Leah Gordon is an artist and curator and has produced a body of work on the representational boundaries between art, religion, post-colonialism and folk history. Her photographic work often registers junctures between history, cosmologies and the present, with specific references to the Industrial and Haitian revolutions. Gordon’s film and photographic work has been exhibited internationally including the Museum of Contemporary Art Sydney; the National Portrait Gallery, UK; Parc de la Villette, Paris and the Dakar Biennale. Her photography book Kanaval: Vodou, Politics and Revolution on the Streets of Haiti was published in June 2010. She is the co-director of the Ghetto Biennale in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, was a curator for the Haitian Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale, was the co-curator of Kafou: Haiti, History & Art, at the Nottingham Contemporary and on the curatorial team for In Extremis: Death and Life in 21st Century Haitian Art shown at the Fowler Museum, UCLA in 2012 and at the Musées de la Civilisation, Quebec City in 2013. Leah Gordon is represented by Riflemaker Gallery.

This talk was recorded on 28 October 2014. Tuesday Talks series invites leading artists, thinkers and curators to explore the driving forces, influences and sources of inspiration within contemporary art. The series is programmed by Professor Pavel Büchler and Bryony Bond, and is a collaboration with Manchester Metropolitan University.

For information on upcoming talks in the series please see our events page: http://bit.ly/1okfAG5

Tuesday Talk: Leah Gordon

Ayo Akingbade’s current exhibition, Show Me The World Mister presents two new films The Fist and Faluyi, shot on location in Nigeria, the artist's ancestral home.

The Fist is a portrait of the daily workings of the Guinness Factory in Lagos, the first Guinness brewery to be built outside of Ireland and the UK. This modernist factory was completed in 1962 in the wake of Nigeria's independence from Britain. The film captures the comings and goings of workers, the factory assembly and packing lines.

It highlights the interwoven histories of industry and labour and the deep-rooted politics of Guinness production in Nigeria.
Faluyi considers the artist's own relationship with Nigeria. A scripted drama, it tells a coming-of-age story of a young girl called Ife who embarks on a spiritual journey to trace her family legacy in ancestral lands. Faluyi is filmed in the Idanre Hills, a UNESCO World Heritage site in Ondo State, and the birthplace of Akingbade's parents.

Both films are displayed around a metal and polycarbonate structure inspired by the infrastructure of the factory, as well as the fading street lights of Faluyi.

Show Me The World Mister is produced by Chisenhale Gallery, London and Spike Island, Bristol. Commissioned by Chisenhale Gallery, London; Spike Island, Bristol; the Whitworth, The University of Manchester; BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead; and John Hansard Gallery, Southampton.

The commission and its acquisition by the Whitworth, The University of Manchester, are made possible with Art Fund support.

With additional support from the Chisenhale Gallery Commissions Fund and WEVAA (West of England Visual Arts Alliance).

Biographies.

Dr. Matthew Barrington is a film curator and researcher based in London. He earned his PhD from Birkbeck, University of London and holds an MA and BA from Kingston University London. Matthew teaches at Birkbeck and has led courses at UCL, Queen Mary's, and the London College of Communication. He curates
films for the Barbican Centre and the Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image, and has worked with the Essay Film Festival and the London Korean Film Festival. His writings, featured in publications like Sight and Sound, ASAP Journal and Afterall, cover a range of topics from film reviews to festival reports. Matthew is dedicated to exploring the cultural and creative factors behind film restoration, exhibition and distribution.

Ayo Akingbade is an artist, writer and director. She works predominantly with film and installation to address themes of power, urbanism and stance.

Her films have been shown at Cannes Film Festival, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, MoMA Doc Fortnight and International Short Film Festival Oberhausen among others. Akingbade was shortlisted for Jarman Award in 2023 and is a recipient of the Kleinwort Hambros Emerging Artist Prize, Brewers Award and Loewe Foundation X Studio Voltaire Award. She is currently developing her debut feature, supported by BFI.

As an artist, writer, and director, Ayo Akingbade makes experimental films that explore people, place and belonging and their relationships to power and history.

Her films have been shown at Cannes Film Festival, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, MoMA Doc Fortnight and International Short Film Festival Oberhausen among others. Akingbade was shortlisted for Jarman Award in 2023 and is a recipient of the Kleinwort Hambros Emerging Artist Prize, Brewers Award and Loewe Foundation X Studio Voltaire Award.

Ayo Akingbade and Matthew Barrington in conversation at the Whitworth

Le Bas addresses nationhood, land, belonging and gender across diverse media including embroidery, painting, decoupage, sculpture, installations and performance. On Friday, 18 October at 6pm Le Bas spoke with former curator of the Turner Prize, Sarah James about her life and work – following the launch of her Turner Prize exhibition at Tate Britain and ahead of the announcement of the winner in December.

Delaine Le Bas in Conversation with Sarah James

Jakkai Siributr In Conversation + Q&A

An afternoon of discussion and live performance at the Whitworth marking the final weekend of Barbara Walker's survey exhibition 'Being Here' (4 Oct 2024 – 26 Jan 2025). 

In two panel discussions, leading academics and professionals explored Walker’s approach to Black British representation, as well as wider issues around race, accessibility, and inclusion in the arts. Speakers: Richard Hylton, Alice Correia, Keisha Thompson, Marlene Smith, and Andrew Ibi. 

This event was organised by community-oriented arts organisation Purple Collective in collaboration with the Whitworth and generously supported by British Art Network (BAN). 

Image: Barbara Walker, Vanishing Point 25 (Costanzi) (2021), graphite on embossed Somerset Satin paper. UK Government Art Collection. © Barbara Walker. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2024. Photo: Chris Keenan. Graphic design: Biba Jones.

'Recentring' - Richard Hylton and Alice Correia in conversation

An afternoon of discussion and live performance at the Whitworth marking the final weekend of Barbara Walker's survey exhibition 'Being Here' (4 Oct 2024 – 26 Jan 2025).

In two panel discussions, leading academics and professionals explored Walker’s approach to Black British representation, as well as wider issues around race, accessibility, and inclusion in the arts. Speakers: Richard Hylton, Alice Correia, Keisha Thompson, Marlene Smith, and Andrew Ibi.

This event was organised by community-oriented arts organisation Purple Collective in collaboration with the Whitworth and generously supported by British Art Network (BAN).

Image: Barbara Walker, Vanishing Point 25 (Costanzi) (2021), graphite on embossed Somerset Satin paper. UK Government Art Collection. © Barbara Walker. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2024. Photo: Chris Keenan. Graphic design: Biba Jones.

'Recentring' - Keisha Thompson, Marlene Smith and Andrew Ibi in conversation

This guide will help you plan your visit to the Gallery and find your way around.  For information about the work on display please speak to a member of our Visitor Team or attend one of our Audio Plus Tours.

Welcome To The Whitworth - Track 13 - Lower ground floor level and toilets

23 February 2016. Pat Fisher's long career as principal curator of the Talbot Rice Gallery at The University of Edinburgh has made a decisive contribution to the presence of international visual art in Scotland. In her talk, she will discus the determination and tactics she has used to bring to Edinburgh the work of some of the world's most prominent artists. These have included, among many others, a retrospective of rarely seen works by Hanne Darboven (2015), Transmitted Live: Nam June Paik Resounds (2013) and last year, Luc Tuymans: Birds of a Feather. The exhibition displayed Tuymans in dialogue with Scottish enlightenment painter, Henry Raeburn.

Tuesday Talks: Pat Fisher

1 March 2016. Isabelle Malz studied Art History, Philosophy and French Literature in Basel and Bochum and completed her doctorate on ‘The image in the video works of Gary Hill’ in 2007. Since September 2007 she has been Curator at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, Germany. She has produced a number of acclaimed exhibitions that include Joseph Beuys: Parallelprozesse (2010/11), two exhibitions of work by Wolfgang Tillmans, Zachęta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw (2011/12) and at K21 Ständehaus, Düsseldorf (2013) and she also curated the exhibition Kandinsky, Malevich, Mondrian – The Infinite White Abyss in 2014. Her most recent project is THE PROBLEM OF GOD a group exhibition looking at ways in which the tradition of Christian imagery has evolved in secular contexts as a universal cultural heritage, independent of religious references. 


Tuesday Talks: Isabelle Malz

Richard Forster makes super realistic drawings from photographs rather than from life - either using his own snapshots, or images found in magazines, books or on the internet. His choice of subjects is diverse but they are brought together by a documentary approach to time, process and a sense of place. He is currently exhibiting a body of work made in the last seven years at the Whitworth, other recent solo exhibitions include Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh;  Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art and The Flag Foundation, New York. He has also been included in recent group exhibitions The Northern Art Prize at Leeds City Art Gallery; Drawn from Photography at The Drawing Centre, New York and Slow Looking: Contemporary Drawing at Tate Britain, London. 27 October 2015. 

Tuesday Talks: Richard Forster

Rosie Cooper is currently Head of Programmes at Liverpool Biennial, and is part of the curatorial faculty for Liverpool Biennial 2016. As part of the Biennial in 2014 she co-curated, with Mai Abu ElDahab, an exhibition about James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) that looked at the artist’s radical practice as an exhibition-maker and provocateur.
She has just finished co-editing, with William Cobbing, a book titled Boooook: the life and work of Bob Cobbing (London: Occasional Papers, 2015) that is the result of three years of conversations, commissions and investigations into the prolific and collaborative career of concrete poet, performer, publisher and organiser Bob Cobbing (1920-2002).
With Ariella Yedgar, she runs an episodic commissioning project – www.outoffocus.biz – that invites artists (e.g. Stephen Sutcliffe, Sebastian Buerkner, Aukje Kok, Patricia Esquivias) and non-artists (e.g. zoologist Stuart Wigby, actor Gretchen Egolf, musician Andrew Weatherall) to create new work in response to each other.
Previous projects include More Soup and Tart, an evening of three-minute performances by artists, musicians, dancers and filmmakers (etc.) in the Barbican Theatre (2011) and Tableau Vivant: A Wandering Retrospective, Prospect New Orleans (2010), a group exhibition performed on the back of a moving flat-bed lorry. She was Public Programme Curator at Barbican Art Gallery from 2009-11. 3 November 2015. 


Tuesday Talks: Rosie Cooper

Nick Thurston is an artist, publisher, poet and writer, his research focuses on the production, distribution and criticism of extra-literary forms of writing in relation to the field of contemporary art. A lecturer at the University of Leeds, his print, bookworks and sculptural projects have been collected by the Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven), V&A (London), Tate (London) and MoMA (New York) amongst other institutions. Since 2006 he has been co-editor of the independent artists’ book publishing imprint information as material (York), with whom he was Writer in Residence at the Whitechapel Gallery (London) 2011-12. In 2014 he was an Artist in Residence at the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin). 24 November 2015. 

Tuesday Talks: Nick Thurston

Annabel Frearson rearranges existing cultural objects into new relationships. ‘Frankenstein2’ is series of works using only words from ‘Frankenstein' (Shelley, 1831), including an album of new pop songs, a sales pitch for a bioscience light industrial estate, and a review of ‘I, Frankenstein’ (Beattie, 2014) on Rotten Tomatoes. Other works include ‘Last Tango Inception’, a conjoining of films not ordinarily seen together, and a performance reading the last words from the books of a recently deceased artist. Frearson works across performance, writing, film, sound and print and has recently completed a PhD in art practice at Goldsmiths College. 13 October 2015. 

Tuesday Talks: Annabel Frearson

Paul Rooney will introduce his latest film, Still at Large, commissioned for this year’s Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival. The film is presented by Nicholas Still who explores the Holy Island’s real and fictional past, including a dreamlike encounter with the shooting of Roman Polanski’s Lindisfarne-set, 1966 film Cul-de-Sac. Rooney’s music, monologues, videos and texts focus on the instabilities of language and narrative, particularly in relation to representing 'place' and the historical memory that haunts it. He has shown work at Tate Britain; Tate Liverpool; BALTIC; Arnolfini; Whitechapel Gallery; ICA; and Liverpool Biennial. A collection of his short fiction was published by Akerman Daly/Aye Aye Books in 2012. 20 October 2015. 

Tuesday Talks: Paul Rooney

Polish artist Joanna Rajkowska is noted for her interventions in public spaces, as well as her objects, films, photography, installations and ephemeral actions. She interrogates individual and collective bodies as politicised sites of historical, ideological and psychological conflict. Her series Painkillers II (2015) is a continuation of Rajkowska’s on-going interest in the paradoxical interrelation of military weapons and pharmaceuticals, as the artist comments, ‘it seems that means of killing and means of saving peoples’ lives are related to each other in terms of the forces generating them.’  Her public projects have included commissions by CCA Zamek Ujazdowski, Warsaw; Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw; The Showroom, London; 7th Berlin Biennale; Frieze Projects 2012 and Institute for Contemporary Ideas and Art, Sweden. 10 November 2015. 

Tuesday Talks: Joanna Rajkowska

The University of Manchester's gallery in a park.

The Whitworth

Pinned to spotlight

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