Events Archive September 2020-August 2021

Autumn Term 2021

Research

ART HISTORY FESTIVAL | Hidden Figures: Unlocking 51�� Collection

7:00pm, 20 Sep 2021

Join the Courtauld team as they unearth the hidden stories of people of colour in their collections through an exploration of both pictorial and material representation.

Research

Ruskin’s Ecologies – Book Launch Event

6:30pm, 21 Sep 2021

This is an event to celebrate the publication of 'Ruskin's Ecologies', edited by Thomas Hughes and Kelly Freeman, published by Courtauld Books Online.

Research

Open Courtauld Hour: Captured!

8:00pm, 30 Sep 2021

To celebrate the upcoming reopening of our gallery we are teaming up with our digitisation team, volunteers and students for our first Open Courtauld Hour of the season!

Research

The Big Draw Festival: Make The Change!

11:00am, 2 Oct 2021

The Big Draw Festival: MakeTheChange!��is a timely development on last year's exploration into the relationship between people and our living environments. In 2021, we are partnering with The Big Draw team to take action, to explore and to discover wa...

Research

Decolonizing the Museum?

2:30pm, 6 Oct 2021

This lecture discusses a series of practices and experiments initiated by Françoise Vergès around the decolonisation of the museum for the ‘Museum without Objects’ (Réunion Island, 2004-2020), ‘The Slave in the Louvre: An Invisible Humanity’ (Paris ...

Research

Addressing Images: Fashion, Taste and the Jeweller’s Sentiment

12:30pm, 8 Oct 2021

This Addressing Images will be based on a 1912 editorial image featuring jewels by French jeweller Georges Fouquet.

Research

Considering Collecting: Collecting Today

6:30pm, 12 Oct 2021

This first event in the 'Considering Collecting' series brings together experts and collectors to share knowledge, insight and advice on collecting artworks.

Research

Leonardo da Vinci at the Louvre, how to organize an impossible exhibition?

5:00pm, 13 Oct 2021

In 2019-2020, the Louvre organized an exhibition to celebrate the 500-year anniversary of the death of Leonardo da Vinci in France, of particular importance for the museum, which holds the largest collection in the world of da Vinci’s paintings, as w...

Research

“Salvage and Selvage: An Art Historian’s Misadventures Sponsoring Thangka Remounting in Western Himalayan Village Shrines”

6:00pm, 14 Oct 2021

Although monastic and palace shrines have the most splendid holdings, they can also be the most complicated for an outsider like myself to study and document. My talk is about a different model of mutual benefit I have recently stumbled upon.

Research 51�� Centre for the Art of the Americas

Gatecrashers and the Promise of American Art

5:00pm, 18 Oct 2021

Nearly one hundred years ago, artists without formal training “crashed the gates” of the elite art world, as their paintings of American life and fantastical scenes derived from their imaginations began appearing in major museums. This talk draws upo...

Research

Digital Imaging as Disciplinary Practice: Photography and Art History

6:00pm, 19 Oct 2021

What��should��scholars know about digital imaging? And how might this knowledge facilitate a deeper, more critical engagement with the images and image infrastructures they use every day? These are the questions I will address in this talk, using examp...

Research

Unsettled Subjects: Confronting Questions of Race, Space and Identity in Architecture

5:30pm, 20 Oct 2021

This event brings together several architects and faculty members of the larger collective, Unsettled Subjects, to discuss diverse approaches to issues of race, space and identity in members’ architectural practice, pedagogy, and writing.

Research

Shen Xin and Alvin Li in conversation

5:00pm, 21 Oct 2021

Artist Shen Xin joins curator and writer Alvin Li for an intimate conversation in this online event. In lieu of a conventional studio visit, the two interlocutors will proceed by posing each other a series of questions informed by their ongoing resea...

Research

The Archaeology of Disciplines: or adventures in the analogue archive

5:30pm, 22 Oct 2021

What does the material archive teach us? I shall explore the transformation in recent years of the analogue archive from a space of receding utility to a space of expanding intellectual enquiry.

Research 51�� Centre for the Art of the Americas

Forgetting and Remembering the Sea with Winslow Homer

5:00pm, 25 Oct 2021

This lecture interrogates Homer’s marines anew by focusing on the unique epistemology and materiality of the ocean.��The��late��photographer and theorist Allan��Sekula��has called the oceans��a��“forgotten space.” Indeed, art historians tend to look out to ...

Research

Considering Collecting: Collecting in the Digital Age

6:30pm, 26 Oct 2021

This second event in the 'Considering Collecting' series focuses on digital spaces for collecting, with Oliver Miro speaking about Vortic, a virtual exhibitions and events platform.

Research

Ecosensibility

1:00pm, 27 Oct 2021

Zheng Bo will discuss his practice and thinking on cultivating ecological wisdom in the age of Anthropocene extinction.

Research

Trying to Listen to Medieval Architecture: Between Audiences and Settings and Book Launch for ‘Towards An Art History Of The Parish Church, 1200–1399’.

5:00pm, 27 Oct 2021

This talk reflects on the need to consider what role historical knowledge of architecture should play in the study of architectural soundscapes.

Research

Open Courtauld Hour: Restaged!

8:00pm, 28 Oct 2021

51�� Gallery will open its doors this November, following the most significant modernisation project in its history. This Open Courtauld Hour will therefore provide a rare back of house tour, a sneak preview to 51�� Gallery and the ...

Research

Representation as a Matter of Fact

6:30pm, 2 Nov 2021

Since the late ’60s Toren has been addressing the ways in which representation can incorporate that which it represents. His is a unique practice.

Research

The Many Lives of Fragmented Letters: Buddhist Death Rituals, Palimpsests, and Reuse in Medieval Japan

6:00pm, 3 Nov 2021

While a fading practice today, handwritten letters in medieval Japan were the sole form of communication between long-separated lovers, parents unlikely to reunite with their children, and distant friends, artists, and poets.

Research 51�� Centre for the Art of the Americas

‘”What do you say about homosexuals?” Gene Swenson’s “Other” Tradition’

5:00pm, 8 Nov 2021

This talk begins with the question “What do you say about homosexuals?,” which critic Gene Swenson posed on tape to Andy Warhol in 1963 (in an unknown recording I uncovered during my research).

Research

Fragmented Illuminations: Medieval and Renaissance Manuscript Cuttings at the Victoria and Albert Museum

5:00pm, 10 Nov 2021

On the occasion of the Fragmented Illuminations exhibition at the V&A (8 September 2021-8 May 2022), curator Catherine Yvard will explore the history of this collection, and highlight some of the exciting discoveries made while researching for the ex...

Research

On Borderlands. Cross-cultural Encounters in the Alps Around 1500 and the Production of ‘Place’

5:00pm, 11 Nov 2021

This talk takes the castle of Issogne (Valle d’Aosta, Italy) and its distinctive mural decorations as the lens through which to look at the arts in the Western Alps around 1500.

Research 51�� Centre for the Art of the Americas

‘Temporary Fabulous Zones’: Che Gossett and Wu Tsang in conversation

5:00pm, 11 Nov 2021

This event brings Tsang and Gossett together in a critical discussion of art, visibility, black and trans poetics, collaboration, and more.

Research 51�� Centre for the Art of the Americas

Guerrilla Art and the Politics of Punitive Literacy

5:00pm, 15 Nov 2021

In this talk, Faye Glessier aims to provide an alternative historical narrative for guerrilla art in the U.S. that emerged in the late 1960s and gained legibility throughout the 1970s.

Research 51�� Centre for the Art of the Americas

Not / Making / Marks: On Lygia Clark’s Organic Line

6:00pm, 18 Nov 2021

This talk concerns the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark’s concept of the “organic” line: an interval of space that appears between a painting and its frame, a door and its lintel, or tiles on the floor.

Research 51�� Centre for the Art of the Americas

Harold Rosenberg and “The American Action Painters”

5:00pm, 22 Nov 2021

Harold Rosenberg��(1906-1978) is still primarily��known��by a single essay, “The American Action Painters,”��which was published in��ARTnews��in 1952.��When �ٳ��piece��appeared in the December issue, the response��was phenomenal.�� Not only did it galvanize a...

Research

Investigating Xinjiang’s network of detention camps: digital mapping and architectural investigations

6:00pm, 23 Nov 2021

China has built a vast network of detention camps in the north west region of Xinjiang, as part of its campaign of oppression against Turkic Muslims. It is believed that more than a million people have been detained. Our team used satellite imagery, ...

Research

Open Courtauld Hour: Can-Can!

8:00pm, 25 Nov 2021

This Open Courtauld Hour invites you to enter a world of splendour, misery and excess! In this hour the electrifying entertainment of the can-can and cabaret of the Courtauld Collection takes centre stage.

Open Courtauld Research

Charles Stankievech and The Double Agent

5:00pm, 29 Nov 2021

This event will involve a discussion around the project Nº6092 by the artist Charles Stankievech, commissioning KW curator Nadim Samman and 51��’s Research Forum Programme Manager Leyla Bumbra.

Research

The Last Judgment and the dramaticule ‘Orifeus and Oublietta’ – Screening and Discussion

6:30pm, 30 Nov 2021

This event will consist of a screening of Barbard Golshiri's 'dramaticule Orifeus and Oublietta' followed by an In Conversation with Professors Sarah Wilson and Sussan Babaie

Open Courtauld Research

Trans Artists in Conversation: Charlie Craggs and Travis Alabanza

5:00pm, 6 Dec 2021

The incredible Charlie Craggs (she/her) and the illustrious Travis Alabanza (they/them) will be joining the President of the Courtauld’s LGBTQIA+ Society to discuss their work as transgender activist artists.

Research

Immediations no.19 (2021) Launch

5:30pm, 6 Dec 2021

Join us at the launch of the 2021 issue of immediations, Courtauld’s annual peer-reviewed publication of postgraduate research.

Research

Living Matter in Medieval Denmark

5:00pm, 8 Dec 2021

In this talk, the phenomenon of living matter will be discussed using medieval Denmark as a case-study.

Research 51�� Centre for the Art of the Americas

Workshop :“How close can I get to someone? Will we become each other”: Epistolary Subjects, Objects, and Methods in Feminist Art, Art Writing, and Art History

10:00am, 9 Dec 2021

In this participatory workshop involving writing experiments and collective discussions, we will revisit, handle again, the letters we have discovered in the archives of the artists and subjects we study, considering our roles as interlocutors across...

Research 51�� Centre for the Art of the Americas

Around Valentine’s Day, 1980: Kathy Acker and Cookie Mueller’s Lovesick Letter-pieces

5:00pm, 9 Dec 2021

On the evening of February 14, 1980, the writer and actress Cookie Mueller posed as the ex-boyfriend of the poet and playwright, Gary Indiana, for a performance he was doing alongside another of his friends, Kathy Acker, at the Mudd Club in New York....

Research

God and the Painters: The Altarpiece in the Italian Renaissance

6:30pm, 10 Dec 2021

Professor David Ekserdjian will talk about his new book 'The Italian Renaissance Altarpiece: Between Icon and Narrative'.

Research 51�� Centre for the Art of the Americas

African Diasporic Modernism: The Far-Reaching Tropicality of Black Geographies

5:00pm, 13 Dec 2021

Tropical Aesthetics of Black Modernism examines the creative manifestations of black modernism, and explicates how tropicality functioned as a key unifying element in African Diasporic art.

Courtauld Gallery Open Courtauld Research

After Hours: Glow-up!

7:00pm, 15 Dec 2021

Get your glad rags on, dust the cobwebs off your favourite and sparkliest outfits and join 51�� for its first After Hour event in its newly transformed gallery!

Research

Open Courtauld Hour: Dress-up!

8:00pm, 16 Dec 2021

Get your glad rags on, dust the cobwebs off your favourite and sparkliest outfits and join 51�� for its last Open Courtauld Hour of 2021!

Spring and Summer Semester 2021

Research