School of Music & Fine Art, University of Kent

Visiting Artist Talks Series 2015/2016

Venue: Smithery Seminar Room, Historic Dockyard Chatham, Chatham, Kent ME4 4TE

The School of Music and Fine Art is proud to announce a programme of visiting artists, writers, filmmakers, curators and performers, each speaker renowned in their own field, who will pose distinct and searching questions to address the urgent concerns of our age. Our guests will provide a detailed presentation of their work, sharing their experiences of navigating the complex multifaceted art world.

Acclaimed curator and writer Rebecca Gordon Nesbitt will give the final Visiting Artists Talk of the academic year on Tuesday May 17th, the week leading into the School of Music & Fine Art Degree Show opening (21st May).

Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt studied History of Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, before working as a curator and writer on contemporary art. With Maria Lind and Hans Ulrich Obrist she established salon3, a space for international exchange in London in 1998 and, two years later, was appointed as a curator at the Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art in Helsinki. Since the early 2000s her investigative work across cultural and academic fields has led her to take on research positions with institutions including the University of Edinburgh, and CCA Derry. She was editor of Make: the magazine of women's art, and her texts have appeared in a range of publications from Critique Journal of Socialist Theory and the International Journal of Cultural Policy to Mute and Variant.

Having worked for a decade as a curator of contemporary art in the UK, Ireland and the Nordic countries, Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt organized her last exhibition at apexart in New York City on the eve of the Iraq war. Since then, she has focused her work on research exploring the impact of cultural policy upon creative practice. This has led her to chart the various waves of privatization that have beset the cultural field in the UK, and to go in search of alternatives in the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution.

She will be speaking about her recent book To Defend the Revolution Is to Defend Culture, which is based on a four-year research project, which included five months in Havana, to document the approaches to culture that evolved out of the 1959 Cuban Revolution.

For more info go to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWOAHGhaTgE

And http://www.amazon.co.uk/To-Defend-Revolution-Is-Culture/dp/1629631043

FREE TO ATTEND. EVERYONE WELCOME. This talk will be of interest for those involved in art, music and creativity, as well as politics, international relations, and business.