INTERWORLDS: TRANSCULTURAL HYBRIDITY IN ART

Yvonne Feng will speak about how she embodies experiences of otherness and looks with the other in her practice and research. She takes possession of ongoing life and social events by turning them into her own imaginary, subjective experiences in drawing, painting and writing. In her recently completed doctoral research (thesis title: Tracing the Unspeakable: Painting as Embodied Seeing), Feng searched for artistic languages and agency to embody the reality of an event of imprisonment in her family history and other events of displacement. Her current work explores the notions of captivity and docile bodies, questioning how our perceptions of containment and protection have been reshaped by the pandemic. Yvonne Feng (b.China) completed her MA at the Royal College of Art in 2014 and her practice-led PhD at the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL in 2020. She is currently a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art Painting at University of Brighton and an Associate Lecturer at Camberwell College of Arts, UAL. Feng is the recipient of the William Coldstream Memorial Prize 2017, UCL Art Museum and Excellence in Drawing Award 2015, The Arts Club. She has exhibited in both solo and group exhibitions in the UK. Her work is included in UCL Art Museum Collection and private collections worldwide.

 

Errol Francis will discuss how every so often a new word or phrase emerges to describe how we might reach across the real and perceived differences that divide us as human beings. From the world of medical diagnosis to social policy and the arts, a succession of these terms have arisen over the past few decades and then quietly dropped or superseded. Multiculturalism, transculturalism, syncretism, hybridity, Créolité, diversity, plurality, cultural sensitivity. Yet behind these terms lies the spectre of culture, which Raymond Williams described as ‘one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language’ and which can be argued to already contain implications of these terms. So why do we need such terminology; what is their conceptual integrity; what are they trying to do and where do they get us in bridging the differences that divide us?

Dr Errol Francis is artistic director and CEO of Culture&. Errol studied photography and fine art at Central Saint Martin’s, University of the Arts London. His doctoral research at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London focused on postcolonial artistic responses to museums. Errol’s background in mental health activism has influenced his arts practice such as his directing of the Anxiety Arts Festival 2014 and Cyborgs 2019. Errol is director of the New Museum School which, in collaboration with the University of Leicester, trains diverse young people who want to work in museums. He is visiting lecturer at the University of Greenwich, Goldsmith’s University of London and Sotheby’s Institute of Art.

 

Jasmir Creed is a practice led PhD researcher at the Slade School of Fine Art. She explores alienation and the transcultural in paintings of people in urban non-places or iconic historical sites, informed by her identity as a British South Asian artist. Solo exhibitions of paintings by Jasmir Creed include Urban Forest at Delta House Studios, London 2017; Dystopolis at Victoria Gallery and Museum, Liverpool 2018 with catalogue distributed by Liverpool University Press. Group exhibitions include Asia Triennial Manchester 2018, Home and Unhome at Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, Chongqing, China, 2020 and Art Contact, Istanbul Art Fair, Turkey 2021.

 

The Interworlds talk series is supported by the Institute of Advanced Studies and by the Slade School of Fine Art at University College London.