Ayman Mahmoud Saey - Presenter Biog

I started working with video in my early teenage years. Enthusiasm and a small amount of competence in my first project led to me getting a small paid job. This in turn led to another small job, and quite soon after I was registered as self employed and doing more small jobs.

While grateful for the experience that had seemingly landed on my lap, I began to get restless with the type of work I was doing. I didn’t necessarily care much for the subjects of my films and furthermore I didn’t find myself in any environments that would inspire me to develop as a filmmaker.

My next step was to go to university, which is where I am now. At university my films have been characterised by having elements of both documentary and fiction. I find myself more concerned with what I see as the essence of the film rather than subscribing to a particular form that it must be expressed in.

Also my films tend to be quite self reflexive despite usually have no intention for them to be so; in my short experience, the filmmaking process itself often strangely coincides with the intentions of the film in a way that makes it just as important a part of the film to be depicted/ referred to.

I’m not too sure what is next for me, but if I do continue to make films I would image I would still be concerned with finding ways of translating experience on to film. I prefer it when one gets a sense of something in a film rather than just intellectually derived conclusions.

Also I am interested in just showing things as they are. I believe that watching a film is a unique time in a persons life when all but what is seen and heard in the film is removed, allowing the viewer to connect with the subject in a way that may be much more difficult to within the abundance of ‘real life’. When we connect with a subject we are given the opportunity to comprehend it and with comprehension hopefully comes transcendence.

Film and Video BA, London College of Communication, University of the Arts London.

You can contact Ayman at a8hm@hotmail.com.

William Raban - Presenter Biog

Fig. 2 - Still from About Now MMX


Fig. 2 - William Raban

Born 1948, Fakenham. BA painting, Saint Martins School of Art 1971; MA (Fine Art) Reading University 1974. Manager of London Filmmakers Co-Op Workshop 1972-6. Published bi-monthly Filmmakers' Europe 1977-81. Part-time senior lecturer in Film at Saint Martin's School of Art 1976-89. Reader in Film at University of the Arts, London. Member of editorial board Vertigo film magazine.

William's Luxonline profile
Putney Debater's review of William's new film

Louis Henderson: Presenter Biog

Fig 1. Une Carte Postale à Marcel.

Louis Henderson is a filmmaker who lives and works in London. He has shown his work nationally and internationally, including Rotterdam International Film Festival, Centre Pompidou, Tate Modern, Whitechapel Gallery and EMAF Osnabrueck. Currently Louis is doing a practice-based PhD at London College of Communication supervised by William Raban and Dr Jonathan Dronsfield, working in film, photography and text. The research is led by the question “Can Film be a Future Archaeology?” and looks into the politics of institutional archives, the possibility of aesthetic communism and the place of art in the production and distribution of the common.

www.louishenderson.wordpress.com

You can contact Louis at henderson.louis@gmail.com

Fig.2 Eisenstein at Work

Ian Brown - Presenter Biog

Fig. 1 - Air/Fire; Screenprint / Etching (2011)

Ian Brown is the founder of Volcanic Editions Print Workshop in Brighton He studies at Canterbury College of Art and in 2009 completed a MA in Printmaking at Camberwell College of Art (MA Printmaking). He has exhibited his work widely both in the UK and abroad, and has received several awards in recognition of his printmaking work. His work is included in private and public collections, including the Arts Council of Great Britain, the British Library Special Collections, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and in Tate Britain’s Artist Book Collection. Until 2010, he worked as Subject Leader at the FdA Fine Art: Contemporary Practice, University of Brighton, and as Pathway Leader Fine Art, at the BA (Hons) Art and Design Sussex, Coast College Hastings. He regularly contributes articles to specialist publications on printmaking, and wrote and edited the Silkscreen Chapter for Printmaking, Traditional and Contemporary Techniques by Anne d’Arcy Hughes and Hebe Vernon Morris, Chronicle Press, San Francisco (2008).

http://volcaniceditions.com

Marina Kassianidou - Presenter Biog

Fig.1 - Untitled (2008) Photo by Vassos Stylianou

Marina Kassianidou was born in Limassol. In 1998 she received a CASP/Fulbright scholarship to study in the USA. She graduated from Stanford University in 2002 with a BA in Studio Art (with Distinction) and a BS in Computer Science (with Distinction). Upon graduation, she was awarded the Arthur Giese Memorial Award for Excellence in Painting by the Stanford University Department of Art & Art History. In 2005, she obtained a Master in Fine Art degree at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, University of the Arts, London, UK. During that time she was invited to participate in XHIBIT05, an exhibition showcasing selected students of the University of the Arts. She has participated in group exhibitions in the UK, USA, Cyprus, Israel and Germany and she has had solo exhibitions in Nicosia, Cyprus (Gloria Gallery, 2006, 2008) and London, UK (Tenderpixel Gallery, 2009). Her last two solo shows were accompanied by publications containing essays on her work by herself and other artists. From 2005 to 2007 she was a contributor to ArtSEEN journal (Florence, London, New York), writing articles on her work and the work of other artists. In 2006 and 2007 she was shortlisted for the Cyprus Young Artists Awards, a competition organized by Brio Expressions Gallery. Her work is found in several private and public collections, including the Cyprus Ministry of Education and Culture. She is currently a PhD candidate in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art & Design, London, UK.

http://www.marinaek.com

Sonia Boyce - Presenter Biog

Sonia Boyce is a British Afro-Caribbean artist, living and working in London. Her early work addresses issues of race, ethnicity and contemporary urban experience expressed in large pastel drawings and photographic collages, questioning racial stereotypes in the media and in day-to-day life. Her work has since shifted to materially and conceptually; incorporating a variety of media that combines photographs, collages, films, prints, drawings, installation and sound. She also worked with other artists and people within 'improvisational collaborations'. Recent work brings the audience into sharper focus as an integral part of the artwork, collaboratively between artist, vocalists and audience. Her works are held in the collection of Tate Modern. Sonia is currently a Research Fellow at Wimbledon College of Art.

Jennet Thomas - Presenter Biog

Jennet Thomas’ work emerged from the anarchistic, experimental culture of London's underground film and live art club scene in the 1990's, where she was a co founder of the Exploding Cinema Collective. Thomas' video narratives are absurd - using uncanny visual and verbal puns- mixing elements of the banal and the bizarre.

Her work began as spoken word performance with projections for a live audience, and developed into an idiosyncratic hybrid of filmic languages; experiments with sound design are combined with unusual collisions of narrative genres - her videos can look like a low budget T.V. news, childrens' drama, or performance art behavior, with precisely crafted experimental, cryptically critical, texts; she likes to explore unlikely methods of sense-making. Her narratives are often generated via dream-logic, inspired by odd corners of British culture, our relationship with science, television, and the problems of ‘truth.’ Her single screen work has screened extensively in the international Film festival arena, particularly in the US and Europe but has recently been showing more in galleries the UK. Recent shows include: ‘All Suffering Soon to End’ at Matt’s Gallery 2010, ‘Return of the Black Tower’ at PEER in 2007, with a forthcoming solo show at OUTPOST, Norwich in November 2010 and group show ‘The Life of the Mind’ at Walsall New Art Gallery in January 2011. She is currently .5 Senior Lecturer on Fine Art: BA Print and Time Based media at Wimbledon College of Art.

http://www.vdb.org

Fig 1. Preaching in Bathroom, Matt's Gallery 'ALL SUFFERING SOON TO END' 2010

Fig 2. Nun Raises Puppets, Matt's Gallery 'ALL SUFFERING SOON TO END' 2010

Angela Hodgson - Presenter Biog

Angela Hodgson diverse work centres on collaborative practice, using drawing and other materials, often on a microcosmic scale. She has organised events for the Big Draw in a London hospital and public gardens in Cornwall. Her research interests include the place of empathy (viewed from aesthetic, psychoanalytic & scientific perspectives) within collaboration. Angela is currently studying for a PhD at Wimbledon College of Art.

Caroline Rabourdin - Presenter Biog

Fig 1. Illustration for Larousse by Eugène Grasset

Caroline Rabourdin is an artist and architect, who graduated from the ENSAIS in Strasbourg in 1999 and subsequently received a Master in Architectural design at the Bartlett School of Architecture. She has worked in various architectural offices in Paris and London and has taught architectural design at the Ecole Speciale d’Architecture in Paris with Sir Peter Cook, interior design with Kate Davies at Chelsea College of Art and Design in London, where she’s undertaking her PhD studies. She currently teaches architectural design at Greenwich University with Matthew Butcher.

Her interests are in language, specifically bilinguism and translation, as well as space theory, phenomenology and spatial representation.

www.noarchitecture.org
www.unit10greenwich.wordpress.com

Mark McGowan: Presenter Biog

Fig 1. Mark McGowan eating a Corgi dog

Mark McGowan is a UK-based performance artist who lectures at the Camberwell College of Arts, and at Chelsea College of Art and Design. Mark has entered the news a number of times for his unconventional approach to public protest and demonstration. He grew up in Peckham, on the North Peckham Estate, and has a degree in Fine Art from Camberwell College of Art. His performance antics include pushing a peanut with his nose around London streets, eating a Corgi dog, and re-staging the murder of Charles de Menezes.

http://www.markmcgowan.org/

Hayley Newman: Presenter Biog

Fig 1. The Gluts - Still for River Singing Purple Sky

Hayley Newman is Reader in Performance at Chelsea College of Art and Design in London. Her work includes MKVH (Milton Keynes Vertical Horizontal, 2006), an event in which volunteers were driven around the Milton Keynes road grid until their coach ran out of diesel. In 2009 she worked with artist Andrea Mason, organising Capitalist Anonymous meetings outside The Bank of England in the City of London. She is has just returned from touring Copenhagen during the climate summit with Kaffe Matthews and Gina Birch (aka The Gluts) and their project CafCarbon. She is represented by Matts Gallery.

http://www.hayleynewman.com

Aaron McPeake - Presenter Biog

Fig 1. Aaron McPeake - Teddy

Aaron’s work is diverse both in terms of the range of media used and the subjects he addresses. He works with bell bronze to mediate sound sculptures, film and photography to examine travel and memory (often using shadows as the principal characters or central themes of the narrative) and various forms of printmaking with which he engages to highlight the apparent paradoxes of his research and practice. He came to lose most of his vision (is registered blind) through an auto-immune condition which ended his long career in stage lighting design, however this has not been an entirely negative experience and has opened up some new possibilities including the pursuit of his long standing fine art practice with increased vigour. Aaron is also focussing on the physical and material processes that artists use as these can often articulate serendipitously multiple readings within the work. His PhD examines how visual artists respond to the loss of their eyesight and the working title of the research is: Nibbling at Clouds – when the visual artist encounters adventitious blindness.

Wiebke Leister - Presenter Biog

Fig. 1 - Installation view of Eigenzeit (1999)

Wiebke Leister is a German artist and writer based in London. She studied photography at the University of Essen and holds a PhD from the Royal College of Art, London. As well as teaching on the MA Photography programme at the London College of Communication and at the University of Applied Sciences in Bielefeld, she has exhibited and published her work internationally. Her research investigates the nature of photographic portraiture beyond the limits of individual likeness – currently focussing on representations of faciality, including the laughing, mocking or kissing mouth in relation to its facial canvas. She is an Associate Director of the Photography and the Archive Research Centre at the University of the Arts London, and she has also worked in different museum contexts, organizing conferences and exhibitions.

Read more about her research at: www.lcc.arts.ac.uk/Wiebke_Leister_research.htm

Jane Collins: Presenter Biog

Fig 1. The Duchess's flight as viewed from the windows of the Nightingale Theatre photograph by Matthew Andrews.

READER

BIOGRAPHY: Jane Collins is a Reader in Theatre at Wimbledon College of Art. She is a writer, Director and theatre maker who works all over the UK and internationally. She has a long association with the continent of Africa and for The Royal Court, with the National Theatre of Uganda, she co-directed Maama Nalukalala N_dezze Lye (Mother Courage and her Children) by Bertolt Brecht, with a Ugandan cast in Kampala. This production which was funded by the British Council was the first official translation of a play by Brecht into an African language and toured internationally funded by the World Bank. Her AHRC funded research into ‘performing identities’ resulted in a new work for the stage The Story of the African Choir which was developed in conjunction with the Market Theatre Laboratory in Johannesburg and performed at the Grahamstown International Festival in 2007.

Throughout 2008–09 her research was mainly concerned with co-editing Theatre and Performance Design: a reader in scenography, which was published by Routledge in January 2010. This book, with over 52 texts is the first of its kind in this field. In addition, in 2009, her performance research included re-staging the award winning Ten Thousand Several Doors for the Brighton International Festival.

In November 2009 Collins was commissioned by the V&A to research and produce a soundscape to accompany the forthcoming Space and Light: Edward Gordon Craig Exhibition which opens in London in September 2010 and tours to Europe in 2011. Edward Gordon Craig is credited with being the founder of modern stage design. She was one of a group of artists who participated in re:SEARCHING playing in the archive an exhibition at the ING Bank in the city of London in May 2010 in response to the Baring archive. Collins has been asked to contribute an essay on Ten Thousand Several Doors to the forth coming collection Performing Site-Specific Theatre edited by Anna Birch and Joanne Tompkins to be published in late 2011.

RESEARCH STATEMENT: My research continues to focus on performance which re-engages the ‘theatrical’ as a means of interrogating contemporary society. In 2007 I wrote an article for Studies in Theatre and Performance which examined the efficacy of performance as a means of investigating the construction of post colonial identities through the ‘staging’ of an African ‘past’. One aspect of this research was an analysis of the scenographic framing of these performances for western audiences. Among the many outcomes of this process was the identification of a dearth of material with which to interrogate critically the visual aspects of performance in particular and the scenographic in general. Concurrent with this, in my role as Contextual Studies Co-ordinator for Theatre at Wimbledon, I was also concerned that students of theatre design did not have a comprehensive body of accessible written texts to help them situate their own work and analyse the work of others. Theatre and Performance Design, a reader in scenography aims to fulfil this need and continues to be the main focus of my research as a practitioner and in my critical writing.

RECENT SELECTED OUTPUTS AND ACHIEVEMENTS
SELECTED PERFORMANCES
2007 ‘The Story of the African Choir,’ Grahamstown International Festival, South Africa.
2006-9 Devised and Directed Ten Thousand Several Doors the Brighton International Festival. Best Production of the Festival Joint Winner, 2006, restaged 2009
2005–06 Wrote and Directed The Voyages of Harriet Herring ING Bank.
2005–06 Wrote and directed workshop performance: The Story of the African Choir, The Market Theatre, Johannesburg, South Africa.
2005–06 ‘Bright Angel Point’ Selected Finalist The Croydon Warehouse International Playwriting Festival.
2005 Bright Angel Point shortlist finalist; The Croydon Warehouse International Playwriting Festival.
2003–04 Completed draft Bright Angel Point. Reading at the Royal Shakespeare Company, ‘The Other Place’, Lawrence Boswell (dir).
2003–04 Shakespeare’s Dream on Sea, performance development project including workshop production, Northbrook Theatre, W. Sussex.

SELECTED CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS
2010 International Federation of Theatre Research, Munich
2009 International Federation of Theatre Research, Lisbon.
2007 Rhodes University Summer School Guest Speaker.
2007 Royal National Theatre ‘Agendas’ Seminar with John Carni.
2007 National Maritime Museum / Tate Gallery Travel and Narrative (paper).
2006 Theatre and Performance Research Association TAPRA (paper).
2006 The International Federation of Theatre Research Helsinki (paper).

SELECTED AWARDS
2007 AHRC Practice-led and Applied Research grant
2005 AHRB Small Grant in the Creative and Performing Arts.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
Theatre and Performance Design: a reader in scenography, co-editor Routledge 2010
2007 ‘“Umuntu, Ngumuntu, Ngabantu”: The Story
of the African Choir’ in Studies in Theatre and Performance, 27.2.

SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
2007 ‘Stages Calling’ Ruphin Coudyzer, Thirty Years of Stage Photography, The Market Theatre Johannesburg; Royal National Theatre (co-curated by Michael Pavelka)

Katie Pratt - Presenter Biog

Fig. 2 – Sascheckewan (2007). Oil on canvas, 200 x 250 cm, Courtesy of the artist and Kontainer.

Katie Pratt

Senior Lecturer BA Painting Katie Pratt studied Painting at Winchester School of Art (BAhons) and Royal College of Art (MA). She won the Jerwood Painting Prize in 2001 and was awarded an AHRC Fellowship at the University of Southampton.

The paintings meditate on the making-process itself and the thinking that sustains my studio practice. Paint is simultaneously celebrated and treated with irreverence as it is thrown and splashed about. Each painting - through painstaking detailing - illustrates the thought process that has retrieved a rationale from the chaotic beginnings of poured paint.

Recent and forthcoming group exhibitions include Landscape Confection at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, touring to Contemporary Arts Museum Houston & Orange County Museum, Los Angeles; Cold Climates at the Living Arts Museum, Reykjavik, New British Painting: Part 1 at John Hansard Gallery, Southampton and Approaching Content at the Crafts Council Gallery, London which toured to the Harris Museum, Preston. Solo exhibitions include Kontainer Gallery, Los Angeles; Forum d'Art Contemporain, Sièrre, Switzerland and Houldsworth, London.

Elisa Alaluusua - Presenter Biog

Writing/drawing.Text/image.Drawing rules/games/methods. Sketchbooks as spaces for thinking, organizing, collecting, solving problems, testing out ideas, storing information and memories. Time-based art and mark making

Gary McQuiggin - Presenter Biog

Fig. 1 - Erno Goldfinger's Alexander Fleming House in Elephant & Castle

I'm interested in making documentaries and video essays with a degree of complexity and mystery. More allusive than informative and more poetic than narrative based. I take my inspiration from pre narrative cinema, British documentary film units, the experimental cinema of the 70s, 80s and 90s, Mass Observation, Surrealism, Psychogeography and the Situationist International. I'm not in academia at the moment (perhaps waiting for the dust to settle) and my own film-making is currently on hold. I will be presenting my film The Elephant Without a Tail which I made as part of my BA at LCC and which I have recently screened at the Kassel Dokfest and Optica festival in Germany and Spain. The film is a diary film about my experience living in Elephant & Castle during the summer and autumn of 2009 just as the big regeneration program began and is an attempt to tease out some of the issues surrounding urban regeneration during a time of economic crisis.

http://www.blackoutinertia.co.uk

Vincenzo Di Maria - Presenter Biog

Fig 1 -Water Design Challenge 2010 – co-designing solutions in response to water wastage.

Vincenzo Di Maria is a multidisciplinary designer based between London and Lisbon. His work focuses on social innovation and sustainable development, with a holistic approach to industrial design from products to services. He uses creative techniques and people-centred design approach with an added touch of playfulness.

Vincenzo has been working and is currently freelancing as design researcher for Design Against Crime Research Centre at Central Saint Martins Innovation, University of the Arts London, where he has developed a range of skills and experiences in the field of Socially Responsive Design and Social Innovation.

Vincenzo is co-founder and director of Common Ground, a start up socially responsive design & innovation agency. Common Ground works with companies, organisations and communities to co-create new products, services and strategies that generate positive social change.

www.designagainstcrime.com/methodology-resources/socially-responsive-design/

www.gotocommonground.com

www.vdmdesign.net

Twitter: @cmngrd

Tansy Spinks - Presenter Biog

Fig 1. Tansy Spinks performance with electric violin

Tansy Spinks studied Fine Art in Leeds and has an MA in Photography from the Royal College of Art in London. She has exhibited widely both at home and abroad and is a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Middlesex University, a Lecturer at Camberwell College of Art, UAL and an External Assessor at Hertfordshire and Manchester Metropolitan Universities. Images have been purchased for several collections including the National Media Museum, Bradford and the Museum of Fine Art in Houston, Texas. Her work has been used commercially by many major publishers for book and CD covers and editorially. She is also a performer currently undertaking doctoral research into site-specific sound using live recordings and an electric violin based at LCC, University Of the Arts London (CRiSAP). She lives and works in London.

http://tansyspinks.com/

Ken Wilder - Presenter Biog

Fig. 1: Plenum #3 (2010, video installation) installed in Chapel of Keble College Oxford, March 2010, photo: Uwe Ackermann

Ken Wilder is an artist who originally trained at the RCA as an architect. While in the past he has both taught and practiced architecture, and is currently course director for the MA Interior and Spatial design at Chelsea, Ken now makes site-responsive sculptural installations. He completed his PhD at Chelsea in 2009. He has exhibited widely in the UK since 1998, and has also exhibited in Ulm, Germany (funded by British Council). In March 2010 he installed the first contemporary installation in the Chapel at keble College Oxford. He has had a number of articles published, including for the British Journal of Aesthetics, Estetika (forthcoming), Filmwaves, and Image and Narrative (e-journal). The book Spaces and Narrations (with Julian Maynard Smith) was published in 1998 (funded by Arts Council of England).

Themes of Ken's work include problematizing the relation between artwork and beholder in painting and video art; the role of visual imagination in spectatorship; reception aesthetics and relation to analytical philosophy; the relation between artwork and spatial container.

Amanda Hopkins - Presenter Biog

A graduate initially in psychology, I later returned to college to study Three Dimensional design. My practice, which has developed from these two disciplines, explores ways of reconnecting ourselves with places around us through heightened sensitivity to the world beyond appearances.

I have worked for clients in the public realm (Islington Council, Adur Council, Essex County Council) and private individuals and companies (Stephen Pimbley Architects, French Kier Anglia), producing both temporary and permanent work. My current research interests include exploring the idea of nature as a souvenir versus nature as enveloping, relational and ‘used’.

I have taught at various HE institutions including Goldsmiths, London Metropolitan University and have been a member of staff at Central Saint Martins since 1999.