All events take place at Spike Island unless otherwise stated.
Please refer to their website for booking information.
George Vasey and Simon Senn On the Documentary
Tuesday 1 October, 6pm £5/£3 concessions (free for Associates) Simon Senn’s films deal with patterns of human interaction. His explorations of group dynamics and individual responses heighten pre-existing tensions so that behaviours are accentuated. Curator and writer George Vasey joins the artist to discuss the ethics and aesthetics of Senn’s practice within the wider context of the documentary today.
Night for Fellows
Tuesday 8 October, 6pm £5/£3 concessions (free for Associates) Each year Spike Island works with the University of the West of England and the University of Falmouth to identify and support promising graduates by offering three studio fellowships. Joining us from UWE this year are Emma Lilwall and Joshua Johnson and from Falmouth, Sam Cotterell. All three new fellows introduce themselves and their work in this informal event, alongside outgoing fellows Sebastian Jefford, Menna Cominetti and Elisa Juncosa.
What to Expect from a Postgraduate Course
Tuesday 22 October, 6pm £5/£3 concessions (free for Associates) These quarterly discussions have been initiated by Spike Associates to explore aspects of professional practice in the visual arts. The focus for the autumn season is on the diverse range of post-graduate education. Vivian Sky Rehberg, art historian, critic and Course Director of the Master of Fine Art programme at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam; artist Lorem Impsum from Royal Academy, London; artist Roy Voss, head of the Fine Art MA at the University of the West of England and curator Lorem Ipsum from Open School East, London discuss their own courses and educational experiences while debating wider issues such as the rise in tuition fees and the spectre of the private art school.
Regional Interference
Tuesday 26 November, 6pm Free, booking essential Regional Interference is a unique pilot project enabling artists based in the South West to be supported for a year by Works | Projects, Bristol’s leading commercial gallery. Works | Projects director Simon Morrissey is joined by artists Sebastian Jefford, James Parkinson, Kit Poulson, Mike Ricketts and Marie Toseland, and Grace Davies, Co-ordinator of Visual Arts South West, to discuss the relationship between commercial galleries and artists’ practice.
Extra Curricular
Each event £3, free for Associates, booking essential Join us for the last in the current series of Extra Curricular, Spike Island’s monthly art and culture reading group. Each session is led by a guest reader who has nominated a text reflecting their own research while opening up wider debates
Thursday 31 October, 6pm Bloomberg New Contemporaries artist and editor of contemporary art and feminism magazine Salt, Hannah Regel presents an extract from Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (2011). Regel is interested in discussing the connection between hopefulness and disappointment, desire and anxiety.
Thursday 28 November, 6pm Dr Megan Wakefield recently completed a PhD on artists’ informal peer learning supported by Spike Island and the University of the West of England. She has chosen E. M. Forster’s science fiction short story The Machine Stops (1909) in order to consider the relationship between virtual and bodily presence within our contemporary information society.
Thursday 12 December, 6pm Writer Charlie Fox nominates the short story The Death of Edward Lear (1979) by Donald Barthelme, in which the author recounts the death of nonsense writer and landscape painter Edward Lear. Lear’s death as related by Fox is staged as a spectacle for a selected audience in which he sings, recites a disquisition on cats and dies by a promised time. Monstrously strange and unspeakably sad, the story provides the starting point for discussions on the form of the fable.
