The Centre for Modern Thought

A two-day postgraduate conference at the University of Aberdeen sponsored by the Beyond Text Programme, AHRC

Call for Papers

The long contested issue of the relationship between art and politics has lately re-emerged in critical debate, in conjunction with an explosion of interest in political theory and the exhaustion of the postmodernist model. Recent technological developments have radically transformed modes of creation, circulation, assimilation and dispersion of images, reframing perception and making the investigation of the interdependency of visual arts and politics an urgent ethical necessity. Read more ...

‘Cruel Weather’ and the exhibition ‘Identities in Motion’ by Ayah Bdeir at Peacock Visual Arts, aim to encourage a broader and incisive involvement in, and discussion of artistic responses to crisis, the place of the moving image, and the state of the Middle East today.

The festival is composed largely of documentary, experimental and mixed genre works that have never before been screened in Scotland. Read more ...

A Two-Day Workshop on Jorge Oteiza’s Radical Thought organised by Centre for Modern Thought and Hispanic Studies

Jorge Oteiza (1908–2003) is one of the key Spanish artists of the 20th century. His theoretical writings explore the connections between art and life ⎯more specifically the spiritual dimension of art and the political role of the artist. A few years before the publication of his most influential text “Quousque tandem…!” (1963) Oteiza had already decided to cease creating rather than to repeatedly reproduce what he considered to be the formal conclusion of his artistic experimentation, the work which had won him the top prize for sculpture in the 1957 Sao Paolo Biennial. Read more ...