Human Cultures

Aquatopia

This post comes to you from Cultura21

UTAGAWA-KUNIYOSHI-The-Spirit-of-Sanuki-in-Saving-Tametomo-from-Suicide-oban-size-nishiki-e-triptych_The-Rescue-of-Minamoto20 July–22 September 2013, The Imaginary of the Ocean

Deep, Nottingham Contemporary, UK

Aquatopia is a major exhibition of contemporary and historic art and artefacts that explores how the ocean deep has been imagined across cultures and through time to the present day. The exhibition and the accompanying book reveal how human cultures have projected their sexual desires, their will to power, and their fear of difference and death onto the ocean’s invisible depths and the life-forms it sustains. The deep in Aquatopia is a dream-state, akin to the unconscious. At the same time, its mythologies allegorise far-reaching historical processes—globalisation, colonisation, slavery, expropriation, subjugation, patriarchy.

Aquatopia’s utopic and dystopic depths are inhabited by ancient monsters and sirens, shipwrecks and submersibles, militarised gill-men and dolphin embassies, sperm whales and giant squids, water babies and horny octopi. The deep and its species are represented by major pre-19th-century artists such as JMW Turner, Andrea Mantegna, Odilon Redon, Francis Danby, Katsushika Hokusai and Utagawa Kuniyoshi, and major figures in 20th-century art such as Marcel Broodthaers, Oskar Kokoschka, Barbara Hepworth, Edward Wadsworth, Hannah Wilke, Ana Mendieta and Lucian Freud. Contemporary artists include Christian Holstad, Mark Dion, Spartacus Chetwynd, Juergen Teller, The Otolith Group, Shimabuku, Mikhail Karikis, Simon Starling, Sean Landers, Mati Diop and Wangechi Mutu. Scrimshaw (sperm whale teeth carved by sailors), antique diving equipment, elaborately carved shells and coral, and the glass models of marine species of Rudolf & Leopold Blaschka are amongst the artefacts also featuring.

The exhibition is curated by Alex Farquharson, Director of Nottingham Contemporary, in dialogue with Martin Clark, Artistic Director, Tate St Ives. It travels to Tate St Ives in October, and is a partnership between landlocked Nottingham Contemporary and oceanic Tate St Ives. It features over 150 loans from a great many museums and private collections, in particular Tate, Victoria & Albert Museum and National Maritime Museum.

For more information about the exhibition : click here

Cultura21 is a transversal, translocal network, constituted of an international level grounded in several Cultura21 organizations around the world.

Cultura21′s international network, launched in April 2007, offers the online and offline platform for exchanges and mutual learning among its members.

The activities of Cultura21 at the international level are coordinated by a team representing the different Cultura21 organizations worldwide, and currently constituted of:

– Sacha Kagan (based in Lüneburg, Germany) and Rana Öztürk (based in Berlin, Germany)
– Oleg Koefoed and Kajsa Paludan (both based in Copenhagen, Denmark)
– Hans Dieleman (based in Mexico-City, Mexico)
– Francesca Cozzolino and David Knaute (both based in Paris, France)

Cultura21 is not only an informal network. Its strength and vitality relies upon the activities of several organizations around the world which are sharing the vision and mission of Cultura21

Go to Cultura21

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Call for papers :“No meaning without a frame”

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900x381xfn_0.jpg.pagespeed.ic.MU7lJJOkytApril 22-26, 2014, “Framing Nature: Signs, Stories, and Ecologies of Meaning”

Deadline for sending abstracts : 01 October 2013

This conference is organized by the European Association for the Study of Literature, Culture, and the Environment (EASLCE) biennial conference and hosted by the Department of Semiotics at the University of Tartu in cooperation with the Department of Literature and Theatre Research at the University of Tartu, Estonian Semiotics Association and the Centre for Environmental History (KAJAK).The conference is supported by European Union European Regional Development Fund (CECT, EU/Estonia), Institute of Philosophy and Semiotics at the University of Tartu and Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society.

The conference will  explore the figure of the frame as an ecological concept which draws attention to the way in which meanings are embedded in and sustained by environments that are at once material and semiotic. At the same time, it invites a closer examination of the strategies of framing and contextualization that are constitutive of ecocritical research, as well as a comparison of ecocritical methodologies with those of neighbouring disciplines in the environmental humanities. In turning their attention to the way in which natural environments and human cultures have mutually shaped each other, ecocriticism and environmental history can be said to have subverted the traditional hierarchy which subordinates the frame to that which it frames, in a manner reminiscent of Derrida’s logic of the supplement. The issue of framing immediately opens up a host of profound theoretical questions for the environmental humanities.

In framing nature, human collectives also frame themselves: throughout modern history, particular landscapes were idealized as stages for the drama of national self-identification – often by eliding the material processes which had shaped them. Conflicts between different peoples or social groups over the use of natural resources are always also conflicts between different ways of framing nature, which can be told as stories of material and semiotic exclusion. In this context, the translation and transformation of nature representations across linguistic and cultural boundaries, as well as across different genres and media, gains particular salience.

For more information about the conference :http://www.ut.ee/SOSE/conference/2014_framing_nature/cfp.html

Cultura21 is a transversal, translocal network, constituted of an international level grounded in several Cultura21 organizations around the world.

Cultura21′s international network, launched in April 2007, offers the online and offline platform for exchanges and mutual learning among its members.

The activities of Cultura21 at the international level are coordinated by a team representing the different Cultura21 organizations worldwide, and currently constituted of:

– Sacha Kagan (based in Lüneburg, Germany) and Rana Öztürk (based in Berlin, Germany)
– Oleg Koefoed and Kajsa Paludan (both based in Copenhagen, Denmark)
– Hans Dieleman (based in Mexico-City, Mexico)
– Francesca Cozzolino and David Knaute (both based in Paris, France)

Cultura21 is not only an informal network. Its strength and vitality relies upon the activities of several organizations around the world which are sharing the vision and mission of Cultura21

Go to Cultura21

Powered by WPeMatico