Thursday 19 February 2009 6.00 - 8.00pm
Arnolfini, 16 Narrow Quay, Bristol BS1 4QA (UK)

Available as a podcast download from this site in May. 

Contributors:

Presentations by Joasia Krysa, Luis Silva, Helen Cole, Sara Black, Paula Orrell, Lee Callaghan

Responses from Dr Paul Darke, Lois Keidan, Keith Khan, Dr Paul O'Neill
Moderated by Zoe Shearman

Timetable

6.00     Zoe Shearman     Welcome and introduction

6.10     Joasia Krysa, Kurator and Luis Silva, LX 2.0 // Lisboa Arte Contemporanea

6.20     Helen Cole, Arnolfini

6.30     Sara Black, ProjectBase

6.40     Paula Orrell, Plymouth Arts Centre

6.50     Lee Callaghan, amino

7.00     Paul Darke, Lois Keidan, Keith Khan and Paul O'Neill respond with comments and questions during 

           the discussion session

8.00     Event ends

Speakers biographies:

Sara Black

Sara Black is the Director & Curator of ProjectBase, a contemporary arts commissioning organisation based in Cornwall. As a non-venue based organisation, ProjectBase works in partnership with other organisations, communities and audiences to commission new work by artists working in international contexts. The recent programme included a 7-artist exhibition, social systems with artists SUPERFLEX, Regina Maria Moller, Hassan Hajjaj, Christine Borland, Joseph Grigely, Surasi Kusolwong, & Eloisa Cartonera. Prior to her current post, Sara was Project Manager for public realm commissions for Liverpool Biennial in 2002 and 2004 (commissioning Tatsuro Bashi, Choi Jeong Hwa, LOT/EK, Winter & Horbelt, Paolo Canevari, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Peter Johansson); freelance Curator 1999 to 2004; and Exhibition Manager for Artranspennine98 (1996 to 1998); and has worked with artists Lisa Milroy, Atelier van Lieshout, Duncan Mountford, Grennan & Sperandio, Ansuman Biswas, Tim Brennan, John Drever, Mark Dion, Serge Spitzer, James Turrell, Alison Wilding, Langlands & Bell, Jorge Pardo to name a few.

http://www.projectbase.org.uk

Lee Callaghan

Lee Callaghan co-founded amino with Ben Ponton in 2003 in Newcastle upon Tyne. He has worked in the graphic design, print and marketing industry for 21 years. Twelve of those years were in management, and the last eight running his own design company. He became interested in live art during the early 1990s, when he began to incorporate visual performative elements in the presentation of his live music. He co-founded amino with Ben Ponton in 2003, with the aim of producing innovative contemporary art projects, dispensing with the notional delineations between live art, music, sound art and technology-based art. Their first production, a presentation of Erik Hobijn's Dante Organ in Newcastle City Centre (December 2003) attracted an audience of 8000. Since then they have produced a huge variety of work, ranging from small scale artist's editions to , a major live art festival in 2005. In January 2008 Lee produced John Cage's Variations VII, performed by :zoviet*france;, Matt Wand and Atau Tanaka for AV Festival 08. Currently, as well as the Theo Jansen project, amino are developing touring opportunities for Variations VII, Jordan McKenzie's 'Universe' and managing the North East's live art platform, Platform North East.

http://www.amino.org.uk

Helen Cole

Helen Cole is the Producer of Live Art and Dance at Arnolfini, Bristol, and has been in this post since 1998.  In 2000 she established the biennial Inbetween Time Festival in Bristol, UK.  She is a core member of Live Art UK, Guardians of Doubt and the New Theatre Architects and originated Breathing Space, an international artists development project and We Live Here, a local artists live art development project across sites and venues in Bristol. As an independent producer she specialises in extraordinary large-scale immersive, technological works including the critically acclaimed touring installations 32000 Points of Light and Whiteplane_2.  She has worked as an independent producer, writer and curator on numerous projects within the UK and internationally since 1993 specialising in live art, experimentation and interdisciplinarity. She is also a Drama and Dance Adviser for the British Council.

http://www.arnolfini.org.uk

Paul Darke

Dr. Paul A. Darke is an internationally respected academic, writer and cultural critic who has written and created extensively around the issue of identity and culture. He is also the originator of Normality Theory. He gained his Ph.d. from the University of Warwick - under he supervision of Professor Richard Dyer - through examining disability and its cultural specificities and impact. Though born in Surrey he now works and travels throughout Europe and elsewhere in the world. As an artist Paul Darke is bringing, to various art forms, new insights and exciting concepts which challenge conventional views of both art and society.  Most recently he has been producing Motion Disabled: a high end digital motion capture project about human diversity.  In addition, he is the artistic director of the Wolverhampton Disability Art Festival (January to June 2009) and the Wolverhampton Disability Film Festival (April 23, 24 & 25 2009 at Light House).

http://www.darke.info  http://www.motiondisabled.com

Lois Keidan

Lois Keidan is the Director of the Live Art Development Agency, London. The Agency was founded in 1999 to support the proliferation of Live Art practices and critical discourses in the UK and internationally. Over the last ten years the Agency has responded to the innovative and diverse nature of Live Art by developing an extensive portfolio of resources, professional development initiatives and curatorial and publishing projects. She has previously worked as Director of Live Arts at the ICA, London and as national officer for Performance Art at Arts Council England.  She contributes articles and presentations to a range of UK and international publications and events.

http://www.thisisliveart.co.uk

Keith Khan

Keith Khan is former Head of Culture for the London 2012 Olympic Games and Paralympic Games for which he continues to work part-time on carnivals and outdoor performances. Keith is an artist and co-founder of motiroti, whose projects include Alladeen - a performance project about outsourcing in India and winner of a New York OBIE. His career has been eclectic, engaging with diverse audiences and practices which involved working with communities and technology. Consistently using the energy of popular culture, Keith's work is large scale and celebratory. A member of Arts Council England's National Council, Keith began his career producing costumes for the Notting Hill Carnival and Trinidad Carnival. He was also part of the creative team that produced the Millennium Dome's opening ceremony before going on to be Director of Design Ceremonies at the Commonwealth Games in Manchester in 2002. Keith was also Artistic Director for the Queen's Golden Jubilee Commonwealth celebrations and Chief Executive of Rich Mix, a publicly funded, international cultural and heritage centre which opened in the East End of London in 2006.

Joasia Krysa

Dr. Joasia Krysa, is a curator and director of KURATOR. She is founding member of Art and Social Technologies Research (within AZTEC Art Science Technology Research Consortium) at the University of Plymouth, UK. She edited Curating  Immateriality (Autonomedia, New York 2006) and contributed to New Media in the White Cube and Beyond, edited by Christiane Paul (University of California Press, 2008). Recent projects include exhibition After The Net curated for Observatori 2008 (Festival Internacional de Investigación Artística de Valencia), panel 'Cuarting in/as Open System(s)' for ISEA 2008 (International Symposium on Electronic Art) in Singapore, and a presentation for ARCO 2009 International Contemporary Art Fair in Madrid.

http://www.kurator.org

Paul O'Neill

Dr. Paul O'Neill is a curator, artist, and writer, based in Bristol.  He is Great Western Research Alliance (GWR) Research Fellow in Commissioning Contemporary Art with Situations at the University of the West of England, Bristol. In 2007, he completed his PhD at Middlesex University on the development of contemporary curatorial discourses since the late 1980s.  Between 2001-03, he was gallery curator at London Print Studio Gallery. He was Artistic Director of MultiplesX from 1997-06; an organisation that commissions and supports curated exhibitions of artist's editions. He has curated or co-curated over 60 exhibition projects including: Coalesce: happenstance, SMART, Amsterdam, (2007); Our Day Will Come, Zoo Art Fair, London (2006); General Idea: Selected Retrospective, Project, Dublin (2006); Are We There Yet? Glassbox, Paris (2000) and Passports, Zaçheta Gallery of Contemporary Art, Warsaw (1998). As an artist, he has exhibited widely including at: Zaçheta Gallery of Contemporary Art, Warsaw; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York; Villa Arson, Nice; South London Gallery; Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin and many others. He has lectured on Curatorial Training Programmes including those at Goldsmiths College  London; de Appel, Amsterdam and the Whitney ISP, New York. His writing has been published in many books, catalogues, journals and magazines including Art Monthly, Space & Culture, Everything, Contemporary, The Internationaler and CIRCA.  He is editor of the curatorial anthology Curating Subjects (Amsterdam & London, de Appel and Open Editions, 2007).

http://www.situations.org.uk

Paula Orrell

Paula Orrell is the Curator of Plymouth Arts Centre. Since taking up this post in 2006,  she has established a programme of residencies, exhibitions and off-site projects that has a particular interest in work that engages with human interaction and social context, and places emphasis on research, interdisciplinary practice and collaboration. Her focus is on commissioning that blurs the boundaries between artist and curatorial practice, nationally and internationally. It has an emphasis on collaborations with practitioners in proximity to the arts centre and the location's visual arts ecology. A forthcoming major project is curated in collaboration with Marina Abramovic: The Pigs of Today Are the Hams of Tomorrow, 2010.  Previous projects include a solo exhibition of Lucy Orta at the Barbican, London, 2005; a new commission by Tim Brennan at the British Museum, 2002-2003; and a solo exhibition of acclaimed performance artists Noble and Silver curated in collaboration at Beaconsfield, London, 2002.  Founder of an interdisciplinary Masters programme in Fashion Curation at the London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London, 2004, she continues to lecturer at academic institutions across the country. She is a graduate of MA Creative Curating, Goldsmith's College, 2001. Recent publications include editor of Lucy + Jorge Orta Pattern Book: An Introduction to Collaborative Practice, published by Black Dog and Fashion Theory, The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture edited in collaboration with Alistair O'Neill published by Berg, 2008.

http://www.plymouthartscentre.org

Luis Silva

Luis Silva is currently General Co-ordinator of Lisboa 20 Arte Contemporânea and Curator of LX 2.0 and Upgrade Lisbon. Besides his institutional practice, Silva has curated several projects independently, including Online - Portuguese Netart 1997-2004 (Lisbon, 2005) (http://www.atmosferas.net/netart), I tag you tag me: a folksonomy of Internet art, (TAGallery, Vienna, 2007) (http://del.icio.us/i_tag_you_tag_me), and FW: Re: Re: (Rhizome at The New Museum, New York, 2008) amongst others. He recently collaborated with Rhizome at The New Museum as Curatorial Fellow and has published extensively reviews and texts addressing issues of art and technology.

http://www.lisboa20.pt/lx20/

Moderator - Zoë Shearman

Zoë Shearman is curator and co-ordinator of the overall Anti-Bodies programme. She runs Relational, an independent contemporary art agency based in Bristol, UK, which she founded in 2001. Relational facilitates relationships between artists, communities and organisations, so as to produce projects in response to different cultural contexts and meanings. Its focus is on extending notions of context-led working and participation in the wider social realm.  She has curated or co-curated over 80 exhibitions and projects including: solo exhibitions of the work of Louise Bourgeois, Angus Fairhurst, Peter Fend, Christine and Irene Hohenbuchler, Sigalit Landau, Yoko Ono and Lois Weinberger; site-specific projects by Tania Bruguera, Melanie Jackson, Bruce Nauman, Doris Salcedo and Zineb Sedira; and the major multi-site projects The Visible & the Invisible: re-presenting the body in contemporary art and society, with inIVA (1996); Patterns (2001) and Homeland with Spacex, Exeter, UK (2004). She has developed projects with organisations including Arnolfini, Bristol; Camden Arts Centre, the Architectural Association, the Freud Museum and the Wellcome Trust, London; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Seville and Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon. She was Director of Visual Arts at Riverside Studios, London, 1990-94; an Independent Curator 1994-99 and co-Director of Spacex 1999-2001.

http://www.relational.org.uk