The Urgency of The Arts Assembly: I Want You To Speak To Me Urgently

Join the second Urgency of The Arts Assembly: I Want You To Speak To Me Urgently, with guest speakers Doris Salcedo, Anthea Hamilton, Nina Franco and Jennifer Abbott.

Each speaker, nominated by a current student from the School of Arts & Humanities at the RCA, will present an issue that is most important and most pressing to them right now.

Presentations will be followed by Q&A.

The event will be held via Zoom Webinar. Please note the link will be sent to attendees via email.

Zoom is a free online App which can be downloaded to your computer/laptop, phone or tablet via www.zoom.us.

The event will be also live streamed on Twitch.

Speakers

Anthea Hamilton - introduced by Theresa Weber

Anthea Hamilton (born 1978) is a London-based artist whose current practice comprises installation, sculpture and performance. Her work is always site-specific: a consideration of the location, and the cultural and political environment as well as her personal circumstances at the time provide a framework for Hamilton’s research. Intuition then pulls ideas into forms within a non-verbalised structure: kimonos, chastity belts, boots, perfume, furniture, and mime troupes. Conversation and collaboration are also key to the way Hamilton works.

Constituted from a combination of objects and images, both found and made and rooted in a common experience of the world, the environments she produces are live and conversational, at once humorous and serious, dually minimal and maximal.

Hamilton has exhibited her work worldwide, most recently in solo exhibitions at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge; Kaufmann Repetto, Milan; Tate Britain, London; Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin; Hepworth Wakefield, Wakefield; Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London; SculptureCenter, New York; and KORO, Oslo. Group shows include MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles; Kayu-Lucie Fontaine, Bali, Indonesia; White Cube, London; Loewe Foundation; Miami, 13eme Biennale de Lyon and the Palais de Tokyo, Paris.

Nina Franco - introduced by Patricia Petersen

Nina Franco is a Brazilian visual artist based in London, working with photography and installation.

Born and raised in Rio de Janeiro, over the last 8 years she made her journey to different countries as a migrant.

Nina has been exploring political issues in her work to examine and reflect on the intersectionality of womxn, migration and black identity. She creates through the deconstruction of the functionality of objects as banal as threads to correlate with ancestry, memory and history.

https://www.ninafranco.com/artworks

Doris Salcedo - introduced by Marita Pappa

Doris Salcedo makes sculptures and installations that function as political and mental archaeology, using domestic materials charged with significance and suffused with meanings accumulated over years of use in everyday life. Salcedo often takes specific historical events as her point of departure, conveying burdens and conflicts with precise and economical means.

Doris Salcedo was born in Bogota , Colombia in 1958 where she continues to live and work. Her solo exhibitions include Kunsthalle St. Annen, Lubbeck, Germany (2019); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2019); Palacio de Cristal, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sof a, Madrid (2017); Harvard Art Museums, Massachusetts (2016); Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas (2016); Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, touring to Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and P rez Art Museum, Miami (2015–16); Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan (2014); Museo Universitario Arte Contempor neo, Mexico, touring to Moderna Museet Malm , Sweden, Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon, Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Rome, White Cube, London and Pinacoteca do Estado de S o Paulo (2011–13); Tate Modern, London (2007); Camden Arts Centre, London (2001); Tate Britain, London (1999); and New Museum, New York (1998).

Salcedo has participated in numerous group exhibitions, including Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2014); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2013); Hayward Gallery, London (2010); MoMA PS1 Contemporary Art Centre, New York (2008); 8th International Istanbul Biennial (2003); Documenta 11, Kassel, Germany (2002); and 24th Biennale de S o Paulo (1998).

Salcedo was the recipient of the 2020 inaugural Nomura art prize and also received the 2019 Possehl Prize for International Art; Rolf Schock Prize in the Visual Arts (2017); Nasher Sculpture Prize (2015).

Jennifer Abbott - introduced by Caroline Chouler-Tissier

Jennifer Abbott is a Genie and Sundance award winning filmmaker dedicated to filmmaking as art, philosophy and activism. She is the Co-Director and Editor of THE CORPORATION (2003), still the top grossing and most awarded documentary in Canadian history; the Director, Writer, Editor, Sound Designer and Co-Producer of THE MAGNITUDE OF ALL THINGS (2020) and the Co-Director and Supervising Editor of THE NEW CORPORATION: THE UNFORTUNATELY NECESSARY SEQUEL (2020).

Since the release of her first short film SKINNED (1993), exhibited at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, she has been the recipient of 38 international awards and 11 nominations including most recently Best Canadian Feature at Planet in Focus Film Festival (2020) for THE MAGNITUDE OF ALL THINGS. VIFF Programmer Tammy Bannister called THE MAGNITUDE OF ALL THINGS “Perhaps the most visceral reasoned call to action for humanity since An Inconvenient Truth,” and POV MAGAZINE compared it to the “…lyrical and elegiac wonder of Terrence Malick,” and it has a 9/10 rating on IMDB. THE NEW CORPORATION was called the “Must-see documentary of the year,” by FORBES, “Chillingly relevant,” by VARIETY and made the GLOBE & MAIL’s top 20 films of 2020 list.

Inspired by the experience of writing and directing the dramatic scenes in THE MAGNITUDE OF ALL THINGS, Abbott is interested in crossing over to narrative film as well as pushing the boundaries between documentary and fiction filmmaking. While her primary interests lie in writing and directing, Abbott almost always edits and sound designs her own films. She lives on Canada’s West Coast with her twin teenage daughters.