CRITICAL DIALOGUE - Series 2

The series features invited artists, curators, critics and other thinkers of national and international standing and incorporates a Q&A session.
For further information please contact Shelley Piper, Critical Dialogue Assistant,  (criticaldialogue@herts.ac.uk).  No need to book but to help us monitor attendance please sign in upon arrival.
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Week 9 (7 February)
Joanna Austin
Audience Experience of Movement in the Moving Image
It has been claimed that movement is central to aesthetic experience, linked to emotion and essential to independent thought.  Austin analyses the affect of the movement in a selection of case studies including Entr'acte by René Clair, La Region Centrale by Michael Snow, Descent by Catherine Yass and Austin’s own piece Icara, Icara.
 
Joanna Austin is currently exhibiting with UH Galleries and has shown work both in galleries and in non-gallery contexts. Selected exhibitions and performances include Market Estate Project (Islington), Cutting Room (Nottingham Playhouse), Voyeur Night (Whitechapel Gallery), and FIVE YEARS/JTG Project 09* (James Taylor Gallery).

Week 10 (14 February)
Helen Marriage
The Artist’s Imagination and the Public Realm
Helen Marriage discusses a career spent working with artists on projects that invade the public realm and define a new sense of possibility in our towns and cities.   
 
Helen Marriage is co-founder of Artichoke, the creative company responsible for projects such as The Sultan’s Elephant or Anthony Gormley’s One & Other on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square. Her previous work has included a seven-year period as Director of the Salisbury Festival, which she transformed from a local affair to what The Times described as a ‘miracle of modern British culture’.
Week 11 (21 February)
Donna Lynas
Wysing Arts Centre
Donna Lynas has been Director of Wysing Arts Centre since April 2005 and has been instrumental in delivering the Centre’s £1.7 million capital development project. She has developed new ways for Wysing Arts Centre to work with its 24 studio artists, all of whom now receive professional development support during their five-year tenure at the centre.
 
Lynas has developed the organisation into one of Europe’s leading centres for the visual arts, challenging artists and audiences to re-think what is possible, often in partnership with each other. In the last five years this approach has led to the creation of extraordinary projects and experiences.
 
Previously Lynas was Curator at South London Gallery for six years, and Modern Art Oxford for four. She is an experienced producer, has toured major large-scale exhibitions to venues across the world working with notable artists including Barbara Kruger, Keith Tyson and Julian Schnabel.
Week 12 (28 February)
Gerry Judah
SCULPITECTURE
Gerry Judah will show examples of his work bridging the gap between architectural and sculptural expression. He began to build a reputation for innovative design, working in film, television, theatre, museums and public spaces. Judah created spectacular sets for institutions such as the BBC, British Museum, Natural History Museum, Imperial War Museum, and musicians such as Paul McCartney, Michael Jackson and Led Zeppelin.
 
Gerry Judah has also been exhibited at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, Camden Arts Centre and Yorkshire Sculpture Park and has entered many international public and private collections including the Charles Saatchi Collection London, Anita and Poju Zabludowicz Collection London, Imperial War Museum London, and the Essy & Fatima Maleki Collection London

Week 13 (6 March)
Andrew Hunt
Slimvolume Poster Publication
 
This lecture will provide a description and critical analysis of the ongoing publishing project Slimvolume Poster Publication 2001 to present. The project was initiated by Andrew Hunt as a way for artists to develop their work within a strict format of a print edition and publication.
 
The lecture will provide an opportunity to discuss the exhibition Outrageous Fortune showing with UH Galleries from 24 February. In the exhibition seventy-eight artists, whose work encompasses a variety of formal, conceptual, expressionist, literary or design-based approaches, have been asked to create a card for a contemporary tarot pack. Each artist has been drawn a card from the classic Tarot de Marseilles deck, and invited to interpret it through the lens of their own practice.

Week 14 (13 March)
Kim Akass
From Here to Maternity: Motherhood in the Media
Despite the passing of sexual discrimination legislation, the difficulty of combining work and motherhood repeatedly hits the headlines. This paper looks at the American media phenomenon known as the ‘mommy wars’ and asks if British mothers can expect to face the same issues and attitudes as their American sisters.
Kim Akass has published widely on US TV, is a co-founding editor of Critical Studies in Television, co-editor of the Reading Contemporary TV Series (I.B. Tauris) and webmistress of CSTonline.
Week 15 (20 March)
Simeon Nelson
Anarchy in the Organism
Simeon Nelson will discuss his Wellcome Trust funded residency and commission for the new Macmillan Cancer Centre in London. The funding is to enhance understandings of cancer among patients, doctors and the public. He is interested in the analogies between landscape, geography and anatomy. From a systems point of view, the body system can be conflated with a geographical system. Complexity theory is an inherently integrative way of looking at apparently disparate phenomena, from the stock market to social change, from cancer to population dynamics and epidemiology.
 
By generating the artwork through the visual patterns of complexity theory, cancer’s analogical aspects may be linked to social and cultural systems. Nelson is questioning isomorphisms between the growth patterns and interactions of cities, vegetation cover, animal populations etc and cancer. It is a primary aim of his artwork to draw out and test comparisons between these patterns.
 
Professor Simeon Nelson is a sculptor, new media and interdisciplinary artist interested in convergences between science, religion and art, complexity theory, visual languages, spatial aesthetics and relationships between art, architecture and the natural world.

Week 16 (27 March)
Anna Fox
RESORT
Anna Fox is considered part of the new wave of British colour documentary photographers that emerged in the 1980s. Over the last 25 years she has created a compelling study of the mundane and bizarre in British life, with a mix of social observation and personal diary projects.
 
RESORT is the result of two years spent photographing life at Butlin's Southcoast World at Bognor Regis in West Sussex by Fox. She has captured the British at leisure, providing a vital and highly charged insight into the contemporary Butlins holiday experience.
 
Completing her degree in Audio Visual studies at The Surrey Institute, Farnham in 1986, Anna Fox has been working in photography and video for over twenty years. She has exhibited nationally and internationally. Anna Fox is Professor of Photography at University for the Creative Arts at Farnham.