A one-day symposium looking at the social histories featured in From Here to Eternity

In this full day of talks, presentations and debates, hear from artists, curators, activists and theorists as we reflect on the themes featured in From Here to Eternity: Sunil Gupta. A Retrospective. Topics include representations of gender, sexuality and its intersection with race in relation to art and the photographic image; the transnational consciousness in key cities in the United Kingdom, North America and India in the embodiment of queerness; and artistic responses to contemporary forms of social and political change.   

Contributors include Fiona Anderson (Art History in the Department of Fine Art at Newcastle University), Allan DeSouza (artist), Flora Dunster (Critical Studies, Central Saint Martins), Sunil Gupta (artist), Alona Pardo (curator, Barbican Art Gallery), Gregory Salter (Department of Art History, Curating and Visual Studies at University of Birmingham), Prem Sahib (artist) and Ed Webb-Ingall (Film and Screen Studies at London College of Communication);

Details on how to access the talk will be confirmed upon registration. Please check your junk folders if you haven't received an email from TPG staff confirming your place. 

Schedule

Preserving Queerness (approximately 1.5 hours, timings are estimates)

11.00 Introductions by Luisa Ulyett (TPG) and Durjoy Rahman (Durjoy Bangladesh Foundation)
11.05 Fiona Anderson on From Here to Eternity
11.20 Greg Salter, Transnational queer histories in Exiles, 1987 and Pretended' Family Relationships, 1989
11.35 Sunil Gupta (artist)
11.50 Discussion, chaired by Alona Pardo (Barbican)
12.30 End of morning session

Activism through Photography (approximately 1.15 hours, timings are estimates)

14.00 Flora Dunster on documentary and staged work in the 1980s
14.15 Ed Webb-Ingall (LCC), AIDs Activist Video Do not tape over: Cock Crazy or Scared Stiff
14.30 Discussion, chaired by Karen McQuaid (TPG)

15.30 Break (1 hour)

Now and Then: Critical Perspectives in the Making (approximately 1.15 hours, timings are estimates)

16.30 Prem Sahib (artist)
16.50 Allan deSouza (artist)
17.10 Discussion, chaired by Anna Dannemann (TPG)
17.45 End, closing remarks

Supported by the Durjoy Bangladesh Foundation

Biographies

Dr Fiona Anderson is Senior Lecturer in Art History in the Fine Art department at Newcastle University. Her work explores queer preservation and world making, gentrification and the politics of urban space, mostly in the USA and the UK. She is the author of Cruising the Dead River: David Wojnarowicz and New York’s Ruined Waterfront (University of Chicago Press, 2019). From 2016-2019, she was the UK Principal Investigator for ​Cruising the Seventies: Unearthing Pre-HIV/AIDS Queer Sexual Cultures (CRUSEV) - a special issue of Third Text on the theme of ‘Imagining Queer Europe’, co-edited with Glyn Davis and Nat Raha, is forthcoming in January 2021.

Allan deSouza is a California-based photo-media artist whose works restage colonial-era material legacies through counter-strategies of humor, fabulation, and (mis)translation. deSouza’s work has been shown extensively in the US and internationally, including at the Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; the Whitechapel Gallery, London; and the Pompidou Centre, Paris. deSouza has published two recent books: How Art Can Be Thought (Duke University Press, 2018), examines how art pedagogy and critique can be adapted to new social challenges; Ark of Martyrs (Sming Sming Books, 2020), is a polyphonic, dysphoric rewrite of Joseph Conrad’s infamous Heart of Darkness. deSouza is Chair of the Department of Art Practice at University of California, Berkeley.

Dr Flora Dunster is an Associate Lecturer in Critical Studies at Central Saint Martins, and lectures at other institutions across the UK on art history and photography studies. Her work focuses on the politics of queer and lesbian photography in Britain during the 1980s and 1990s. In 2019 she completed a PhD at the University of Sussex, and in 2020 began adapting this research for publication as a Paul Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow. A recent essay on Sunil Gupta's work is published in the Third Text special issue "Imagining Queer Europe".

Alona Pardo is a curator at Barbican Art Gallery, where she has curated a number of exhibition and catalogues, most recently Masculinities: Liberation through Photography (2020); Another Kind of Life: Photography on the Margins (2018), Vanessa Winship: And Time Folds (2018), Dorothea Lange: Politics of Seeing (2018) and Trevor Paglen: From ‘Apple’ to ‘Anomaly’ (2019). She has contributed widely to art magazines and books, including Modern Forms: A Subjective Atlas of 20th-Century Architecture by the contemporary photographer Nicolas Grospierre (2016) and Vitamin P3: New Perspectives in Painting (2016).

Prem Sahib previously studied at The Slade School of Fine Art 2002-06 and has an MA in Material & Visual Culture from University College London (2006-08). Sahib’s practice incorporates both sculpture and painting that appears abstract and minimal, formally clean and precise. However each is work arises from convictions regarding sexuality, intimacy, desire, and community. Most recently his practice has expanded to include installation and event-based work.

Dr Greg Salter has been Lecturer in Art History at the University of Birmingham since 2016. His research focuses on art in Britain since 1945. He published his book Art And Masculinity In Post-War Britain: Reconstructing Home in 2019. His current research project addresses queer art in Britain since the 1960s, focusing in particular on its international contexts and affiliations. 

Dr Ed Webb-Ingall is a Senior Lecturer on BA (Hons) Film and Screen Studies at London College of Communication. Webb-Ingall is a filmmaker and researcher working with archival materials and methodologies drawn from community video. He collaborates with groups to explore under-represented historical moments and their relationship to contemporary life, developing modes of self-representation specific to the subject or the experiences of the participants. His current research is looking at the role of video in response to the housing crisis and is in partnership with The Serpentine Gallery, Grand Union Birmingham, LUX Scotland and Nottingham Contemporary.

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