Transmission: Becky Shaw and Amanda Ravetz – Tuesday 26 February 2019

Transmission logo and image for Becky Shaw and Amanda Ravetz

Becky Shaw and Amanda Ravetz began working together through a research council funded project ODD: Feeling different in the world of education. The project brings together artists, anthropologists, and educational researchers to explore how politics, school policy, environment, and children interact to produce a child’s embodied experience of what it is to fit, or not fit in. They will talk about ODD and other works, touching on ‘artists ethics’, the ‘meniscus’ between artists and participants in social works, live art and image, the visceral, and what it is to try to work ‘lightly and slightly’ in prescribed commissions or research projects.

Becky Shaw is an artist, occasional writer, martial artist, Reader in Fine Art, and leader of the Art and Design Research Centre PhD programme at SHU. She makes live works in institutions of care, industry, and education, and institutions that try to do all three. The works happen in (and generate) complicated and easily broken relationships with organisations, participants, and commissioners. Recent works include How Deep is your Love?, commissioned by the City of Calgary, Alberta, Water Services, and the ongoing Paper Exercise exploring the local authority use of ‘paperjackets’ to hide empty shops and conjure a better class of customer.

Amanda Ravetz is Professor of Visual and Social Practice at Manchester Metropolitan University. Current preoccupations are growth, transformation, loss, and decay, understood as intimations of liveness. Recent research includes Black Gold: trustworthiness in artistic research (seen from the sidelines of arts and health) in Interdisciplinary Sciences Review 43, 3–4 and On Reverie, Collaboration and Recovery in Collaborative Anthropologies 10, 1–2.

Transmission: Becky Shaw and Amanda Ravetz
Tuesday 26 February 2019, 4.30PM – 6.00PM
Pennine Lecture Theatre, Owen Building
Sheffield Hallam University, City Campus S1 2LW
Please register 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, from undergraduates 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.