These talks should be high on your list of priorities. See below an amazing list of speakers this time around!
Tuesday Talks at The Whitworth Art Gallery
11.00am – 12.30pm, free, no booking necessary
The Tuesday Talks series invites leading artists, thinkers and curators to explore the driving forces, influences and sources of inspiration within contemporary art. The series is programmed by Professor Pavel Büchler and is supported by the Manchester Metropolitan University.
17 January
Andrew Nairne
Appointed the Director of Kettle’s Yard in August last year, Andrew Nairne actually started his career in Kettle’s Yard in the 1980s. Prior to returning to KY, he was the Executive Director, Arts for Arts Council England from 2008 to 2011, was Director of Dundee Contemporary Arts and Modern Art Oxford and worked at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham and the Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow. As a curator and gallery director Nairne has worked with artists at the forefront of the contemporary visual arts including Miroslaw Balka, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Daniel Buren and Olafur Eliasson.
24 January
Christine Borland
Newly appointed as the BALTIC Professor of Contemporary Art at Northumbria University, Christine Borland’s practice negotiates territories in art, ethics, medical humanities and bio-politics. She gathers her source material as a result of research time spent in medical and forensic institutions, observing and participating in their practices. Borland’s work has been shown internationally in numerous museums and large-scale exhibitions including the Lyon Biennial, Manifesta 2, Venice Biennale and Münster Skulpturen Projekte 3. She studied at The Glasgow School of Art and University of Ulster, Belfast and was shortlisted for the 1997 Turner Prize.
31 January
Richard Wilson
Richard Wilson is one of Britain’s most renowned sculptors. He is internationally celebrated for his interventions in architectural space, which draw heavily on the worlds of engineering and construction. Wilson has exhibited widely, both nationally and internationally for over thirty years and was nominated for the Turner Prize on two occasions. Wilson’s seminal installation 20:50, a sea of reflective sump oil, which is permanently installed in the Saatchi Collection, was described as ‘one of the masterpieces of the modern age’. A recent work is Turning the Place Over in Liverpool, a vast ovoid section of a building’s façade that rotates three dimensionally on a spindle.
7 February
Cornelia Parker
Nominated for the Turner Prize in 1997, Cornelia Parker is perhaps best-known for a number of large-scale installations including Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View, and The Maybe, a collaboration with actress Tilda Swinton, who appeared sleeping inside a vitrine at the Serpentine Gallery. Fascinated with processes in the world that mimic cartoon ‘deaths’ – steamrollering, shooting full of holes, falling from cliffs and explosions, Parker’s work triggers cultural metaphors and personal associations, transforming the most ordinary objects into something compelling and extraordinary.
14 February
Georgina Starr
Georgina Starr works with a very broad range of materials and techniques, including video, performance, sound, sculpture and even musicals. She uses incidents from her past, present and future, mixing fact, fantasy and fiction. One series of works concerned a parallel universe full of doppelgängers, including Starr herself. Her works often originate from a chance event or a half-recalled memory. Arecent work, I am a Record draws on everything Starr has ever recorded (on audio) since she began hearing voices aged 5 years old. The range of this archive covers: the rumbling of a broken radiator which she thought was speaking to her, re-enactments of secretly recorded stranger’s conversation, field recordings, singing voices, paranormal telephony, family dinner conversations, spirit messages and interviews with psychics and movie stars.
