Current research projects

Word Unbecoming Flesh – Beyond Text, Across Media

As confirmed in last year’s report, the Centre is a participant in Dr Ika Willis’s project to study the future of the book as ‘Word Unbecoming Flesh – Beyond Text, Across Media’. This project has been given BIRTHA funding and is progressing strongly. The member of our Centre best placed to contribute a workshop to its programme is Siobhán Shilton, who was on Research Leave during 2007-08.  It is anticipated that she will be increasingly involved in this project. She is currently organizing an event for it, in collaboration with the Arnolfini, to take place in the summer term of 2009. This will involve a public talk by an artist who will present her work on the theme of journeys between France and the Maghreb in new media art. The talk will be followed by an academic seminar on this theme in the visual arts. External speakers include Dr Margaret Topping from the University of Cardiff. During a period of research leave in 2007-08, Siobhán Shilton was in dialogue with several Paris-based artists whose work focuses on the themes of travel, diaspora and immigration, and will continue to organise similar, related events.

Cultural Crossings in Contemporary Art

Siobhán Shilton is beginning work on a new project which aims primarily to trace the evolution of a still-emerging canon of ‘diaspora art’ against the complex and shifting background of relations between European and non-European francophone regions and countries, including France, Belgium, Switzerland, the Maghreb, Western and Central Africa, former ‘Indochina’ and the Caribbean. The project, which has given rise to a funding application to the European Research Council, will highlight the heterogeneity of a virtually untouched corpus of photography, video, installation and performance art.