PPV #38: TRANSLATIONAL HISTORIES OF ARCHITECTURE. A LONDON SYMPOSIUM IN HONOUR OF JEAN-LOUIS COHEN

8 December 2023

5-7pm, The Forum, UCL Institute for Advanced Studies

Location:

IAS Forum, G17

Ground floor, Wilkins building

London

WC1E 6BT

United Kingdom

This event is free and open to all.

Registration essential.

Jean-Louis Cohen was a historian and curator of architecture who inspired and impacted the work of many. His unexpected passing this summer was a loss to the entire expanded field of architecture. A pioneer of transnational and transmedial histories of architecture, he was a cultural translator whose work and influence crossed boundaries between continents and epochs – from Paris to Moscow, Casablanca to Kharkiv, New York to Brasilia. He had the true gift to mediate and connect people and ideas within academia as well as beyond it. Based in between France and the US for most of his life, his work, impact, and network was profoundly transnational. This gathering - convened and chaired by Markus Lähteenmäki (UCL Institute of Advanced Studies) and Michał Murawski (UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies) - brings together his former mentees, collaborators, interlocutors, friends and followers in and around the UK. The symposium presents a dozen short speeches that vary from anecdotes and recollections to reflections on his method and its impact and critical reconsiderations of historiography.

PPV x VSEVSIT: Former West and New East (Away, Beyond and Sideways)

22 September 2023

7:00pm-9:00pm

Visual Caption: Olia Sosnovskaya. Outdoors, gunpowder burns quietly. In a closed space gunpowder explodes, 2016

Location:

House of Anetta

25 Princelet St

London

E1 6QH

Doors 6:30 pm

Talk 7-8 pm

Close 9:30 pm

The event is free and available to everyone.

Join this event with curator Aleksei Borisionok and artist and researcher Olia Sosnovskaya re-examining their essay “The Former West and the New East” (2017) which critically unpacked the notion of “New East” introduced by the UK-based media after the annexation of Crimea in 2014. Aleksei and Olia will address the narratives and representations of Eastern Europe and how the underlying power dynamics are underscored and re-actualised in the context of current Russia’s invasion of Ukraine supported by the Belarusian regime.

The talk will focus on (self)exoticization of Eastern Europe and analyse aesthetics and politics within artistic practices in the context of “the Former West” and “the New East”, in particular referring to imperialist and (crypto)fascist tendencies.

What other temporalities could be suggested within and beyond the notion of ‘post-socialism’? What are the ways of constructing networks and solidarities beyond intercolonial communication, to use the notion of Svitlana Matviyenko?

The event is co-organised by PPV (Perverting the Power Vertical) and Vsesvit (Ukraine solidarity collective) and hosted by Anneta House social centre.

Vsesvit will join with a pop-up corner featuring a selection of fundraising projects and will run a makeshift bar during the event.

Speakers:

Aleksei Borisionok is a curator, writer, and organiser, who currently lives and works in Vienna. He is a member of the artistic-research Problem Collective and a working group of Work Hard, Play Hard! He writes about art and politics for various magazines, catalogues and online platforms such as e-flux Journal, L’Internationale Online, Partisan, Springerin, Paletten, among many others. He is currently a fellow at Vera List Center, New York, and, together with Katalin Erdődi, he is co-curating the upcoming edition of the Matter of Art Biennale in Prague (2024).

Olia Sosnovskaya (Minsk / Vienna) is an artist, writer, and organizer. She engages in textual, performative, and visual practices, intertwining the notions of festivity, collective choreography, and the political within the post-socialist contexts and beyond. Member of artistic-research group Problem Collective and Work Hard! Play Hard! working group. Candidate at PhD in Practice, Academy of Fine Art Vienna.

Organisers:

Perverting the Power Vertical (PPV) is an event platform and seminar series based at the UCL SSEES.

Vsesvit is a Ukraine solidarity collective based in London. Vsesvit organises cultural and community events to support the local community in London and raise funds for grassroots collectives and initiatives responding to the Russian invasion in Ukraine.

House of Annetta is a social centre and platform for practicing systems change. Over the past two years the house has been used by hundreds of different groups, individuals and networks for gathering, eating, talking, exhibiting, listening and making. Get in touch if you would like to use the space or connect with the project.

This event is moderated by Daša Anosova, who is a researcher and cultural worker from Kyiv, Ukraine. She is a PhD candidate at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies and Michał Murawski - an anthropologist of architecture and of cities based at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies

OCCUPY PPV #07: Pain and its Politics

26th May 2023

6:00 pm – 7:30 pm

Location:

Mimosa House

47 Theobalds Rd

London

WC1X 8SP

Please join the conversation with Dr Rachel Warriner on pain as a feminist method. Rachel will discuss the politics of representing suffering in feminist practice, focusing on artists whose work examines different kinds of hurt and injury. This conversation will explore questions of bodily empathy, the politics of emotions, and how a visual language of pain might act for feminism.

Image: Nancy Spero, Helicopter Blinding Victims, 1968. Gouache and ink on paper, 59.7 x 90, 4cm. A detail used on the cover of 'Pain and Politics in Postwar Feminist Art: Activism in the Work of Nancy Spero' by Rachel Warriner

Registration is free but essential.

Speaker:

Dr Rachel Warriner is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at The Courtauld, where she has been working on the project Feminist Arts-Activism, New York: Collectives, Actions, Agitations. She is also the convenor of The Courtauld’s Gender and Sexuality Research Group and Group Work Network, and Founder of and Curator at Pluck Projects with Sarah Kelleher.

This event will be chaired by Daša Anosova (UCL SSEES)

This talk is a part of the public programme contextualising the exhibition I AM NOT HERE TO BE STRONGER THAN YOU co-curated by Daša Anosova and Alexandra Tryanova at Mimosa House in London. The show is the first major presentation of works by Alyona Tokovenko and AntiGonna - contemporary Ukrainian artists working with transgressive practices, radical intimacy, and personal traumatic memories.

In the exhibition, autobiographical narratives are manifested through the acts of (auto)eroticism, transgression and pornographic imagery incorporating painting, sculpture, installation, video, and viscerally embodied live art. Hurt and injured bodies are present in the gallery space in the form of moving image and morphing canvases, while pain, as a visual language, and a key theme of the artists’ works, addresses the politics of the moment.

The talk will take place in the exhibition space where the participants will have an opportunity to learn more about both artists' artistic practices. Learn more about the show here.

In partnership with FRINGE: UCL's Centre for the Study of Social and Cultural Complexity.