Art Space City

14/04/2025

it is now live the dossier on Projection Activism that Giorgia Rizzioli curated for the Mediapolis Journal.

This dossier presents an interdisciplinary exploration of projection studies, activism, and urban media. It brings together cutting-edge contributions from activists, artists, and curators who engage with the public sphere in their daily work.

Additional content will be released throughout the week, so stay tuned.

Dossiers, no. 1, vol. 10April 14, 2025

23/01/2025

Dr Mahsa Alami Fariman will speak at the 17, Instituto de Estudios Críticos ###VIII International Colloquium, 'Urban Realities: Produced City, Inhabited City' on Friday 24 January, 3:30 pm-5:30 pm GMT. 🌎 🏙️

The forum, held from 20 to 25 January at the Museo de Arte Popular
Museo de Arte Popular in Mexico, will explore critical territorial studies and their intersections with social sciences such as geography, sociology and urbanism.

Dr Mahsa's presentation 'Academy and the Urban Question: Towards a More Equitable City' will be delivered alongside Professor Mel Jordan (Coventry University) and Dr Ahmadreza Hakiminejad (Leeds Beckett University).

🔗 For more information: https://17instituto.org/###viiicoloquio-realidades-urbanas/

19/10/2024

The Centre for Postdigital Cultures welcomes PhD research proposals through the AHRC-funded Midlands4Cities Doctoral Training Partnership (M4C). If you're interested in conducting research within the ArtSpaceCity cluster, please feel free to reach out. This would be a fantastic opportunity to thrive both academically and professionally, while benefiting from a stimulating and cutting-edge research environment.

More info in the link below:

The Centre for Postdigital Cultures is open to PhD research proposals for each of the Centre’s research strands particularly via the AHRC-funded Midlands4Cities Doctoral Training Partnership (M4C).

13/09/2024

The exhibition 𝐷𝑖𝑠𝑠𝑒𝑛𝑡: 𝐴𝑟𝑡 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑃𝑟𝑜𝑡𝑒𝑠𝑡 𝑖𝑛 𝑁𝑜𝑟𝑡ℎ𝑎𝑚𝑝𝑡𝑜𝑛𝑠ℎ𝑖𝑟𝑒 opens tomorrow at Northampton Museum and Art Gallery and runs until December 6, 2024. You’ll have the chance to view a range of works by artists including Mel Jordan, Andy Hewitt, and Partisan Social Club. For more details, visit: https://www.northamptonmuseums.com/directory-record/494/8dissent-art-and-protest-in-northamptonshire

One of the featured pieces is 𝑫𝒓𝒆𝒂𝒎-𝒘𝒂𝒍𝒌𝒊𝒏𝒈-𝒃𝒂𝒏𝒏𝒆𝒓 (𝑯𝒐𝒘 𝒕𝒐 𝑷𝒓𝒂𝒄𝒕𝒊𝒄𝒆 𝑪𝒖𝒍𝒕𝒖𝒓𝒆-𝒍𝒆𝒅 𝑹𝒆-𝑪𝒐𝒎𝒎𝒐𝒏𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒐𝒇 𝑪𝒊𝒕𝒊𝒆𝒔), 2024, by Mel Jordan, Andy Hewitt, Partisan Social Club. Fabric, felt, cotton, metal tube, alloy joints, paint, spray paint, concrete. Height 240cm x width 190cm

The work calls forth a future city as text on a fabric marching banner in the style used by trade unions. The images conjure a sleeping figure whose dreams are filled with ideas and desires given by capital and supplied by Amazon.

22/04/2024

‼️ArtSpaceCity invites you to the first event of its series 'agency' happening next Monday, 29 April on Zoom. The online event is led by Giorgia Rizzioli and is titled 'anthropocentric placemaking(s) vs cinematic placemaking: a talk on cinema's operativity in (making) places.
Free and welcome to attend!

About agency:
ASC's series, which is centred around the theme of ‘agency’ and includes presentations, discussions, film screenings and provocations, will run from April 2024 – January 2025. Please join us 29 April for the first session. In this series of meetings ASC explores political agency in relation to the multifaceted ways that the city and urban space come into being. Given the depoliticization processes of neoliberal governments, exacerbated by divisions in the UK and the ascent of populist ideologies, and amidst ongoing culture wars, ASC seeks to explore what can be done to support democratic processes of city making.
At a time when we are disillusioned about the power of our individual actions we want to question, what we can do and, how can we maintain hope for change towards more inclusive and equitable cities for all? We will explore the paradoxes of action and engagement given our own bodies which are those of artists, researchers, and academics. When thinking about agency we utilise Judith Butler’s thinking in relation to performativity. Agency here is about embodying the autonomy to resist and/or subvert predefined social and political norms. Our hope is that it can lead to the repetition of actions in such a way that they contribute to the development of new ways of living together.
We envisage a more-than human perspective towards our world-making. We favour emergent assemblages of agents instead of autonomous and individual assets. In claiming this we are close to Karen Barad’s agential realism, where intra-activity and entangling of agency perform spatial and material practices.

17/04/2024

"Woman, Life, Freedom: The Sounds of A Revolution", a short film made by Mahsa Alami Fariman, Ahmadreza Hakiminejad and Duncan Whitley, is among the selected screenings in ‘Telling Stories of Place Filmmaking Workshop’ in Honolulu, Hawaii, organised by American Association of Geographers (AAG) and Film Geographies.

To the lucky ones in Honolulu, the short film screening is scheduled tomorrow, 18th April, 17:00 – 20:00 HST at Hub Coworking Hawaii-Waikiki.

A glimpse of it:

In the light of the recent women-led mobilisations in Iran which have mushroomed after the state killing of a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman, Mahsa Jina Amini, this multi-media sound work, entitled "Woman, Life, Freedom; The Sounds of A Revolution”, tries to depict the Iranian women’s struggle against the tyrannical establishment of the Iranian regime since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. In so doing, eleven sounds have been extracted from the recordings of the 1979, 2009, 2021 and the 2022 protests, shared on social media from within Iran. The accompanied text situates the sounds within their historic, geographic and political contexts.

More info, here: https://www.filmgeographies.com/events/aag-shorts-2024/
Registration, here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/aag-shorts-2024-film-screening-tickets-876968625767?aff=erellivmlt

Photo: still image from "Woman, Life, Freedom: The Sounds of A Revolution" short film.

16/04/2024

Pencil this event in your diary 📅
Screening+ discussion organized by Duncan Whitley happening this Thursday, April 18 at Commonground, Coventry.

"African Voices in the UK Asylum System: Care, Bureaucracy and the Hostile Environment"

A documentary short film screening and panel discussion about experiences of the UK asylum system. The film was made collaboratively between service users of Inini Initiative artist Duncan Whitley, as an outcome of participatory filmmaking workshops coordinated by Duncan last year. The screening will be followed by a panel discussion chaired by Ana Aliverti (University of Warwick, author of ‘Policing the Borders from Within'), with Last Mafuba (CEO of Inini Initiative, a social enterprise providing psychosocial interventions to refugee and migrant communities), Loraine Masiya Mponela (poet and activist, author of 'I am not a sad poet’) and Andrew Nyamayaro (legal professional and contributor on immigration content for the global publisher By Lawyers). The conversation will explore some of the issues faced by people seeking Leave to Remain who often find themselves unable to work or study for several years whilst awaiting decision from the Home Office, and acts of care amidst the dehumanisation of the asylum bureaucracy.

Here, more info and Eventbrite link: https://rb.gy/gcb9ex
Reserve a shot and come along!

06/04/2024

Check out The Arts in Solidarity event, a working assembly convened by the Partisan Social Club, UK, and Casco Art Institute as part of the SPACEX-Rise exchange project.

More details:

The Arts in Solidarity event raises crucial questions about navigating challenging times. It unites scholars, artists, activists, and arts organizations from the UK and the Netherlands to strategize alternatives to limiting and limited funding paradigms. Together, we will discuss and debate a series of questions: How do we continue critical arts-based work when public resources are dwindling? How can we better share and common our work? How can we resist arts funding becoming a competitive process between institutions? Can arts institutions apply social and art commoning practices as methods to challenge the current economic structures of funding?

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23/02/2024

Alex Parry is an artist currently doing research on the role of participatory art workshops in creating structures of care during polycrisis. She has been part of collectives such as Studio Yea (2021-) a group of three artists exploring how to create support structures for and with each other in precarious times and RARA, a co-operative of artists and architects from 2012-2020. Public commissions include at Eastside Projects (2022), Arts and Heritage and Northumberland Council (2020-21) and The Pumphouse Gallery (2019). Alex has an MA in Contemporary Art Practice: Public Sphere from the Royal College of Art (2016-18) and a BA in Social Anthropology and Media from Goldsmiths University.

22/02/2024

Dr Ahmadreza Hakiminejad is Lecturer in Architecture based in the Leeds School of Arts and affiliated with the Leeds Arts Research Centre (LARC) at Leeds Beckett University. He has studied architecture, spatial planning and urban design in Iran and the UK and has previously worked in architecture and design practices in the Middle East. He is a member of the editorial team for the journal: Engineering Future Sustainability, a member of The Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain, and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. He is also a jury member in the international architecture and design competition: Tamayouz Excellence Award. His research interests revolve around critical urban theory, politics of space, architectural humanities, and urban sociology. He is currently co-editing a book for Routledge entitled: City, Public Space and Body: The Embodied Experience of Urban Life.

22/02/2024

Mahsa Alami Fariman is an urbanist, researcher and academic based at Coventry University, where she teaches on urban and human geography. Having studied architecture and urbanism in Iran and the UK, she holds a PhD in urban sociology from Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research focuses on city, urbanism, architecture, production of space, feminism and power relations.

https://pureportal.coventry.ac.uk/en/persons/mahsa-alami-fariman