Impact

Sam Chatterton Dickson is Director, Sales, at Lisson Gallery, the leading contemporary commercial gallery. He studied history at Durham University and then pursued postgraduate studies in art history at the Courtauld Institute, London. After a short spell in the Old Masters field he moved over to contemporary art in the mid 1990s. Before joining Lisson Gallery he was senior sales associate at Haunch of Venison in London.

Artists, curators and founders of Zeitgeist Arts Projects Rosalind Davis & Annabel Tilley will discuss the impact of leaving art school, surviving as an artist and sustaining a practice long term and the impact that artist-led organisations, social media and the wider community can play in this process. Zeitgeist Arts Projects was founded in 2012 by Rosalind Davis and Annabel Tilley to support ambitious artists with practical ways to sustain their practice. At the heart of the ZAP philosophy are the questions: How do we survive as an artist? How do we develop and sustain a critically engaged practice over the long term? Their annual programme: Show & Tell addresses these questions through talks, seminars, art tours and exhibitions that encourage artists to develop networks and learn from other artists. Guest artists have included: Mark Titchner, Susan Collis, Phoebe Unwin, Virginia Verran and Transition Gallery. Their pioneering talk: The A-Z of Surviving as an Artist has toured the country and been hosted by Firstite, De La Warr Pavilion, The Whitstable Biennale and BayArt, Cardiff among others and is informed by Tilley and Davis's differing experiences of the art world and the joys and struggles of sustaining an art career longterm. As curators Tilley and Davis organise exhibitions of outstanding new, mid-career and established artists: Collectible (2012), Discernible (2013) and The Zeitgeist Open (2012 & 2013). These large group shows are significant because they provide a snapshot of what critically engaged artists across the country are doing in their studios now and result in an exciting cross-fertilisation of ideas and networks as well as gaining critical attention from wider public and art world audiences.

As a crowd-pleasing finale they will attempt to answer the age old questions ‘Does hope really spring eternal?’ and 'How much is that doggy in the window-the one with the waggley tail?’ Andrew Marsh has a BA in Fine Art from Norwich School of Art and Design, and an MA in Fine Art Administration and Curatorship from Goldsmiths. He teaches curatorial practice across all three years of BA Communication, Criticism and Curation at Central Saint Martins. He is also a freelance exhibition organiser and has curated and managed exhibitions and events in London, Birmingham, Dusseldorf and New Delhi (to mention a few); he has written for ‘Flash Art’, various artists’ monographs and other publications. http://anoccasionaljournal.tumblr.com/ Simon Hollington is an artist working in a range of media from painting and drawing to interactive narrative environments. His work has been exhibited widely in the UK including Tate Modern and the ICA London as well as internationally including The 51st Venice Biennale as well as shows in mainland Europe, North and South America and Australia. He has been a guest speaker at Tate Britain, The Royal College of Art and The Royal Society for the Arts. He has been teaching at Central St Martins since 2000 where he is currently an associate lecturer in Contextual Studies. www.electronicsunset.org

Michael Heilgemeir is a German-born, London-based photographer, author of ‘The Nomadic Studio’, Art director and Photographic editor of Misery Connoisseur Magazine and Lecturer in Photography at University of Hertfordshire. He studied at Fachakademie für Fotodesign in Munich and completed his MA in Image & Communication at Goldsmiths, University of London. His recent publication 'The Nomadic Studio' is as much case study as it is art and artists’ book. It forms an energetic enquiry into the role of the artist studio within processes of re-development in cities today, and portrays the spirit of a transitional artist led commune. Its online companion 'The Nomadic Studio Directory' will map the trajectories of current and historic artist led spaces. Misery Connoisseur Magazine is a glossy art magazine that curates the visual and theoretical artwork of up to 30 artists and writers as art on the printed page, and from there expands into the exhibition space and the internet. Michael regularly collaborates with installation artist Claudia Djabbari on large-scale photographic works. www.thenomadicstudio.com / www.thenomadicstudio.net www.miseryconnoisseur.co.uk

“It’s now a reality”, Jens Hauser announced at the 2003 Biotech Art exhibition, “artists are in the labs. They are intentionally transgressing procedures of representation and metaphor, going beyond them to manipulate life itself. Biotechnology is no longer just a topic, but a tool, generally generating green fluorescent animals, wings for pigs and sculpture moulded in bioreactors or under the microscope, and using DNA itself as an artistic medium.” To challenge the validity of singular and fixed species at this “evolutionary crossroad” of genetically engineered mammals and organ transpeciation, Transgenic artists have intervened into biogenetic technology in roles first imagined by Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Through the microinjection of DNA with cells containing green fluorescent protein into a rabbit zygote, Eduardo Kac was able to genetically engineer GFK Bunny. Using living tissues, Zurr and Catts created ‘partial life sculptures’ at SymbioticA including frog-steaks and even flying pigs. In their collaboration with Stelarc, SymbioticA has also grown a 1Ž4 scale replica of his ear made out of human cartilage cells, implanted upon Stelarc’s arm in 2010. Following the launch of The Humane Genome Project, Patricia Piccinini chose silicon, acrylic and fibreglass, rather than human and non-human tissue to produce The Mutant Genome Project (TMGP) and Lifeforms with Unevolved Mutant Properties (LUMP) – genetically mutant babies engineered to look like pink-skinned tumours or, in her words, “a cute grotesquery”. As controversies raged over organ xenotransplantation and interspecies breeding, Piccinini created a human sow suckling a litter of 'pigren'. This year she produced a controversial skywhale, part-human, part-whale, able to take flight. As Kac explains, “Transgenic Art is, a new artistic terrain and art form based on the use of genetic engineering to transfer natural or synthetic genes to an organism – to create unique living beings.” Yet this can only be done, he stresses, “with great care … and above all, with a commitment to respect, nurture and love of the life thus created.” By focusing upon the bioethics of transhumanist genetics in relation to this Transgenic Art, this lecture will examine how these artists also engage in the nurturance and reciprocity of transgenetic and transpecies creations, rarely addressed in genetic biotechnologies, to consider how they are not rejected, unlike Dr. Frankenstein's "modern prometheus" but are incorporated into our posthuman evolutionary era. Fae (Fay) Brauer is Professor of Art and Visual Culture at the University of East London Art and Digital Industries. She is also Associate Professor in Art History and Cultural Theory at The University of New South Wales College of Fine Arts. Her books are Rivals and Conspirators: The Paris Salons and the Modern Art Centre (2013), Picturing Evolution and Extinction: Degeneration and Regeneration in Modern Visual Cultures (2013), The Art of Evolution: Darwin, Darwinisms and Visual Culture (2009) and Art, Sex and Eugenics, Corpus Delecti (2008). Presently she is preparing the books, Regenerating the Body: Art and Neo-Lamarckian Biocultures in Republican France; Symbiotic Species: The Art and Science of Neo-Lamarckian Evolution in the Solidarist Republic, Feminizing Muscle: Body Trouble in Visual Cultures, and Unmasking Masculinity: Imaging Hysterical Men in Republican France. She is also editing the books, Building the Body Beautiful: Modernisms, Vitalism and the Fitness Imperative; Bloody Bodies: The Art and Execution of Dissection, and Vision and Visionaries: Psychology, Occult Science and Symbolism.