David Roberts Art Foundation-Gallery Talk

Posted on | February 8, 2010 | No Comments

Garin Dowd, who lectures in the areas of Film, Media and Cultural Studies in the School of Media, was an invitee of the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture at the University of Westminster and the David Roberts Art Foundation in December. Dr Dowd was on a panel with Stephen Meville, Professor of Art History at Ohio State University and Dr. Alev Adil, Head of the Department of Creative, Critical and Communication Studies at the University of Greenwich. Running in tandem with the exhibition Sculpture in the Space Age which took place at the David Roberts Arts Foundation in Fitzrovia, the founders of IMCC at the University of Westminster, Dr Marquard Smith and Dr David Cunningham organised 4 events on the theme of ‘the future’.

 The exhibition itself, according to the foundation’s press release, was [d]eveloped over the last year by Raimundas Malasauskas, the second guest curator at the David Roberts Art Foundation Fitzrovia, Sculpture of the Space Age refers to a purely fictional exhibition mentioned in J. G. Ballard’s short story ‘The Object of the Attack’ (1984). Not detailed in the text, the exhibition was supposedly held at the Serpentine gallery in the late 70’s and exists only as a title in the short story. Invited artists Gintaras Didziapetris, Ryan Gander, Mario Garcia Torres and Rosalind Nashashibi will work collectively to create a space for this exhibition to emerge.

The final event in the series of talks ‘The Object of the Attack’ examined the topic of ‘The Future Now’. Garin’s presentation was entitled ‘Replay: conducts of time x 4 (interstitial pedagogies)’. Garin responded to the exhibition by exploring the Ballard-inspired film by Ursula Meier, Home (2008), the premise of the exhibition itself and, perhaps most surprisingly, the then topical and notorious Thierry Henry handball incident. He subjected the latter to a novel twist of interpretation using the theories of the philosopher Giorgio Agamben and the cultural theorist Brian Massumi. In a coincidental dovetail with Garin’s other research interests, Professor Melville presented his talk on the question of the future as this is posed in the drama of Samuel Beckett, while Dr Adil presented an infectious poem-performance-paper which, in the course of an autobiographical travelogue through the ‘non-places’ of our present (and future), animated voices from texts by the philosophers Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze.

www.davidrobertsartfoundation.com

Dr Dowd’s paper was chosen to appear on the Institute’s web-page and may be read in full here:

http://instituteformodern.co.uk/2009/the-future-papers-part-two-garin-dowd

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