Radio talk and sound walk

The Somerset Dispatches from the Air Series Launch.

Saturday 6 July, 18:00

Gallery 1, East Quay, Watchet, Somerset TA23 0AQ

Book you free ticket here.

Inspired by WWII-era BBC recording practices and celebrating the collection housed at Watchet’s Radio Museum, we are inviting you to take part in a series of talks and recording sessions exploring the soundscapes from opposite sides of the U.K. 

This summer-long project of listening, recording and exchanging sounds is kicked off in Watchet, Somerset. We invite you to be part of this sound exchange between West Somerset and Bloomsbury, London, one mile from where the BBC started.

The launch event will take place at East Quay Gallery at 6pm on Saturday 6th July, where Neil Wilson (curator, Watchet Radio Museum) and Emily Best (sound researcher, Birkbeck, University of London) will lead a discussion on how we think about sound across space and the messages it carries.

After the talk we will take you on a guided sound walk, where you’ll be invited to listen to the environment around you and even make some sound recordings on-the-go. The walk will finish at a local pub (location tbc) for those who want to continue the discussion. 

Over the summer we will run a series of sessions that invite members of the public in Bloomsbury and West Somerset to make and share their own sound recordings. These may include ambient sounds (rural, coastal and urban), local voices, sounds of motion, and music. Recordings will then be mixed in an open mixing session at Birkbeck’s labs. The final mixes will then be showcased online, demonstrating how merging distant and varied landscapes in a shared aural experience changes the perceptions of distance and fosters relations. 

This project is a collaboration between the Watchet Radio Museum, East Quay and BIRMAC (Birkbeck Centre for Research in Media and Culture, Birkbeck University of London)

Sex Work, Activism and Collaborative Cinema: REVOLUCIÓN PUTA (2023)

21 June 2024, 18:00, Birkbeck Cinema, 43 Gordon Square

Film Screening + Q&A with filmmaker and director, María Galindo

BIRMAC, BIMI (Birkbeck Institute of Moving Image), BiGS (Birkbeck Institute in Gender and Sexuality), and CILAVS (Centre for Iberian and Latin American Visual Studies) and organiser, Dr Irene González-López are delighted to invite all to a free screening and discussion of REVOLUCIÓN PUTA (2023), a documentary film made by MARÍA GALINDO in collaboration with sex workers’ collectives of Bolivia. I’m delighted that María Galindo will join us to talk about her uncompromising film, which is the result of two decades of collaborative art and activism in Bolivia. Listen to sex workers, on their own terms. Expect to be challenged, surprised, moved, and inspired.

MARÍA GALINDO is one of the most influential voices in intersectional feminism in the Spanish-speaking world and beyond. She is an author, artist, and co-founder of the anarcho-feminist collective Mujeres Creando, which has produced this thought-provoking documentary film. Paul B. Preciado writes, Galindo ‘brings the subaltern practices and knowledge of indigenous women into dialogue with the political and literary traditions of anarchism, punk and nonwhite feminism.’

The event is free, but booking is required. Please book your place here!

You can watch the film’s trailer here.

Looking forward to seeing you on June 21st!

Reading Chinua Achebe

Welcome to the second BIRMAC Writing Culture reading group. The reading group is student-led and will include books suggested by MA and PHD students at or around Birkbeck. The name for our group, Writing Culture, is of course in reference to the influential volume edited by anthropologists, James Clifford and George Marcus. We take this book as a starting point and move its arguments beyond the confines of anthropology and into works of storytelling that bring worlds and ways of being ‘into the making’. This second session is on Chinua Achebe’s last book, “There Was a Country“. Joining us is Dr Rogers Orock (Louisiana State University) and we will be drawing on Dr Orock’s recent publication in Africa entitled, “Chinua Achebe’s postcolony: a literary anthropology of postcolonial decadence“.

We will be reading the book and article then discussing how it relates to Nigerian politics, post- and de-colonial movements, and Nigerian cultural identities.

Read as you have time and all are welcome.

Event time: 15 March 2024, 17:00-19:00 UTC/12:00-14:00 UTC-6
Location: Online, Link and registration here.

Reading Flora Nwapa

Welcome to the first BIRMAC Writing Culture reading group. The reading group is student-led and will include books suggested by MA and PHD students at or around Birkbeck. This first session is on Florence Nwanzuruahu Nkiru Nwapa’s (aka Flora Nwapa) last, posthumous book, “The Lake Goddess“.

We will be reading the book and discussing it with social anthropologist, Professor Paula Uimonen (Stockholm University), as guest. Prof. Uimonen will be referencing her 2020 book, “Invoking Flora Nwapa“, on female authorship in Nigeria and the legacy of Flora Nwapa. All are welcome.

Event time: 19 December, 18:00-21:00 (at the latest)
Location: Hybrid. Online link and registration here

Friday 12 May, 4-5:30pm
Discussant: Piotr Cieplak (University of Sussex)

• Globalized Memorial Museums – Victim Hierarchies and Travelling Musealization Trends, Ljiljana Radonić (PI ERC project “Globalised Memorial Museums”, Vice-director of the Institute of Culture Studies and Theatre History, Austrian Academy of Sciences)
• Forensic Reframings of Museums and Memorial Sites at the former Nazi Camps, Zuzanna Dziuban (ERC project Globalized Memorial Museums, Austrian Academy of Sciences)
• Lidice – From “Ground Zero” to the Present, Ivo Plsek (Masaryk University)

Register via email or via this link

TRANSNATIONAL MEMORY OF THE SINO-JAPANESE WAR

Seminar online. Registration required. Register here
Thursday 30 March, 3:00-5pm, UTC
Discussant: Michael Tsang (Birkbeck, University of London)

Reading the Transformations of Chinese War of Resistance Museums in the Xi Jinping Era through the Visual Analysis, Marketa Bajgerova (ERC Project “Globalized Memorial Museums”, Austrian Academy of Science and University of Vienna)

The memorialisation of the War of Resistance against Japan has been always linked to the political imaginings of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s leadership. Since 1949, the narrative regarding the war has served as a tool for progression of the leading power’s political objectives, and thus, just like the CCP’s agenda and leadership itself, has been subjected to constant changes. Since Xi Jinping consolidated his power, the memory politics regarding the War of Resistance began to transform again. The contemporary narrative has brought forth a discourse of China’s global victory and national rejuvenation, downsizing the previously overpowering focus on Japanese war atrocities in favour of the focus on triumph, and expanding the international element of the narrative, presenting China as a global victor of World War II. This presentation will focus on how these transformations in memorialisation manifest and materialise visually in three major War of Resistance state-funded museums in China – Museum of the War of Chinese People’s Resistance Against Japanese Aggression in Beijing, the Memorial Hall of the Victims in Nanjing Massacre by Japanese Invaders and The Exhibition Hall of the Evidences of Crime committed by the 731st Unit of the Japanese Imperial Army in Harbin. 

Investigating Photography Albums of Japanese Soldiers in North-East China. Methodological and Epistemological Challenges, Jasmin Ruckert (Heinrich Heine University, Düsseldorf)

This presentation analyses photography albums produced by Japanese soldiers during their employment in North-East China in the period of the 15-year war. After the establishment of ‘Manchukuo’, the Japanese puppet state founded in 1932, and especially after the official commencement of the war with China, Japanese authorities employed photographic propaganda to convince international partners and the Japanese population of the righteousness of the Army’s activities. In contrast, Japanese soldiers (and civilians) used the camera to manufacture souvenirs of their experiences on the continent for themselves. Yet, private photo albums were not merely created through photographing and preserving images, they were products of a creative process of selection and ordering of images and of adding captions, identifying or describing places, people and situations. The albums served – together with the various reporting and illustrations in Japanese magazines to deeply ingrain visual narrative tropes of war and occupation in the minds of a Japanese populace. The presentation traces the adaptation of stylistic elements from propagandistic material and of ideological viewpoints in these hitherto underresearched medium and asks how the albums function as containers of personal and collective memory.

MEMORIAL SITES IN KOREA

Thursday 30 March, 3:00-5pm, UTC
Discussant: Owen Miller (SOAS, University of London)

The Korean War through Women’s Eyes: Sinchon Museum of American War Atrocities, Suzy Kim (Rutgers University)

Known as the “forgotten war” in the West, the Korean War (1950-53) is anything but forgotten in Korea. Subjected to brutal aerial bombing by the superior air power of the United States in a “scorched earth” campaign, upwards of 60 to 80 percent of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea) is estimated to have been destroyed in the three years of the war, including 12-15 percent of the civilian population. In that sense, the entire country could be said to constitute a kind of “ground zero,” but during the brief occupation of North Korea by the US-led UN forces in late 1950, the town of Sinchon has come to be memorialized as the site of gruesome civilian massacres. Built in 1958 only five years after the signing of the armistice, the Sinchon Museum of American War Atrocities presents the official North Korean view of the Korean War as an interventionist war of aggression waged by US imperialists. Using newly found archival footage of the site filmed during a 1951 visit by a women’s fact-finding commission organized under the auspices of the Women’s International Democratic Federation, this chapter aims to go beyond a simple critique of the site as a form of state propaganda to show why Sinchon endured, not only in official narratives, but in the collective memories of women.

Jeju 4.3 – Postmemory Aesthetics of Museal Images, Hyun Seon Lee (SOAS, University of London)

Jeju 4.3 was the precursor to the Korean War (1950-53). The designation Jeju 4.3 Massacre, – Uprising or – Incident is still disputed. From 1 March 1947 through 3 April 1948 to 21 September 1954, the massive operation by the South Korean interim government aimed to crush South Korean communists and sympathisers on Jeju Island, with the cooperation and approval of the US military. It resulted in the deaths of an estimated 30,000 people, or 10% of the population of Jeju at the time. This tragedy, caused by ideological conflicts in modern Korean history, had been subject to silence and oblivion over 50 years. It only became part of official history in October 2003, commemorated in museums such as the Jeju 4.3 Peace Park, one of the most popular sites of dark tourism. Using the visual images of the Jeju 4.3 commemoration and their representation in photography, visual art and documentary, this presentation asks broader questions about the role and aesthetics of commemorative images produced in recent decades by Korean artists of the postmemory generation who did not directly experience the massacre but grew up with the memories of their parents’ generation. Special attention will be paid to the autobiographical documentary by Korean diaspora auteurs – Soup and Ideology (2021) by Yang Younghi and Reiterations of Dissent (2013) by Jane Jin Kaisen, focusing on the ways in which women filmmakers remember and document Jeju 4.3 and how they challenge the existing forms and politics of commemoration.

Seminar online. Registration required. Register here
Thursday 30 March, 3:00-5pm, UTC
Discussant: Michael Tsang (Birkbeck, University of London)

• Reading the Transformations of Chinese War of Resistance Museums in the Xi Jinping Era through the Visual Analysis, Marketa Bajgerova (ERC Project “Globalized Memorial Museums”, Austrian Academy of Science and University of Vienna)
• Investigating Photography Albums of Japanese Soldiers in North-East China. Methodological and Epistemological Challenges, Jasmin Ruckert (Heinrich Heine University, Düsseldorf)

MEMORIAL SITES IN KOREA

Thursday 30 March, 3:00-5pm, UTC
Discussant: Owen Miller (SOAS, University of London)

• The Korean War through Women’s Eyes: Sinchon Museum of American War Atrocities, Suzy Kim (Rutgers University)
• Jeju 4.3 – Postmemory Aesthetics of Museal Image, Hyun Seon Lee (SOAS, University of London)

Read more about our Memorial Sites: Acts of Remembering through visual culture series here

Tuesday, 7th March, 10am-12pm, UTC+1
Discussant: Professor Astrid Erll (Founder of Frankfurt Memory Studies Platform, Goethe University)

Join us for the second in the series on memory, acts of remembering and place organised by B fellow, Marcos Centeno. This second seminar includes two presentations and a discussion on: The Long Journey from the atrocity paradigm to cultural heritage: Discovering S-21, Building Tuol Sleng, with Professor Vincente Sánchez-Biosca (PI Repecri, University of Valencia), and
The Holocaust in a Chinese Mirror – reflections on Shanghai’s Jewish Refugees Museum, with Professor Edward Vickers (UNESCO Chair on Education for Peace, Social Justice and Global Citizenship, Kyushu University, Japan).
This seminar is online. Registration required. Please, register here.

Algorithmic Memory: Digital Media and the National September 11 Memorial & Museum, Joel McKim (Birkbeck, University of London)

Friday 24 February 4-5pm, UTC
Join series organiser & BIRMAC fellow, Marcos Centeno, and Senior Lecturer, Joel McKim (Birkbeck), for the first in a series of seminars on memory, acts of remembering and place. This talk will discuss the significant presence of digital media at the 9/11 Memorial & Museum, focusing particularly on the interactive design work of Jake Barton and his studio Local Projects. Through concepts of mediated intimacy, algorithmic memory, and digital engagement, the talk will consider the ways in which forms of computational logic and digital interactivity are transforming the surfaces and interfaces of the traditional memory museum. It will argue that Local Project’s media interventions into the space of the museum present the potential for a productive confrontation with the complexities of post-9/11 memory, while also acknowledging that the studio’s vision for a collaborative and even contested engagement with the past is only partially realized at Ground Zero.

Free event, registration required. Register here.

Part of the Memorial Sites series of events

5 – 6.30 pm, 30 September 2022, Online

As Documenta 15 draws to a close, possibly to be remembered as the controversial iteration of this significant exhibition, we invite you to discuss the actual content of the exhibition (as opposed to its problems or omissions which dominated its coverage), its curatorial approach and the radical departure from the traditional exhibition format, introduced by ruangrupa’s curatorship. In this first iteration of Documenta to be curated by a collective, we witnessed a series of functional networks or nodes, invited by ruanrgupa and fourteen other collectives, mostly from the global south. In this hub of activity, individual authorship took a back seat counting few recognisable artists’ names and instead opening up propositions for organising and collective action.

The DFF is an informal forum, with no hierarchies, no formal presentations and no necessary preparation. It is a conversation. We will show some images from Documenta 15, as a backdrop for a discussion.

Thursday 15^th September 2022 , 2-4 pm, Keynes Library, Birkbeck 

A talk about the Universidad de la República, Uruguay with Birkbeck School of Arts Honorary Research Fellow Prof Ana Laura López de la Torre
This was an in-person event.

This event will also be a fund raiser for the UCU Birkbeck Hardship fund, so please bring cash for the food stall!

The event is hosted by Dr Sophie Hope in collaboration with UCU Birkbeck and Birkbeck Interdisciplinary Research in Media and Culture (BIRMAC).

About the event:

The Universidad de la República is the public university of Uruguay. Founded in 1849, it enrols over 150 thousand students annually. It offers free tuition at undergraduate and postgraduate level in all disciplines and fields of knowledge. Although fully funded by the state, the autonomy of the university’s governance was enshrined in a national law in 1958 following 20 years of organised action by students.

All academic activity is organised under 3 essential functions: teaching, research and extensión. This last function – loosely translated as ‘outreach’ – is a distinctive element of the Latin-American university movement. Extensión mandates public universities to serve society and the public good. Over the years, the way this has been interpreted and put in practice has changed alongside ideas of democracy, equality, social justice and inclusion. Today, ‘critical extensión’ is a complex field of theoretical and methodological innovation, connected to the fields of critical pedagogy, southern epistemologies and decolonial thought.

Read more here

5-8pm, Tuesday 26th July 2022

“One species among millions of others, striving to live together in a delicate balance. It’s a vital connection, and one we can’t afford to lose.” This is the tagline of ongoing exhibition, Our Time on Earth, at the Barbican. Featuring 18 international artists, the exhibition speaks to a more-than-human experience of the world. This exhibition presents a grand narrative in response to catastrophic climate change. 

BIRMAC and the Environmental Humanities hub invite you to join us on a visit to the exhibition where we view it not only through our own lens, but through the work of feminist scholar, Isabelle Stengers and her work, In Catastrophic Times. 

We ask you to think of our time on earth as catastrophic, for any number of reasons. We also invite you to read the exhibition through the work of Zakiyyah Iman Jackson (in Wilcox 2022) and her work on plasticity and anti-blackness to highlight the process of racialisation that in ongoing in some multispecies work. Finally, we take inspiration from Adrienne Maree Brown in looking for ways forward and inspiration for thinking beyond Our Time on Earth.

Read more here.

22 June 2022, 2-3.30pm, Keynes Library

BIRMAC sponsored panel, School of Arts Doctoral Conference 2022

Working in and with archives is always about more than recovering or discovering the past; it also entails producing or shaping various futures, both by accident and design. This panel explores this productive tension, bringing together researchers engaged in the implications of the archive in both theory and practice.

Organised as part of the FMACS Doctoral-Led Conference, and sponsored by Birkbeck Interdisclinary Research in Media and Culture (BIRMAC), this interdisciplinary panel will provide the space to explore questions pertaining to memory, temporality, ideologies, counter-archives, and the production of present and future histories through archival practice.

This call is for research students across the School of Arts. Areas of interest include curatorial practice and museology; born-digital and audio-visual archives; archival ordering and medial logic; internet (as) archive; notions of play; remixing and image circulation; memory transmission; loss and absence. We welcome proposals that engage with these themes, archival and counter-archival thinking, and methodological approaches to studying archives.

Chair: Dr Silke Arnold-de Simine, Panel presenters: Sean Cham, Katherine MItchell. Raquel Morris, Selena Robertson.

Organised by Katherine Mitchell.

6th May, 1:30pm-3:00pm, Online

Archives in Pandemic-stricken times, workshop 02

Digital archives: tools, ethics and issues of materiality

Register for this event here

Join Dr Eleni Liarou and an international panel of academics, Dr Emily Bell, Dr. Joseph John Viscomi and Dr. Nanna Bonde Thylstrup, will lead the second workshop and they will present their work in relation to digitisation and new research tools, the politics of data archives and the relationship between archives and historical materiality.

Read more here

5pm, 29 April 2022, Online

In this session focussed on the recent lecture ‘Decolonizing the Museum?’ by  Françoise Vergès, a French political scientist, antiracist and decolonial feminist activist. She is the cofounder of the French association ‘Decolonize the Arts’ and the author of  A Decolonial Feminism (2021).  Her work focuses on postcolonial studies and decolonial feminism.

Archives in Pandemic-stricken times, workshop 01

11am-12:30pm, 4th March 2022, Online

Register for this event here

Join Dr Eleni Liarou and workshop speakers, Hannah Ishmael (Black Cultural Archives, Collections and Research Manager), Mark Duguid (British Film Institute, Senior Curator), and Jake Berger (BBC Executive Product Manager, BBC Archive), who will discuss current challenges and opportunities for public archives such as the BCA, BFI and the BBC.

Read more here

5pm, 25 February 2022, Online

In this session we reflected on the enormous significance of the work of the recently-departed American author, professor, feminist, and social activist bell hooks. Participants were sent several links and were invited to select a quote from one of the talks (or a text) and bring it to the session along with personal comments about their choice.  

Book here.

11 am – 2 pm, 24th February 2022, Online

Welcome to The Friday Club. Join us every last Friday of the month for The Friday Club group writing sessions. Each meeting is designed to help the busy scholar dedicate time and focus to a piece of writing that stubbornly refuses to be written, a draft that is driving you crazy, a grant application that needs some finesse, or even that thesis that just won’t take form. For more info and to book.

4 – 6.30 pm, Friday, 11 February 2022, Online

BIRMAC in association with Artpool, is delighted to celebrate the launch of ‘What Will Be Already Exists’, an edited volume emerging from a conference organised around Artpool’s 40th anniversary, published by Transcript Verlag in 2021.

The book includes texts by Emese Kürti / Zsuzsa László (eds.) with essays by Zdenka Badovinac, Judit Bodor-Roddy Hunter, David Crowley, Lina Džuverović, Daniel Grún, Emese Kürti, Karolina Majewska-Güde, Kristine Stiles, Sven Spieker and Tomasz Zaluski. More information.

Invited respondents, art scholar, critic, and curator Ieva Astahovska (Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, Riga, Latvia) and art historian and curator, Cristian Nae (George Enescu National University of Arts, Iasi, Romania), will offer their responses to the publication, which will be followed by a panel discussion with the editors and a number of contributors. Chaired by Dr Sophie Hope (Department of Film Media and Cultural Studies, Birkbeck College).

BIRMAC and Art Monthly, in association with Electra present a series of four online panel conversations

Participants: Ximena Alarcón-Díaz, Felicity Allen, Carla Cruz, Fabiola Fiocco, Karolina Majewska Guede, Lily Hall, Manual Labours, Kuda.org/Zoran Pantelić, Kirsten Lloyd, Chris McCormack, Gerrie van Noord, Helena Reckitt, Irene Revell, Marina Rosenfeld, Katja Praznik, Abhijan Toto, Jelena Vesić.

All talks will be held online via MS Teams, booking details for each event below.

BIRMAC and Art Monthly, in association with Electra present a series of four online panel conversations.