MD4 at The Koppel Project. Photo credit: Kai Syng Tan

The Global Engagement Funds are intended to support UCL academics collaborating with colleagues based in other countries. Last year, they enabled Professor Andrew Stahl of the UCL Slade School of Fine Art to bring several brilliant Thai artists to the UK for a fourth edition of Monologue/Dialogue. Curated by Professor Stahl, Monologue/Dialogue is an exhibition series alternating between Thailand and the UK. Originating from a British Council initiated and funded residency and exhibition in Bangkok, Professor Stahl has organised and participated in the project since 2006. The key focus of the project has been to celebrate transcultural conversations by bringing together artists mainly from Thailand and the UK but also from different parts of the world to install or construct work together, and develop existing contacts between UK and Thai universities and in some way to reflect on the transcultural nature of today’s discourse for artists.

This edition, ‘MD4: Mysticism and Insecurity’, took place in London’s Koppel Gallery in Baker Street. It involved 16 artists mainly from Thailand and the UK, but also from Singapore, Bangladesh, China and Japan.

In collaboration with Dr Kai Syng Tan (UCL Institute of Advanced Studies), an artist, curator, and researcher, Professor Stahl organised numerous events in the gallery including tours of the exhibition and discussions engaging the public, students and artists. The project received additional funding from the Royal Thai Embassy and was opened by his Excellency the Thai ambassador.

Links

• The Koppel Project
• Monologue / Dialogue 4
• Review of MD4
• Monologue / Dialogue 3
• Transcultural Art Network
• About Professor Andrew Stahl
• About Dr Kai Syng Tan

An acre of seats in the garden of dreams.

Trips to the big screen are often some of our fondest childhood memories. So it was no surprise that the first UCL Festival of the Arts film event was a popular one as we spent a nostalgic hour reconstructing the space of 1960s cinema in Britain through the memories of cinema-goers.

The tiered flip down chairs of the Sir Ambrose Fleming Lecture Theatre and slideshow of iconic cinematic moments—Sean Connery and Shirley Eaton in Goldfinger, Marilyn Monroe, Breakfast at Tiffanys—set the scene for Dr Melvyn Stokes and Dr Matthew Jones (UCL History) to talk about the findings of their research project, which explores how cinema shaped the collective experience of during a period of turbulent social change.

Their research opens up questions about our notions of the relationships between memory, experience and space, as well as questioning received narratives of the 1960s decade.

Dr Henry K. Miller (film historian and critic) complemented their talk with a discussion of his research into the history of the first university film department to open in the 60s at UCL Slade School of Fine Art.

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“I have been at Slade for two years now, and my personal experience of the show was many-layered. On the one hand, I was viewing the work of friends and fellow students with whom I had regularly exchanged opinions and criticism in seminars over several years,” reports UCL Slade school student and artist Tom Rees on the UCL Slade BA Fine Art Summer Show.

Slade exhibit by Kitty Clark

Some of the work I had seen before, having experienced it first during the weekly ‘crits’ that form the backbone of students’ shared development at the Slade. Seeing this work fixed or projected within what is normally studio space, the sensation was of a door having shut between us: I was now more a viewer than a participant. I felt this while watching Tom Clark’s ‘White Paper’, a video piece which evoked something between a child’s first impressions of the world, and a graduating artist conscious of the expectations upon him. (more…)