Talks & Booking
All events are free and registrations are required. Please book your places by following the links of each event. If you are in a different time zone, please notice that all events are organised in British Summer Time.
Attendees who successfully booked any talk will receive a link for joining the webinar one day before the event. Registrations will close one day before each event or whenever it is fully booked. Fully booked events will be available again when the system releases spaces due to any cancellation.
Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Catharsis, 2019, immersive digital installation. Photo credit: Courtesy of the artist.
10 SEP / 16:00 BST
Ecological Perception and Decentralised Human Body
How can technology change the way we perceive the environment? Working through practices of environmental storytelling, artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen uses immersive art installations to rethink the ways in which we are situated within the natural world. From 3D animation, augmented reality, virtual reality and sound installations, technology forms the basis of this artistic inquiry as its audience is transported to, and embedded within, multiple environments. In this talk, Kudsk Steensen will be in conversation with art historian Amanda Boetzkes, to discuss the role of vision within artistic practices seeking to examine modes of ecological perception. With Boetzkes offering a specialist focus on the visualisation of Arctic landscapes, they will explore the potential and challenges of vision, technologically mediated or otherwise, for art addressing today’s ecological crisis.
Dynamic and changeable, our interactions with water echo a sense of humanity’s relationship to the watery field as a whole, which is firmly connected to our involvement in wider environmental, social and political systems. From the organic bodies of natural lives to rivers and oceans, water sustains a connection beyond human selves, enabling a dynamic interface between humans and non-human.
In this talk, conversations between cultural theorist Astrida Neimanis and writer and curator Stefanie Hessler engage in perspectives of water through their collaborative and curatorial experiences, demonstrating relationships between humans and bodies of water in cultural, political and biological dimensions. Discussing Neimanis’ various artistic collaborations, including her work for the 13th Shanghai Biennale and the 2019 Lofoten Biennale’s Kelp Congress, alongside Hessler’s curatorial experience with the TBA21-Academy and The Seed Box, the multifaceted relationship between water and artistic practice will come to the fore. With a rhythm of the water, these art projects scope a realm beyond human-centred and continent-based narratives to approach the field, where habitats are connected under the mutual climate system.
Photo credit: Lance Asper.
Entangled Garden for Plant Memory, Yuhisui museum of Art Taiwan. Preserved Cherry Wood tree Taxidermied Owls Mineral Rocks Fungi From NTU university Collection Mirror Lab Glass. Photo credit: Courtesy of the artist.
24 SEP / 10:00 BST
Humanities within Natural History
Janet Laurence / Wan-Chen Chang
Representing the convergent sites where natural history encountered the development of human society, Janet Laurence’s practice demonstrates the intricate network among human beings and natural creatures as well as the efforts we should make to maintain the balance. In this talk, Laurence and Chang Wan-chen, the curator of Laurence’s solo exhibition ‘Entangled Garden for Plant Memory’ in 2020, will explore this sensitive landscape of nature through both scientific and artistic engagements.
These projects adopted a museological view to generate interconnected narratives of natural history including specimens of plants, birds, minerals and fungi. By building an immersive habitat, Laurence’s practice scopes the sensation of nature, demonstrating the relationship among different natural lives on this planet and their interactions with the humanities.
1 OCT / 15:00 BST
The Material Origins of Technology
Riar Rizaldi / Ana Bilbao Yarto
As one of the best electrical conductors, tin is a vital component of smartphones, computers, automobiles, household equipment and green energy technologies. In this talk, artist Riar Rizaldi will be discussing his moving image work Kasiterit (2019), which traces the origin of tin back to Bangka Island, Indonesia, where a third of the world’s tin supply is mined.
Exploring the ways in which we trace this material history through screens, Rizaldi will be in conversation with art historian Ana Bilbao Yarto to discuss the politics of extractivism in the Global South. From the “catastrophic beauty” of ruined landscapes turned into tourist attractions to the human rights violations undergone to support our screen culture, Rizaldi and Bilbao Yarto will discuss the role art can play in examining the colonial implications of technological industries today.
Riar Rizaldi, Kasiterit, 2019, 18-minute colour video. Photo credit: Courtesy of the artist.