Nasty Women Cambridge – Call out

Worried about the state of the world?

Here’s your chance to push back and be part of an international collective response to a time when division and intolerance are on the rise

Imagine how placards in a demonstration create a chorus of voices. Imagine you are one of those voices and what you’d want to say. In the spirit of resistance we’re putting out a call for artists’ placards to be exhibited as part of a group show Nasty Women Cambridge.

SUBMIT A PLACARD:

A2 portrait (42×59.4cm/ 16.5×23.4inches)

Text-based work

Placards can be made of card, paper or material

Please sign work on the reverse only

 

We welcome work from anyone who identifies with being a Nasty Woman. We want artists of all ages, races, sexual orientations, religions, gender or non-gender identifications, economic background.

Original artworks should be sent to:

Nasty Women Cambridge

ArtWorks, 5 Greens Road, Cambridge CB4 3EH

 

Deadline 17th March 2017, 5pm

 

The exhibition will run from 21st – 30th April 2017. Exhibited artworks will be sold to raise money for Cambridge Women’s Aid. Corona House and Cambridge Rape Crisis

Works will be pinned to the wall. Artworks will not be returned.

 

Exhibition organised by the Congress for the Defence of Culture

(Idit Nathan & Sarah Wood), Eliza Gluckman and Seana Wilson.

Nasty Women Cambridge is one of many Nasty Women actions

happening across the world in different formats and locations.

nastywomenexhibition.org

Unite!

Unite Against Dividers: a lunch

14th January 2017, 12.30–14.30

Cambridge Artworks, 5 Greens Road, Cambridge CB4 3EH

Are you an artist? Do you work in the arts? Do you want to do something about the negative impact of Brexit and the other seismic events that have shaken 2016 but don’t yet know where to begin or what to do or with whom?

2017 is going to be the year to change all that. On January 14th all across our divided nation people will be meeting and eating and starting the conversation about what might be possible in a network of events initiated by Keep it

Complex – Make it Clear. Don’t work in isolation. Join us at the Cambridge event for the inaugural Unite Against Dividers lunch: a creative action for creative people. Congress for the Defence of Culture will provide a hearty soup, bread and drinks and some creative questions to help us welcome 2017 in a playful and productive way.

 

Please spread the word far and wide.

To book a place please email cfdoc2016@gmail.com by January 11th 2017.

One Place After Another

At the beginning of the twenty-first century in the face of the mass movement of people escaping conflict and environmental catastrophe across the world One Place After Another explores contemporary nomadic experience.

Deploying visual art as a form that can transcend borders the exhibition is a response to Cambridge’s Festival of Ideas’ 2016 theme of movement, asking how free is movement in the modern world? The exhibition borrows its title from Miwon Kwon’s seminal book One Place After Another which describes the siting of art as a complex cipher for the unstable relationship between location and identity in the modern world.

For this exhibition local and international, near and far, here and elsewhere are collapsed in works that reposition immigration and foreignness at the heart of twenty-first century human experience (program notes by Idit Elia Nathan ands Sarah Wood).

Participating artists: Jan Ayton, Lucy Harris, Susie Johnson, Olga Jurgenson, Idit Elia Nathan, Corinne Silva, Ali Smith, Helen Stratford & Lawrence Bradby, Sarah Wood.

Announcing the establishment of the Congress for the Defence of Culture

Dear friends and colleagues,

The Congress for the Defence of Culture is an artist-led fast action-response. We’re reeling from the impact of the vote to leave the European Union. We’re shocked by the casual disregard for the culture of co-operation that Europe has worked towards in the last sixty years and the sudden and shocking rise of visible far right vitriol. What happened to the idea of union in the recent ugly scramble of populist politicking and biased and uncritical media analysis?

Realising that now is the time for swift and articulate counter-argument and recognising that art occupies a freed-up space for the interrogation of ideas and the imagining of possible social alternatives we’re writing to you, fellow artists, to join the Congress.

The original Congress for the Defence of Culture was held in 1935 in Paris in a European landscape shocked by the rise of fascism and the failings of communism and social democracy to counter this phenomenon. Artists and writers came together from across the continent to start what was often an uneasy dialogue about the possibilities to resist this movement.

Here in 2016 we are again confronted with a careerist and careering political trajectory based in division and hatred. This is what we want to counter. Dialogue is always a good place to start so here at the Congress for the Defence of Culture what we’re imagining at this early stage is a series of pop up events – screenings, talks, happenings and performances that can offer space to articulate alternatives, question current truisms and encourage creative and generative dialogue. The Congress will be at once playful and serious: an artists’ think tank mediated through arts practice to enable the sharing and analysis of our current position and to imagine alternative futures.

This is the moment to open up ideas not close them down. Valuing Cambridge’s history as a city that stands for interdisciplinary and international thought we invite proposals and contributions to the Congress as a focus for thought and action that can have impact way beyond the city’s limits. Please join us.

Idit and Sarah (June 2016)