Transmission: TC McCormack and Marie-José Ourtilane – Tuesday 29 January 2019
TC McCormack and Marie-José Ourtilane are developing a project that explores a principle that might be called the complex space (espace complexe), the title of a series of exhibitions through which curators and artists experiment with their relationships. ESPACE COMPLEXE implicitly refers to dialogue, to an idea developed by Edgar Morin: ‘Two principles united without duality being lost or vanishing in this unity. [T]he problem is to unite antagonistic notions to think about the organisational and creative processes. The word complex is understood here in the etymological sense of the term, i.e. “complexus what is woven together in a tangle of intertwining (plexus)”’.
TC McCormack’s central preoccupation has always been how one navigates the space between the legacy of modernism and the reach of contemporaneous media. He is an artist, researcher, and curator. His work is primarily based in film and installation, while spanning photography, collage, and text, involving searching through media and archives for speculative contexts, in the social sphere, film history, sculpture, technology, museology, architecture, and urban planning. His work is commissioned by galleries and arts institutions in the UK and internationally.
Marie-José Ourtilane studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Le Havre and the Faculty of Art History of Paris I Pantheon-Sorbonne. In the 1990s she moved to Berlin. She founded and was a member of numerous art projects, including the gallery-residence Visite ma tente 2010-15 and the project space General Public. She works as a freelance curator and has been the director of Project Space Festival since 2016.
Transmission: TC McCormack & Marie-José Ourtilane
Tuesday 29 January 2019, 4.30PM – 6.30PM
Adsetts Learning Centre Lecture Theatre 6620
Sheffield Hallam University, Arundel Gate S1 1WB
Please register your interest on Eventbrite.
Transmission is an annual series of lectures and symposia, now in its seventeenth year, and is a collaboration between Fine Art, the Art & Design Research Centre at Sheffield Hallam University, and Site Gallery. Convened by Sharon Kivland in 2001, Transmission was developed collaboratively with Lesley Sanderson from 2001 to 2004, and with Jasper Joseph-Lester from 2004 to 2012. The series is now convened by Sharon Kivland, TC McCormack, Hester Reeve, and Julie Westerman, in association with Site Gallery, Sheffield. The lecture series has an annual theme, and involves students from Fine Art, fromundergraduates to PhDs.
Transmission is the passing of information via a channel, and this is the intention of the Transmission project. We enquire about the aesthetic and discursive forms required by practices in the field of contemporary art and theory that address sociality and subjectivity. It has encompassed a lecture programme, seminar discussions, an annual symposium, a print portfolio, four series of books: Transmission Annual, The Rules of Engagement, Transmission chapbooks, and five volumes of discussions/interviews, entitled Transmission: Speaking and Listening. These are published by Artwords Press, London.
Site Gallery is Sheffield’s international contemporary art space, specialising in moving image, new media, and performance. Pioneering emerging art practices and ideas, Site works in partnership with local, regional, and international collaborators to nurture artistic talent and support the development of contemporary art. At the heart of what Site does is the connection of people to artists and to art, inspiring new thinking and debate through its public programmes and participatory activity. Through diverse programming, Site reveals the process of making art to invite its audience to engage, explore, and connect. In 2018 Site Gallery re-opened after a building programme which trebled the scale of its public area.