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PANIC! In conversation: Anne Hardy and Bijan Amini-Alavijeh with Griselda Pollock

  • 2 Nov 2021
  • 6.30–8pm
  • Online
  • Free, donations welcome
  • This event was closed captioned as part of the Zoom Webinar software. To enable these, please select the closed captions button on the bottom of your Zoom screen.
    For further access requirements, please email bella.probyn@yorkshire-contemporary.local

For this online talk artists Anne Hardy and Bijan Amini-Alavijeh and art historian Griselda Pollock discussed Hardy’s artistic and curatorial practice, and the relationship between photography and sculpture in her work.

The artists reflected on the conditions and support networks that helped enable Hardy’s artistic development and her recent work promoting fair and transparent pay for artists.

PANIC! uses talks, events, crits and sharing to critically engage and address the entanglements of the axes of power: race, class, gender, sexuality and the complex experiences of situated, self-reflexive diversity among the creative communities of Leeds. We hope to share, activate and action the research that has been done on the role and significance of artist-led and artist-based initiatives in the creation and sustaining of visual arts in cities.

About the speakers

Anne Hardy is internationally recognised for her photography and large-scale sculptural installations or ‘FIELDWORKS’, which combine physical materials with light and sound to create immersive and sensual environments. These works derive from places she calls ‘pockets of wild space’ – gaps in the urban space where materials, atmospheres, and emotions gather.

Hardy was recently commissioned by Tate Britain, London to create ‘The Depth of Darkness, the Return of the Light’ for their annual Winter Commission. Recent solo exhibitions and commissions include ‘Sensory Spaces #13’, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Netherlands (2018), Museum Marta Herford Museum, Germany (2018), ‘Falling and Walking (phhhhhhhhhhh phossshhhhh crrhhhzzz mn huaooogh)’ at Leeds Art Gallery (2018) and ArtNight, London (2017).

Bijan Amini-Alavijeh, born in Dewsbury, is an artist, teacher and technician with a studio based in Wakefield. At the root of his practice is an obsession with the systematic use of mathematics; structure; repetition; failure and scale. This results in predominantly sculptural forms that abstract architecture and infrastructures into gestural forms and structures, using failure and problem solving to depict the outcome. Recent projects include involvement with Yorkshire Sculpture International as an engagement artist and leading the collaborative project PISINmail.

Griselda Pollock is an art historian and cultural analyst. PANIC! is funded by the Holberg Prize that was awarded to Griselda Pollock in 2020 for her 50 years of work promoting feminist, postcolonial, queer, and social histories of art, curation, cultural analysis and art making. She taught in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at University of Leeds from 1977 to 2021.