The 2019 Research Symposium takes place on 30 January at Dorich House Museum.
Examples of past Modern Interiors Research Centre conferences and events include:
Dr Stephen Knott - Talk
In recent years practitioners, researchers, curators and critics concerned with the importance of making have naturally welcomed a renewed interest in craft, both from the general public and the nebulous world of fine art. From Assemble's winning the 2015 Turner Prize, sloppy ceramics at the Venice Biennale and live weaving demonstrations, to education scenarios that place the hand-made centre stage, it looks that making is back in fashion.
While experiencing this vogue there is an opportunity to triumph histories of craft thinking and practice that have long been marginalised, and question the motivation behind the current resurgent need to get our hands dirty. Does it originate from disillusionment with the sensory limitations of digital screen-based media? And if there is a desire to see 'evidence' of the processes and plain hard graft that lie behind the production of objects, how is this manifest and managed in contemporary artworks?
Dr Stephen Knott - Curator
For this thematically-led iteration of Tendenser (2018) the aim is to explore the various ways in which craft is experienced in time, drawing attention to daily rhythms, the momentary, and the ongoing. With a view to get behind the finished, pristine object, the exhibition foregrounds process, the experience (or phenomenology) of making, and the complexity of exercising skilled labour in challenging economic environments.
Night Fever is a touring exhibition that opened at Vitra Design Museum in Germany in March 2018. Co-curated by Jochen Eisenbrand (Chief Curator, Vitra Design Museum), Dr Catharine Rossi and Dr Nina Serulus (ADAM Design Museum, Brussels) this is the first large-scale examination of the relationship between design and club culture from the 1960s to the present, on an international scale. The exhibition is accompanied by a 400 page catalogue, co-edited by Eisenbrand and Rossi, and an events programme.
See more details on the website and the press release.
The panel of three papers focuses on considering displacement through issues in design and film, with special reference to interiors - in the widest sense of that word.
Convened by Pat Kirkham: Professor: Design History, Kingston University, UK.
Papers
A Research Symposium co-Convened with Parsons School of Design, New York.
Programme
Book launch of Architectures of Display: Department Stores and Modern Retail by P Lara-Betancourt et al.
This influential event focused on three contrasting studies looking at an innovative mid-20th century architect-designed home in Leicester; Manhattan interiors of the late 1960s; and Franco-era domestic interiors in Spain; and an introduction to the Iconic Houses Network from its founder Natascha Drabbe.
Book launch for the Routledge Companion to Design Studies by Penny Sparke and Fiona Fisher.
A jointly hosted symposium with the MA program in the History of Design and Curatorial Studies at the School of Art and Design History and Theory, Parsons School of Design.
A one-day symposium, to which invited speakers contributed papers on their recent/current research on interiors.
Symposium co-convened by Patricia Lara-Betancourt (MIRC, Kingston University London) with Gladys Arana (Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán, Merida, Mexico.
The body of literature on the history of domestic architecture and interiors in Latin America is scant, fragmentary and not yet disseminated. The home has been little researched from a historical perspective and its interiors and domestic material culture are therefore largely unknown.
As a privileged space for the forging, affirming and contesting of identities (class, gender, local, national), the domestic interior is a key site of social and cultural generation and transformation. The process of home making is fundamental to social life, with its hybrid melding of tradition and modernity, gradually producing a personal, familial and collective palimpsest.
The symposium invited and selected papers about domestic interiors in Latin America in the 19th and 20th centuries, with the aim of illustrating and charting the changes that have permeated them within a framework of identity building, and particularly with reference to issues of class, gender and nation.
A one-day symposium, to which invited speakers contributed papers on their recent/current research on interiors.
In collaboration with the Histories of Home Specialist Subject Network.
The event brought together scholars from different disciplines to consider the role of advice literature in the study of the home, its design and interiors, recognising the significance of the source in shaping perceptions and representations of the domestic sphere. Examples of home decoration and household management advice published from the second of half of the 19th century onwards were discussed. Themes included the problematic nature of the relationship between ‘ideal' and ‘real' interiors and the multiple agendas and influences which have informed the production of different types of domestic advice.
In collaboration with the V&A Research and Education Departments
Developed as part of the British Design Season at the V&A, Spaces and Places: British Design 1948-2012 explored a range of public and private spaces - domestic spaces, educational spaces, retail spaces and leisure and transport environments - from the perspective of world class British design in the post-war period.
Christopher Breward and Ghislaine Wood (curators of British Design 1948–2012: Innovation in the Modern Age), Christine Lalumia, Fiona Anderson, Alison Clarke, Cheryl Buckley, Janine Barker, Paul Gorman, Julian Powell Tuck, Piers Gough, Maurice Howard, Jules Lubbock, Alan Powers, Catherine Burke, Harriet McKay, Joe Kerr, Joe Moran.
In collaboration with Melbourne School of Design, University of Melbourne
Fluid urban conditions such as supermodern public spaces – international airports, shopping malls, urban plazas and post-industrial parks – render problematic the relatively simple dualities of 'inside' and 'outside', 'private' and 'public', 'domestic' and 'non-domestic' and 'place' and 'non-place'. Likewise global concerns such as climate variability, economic instability and transnationalism are similarly informing discussion about design, occupation and conservation, particularly where local ecologies and practices are impacted by the flow of change.
FLOW 2, the second investigation into the transitional and intermediary relationships between interiors and landscapes, took a theoretical and practice-based approach to the examination of historical and contemporary interiors and landscapes, focusing on those arising from the emergence of increasingly fluid and virtual spatial environments. The conference was accompanied by an exhibition of practice-based responses to the conference theme, held at the Wunderlich Gallery at the University of Melbourne.
Elias Constantopoulos (University of Patras, Greece), Luca Basso Peressut (Politecnico di Milano, Italy), Suzie Attiwill (RMIT University, Australia), Esben Skouboe Poulsen, Anne-Marie Sandvig Knudsen and Ole B. Jensen (Aalborg University, Denmark), Michael Chapman (University of Newcastle, Australia), Chris Hay (Lincoln University), Patricia Brown (Kingston University), Sing d'Arcy (University of New South Wales, Australia), Berta Tello Peon (UNAM, Mexico) and Lucia Tello Peon (University of Yucatán, Mexico), Joel Sanders (Yale University), Donna Wheatley, Ninotschka Titschkosky, and Domino Risch (BVN Architecture, Australia), Kendra Locklear (University of Texas at Austin), Elisa Bernardi (Politecnico di Milano), Lorens Holm (University of Dundee, UK)
Jude Walton and Phoebe Robinson, Sarah Jamieson and Nadia Wagner, Sarah Breen Lovett, Gini Lee and Dolly Daou, Eleanor Suess, Donna Wheatley and Ninotschka Titschkosky.