Current Events

Artist Talk: Fiona Tan

Artist Talk: Fiona Tan

The Photographers Gallery

Wed 22 Nov 2023, 6:30pm – 7:45pm

Price: £8, £5 members & concession

Hear the visual artist and filmmaker, in conversation with Gareth Evans

Film still showing a field of red tulips superimposed with B&W images of women gathering

Hear artist Fiona Tan in this public talk as she discusses her new work, Footsteps. Completed in 2022, it is a 97-minute moving image piece that takes letters from the artist’s personal archive and film footage from Amsterdam’s Eye Filmmuseum’s collection to create a study of how someone might contend with political and technological change.

Renowned, too, for her photographic work, she will also talk through her exploration of time and history in her practice. 

Moderated by writer and curator Gareth Evans

Biographies

Gareth Evans is a London-based writer, editor, film/event curator, producer & host and documentary mentor. He works on special projects for the London Review of Books and curates their Screen at Home series. From 2012–2023 he was the Adjunct Moving Image Curator at the Whitechapel Gallery. He has written many catalogue essays and articles on place culture, artists and the moving image, as well as the extensive text for Radiohead’s KID A MNESIA catalogue.

Fiona Tan was born in Pekan Baru, Indonesia in 1966. She studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, and the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunst, Amsterdam. Her commission for a stained glass window in St Laurence Cathedral Alkmaar, Netherlands, will be unveilled in October 2023. Recent solo exhibitions include Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam (2022); Kunsthalle Krems, Krems an der Donau (2020); Museum der Moderne Salzburg (2020); Sprengel Museum, Hannover (2019) and MAC’s (Grand-Hornu), Belgium (2019).

Artist Talk: Monica Narula

Artist Talk: Monica Narula from Raqs Media Collective

Thu 07 Dec 2023, 6:30pm – 7:45pm

Price: £8, £5 members & concession

Hear more about their recent commission, The Bicyclist Who Fell into a Time Cone

Still from featuring a person on a trail in a forest

In conversation with Eszter Steierhoffer (Director, Jencks Foundation), Raqs Media Collective member Monica Narula discusses their new film commission and exhibition 1980 in Parallax on view at The Cosmic House until 23 December 2023. The conversation will evolve around a particular year, and touch upon perceptions of time and geography, fact and fiction. As part of the event, we will also screen The Bicyclist Who Fell into a Time Cone.

Biographies

Monica Narula formed Raqs Media Collective in 1992, along with Jeebesh Bagchi and Shuddhabrata Sengupta. The word “raqs” in several languages denotes an intensification of awareness and presence attained by whirling, turning, being in a state of revolution. Raqs take this sense to mean ‘kinetic contemplation’ and a restless and energetic entanglement with the world, and with time. Raqs practices across several media; making installation, sculpture, video, performance, text, lexica, associative milieus and curation. Their work finds them at the intersection of contemporary art, philosophical speculation and historical enquiry. Raqs enlists whatever they can find in the world — a 2000-year-old cup, a 300-year-old automata, 150-year-old biscuits, a billion-year-old meteorite — to sniff and taste time. Such and other devices are played with in order to undertake historical subterfuge and fabulist adventures. Raqs is also interested in the way language is material, and how we can feel the sensation of thought.

Eszter Steierhoffer is a London based art historian and curator, she is Director at the Jencks Foundation at The Cosmic House. Previous to her current role she was Senior Curator at the Design Museum in London and Curator of Contemporary Architecture at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, where she curated a number of thematic exhibitions to situate architecture in its broader cultural, historical, and socio-political contexts. She received her PhD degree from the Royal College of Art, her academic research revolves around the histories and exhibitions of Post-Modern architecture.

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