Visual & Material Culture

AHRC Leadership Fellowship (AH/P008984/1)
 

The project seeks to understand the ways that immigrant and ethnic communities engage with their heritage through public cultural expressions organised outside of mainstream institutions - including creative or exhibitionary or museum activities. The research draws attention to how and why organisations express cultural heritage, with heritage not always understood as buildings and objects, but as arts, traditions, characteristics and ways of thinking drawn from the past. Seven partners are engaged with the project as case study sites and as co-researchers Sangini, Vamos, GemArts, Everyday Muslim, The Angelou Centre, the Manchester Jewish Museum and the Centre for Chinese Contemporary Art.

Julie Crawshaw: Stretched: Expanding notions of artistic practice through artist-led cultures

Swedish Research Council (2015-2018):

PI Jason E Bowman (Valand Academy, University of Gothenburg).

From the fostering of the solo-exhibition, the history of artist colonies in the C19, through alternative space and DIY movements of the 60s and 70s, to the contemporary conditioning of the neo-liberal, artist-led activities have sought to place decision-making powers, regarding the conditions of art making into the hands of artists. Artists have provoked critique and generated change regarding the circumstances and conditions that inform the development, representation and sites of artistic practice - both in terms of production but also of display and circulation, not only of art-works, but also of artists themselves. To explore the nature of artist-led practice, as Co I of Stretched, I have undertaken ethnographic fieldwork in tandem with artist-led projects in Sweden.

http://akademinvaland.gu.se/english/research-/research-projects/stretched

Matthew Potter: PI The afterlife of Georgian political cartoons

Philip Leverhulme Prize (Awarded November 2012: running October 2013-September 2015).

I am currently undertaking research into the legacy of Georgian political prints, exploring how they have been collected, exhibited, reproduced, and quoted by artists. At the core of this project is an interest in the historical process of how past visual cultures are used in subsequent ages.

IMAGE: James Gillray, The Plumb-pudding in danger - or - State Epicures taking un Petit Souper (26 February 1805), Published by Hannah Humphrey

Elizabeth Kramer: Co-I Fashion and Translation: Britain, Japan, China and Korea

AHRC funded network (2014-2015)
Dr Sarah Cheang, Royal College of Art (Principal Investigator)

Fashion and Translation brings together those who are interested in looking at the way in which fashion operates as an intermediary between Britain, Japan, China and Korea. While spoken and written language can impede cross-cultural communication, fashion is a conceptual, visual and material language that speaks across geographical boundaries. Given the distance and lack of shared language, these material interactions have been fundamental in informing and sharing ideas of ‘Japaneseness’, ‘Chineseness’, ‘Koreaness’ and ‘Britishness’. Notions of national identity continue to remain crucial to fashionable dress as cultural expression, and cultural stereotypes also still abound.

IMAGE: Photo reproduced with kind permission of the Victoria and Albert Musem

Ysanne Holt: PI Northern Peripheries

Arts & Humanities Research Council

The Northern Peripheries network brings together a group of visual artists and scholars from discrete arts disciplines (fine art and photography, art history and film studies) as well as from the humanities and social sciences (anthropology, archaeology, human and cultural geography) in order to explore historical, present and future representations and practices in relation to a series of locations – primarily edges, borders and island locations in the UK ‘north’. A central focus of the network is to examine the legacies of over-layering narratives of sites that have commonly been regarded as ‘remote’ and ‘marginal’ and to question essentialising preconceptions.

See website at http://northernperipheries.wordpress.com

IMAGE: Northern Peripheries visit to Skara Brae, Orkney

Susan Ashley: PI Memorializing as valuation: Examining public culture at the Chattri Sikh Memorial, Brighton

Arts & Humanities Research Council

This research aimed to broaden the discussion of cultural value by studying the Chattri Indian Memorial near Brighton, a site of public culture that hosts and embodies marginal, unfamiliar and vernacular cultural heritage practices in a complex form. It sought to understand both memorialising and ‘outsider’ symbolic activities as culture, and situate these as values people produce in and for themselves in unspoken ways.

To view a short video from the project click here.

IMAGE: Chattri Memorial ceremony, Brighton UK, 9 June 2014. Photo by author