Exhibitions, conferences and events

From Tallinn to Tbilisi: Art across boundaries in the age of empire

Event series: January to July 2023

Through the long nineteenth century until the eventual collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917, artists in territories under imperial control, such as Poland, Finland, Ukraine, the Baltics, the Caucasus, Central Asia and others, increasingly began to explore questions of national identity in response to hegemonic and Russo-centric narratives advanced by the tsarist regime.

In this seminar series, speakers examine art production in key centres of activity beyond St Petersburg and Moscow to present perspectives from across the Empire. Exploring a range of topics, such as art education, travel, national revivals, and women's advancement, they consider the ways in which artists negotiated ethnic and territorial identities, advanced their professional careers, and recalibrated their art-making in response to imperial rule.

Image: Edvard Isto, Attack, 1899, oil on canvas, National Museum of Finland, Helsinki

Fourth event in this seven-part series: 24 April 2023

Nomadic art as cultural and political capital

Speaker: Petra Andreeva, Parsons School of Design, The New School

Home to both nomadic and sedentary groups of various ethnic and religious backgrounds, the Golden Horde (1242-1502) was the Mongol Empire's north-western and most diverse section. The polity was situated at the heart of the Western Steppe and became the centre of the newly-emerging Black Sea trade routes passing through Crimea (Urgench-Sarai-Caffa).

Whilst centred at the traditionally-nomadic steppe, the Golden Horde was surrounded by several sedentary societies, including the Grand Duchy of Moscow. Ruling over such diverse demographics, the Mongol rulers of the Golden Horde had to maintain, reconcile and fashion two distinct identities. One was that of a worldly trade partner and an astute politician in an increasingly global milieu who started to invest in the urbanisation of the steppe under Pax Mongolica. The other was that of a proud successor to an uninterrupted steppe nomadic tradition defined by zoomorphism and portable luxury. As such, the Golden Horde elite started to build trade-centred cities, often modelled after Islamic urban centres elsewhere in Afro-Eurasia; yet, they also needed to demonstrate a certain attachment to centuries-old nomadic traditions to maintain the collective memory of a tenuous alliance.

This lecture will explore the visual and political parameters of this "balancing act", and also delve into the later impact of the Golden Horde on Central Asian and Russian imperial history. Could certain parallels be drawn between the self-fashioning dilemmas of the Russian tsars and those of the Golden Horde khans, especially in light of their similar political challenges in Crimea and on the global stage?

Petya Andreeva is Assistant Professor of Asian Art History at Parsons School of Design of The New School in New York. She completed her PhD in East Asian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests span several main areas: artistic exchange across the Silk Roads, nomadic material culture, Chinese art under conquest dynasties, patronage and dissent under the Mongol and Russian imperial conquests in Central Eurasia. Her work on these topics has appeared in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Fashion Theory, Early China, Orientations, Sino-Platonic Papers, several National Museum of Korea volumes, among other publications. She is the editor of the recently published open-access volume The Zoomorphic Arts of Central Eurasia, and the author of an upcoming book on nomadic visual and material culture. Andreeva has received awards from UNESCO, the International Convention of Asia Scholars, the Getty Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies.

Image: Early Golden Horde, gold belt fitting with deer amid foliage, 13th c. Discovered in Gashun-Ust (near modern-day Stavropol, south Russia).

Artists' Homes in Kingston: Gordine and Muybridge

In this final event of a three-part series taking place over May–June on the theme of HOME, members of KSA's Visual and Material Culture Research Centre will be in conversation with guest speakers exploring the various homes of two former Kingston residents, the artists Dora Gordine (1895–1991) and Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904). The conversations will be followed by a discussion and opportunity for audience questions.

Dora Gordine's Homemaking

In this conversation between art historian Jonathan Black, curator Brenda Martin and art historian Fran Lloyd, we will focus on the sculptor Dora Gordine's concept of home. Gordine had a number of different homes between 1895 to her move into Dorich House in Kingston Vale in the autumn of 1936, from Liepja in Latvia, St Petersburg in Russia and Tallinn in Estonia to Berlin in Germany, Paris in France, and Johor Bahru and Singapore in the Malay States of the British Empire. In the late 1960s, after her husband Richard Hare's death at Dorich House, Gordine considered a move to a new home to be bult for her in Indianapolis, Indiana by the wealthy Anglo-Armenian Tarzian family. The move to Indianapolis was off by the early 1970s, however, with Gordine instead focusing on trying to find a new home for Dorich House and its collection of Imperial Russian artefacts, trying to persuade the National Trust, the Victoria and Albert Museum or the National Portrait Gallery to take Dorich House on as a satellite museum.

Coming Home: Eadweard Muybridge's return to Kingston

The photographic and moving-image innovator Eadweard Muybridge was one of Kingston's most celebrated and eccentric residents, spending the first 20 and final 10 years of his life there, with the intervening 44 years spent mainly in the USA. This discussion will focus on Muybridge's relationship with Kingston and the range of places he lived after returning to the town in 1894 following his disastrous participation as an exhibitor at the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition. He lived in a succession of Kingston homes, from a room in a riverside boarding-house (‘The Chestnuts') to a large, detached house alongside Kingston's entrance to Richmond Park. He remained very active, using Kingston as his travelling base for an extensive projection tour of his work across the UK's civic halls and arts clubs, and assembling an immense scrapbook of his life's work, intended for future researchers. But much of his time in Kingston remains mysterious (Why did he tell his Kingston-based relatives he had returned there from Japan rather than, as was really the case, from New York? Was he really digging a swimming pool in his back garden at the moment of his death?). The Kingston Museum's Muybridge Collection curator Seoyoung Kim and Kingston University film historian Stephen Barber will try to unravel a few of Muybridge's Kingston enigmas.

Date: Friday 10 June 2022, 6.30 to 8pm
Location: Online.

Art School Archives

Part of The Henry Moore Institute's Researching Women in Sculpture Research Season.

By the early twentieth century, women constituted over forty percent of new entrants to the sculpture profession, marking a substantial increase in the number who had completed formal training in the previous century. The establishment of the Slade School of Art in 1871 made history by offering women an art education on equal terms to their male counterparts and in some institutions women even outnumbered men among groups of art students.

Given the large number of women who undertook training in art schools, the archives of such institutions provide a crucial resource for locating women's sculptural practices. In this workshop, held at Kingston University's Archive in the RIBA Stirling Prize 2021 Town House building, speakers Fran Lloyd, Dayna Miller (both Kingston School of Art, Kingston University) and Althea Greenan (Women's Art Library) will discuss the role of art school archives in research and the structures of support provided by such institutions.

Date: Wednesday 11 May 2022, 2.15 to 6pm
Location: Town House, Kingston University, Penrhyn Road

Curating Home

In this first of a three-part online public event series taking place over May–June 2022 on the theme of HOME, members of KSA's Visual and Material Culture Research Centre will be in conversation with guest speakers on the theme of curating the home. The conversations will be followed by a panel discussion and opportunity for audience questions.

'Stay Home' rapid response collecting project, Museum of the Home

The Stay Home Collection is a digital collecting project at the Museum of the Home that explores people's experiences of home during the COVID-19 pandemic. Since April 2020, the project has received over 400 submissions including questionnaires, photographs, oral recordings and diaries, all of which document how the pandemic has impacted on home life – from the challenges of isolation, home-work and home-schooling to building new relationships and community support. In this conversation between Véronique Belinga (Collections Assistant, Museum of the Home) and Annabelle Wilkins (post-doctoral researcher, Kingston University and Queen Mary), we will explore how the project has enabled the museum to engage with the changing meanings of home in its exhibitions and collections, as well as reflecting on collaborative practice with participants, creative practitioners and researchers.

Curating Home: a conversation with emerging artists

This conversation between artists Omalola Mau, Husna Memon and Helen Potkin (Associate Professor, Kingston University) will focus on a recent exhibition on the theme of home that took place at One Paved Court Gallery in Richmond in January 2022. We will explore how the curators and artists individually and collectively addressed the themes of home, identity and cultural heritage, the curatorial decision-making process and audience responses.

Date: Monday 9 May 2022
Location: This event is online.

The Echo of Your Departures

The Echo of Your Departures is a multimedia installation comprising a five-channel sound and two-channel video piece reflecting on Azadeh Fatehrad's current research project Double Agency: The Formation of Diasporas.

The installation has been inspired by a series of in-depth anthropological interviews in the context of women in diasporas, and covers questions regarding gender, identity, femininity, emotion, desire, fantasy, body language, clothing norms and moral values, among other things. Fatehrad has taken fragments of the interview transcriptions and combined them with imaginary elements of self-reflection to create an ephemeral constellation (of sound and video) through which she seeks to represent the notions of uncertainty and in-betweeness in the diasporic experience.

'The Echo of Your Departures' is the result of a three-month residency at St John's College, University of Oxford in collaboration with students and staff.

Date: 14–20 June 2018
Location: the Barn Gallery, St John's College, University of Oxford

ARTAUD

This live event will comprise readings of new translations of Artaud, as well as talks addressing specific aspects of his work.

With contributions from:

• Stephen Barber
• Ros Murray
• Samantha Marenzi
• Paul Buck
• Ed Atkins
• Richard Hawkins

Spaces limited. RSVP essential to art@cabinetltd.demon.co.uk

Date: Saturday 24 March 2018, 2.30pm
Location: CABINET, 132 Tyers Street, Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, London, SE11 5HS