Megen de Bruin-Molé

PhD Seminar Series Autumn 2024

The Winchester School of Art PhD Seminar Series resumed from 3rd October 2024.

We invite you to join us for future instalments in the Seminar Series, which will run from 2-4pm on Thursdays during term time, in person (PGR Rooms at WSA) and on MS Teams. The series consists of (guest) speakers, workshops, trainings, and other research- and practice-led events.

The full schedule for the Autumn 2024 term is available below (details and bios for individual sessions will be linked as available):

3 October 2024
Induction Week

In this opening week we will be running a Meet & Greet between incoming and current PhD researchers, and colleagues in the department (with refreshments).

10 October 2024
WSA PGR Town Hall

Agenda and notes HERE.

17 October 2024
NO SESSION (Faculty Town Hall)

24 October 2024
Dr Megen de Bruin-Molé ‘Salvaging University Infrastructures’
(making / playing session with PGR manager and other university systems)

Followed by Thursday Lates/Material Interests, ‘Edward James: The Art of Letter Writing’
Venue: Lecture Theatre B, East Building, Winchester School of Art / Online via Teams at 5pm

30th October
EXTRA SESSION, Wednesday 9-11am
Research Ethics and Research Integrity training (online-only, link here)

31 October 2024
2pm Meet the ‘Critical Infrastructures and Image Politics’ (CIIP) Research Group
3pm CIIP special guest lecture Angela YT Chan on ‘Climate History and Technology’ (please note this will take place at a different link/location: Lecture Theatre A, West Side and on MS Teams HERE)
(talk + discussion)

Followed by joint PhD / Early Career Colleagues Halloween party in WSA Café from 4pm!

7 November 2024
Dr Daniel Cid Moragas
‘Decolonisation and decarbonisation of architecture; report from the Venice Biennale’
(talk + discussion)

14 November 2024
Elissa Wang Knitting/Crochet Workshop (TBC)

Followed by: Private View ‘Collecting Sue Clowes’ exhibition, in person in WSA Gallery from 5pm

21 November 2024
Joint event with Early Career Colleagues
title TBC
(research talk + discussion)

28 November 2024
Emily Rogers
‘Using your PhD in industry and beyond: a focus on Arts and Humanities’ (talk + discussion)

Followed by Thursday Lates/Material Interests, ‘Time As Contested Infrastructure’ with Dr Tsvetelina Hristova and Dr Adam Procter. Venue: Lecture Theatre B, East Building, Winchester School of Art / Online via Teams at 5pm

5 December 2024
Dr Kwame Phillips
topic TBC
(talk + discussion)

12 December 2024
Francis Gene-Rowe
topic TBC
(talk + discussion)

Followed by Christmas party from 4pm! With refreshments.

‘More Than a Thesis: Different Approaches to PGR Study’ Exhibition

A collective group exhibition organised by Winchester School of Art (WSA) postgraduate research students was held in The Winchester Gallery between 29 June – 26 July 2023. This was the first collective PGR show at the Gallery, facilitated by Professor Louise Siddons, and curated by researchers Yimeng Li and Elio Hao, bringing together the work of 12 students and visiting scholars.

The works were created specifically for the exhibition and aimed to represent not only the artists research but their thoughts and processes that they apply to their work, providing a platform to celebrate their daily lives, interests, and voices.

A virtual tour of the exhibition, produced by Lian Pan, is now available:

VIEW THE VIRTUAL EXHIBITION

The exhibition provided a unique opportunity to bring visibility to the experiences and achievements of the students, while fostering a sense of belonging and collaboration to the WSA, University community and wider audiences in this public exhibition.

A broad variety of work was showcased utilising a range of mediums and practices, including painting, installation, sculpture, textile work and the AI generation of texts and images. Topics embraced papercut, silent poetry Queerness and dream worlds, hobbies as methodology, devices that articulate actor network theory, recreations of a WWII desk, abuse, passions, silver stickers, desire, co-curation, and cultural rootlessness of international students and the ‘unknown’ vegetable, Pak Choi.

Curators Yimeng and Elio explained:

“Curating this exhibition has been a great challenge for me, as it was the first time we curated an entire gallery space within such a short period. Despite the difficulties, the experience has been incredibly valuable, and we have learned so much from this journey. As a curator, I am delighted to have been able to contribute my knowledge and skills to the PGR community and to WSA. It is great to see our efforts making a positive impact and increasing the visibility of our community. This experience has not only strengthened my expertise as a curator but also reinforced the importance of teamwork and collaboration in creating something truly exceptional. It has been great to work with Elio too. Thanks a lot for everyone who helped and assisted us!” Yimeng Li

“This is the last year of my PhD, and I have been a student rep for the previous three years, so I think, and I know this is the first time we (the WSA PGRs) have had an opportunity to make and show work in a public space. WSA is an art school, and we pretty much all deal with art or design-related research, and I’m very grateful that the university offered us this tremendous opportunity and the support from many University departments. This is my first time being a curator, and I need to thank Yimeng for taking me on board. It feels very empowering. “Elio Hao

We hope this will become an annual event and would welcome collaborations with PGRs across the University of Southampton.

Text courtesy of WSA Rotunda

PhD Seminar Series Autumn 2023

The Winchester School of Art PhD Seminar Series will be resuming from today (4th October).

We invite you to join us for future instalments in the Seminar Series, which will run from 2-4pm on Wednesdays during term time, in person (PGR Room) and on MS Teams. The series consists of (guest) speakers, workshops, trainings, and other research- and practice-led events.

The full schedule for the Autumn 2023 term is available below (details and bios for individual sessions will be linked as available):

4 October 2023
In this opening week we will be running a Meet & Greet between incoming and current PhD researchers, and colleagues in the department (with refreshments).

11 October 2023
Dr Chris Müller
‘Laughing with Machines’
(workshop)

18 October 2023
Dr Sasha Anikina
‘Animist Infrastructures: Bots, Net-Works and Imagining a (Socialist) AI’
(artist talk + workshop)

25 October 2023
Dr Seth Giddings
‘Toy Theory’
(talk + discussion of academic publishing)

1 November 2023
Dr Kai Syng Tan
‘Tentacular Networking: Making Meaningful Entanglements’
(talk + discussion)

Followed by Halloween party from 4pm! With refreshments.

8 November 2023
Ink Yijie Gao
‘Researching Robots’
(live robot demo and research test)

15 November 2023
Anurita Chandola
‘Speculative Textiles + Building a Martian House’
(artist talk + discussion)

22 November 2023
Dr Shan Wang
‘User experiences in design, interactive design, and inclusive design’
(research talk + discussion)

29 November 2023
Dave Gibbons
‘Developing a PhD research question with Dave Gibbons’
(art/research talk + discussion)

6 December 2023
Julia Vogl
‘Art and/as Social Practice’
(artist talk + discussion)

13 December 2023
Dr Lexi Webster + Dr Sonia Moran Panero
‘Empathetic Peer Review’
(training and talk co-hosted with ECR Development Series)

Followed by Christmas party from 4pm! With refreshments.

Nothing to See Here: A (Visual) Culture of Exchange

The right to look is not about seeing. It begins at a personal level with the look into someone else’s eyes to express friendship, solidarity, or love. That look must be mutual, each person inventing the other, or it fails … It is the claim to a subjectivity that has the autonomy to arrange the relations of the visible and the sayable. The right to look confronts the police who say to us, ‘Move on, there’s nothing to see here.’ Only there is, and we know it and so do they.1

Winchester School of Art became an Associate of Tate Exchange in 2017 and staged its first main event, Building an Art Biennale, in May 2018. The second, Itinerant Objects, took place in April 2019. A podcast project, Nothing to See Here, was due to be the School’s third project. It was being developed in response to Tate Exchange’s annual theme of power for 2020, but was one of many events cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In lieu of this project an dialogue was held between Nicholas Mirzoeff (who has been a scheduled guest) and Sunil Manghani, and is posted as a ‘Research Feature’ on the Tate website.

Tate Exchange at Tate Modern opened in 2016 and describes itself as an open experiment exploring the role of art in society. It offers a unique platform that combines curation, education and social participation. In doing so, it brings together the work of international artists, members of the public and contributions from over sixty ‘Associates’ who represent an array of organisations, large and small, from diverse fields within and beyond the arts, including education, youth engagement, health and wellbeing, and community advocacy. Crucially, Tate Exchange has afforded its Associates a great deal of freedom to devise and curate their own contributions for an annual themed programme, allowing for an entire floor of Tate Modern’s new building to be dedicated to participatory artworks, workshops, activities and debates.

As a collaboration between two Associates, Winchester School of Art and Stance Podcast, the project, Nothing to See Here, had sought to foster social proximity with three other Tate Exchange Associates – Valleys Kids, People Empowering People, and John Hansard Gallery – each of which work in highly creative ways, deep within local communities (way outside of the ‘art world’ bubble), often working through very live issues of social and economic hardships. Everyone involved was due to join together to produce a podcast series, which would explore the value of art and creativity as it actually takes places within the local circumstances of the collaborating Associates. The series was to be launched at a special event at Tate Modern at which the audio would provide an invisible soundscape across the entire floor of Tate Exchange, which would otherwise be completely ‘empty’ (‘nothing to see there’). A dedicated forum had been planned, inviting the collaborating Associates and their communities, guest speakers and members of the public, to engage in critical dialogue about the ‘values’ of art and creativity, about the voices that are allowed to be heard, and the right for us to look.

One such guest speaker was Nicholas Mirzoeff, Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University, and author and editor of key texts on visual culture, including An Introduction to Visual Culture (1999), Diaspora and Visual Culture: Representing Africans and Jews (2000), Watching Babylon: The War in Iraq and Global Visual Culture (2005), The Right to Look: A Counter-History of Visuality (2011) and How to See the World (2015). Mirzoeff had been a key inspiration for the project concept, not least due to his use of the phrase ‘nothing to see here’. As it turned out, however, there really was going to be nothing to see.

The COVID-19 health crisis swept across the globe just as the project was finding its footing; just as the collaborators were working out when and where they could meet, among their other pressing activities and duties. There was a great deal of good will, excitement and anticipation for what this ‘open brief’ project was going to bring. Yet, as country after country went into lockdown, social distancing rules were being enforced precisely when the project collaborators were working towards proximity and exchange. As a form of observing the ‘passing’ of this event, to acknowledge the fact that nothing can now be shown for its endeavour, and yet that this very precarity of our right to be seen was always at the heart of the project, the following interview with Nicholas Mirzoeff explores some of the conceptual concerns, which also, inevitably, come to be framed within this unprecedented global event.

Find out more about Winchester School of Art’s projects with Tate Exchange: https://www.southampton.ac.uk/cpwsa/tate-exchange-projects/wsa-tate-exchange-all-projects.page

To read the interview with Nicholas Mirzoeff visit the Tate website.