‘A charred and battered peninsula’: artistic reflections on the Dardanelles and other sites of memory

New Zealand Studies Network presents:
Professor Paul Gough
‘A charred and battered peninsula’: artistic reflections on the Dardanelles and other sites of memory
6.00 to 8.00 p.m. Friday 18th January
Birkbeck, University of London (Room Malet St 254)

To book: please email info.nzsn@gmail.com

In an illustrated lecture Paul Gough will reflect upon his sojourns in the 1990s in the memory-scapes of Gallipoli, exploring the charred headlands of the Dardanelles Peninsula, the once-hidden trenches and dug-outs of New Zealand troops; and then in France, Belgium and Salonika. The resulting drawings and paintings were shown at New Zealand House in London and at the National War Memorial in Wellington. Gough has also written about the way war artists learned to describe emptiness and abandonment. His lecture will focus on how New Zealand artists have articulated their vision of war and peace.

Professor Paul Gough, painter, broadcaster and writer, has exhibited widely in the UK and abroad, most recently in Canada, New Zealand and Australia, and is represented in several permanent art collections. His research interests lie in the processes and iconography of commemoration, the cultural geographies of battlefields, and the representation of peace and conflict in the 20th/21st century. Paul Gough has worked for ITV, BBC and C4 on creative arts programmes ranging from dance to drama, poetry to painting. He is currently Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic) at UWE, Bristol

Please reply to info.nzsn@gmail.com if you wish to attend.

British Museum - Australian Season

The first of three posts with an Australian flavour... The British Museum has launched a series of exhibitions and events focusing on Australia, running through to October 2011. The season has started with the planting of an Australian landscape in the forecourt of the Museum (in partnership with the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew). two exhibitions follow, opening on the 26th of May - one entitled "Baskets and belonging: Indigenous Australian histories", exploring fibrework from the British Museums colelctions; and the other "Out of Australia: prints and drawings from Sudney Nolan to Rover Thomas" featuring over 120 works on paper by 60 artists, from the 1940s modernists to contemporary artists and Indigenous Australian printmakers.

The season also includes performances of music, film, readings, gallery talks, lectures and debates and workshops.

For further details and to follow the landscape blog online go to britishmuseum.org/australianseason

CFP: PAINTING THE CARIBBEAN, University of Essex, 6-7 May 2011

See below the announcement of a symposium which will take place next May. Offers of papers (title and short synopsis) should be sent to Peter Hulme [phulme@essex.ac.uk] by 15 January 2011. Please feel free to circulate the announcement.


PAINTING THE CARIBBEAN

A symposium at the University of Essex, 6-7 May 2011
Sponsored by American Tropics, UECLAA, and the Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies

For centuries the Caribbean has both attracted and produced artists who have represented the lineaments of its landscapes and cultures. Agostino Brunias, Paul Gauguin, Winslow Homer, Chris Ofili, and Peter Doig are among many who have visited and painted. Others born in the region, such as Camille Pissarro and Frank Bowling have remained haunted by their childhood memories. Yet others have returned again and again to paint the places and spaces of their islands: Isaac Belisario, Wifredo Lam, Michel-Jean Cazabon, Aubrey Williams, Gesner Armand, Pétion Savain, John Dunkley … And the tradition remains vibrant, as for example in the map-based works of Rafael Ferrer, José Bedia, and Ibrahim Miranda.

Derek Walcott, the St Lucian nobel laureate, has always been a keen painter of his island and an astute interpreter in his poetry of other painters. St Lucian painters such as Dunstan St Omer and Llewellyn Xavier are among the most distinguished in the region. So, in association with his time at Essex as Professor of Poetry, the AHRC-funded American Tropics project, along with the University of Essex Collection of Latin American Art and the Centre for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, is organising a two-day symposium called Painting the Caribbean. In keeping with the place-based approach of the American Tropics project, this symposium will focus on how the places of the Caribbean have been represented—its landscapes, its cities, its light, its sea.

Featured speakers will include distinguished Caribbeanists and art historians Lisa Paravisini (Vassar) and Judith Bettelheim (SFSU).