge. Ambika P3 engaged in a curatorial dialogue with each artists to encourage both an encounter with its vast post industrial space and the use of an original and complementary ecology of media.

Jasmina Cibic’s new work, Unforseen Foreseens, is a site-specific 12m long corridor installation fusing sculpture and performance, and alluding to the relationships between astrology, power and architecture. Federico Díaz is presenting a trade fair booth of a fictional initiative BIG LIGHT, offering a glimpse into a possible future of merging biological and technological scientific progress with social changes through augmented techno-shamanistic rituals. Lynn Hershman Leeson’s Real-Fiction Botnik is a 3D holographic Artificial Intelligence bot with a brain shaped by seventeenth-century astrological consultations, who is able to offer on-the-spot personal predictions. The Casebooks Calf by Rémy Markowitsch is a large-scale sculpture of a calf made of the same calfskin as the bindings of the casebooks, and from which emanate readings selected from the original seventeenth-century consultations. Seers’ work Mental Metal considers, through Simon Forman's writings, how elements of contemporary life have passed beyond causal, materialist/mechanistic Newtonian concepts to quantum speculations that have a hint of the supernatural about them. Following a method of correspondences as Forman did in his astral cosmology Seers' work is also shaped by affinities and Neoplatonic ideals of unification. Me, You and the Moon, a recent work chosen for the exhibition by the late artist Tunga, is a monolithic sculptural constellation of clay, rock and organic materials symbolising alchemy, astrology and the senses.

CASEBOOKS is curated by Dr Michael Mazière and is a collaboration between the Casebooks Project, Ambika P3, and the artists. The Casebooks side of the collaboration has been led by Dr Lauren Kassell, Director of the Casebooks Project and Dr Natalie Kaoukji, Research Fellow at the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge.

Find out more about the Casebooks Project and download the book accompanying the exhibition.

CASEBOOKS is supported by a Wellcome Trust Provision for Public Engagement, with additional funding from the University of Westminster; Pro Helvetia; Czech Centre London; Pembroke College, Cambridge; Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Cambridge. Simon 

Events

Friday 17 March, 4pm - Artist and Curator Seminar
Artist and Curator Seminar chaired by Lauren Kassell. 

Free to attend, places limited. To reserve a place, please visit Eventbrite

Wednesday 29 March, 6:30pm - Artist Talk
CASEBOOKS artist Jasmina Cibic, winner of the MAC International Ulster Bank Art Prize 2016 who represented Slovenia at the 55th Venice Biennial presents her new work ‘Unforseen Foreseens’ inspired by the Casebooks which examines the relationship between astrology, power and prophecy. Followed by the artist in conversation with Dr Michael Maziere, Reader at the Westminster School of Media, Arts and Design and Curator of the Casebooks exhibition. 

Wednesday 5 April, 6:30pm - Exhibition Talk
Alanna Heiss, Olivia Laing and Lauren Kassell discuss CASEBOOKS, followed by drinks. Alanna Heiss is Founder and Director of Clocktower Productions and was Founder and Director of MOMA PS1 (formerly PS1 Contemporary Art Centre) from 1978 to 2008. She has curated more than 700 exhibitions at PS1 in art spaces around the world. She chaired the CASEBOOKS Curatorial Advisory Committee. Olivia Laing writes on art and culture for Frieze, the Guardian and the New York Times, and is the author of three acclaimed books, including The Lonely City. Lauren Kassell is Reader in the History of Science and Medicine at the University of Cambridge. She directs the Casebooks Project, and is the force behind this exhibition. 

Free to attend, booking essential. To reserve a place, please visit Eventbrite

Wednesday 22 March, 4-6pm
Saturday 8 April, 2-4pm Free, book a place here
Casebooks Clinics - The Casebooks Project is holding two ‘clinics’ offering help reading and understanding Simon Forman’s and Richard Napier’s casebooks. Forman and Napier recorded 80,000 consultations in messy handwriting and astrological notation between 1596 and 1634. Topics in the cases include health and illness, emotions, marriage, sex, witchcraft, dreams, the weather, voyages, theft and treasure. There is something for everyone, from apples to wrestling.

Please bring a laptop and a brief list of cases of interest. These can be found by searching the casebooks project website. See also the guide to searching and list of topics. We welcome inquiries and feedback even if you cannot attend the clinics.

MA Photography degree show

23 August - 5 September 2017

MA Photography students present two concurrent exhibitions and a symposium bringing together the result of a year-long exploration of art, documentary and photojournalism.

Work by the 2017 MA Photography Arts and MA Documentary Photography and Photojournalism students will be on display in Ambika P3, the University of Westminster’s unique exhibition space, from 23 August - 5 September 2017.  

For the whole two weeks two exhibitions will be on display: Light into Matter, an exhibition from students on the Photography Arts MA will present richly eclectic and strikingly visual practices pointing to possible futures and histories of photography. Their practices emerged from extended research into: lost utopias; emotional abuse; London’s edgelands; living with radioactivity; subjective studies of Hastings; and modelling dancers’ movements.

Exhibiting artists: Jan Cylwik, Nicola Morley, Mike Cookson, Joanna Burejza, Krystian Data, Rob Wyllie and Jean Johnson-Jones.

Out of Dust, an exhibition of work from the Documentary Photography and Photojournalism MA students presents projects which advance ideas of documentary photography, interpreting society using exciting and developing methods in photography and consider what it means to engage with the world in the 21st Century.

Exhibiting artists: Stephen Burke, Tamuna Chkareuli, Emanuele Gaudioso, Rachel Gover, Yves Salmon and Andy Wright. 

On 2 September 2017 a symposium titled On the Cusp will debate Richard Mosse’s recent exhibition, Incoming. Sitting on the cusp of art and documentary, Mosse’s work raises pressing questions about the roles of representation, aesthetic values and representation.  The speakers Lewis Bush, Joy Gregory, David Moore, Lucy Soutter and Duncan Woolridge were chosen for their distinct perspectives on the work.  

The symposium will take place on 2nd September 4-6 pm, with further information and tickets available on Eventbrite: http://bit.ly/2txFMSC 

Further details about hte programme are availalbe here: 

http://lightintomatter.art/

http://outofdustexhibition.com/

Sunday Art Fair

5 – 8 October 2017

Opening Reception

Thursday 5th October, 6 – 10 pm open to the public

Fair Opening Hours

Friday 6th October to Saturday 7th October, 12 – 8 pm

Sunday 8th October, 12 – 6 pm

Sunday is London’s international contemporary art fair for young galleries. Held annually it focuses on new and emerging galleries, exhibiting solo projects and curated group presentations. The gallery led fair is a platform for discovery and prides itself on showcasing the best young artists working today.

The 2017 edition sees 8 galleries returning from last year, with 17 that are new to the fair. This reflects the fair’s continuing engagement with showing galleries from underrepresented areas of Europe and America along with the more established art centres.

The Editions Section returns this year with artist’s editions presented by specially invited organisations including Daata Editions, Kunstraum with &editions, Liverpool Biennial, and Nottingham Contemporary.

www.sundayartfair.com

pic.london

26 October – 5 November 2017

Opening Night at Gallery SO, Brick Lane

Thursday 26th October, 7 – 9.30 pm open to the public

Opening Night at Ambika P3, Baker Street

Friday 27th October, 7 – 9.30 pm open to the public

Exhibition Opening Hours 

27th (Gallery SO) / 28th (Ambika P3) October to 5th November

11.00-19.00 weekdays, 10.00-18.00 weekend

and during events

Closing Event at Ambika P3, Baker Street

Saturday 4th November, 7 – 9.30 pm open to the public

All the festival event listings at http://piclondon.org/Events

pic.london brings together artists from across the world, at different stages of their careers to present a large scale exhibition across Ambika P3 and Gallery SO, an art flea market, an immersive installation, a series of public panels, discussions and critiques, exploring questions like “what does it mean to work in the arts and photography?”, examining every aspect of photography as an art form.

pic.london has been devised to celebrate the photographic arts and introduce new ideas about photography to a public audience who enjoy photography daily through their phones and social media, and asks them to think about it differently. 

The exhibition at Ambika P3 will showcase work from established artists like Thomas Ruff and Barbara Probst while also providing a platform for artists at earlier stages of their career like Miki Soejima and Jorge Luis Dieguez. 

Across the city, Gallery SO will be the east London hub of pic.london, with an exhibition that includes works by Christopher Williams and Eva Stenram, but also home to The Professor’s Office, a mini library where visitors can explore books, papers, objects and curiosities, taken from the office of a mysterious Professor which tell the story of a life teaching photographic arts. 

Close-Up Cinema, pic.london’s film programme partner, will be screening a series of historic and recent avant-garde films including Letter to Jane by Jean-Luc Godard and La Jetée by Chirs Marker as part of a film programme that explores the long standing and complex relationship between photography and film. 

pic.london opens and closes with a critical cocktail party. Using Graphic Designer Aggie Toppins' books of Critical Theory Cocktails which match traditional cocktails with philosophical thinkers and authors and devises new cocktails to represent their ideas, pic.london will be serving guests critical cocktails to encourage critical and conceptual thinking of photographic arts. 

Throughout the festival there will be a series of events including a panel discussion on careers in the photographic arts, and a talk on the relationship between theory and practice as well as group critiques where artists put their work forward for peer review. 

The festival closes with The Art Flea Market, bringing together artists, publishers, makers and designers in Ambika P3 to present an art fair offering people the opportunity to buy affordable works of art, books and zines.

10th Anniversary Celebration

launch of printed & electronic catalogues volumes 1–4, with musical performance from LCMF resident music ensemble Apartment House

'The capital's most adventurous and ambitious festival of new music' (The Guardian) is back for its sixth edition. Returning to the epic surroundings of Ambika P3, LCMF 2017 will run from 3 – 10 December, offering a week of multi-disciplinary events, new commissions, experimental films, live sets and talks.

The London Contemporary Music Festival (LCMF) was founded in 2013 by Aisha Orazbayeva, Igor Toronyi-Lalic, Sam Mackay and Lucy Railton, to provide a home for the promiscuous music lover. It is currently run by writer/curator Igor Toronyi-Lalic.

In Search of Julius Eastman was their fifth festival in four years, following the critically acclaimed editions of LCMF 2013, LCMF 2014 and LCMF 2015 and the world's first retrospective of the composer Bernard Parmegiani.