UCL Art Museum

Projects UCL Art Museum regularly works in collaboration with contemporary artists and curators in order to develop exhibitions, commissions, conferences, publications and research projects.

The Art of Reading

Join us at UCL Art Museum for The Art of Reading during the weekend of 11 and 12 May, 1 till 5pm.

Have you ever wondered how researchers develop their ideas and projects?

Visit us for drop-in reading groups curated by UCL researchers who will reveal aspects of their fascinating research in Art, Science and Humanities through reading, performance, drawing, talks and other activities.

The event is part of Something Else for the Weekend: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/festival-of-the-arts/something-else-for-the-weekend

Programme:

Saturday 11 May

1pm: Wendy Bracewell, Professor of Southeast European History 'Travelers' anxieties: Where to go? Read specific examples of travel writing in Eastern Europe, an ode to the Soviet toilet, with Professor Wendy Bracewell.

2pm: Lisa Plotkin, Second year PhD student in the Department of History and part of Researchers in Museums team Reading the Hysterical Body Researcher Lisa Plotkin will open the case files of exceptional women who were treated in various curative sites in Britain, Ireland, and India from 1860 until the beginning of the twentieth century.

3pm: Dr Chiara Ambrosio, Lecturer in History and Philosophy of Science Reading the Artistic Body This drawing workshop and discussion facilitated by Dr Chiara Ambrosio focuses on Charles Bell’s watercolours and takes a look at the ways in which knowledge can transform the perception of art. Materials are provided.

4pm: Dr Chiara Ambrosio, Lecturer in History and Philosophy of Science Reading the Artistic Body This drawing workshop and discussion facilitated by Dr Chiara Ambrosio focuses on Charles Bell’s watercolours and takes a look at the ways in which knowledge can transform the perception of art. Materials are provided. Sunday 12 May 2pm: Gemma Angel, Fourth year PhD student working with the Department of History and the Science Museum London Reading Ink on the body Researcher and trained tattoo artist Gemma Angel leads a tattoo workshop, taking a look at both technique and interpretation. There will be a chance to try your hand at creating a tattoo on fake skin! Materials are provided 3pm: Tom Ue, Doctoral Fellow and Canadian Centennial Scholar in the Department of English Sherlock Holmes and Art Researcher Tom Ue facilitates a reading of Sherlock Holmes and art.

Flaxman Exchange

UCL Art Museum is delighted to be working with artist Marcia Farquhar on Flaxman Exchange, UCL Art museum's inaugural Flaxman Gallery artist commission.

Over a week in March (11-13 March 2013) artist Marcia Farquhar has led, or misled, a tour of the newly refurbished Flaxman Gallery and other significant spaces of UCL. 'To find out where you are going you must come', she says.

Farquhar has made it a significant aspect of her practice to question and deconstruct the role of the tour guide. Her performance persona in this context is very much herself, the outsider/ insider imbued with the understanding that history is in the process of being made and as such is always 'half made'.

Farquhar's method of stitching together the factual and the fictional, critical analysis with myth and personal anecdote is the work of a consummate surrealist composer.

She confesses to taking places personally; her site specific tours of UCL address schisms, sculpture, memory, pictorial lies, profanity and femininity.

Each one was unique.

Flaxman Exchange continue with an audio-visual tour and a limited edition work (in progress).

Marcia Farqhar's unique approach to site-specificity weaves together conceptual and social strategies that permit us to unravel institutional and personal histories, and explore the complex relations between fictions and truth.

UCL Art Museum wishes to thank Arts Council England for its support on this project.

Our collaboration with artist Marcia Farqhuar on Flaxman Exchange kicked off on the 11 March 2013 with a week of performances. Join us for the Flaxman Exchange Lecture on the 8th of May, 6:30pm. Marcia Farquhar will reflect on the creation and the legacy of the Flaxman Exchange project, UCL Art Museum's inaugural Flaxman Gallery artist commission.
The event is free but registration is required: 

Flaxman Exchange Lecture

Flaxman Exchange Gallery

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Looking Back at the Life Room

A project by Naomi Salaman

• 27 January - 11 June 2010

This installation looks back at an academic model of art education that centred on drawing the male model in classical poses. In the tradition of the visual essay, artist Naomi Salaman puts together photographs of spaces where drawing is still taught alongside historic prints and photocopies from her research archive. Revisiting the academic art curriculum, she explores the process of looking at, making and reading images in relation to institutional forms of knowledge and the technologies of image reproduction. Drawing a nude model after the antique was the apex of an hierarchical course which began with copying from copies of old master prints and plaster casts and lessons in anatomy. This curriculum served as the basis of art education in Europe from the 1600s. In the 1960s art schools in this country moved away from mandatory exams in these subjects. Charting the remnants of a pedagogical system now suspended, Salaman identifies a "curved space of observation" that builds up through a montage of historic life rooms and dissection theatres. Her research path begins with the much-cited painting of The Royal Academicians (1772) by Johann Zoffany and its reproductions in feminist art history texts two hundred years later. Zoffany's group portrait in the life room was contentious as it illustrated the exclusion of women artists from the life room, and therefore from professional advancement. Looking back at this painting, through feminist critiques, to the early ambitions of the life room, Salaman reconsiders the academy life room as a theoretical apparatus that marked the distinction between fine art as an intellectual pursuit and the workshop practices of the guild. Naomi Salaman is a London-based artist and a lecturer at the University of Brighton. Her research-based practice is rooted in the politics of representation and combines photography, installation, curated exhibitions and publications. Co-curated by Nina Pearlman and Naomi Salaman, this exhibition is supported by Arts Council England and the University of Brighton. It draws on research supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and is accompanied by a limited edition artist's print. In conjunction with the exhibition, UCL Art Collections, the Royal Collection and the University of Brighton have organised a conference entitled Art Schools: Invention, Invective and Radical Possibilities. For more information, please click here. Image: Naomi Salaman, Salle de Dessin, École Nationale Supériure des Beaux-Arts Paris, autumn 2004 © Naomi Salaman