Symposium
Saturday 22 October 2016, 2.00 – 3.00 pm
Room S1, Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road, Cambridge
Followed by a drinks reception in the atrium
Supported by the Cambridge University Festival of Ideas, the Department of Politics and International Studies and ARTUM. Registration is recommended.
Artist Lala Meredith Vula will speak about her exhibition Flowers of Earth and Blood and about her journey in photography documenting important political and social events. The audience are invited to view the exhibition in the Alison Richard Building before the symposium begins.
Chair: Mette Elstriup- Sanggiovani, Department of POLIS
Discussant: Nora V Weller, ARTUM
Speakers: Lala Meredith-Vula is an artist working mainly in photography and film. She is a Reader in Art and Photography at De Montfort University. She was born in Sarajevo, 1966, to an Albanian father and English mother. She came to Britain in the 1970s. She studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths’ College, London University (1985/88) and MA at Pristina University, Kosova (1988/90). Her first show was in Damien Hirst’s landmark exhibition “Freeze”, London (1988) that is famous for launching the YBA Young British Artists. She has represented Albania in the Venice Biennale, (1999 and 2007). She has exhibited nationally and internationally with many solo shows including at the Photographers’ Gallery, London, Germany throughout Italy and Albania. She has also exhibited in many group shows in the UK, USA, China, though out Europe. She was nominated for the Deutsche Börse Foundation Photography Prize 2016 for her solo show “Blood Memory” at the National Art Gallery of Kosova. For more information visit www.lalameredithvula.com
Dr Kelley Wilder is Director of the Photographic History Research Centre, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK. She is the co-author with Gregg Mitman of Documenting the World: Film, Photography and the Scientific Record (Chicago, 2016) and author of Photography and Science (Reaktion, 2009). In her work she considers the photographic practices of Nineteenth-century scientists and artists like William Henry Fox Talbot, Sir John Herschel, Henri Becquerel and others. New projects include work on Photographic catalogues and archives, and Nineteenth and Twentieth-century material cultures of photographic industry and image making.
Professor Gregg Mitman is the Vilas Research and William Coleman Professor of History of Science, Medical History, and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is an award-winning author, filmmaker, and teacher, whose interests span the history of science, medicine, and the environment in the United States and the world, and reflect a commitment to environmental and social justice. Mitman is the founding director of the Nelson Institute’s Center for Culture, History and Environment, and is also curator of the UW-Madison’s popular environmental film festival, Tales from Planet Earth. He is currently at work on a multimedia project—a film, book, and public history website—that explores the history and legacy of a 1926 Harvard medical expedition to Liberia and the environmental and social consequences that follow in the expedition’s wake.He recently co-produced and co-directed with Sarita Siegel, In the Shadow of Ebola, a short film available online on PBS/Independent Lens that offers an intimate portrait of a family and a nation torn apart by the Ebola outbreak in West Africa.
Art at the Alison Richard Building 