Title: Arnold Circus Picnic
Location: Arnold Circus
Start Time: 14:00
Date: 2009-07-26

Title: Barterama
Location: Barbican Conservatory
Description: This will be great, come and swap your books, t-shirts, mugs, see more at occasional papers website
Start Time: 11:00
Date: 2009-07-26
End Time: 17:00

Title: V&A village fete
Location: V&A
Description: This year is the tenth year of the fete with pretty fun games and workshops in perspective with a set of really good design studios holding stands
Date: 2009-07-24

Title: Talk Show
Location: ICA LONDON
Description: A month-long season of artworks and live events addressing that central feature of human life - the act of speech. For full program go here
Date: 2009-05-06

Title: The Collection: Dance and Artworks
Location: Siobhan Davies Dance Studios and Victoria Miro Gallery

Description: This spring Siobhan Davies collaborates with leading London gallerist Victoria Miro to present The Collection.For nearly three weeks, performers and artists present specially commissioned dance and artworks at Victoria Miro Gallery in North London and Siobhan Davies Studios in South London.

Tues 24 March - Thurs 9 April 2009
Admission free, no booking required
Date: 2009-03-24

Form / Content

The Collection is a series of ambitious collaborations that look at the interfaces of contemporary art and dance, where these worlds intersect and how they might inform one another. At the heart of The Collection is a mutual curiosity for potential exchanges across both art forms, and an exploration of the connections and disconnections within them.

Architecture / Space

The Collection will open two different but equally interesting architectural spaces to the public. Sitting atop a refurbished Victorian building, Victoria Miro 14 affords sweeping views of the city, with its minimalist sculptural form and soaring interior spaces. Climbing to the top of the building visitors will encounter a new work by Siobhan Davies Dance.

Dance / Art

For The Collection, Siobhan Davies creates a new work with Catherine Bennett, Matteo Fargion, Henry Montes, Deborah Saxon and Matthias Sperling. Presented as a series of succinct pieces of movement, physical imagery and sound in a white cube the work is performed continuously for six hours each day. The dance is juxtaposed with Doldrum by the artist Anri Sala, which comprises a drum programmed to produce its own rhythm. Located in Victoria Miro 14, visitors can move freely around the space to create their own time frame and perspective of the work.

Art / Dance

Located at Victoria Miro 16 is a group exhibition of works that allude to movement, repetition or a physical engagement with space. The artists presented here work across diverse media, from film and photography, to dance, painting, sculpture and sound. There are several new works on view, including Lying in Wait, an exciting collaboration by Idris Khan and Sarah Warsop, and commissions by Alex Hartley and Susan Philipsz. Works by Francis Alÿs, Yayoi Kusama, Cildo Meireles, Roman Signer and Sarah Sze offer varied and often subtle introductions to ideas around movement in visual artistic practice.

Futher information regarding dates and location

http://www.siobhandavies.com/thecollection/details.php

Title: On the Idea of Communism - Conference
Location: Logan Hall Institute of Education, University of London 20 Bedford Way London WC1H 0AL
Description:

“It’s just the simple thing that’s hard, so hard to do.”(B.Brecht)

The year of 1990 stands for the triple defeat of the Left: the retreat of the social-democratic Welfare State politics in the developed First World, the disintegration of the Soviet-style Socialist states in the industrialized Second World, and the retreat of emancipatory movements in the Third World. A certain epoch was thereby over, the epoch which began with the October Revolution and was characterized by the Party-State form of organization. Does this mean that the time of radical emancipatory politics is over?

In recent years, there are multiple signs which indicate the need for a new beginning. The utopia of the 1990, the Fukuyamaist “end of history” (liberal-democratic capitalist as the finally found natural social order) died twice in the first decade of the XXIst century. While the 9/11 attacks signaled its political death, the financial crisis of 2008 signals its economic death. In these new conditions, the task is not only to reflect on new strategies, but to radically rethink the most basic coordinates of emancipatory politics. One should go well beyond the rejection of the Party-State Left in its “Stalinist” form – a common place today -, and extend this rejection to the entire field of the “democratic Left” as the strategy to reform the system from within its representative-democratic state form. Much more than the debacle of the Really-Existing Socialism, the defeat of 1990 was the final defeat of this “democratic Left.” This defeat raises the question: is “Communism” still the name to be used to designate the horizon of radical emancipatory projects? In spite of their theoretical differences, the participants share the thesis that one should remain faithful to the name “Communism”: this name is potent to serve as the Idea which guides our activity, as well as the instrument which enables us to expose the catastrophes of the XXth century politics, those of the Left included.

The symposium will not deal with practico-political questions of how to analyze the latest economic, political, and military troubles, or how to organize a new political movement. More radical questioning is needed today - this is a meeting of philosophers who will deal with Communism as a philosophical concept, advocating a precise and strong thesis: from Plato onwards, Communism is the only political Idea worthy of a philosopher.

“The communist hypothesis remains the good one, I do not see any other. If we have to abandon this hypothesis, then it is no longer worth doing anything at all in the field of collective action. Without the horizon of communism, without this Idea, there is nothing in the historical and political becoming of any interest to a philosopher. Let everyone bother about his own affairs, and let us stop talking about it. In this case, the rat-man is right, as is, by the way, the case with some ex-communists who are either avid of their rents or who lost courage. However, to hold on to the Idea, to the existence of this hypothesis, does not mean that we should retain its first form of presentation which was centered on property and State. In fact, what is imposed on us as a task, even as a philosophical obligation, is to help a new mode of existence of the hypothesis to deploy itself.” (Alain Badiou)

Speakers:
Judith Balso, Alain Badiou, Bruno Bosteels, Terry Eagleton, Peter Hallward, Michael Hardt, Jean-Luc Nancy, Toni Negri, Jacques Ranciere, Alessandro Russo, Alberto Toscano, Gianni Vattimo, Slavoj Zizek

The Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities
LINK

Date: 2009-03-13

Title: Most Beautiful Swiss Books 2007
Location: Cafe Oto, Dalston
Description: The Helvetic Centre and the Swiss Federal Office of Culture would like to invite you to the opening on the 19 November 2008 at 7pm. Hans Muster, director of Helvetic Centre will have a few words and guests from Switzerland will introduce the competition and the catalogue.
Please reserve Saturday afternoon 29 November for there will be a workshop held in the exhibition with guests from London and Switzerland. For further information go to www.helveticcentre.ch
Start Date: 2008-11-19
Start Time: 19:00
End Date: 2008-11-30

Title: The First Pictures I Enjoyed
Location: Frieze Talks
Description: Writer and artist Alasdair Gray in conversation with novelist and artist Tom McCarthy.

Start Time: 15:00
Date: 2008-10-17

Title: The Ideology of the ‘Iconic’
Location: ARCHITECTURAL ASSOCIATION
Description: Love her or loathe her’ says Kirsty Wark of Madonna, ‘you cannot underestimate the impact she has had on music, or her iconic status.’
The word ‘iconic’ might be the best way into a discussion of where postmodernism’s collapse of high and low has led us: to a situation in which opting out of mass market phenomena simply isn’t considered to be an option. The ‘iconic’ as an ideology means that, regardless of taste, we all have to pay attention to – and analyse, preferably in a sub-Barthesian manner infused with terms like ‘guilty pleasures’ and ‘getting my fix’ – a new canon in which commercial status and cultural status are one and the same thing. As a result, even in the academy quantitative terms have swamped qualitative ones, and criticism – co-opted and confounded by the comforting repetitions of celebrity culture and PR – is in crisis. As we approach the end of this postmodern tyranny, Momus signals what he calls Unpop as one possible exit strategy.

Momus is a singer, writer and artist living in Berlin. As well as 18 albums of ‘disorienteering’ pop music, he’s written for Wired, Frieze, and has a weekly design and culture slot on the website of the New York Times. His first novel, The Book of Jokes, will appear in 2009, when Sternberg will also publish his Book of Scotlands, a piece of speculative non-fiction listing 1000 parallel world Scotlands.

Future guests in the ‘Pop and Populism’ Lecture series include Sam Jacob.

Start Time: 18:00
Date: 2008-10-14

Title: Trattoria Al Capello
Location: Somerset House
Description: Designer Martino Gamper and friends design every aspect of the guerrilla restaurant, including the furniture, tableware, cutlery and food. Join them for this one-off dining event in the gallery.
(Limited capacity)

Date: 2008-11-03