Apocalyse Now: thinking about ruins and radiation
Dates: | 28 November 2012 |
Times: | 14:00 - 17:00 |
What is it: | Seminar |
Organiser: | The Whitworth |
Venue opening hours: | Opening times:
Mon to Sat 10am-5pm
Sun 12pm-4pm |
How much: | Free |
|
A half-day seminar looking at artistic and scientific responses to industrial and other modern ruins, with Jane and Louise Wilson, Paul Dobraszczyk (University of Manchester), Tim Edensor (Manchester Metropolitan University), Bradley Garrett (Royal Holloway College), Jeff Hughes (University of Manchester), Dylan Trigg (University of Sussex)
Ruins have come to occupy a central place in visual culture: as images of the aftermath of acts of terrorism or the resulting war on terror; the ruin of the housing market after the recent financial crisis; the deserted towns and villages surrounding Chernobyl and Fukishima; or a post-apocalyptic obsession in cinema. This seminar will examine contemporary notions of ruin and ruination, in relation to architecture, the city and history, and calling on a diverse range of ruin obsessives from the fields of philosophy, cultural geography, art and architectural history. Signifiers of both civilisation and barbarism, creativity and destruction, ruins call into question the solid, the enduring and the permanent, representing as they do either the end of the old or the beginning of something new. We seek to learn from this challenge presented by ruins, whether they be created by the constructive but often brutal processes of modernisation, or their opposites – the forces of destruction, both natural and unnatural, real or imagined.
To book a place or for more details t: 0161 275 7450
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The Whitworth
Manchester