What's On at UWA

Be transported away from the everyday with our exciting line-up of Thursday 1.10pm, free lunchtime concerts. This year's revamped Lunchtime Concert series features the best of our students in solo and small ensemble performance.

In the late 1970s pioneering art teacher Steve Culley transformed the Fremantle Prison art program from traditional watercolour painting into a course where ‘ideas unfold in the mind and lock into the creator’s hands, as each pursues his own style of art.’ (Shackles prison newsletter, Spring 1984). Jimmy Pike developed his unique style as a pupil of Steve Cully’s whilst serving time at Fremantle Prison. In this evening talk, Fremantle Prison’s curatorial staff will speak about the history of the prison art program at Fremantle and explore the richness and diversity of the Fremantle Prison art collection, which encompasses graffiti, murals, painted furniture, and more traditional works on paper and canvas.

Evensong for All Saints' Day featuring Britten's Hymn to St Cecilia

Introit: Victoria O quam gloriosum

Responses: Smith

Canticles: Noble in b minor

Anthem: Britten Hymn to St Cecilia

Rare insights into the demolition of the iconic Perth Entertainment Centre and the intriguing ideas behind the design of new Perth Arena will be revealed at an exhibition at UWA's Australian Urban Design Research Centre for the month of November. As the Perth Arena begins to host its very first events, the exhibition, In My Beginning is My End, presents the first public glimpse of the secrets within its design while exploring the memory of its predecessor, which for 28 years provided Perth audiences with their first concerts, the bands that influenced them and dates that marked their lives. The exhibition including still and moving image photographs, video, animation, drawings and sculptural constructions brings together renowned West Australian artist, UWA lecturer Dr Jon Tarry and Australia’s most inventive and controversial architects, ARM Architecture with joint venture partners Cameron Chisholm & Nicol.

Free entry, weekdays throughout November 10.00am - 5.00pm

The School of Music invites you and your guests to join us as we celebrate the musical achievements of students from across UWA, who have chosen to broaden and enrich their degrees with music!

In a concert that will take you on journey from the heady lights of Broadway, to the carnival beats of Brazil and beyond. Under the direction of Lee Stanley and Aaron Hales, the Percussion Ensemble and Show Choir will entertain you in a performance showcasing their semester’s work.

Friday 2 November - 4:00- 5:00pm Callaway Music Auditorium Entry is Free

This imaginative and at times shocking play is one of the most celebrated of recent American plays, and the first by an Asian-American to win universal acclaim.

Bored with his routine posting in Beijing, and awkward with women, French diplomat Rene Gallimard is easy prey for the subtle, delicate charms of Song Liling, a Chinese opera star who personifies Gallimard’s fantasy vision of submissive, exotic oriental sexuality. She is to him, the ‘perfect woman,’ yet this Chinese butterfly of his passions is ultimately revealed to be far more than she seems. Gallimard begins a twenty-year affair with ‘her,’ during which time he passes along diplomatic secrets, an act which brings on his downfall and imprisonment.

Weaving into the play many parallels with, and ultimately ironic reversals of, Puccini’s opera, Madame Butterfly, Hwang explores the stereotypes that underlie, distort and threaten relations between Eastern and Western culture, and between men and women. It is powerful metaphor for the exploration of deep themes; the perception of Eastern culture by the West, and the persistent romanticism which clouds and inhibits that perception.

The multi-award-winning play is a brilliant theatrical tour de force, which, in its Broadway production, became an immediate critical and popular success.

The 19th annual graduate exhibition is a culmination of three to four years of study in the UWA Bachelor of Fine Arts course. Seventeen graduating students (including Honours students) each present a body of work exploring various contemporary concerns. From video animation to oil paintings, the depth and range of the work exhibited reflects the diversity of ideas the students have engaged with to communicate the complexities of our current existence.

Please note the Cullity Gallery will be open from 9am - 7pm for each day of this exhibition.

A public lecture by Dr Jeremy Hill, Head of Research, The British Museum.

Following the internationally successful British Museum & BBC Radio 4’s History of the World in 100 Objects, JD Hill offers a rare behind the scenes look at the making of this series. JD led the team who helped Neil MacGregor write this landmark BBC Radio 4 history. As well as looking at how the project grew, he will explore the challenges of writing history aimed at a very wide audience, and how telling this through objects is both harder and easier than writing more conventional history.

J D Hill PhD, MPhil, BA, FSA is Head of Research for The British Museum and is responsible for all the research at the Museum across a wide range of disciplines. From 2007 to 2010 he was the lead curator the British Museum/ BBC project A History of the World in 100 Objects. A visiting lecturer at the Centre for Maritime Archaeology at the University of Southampton, where he previously was based, he is also a member of the executive of the Nautical Archaeology Society. His own research has included studies of the archaeology of religion, social change and foodways in Iron Age and early Roman Britain. His current interests concentrate on interface between archaeology, world history and the sea.

SOLD OUT

There are two extreme positions traditionally taken with respect to the relationship between art and morality; one is autonomism, or aestheticism, which is the view that it is inappropriate to apply moral categories to artworks, and that only aesthetic categories are relevant, while at the other end of the scale is moralism, the view that aesthetic objects should be judged solely with respect to moral standards. Both autonomism and moralism are problematic, as they are based on inadequate conceptions of art and aesthetic value. I examine Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will and Jacque Callot’s Miseries of War both to illustrate the issue and to come to some conclusion about it.

Michael Levine is professor of philosophy at the University of Western Australia. He is author of the following books: Prospects for an Ethics of Architecture, with Bill Taylor (2011), Doing Philosophy, Watching Movies, with Damian Cox (2011), Politics Most Unusual: Violence, Sovereignty and Democracy in the “War on Terror,” with Damian Cox and Saul Newman (2009), Integrity and the Fragile Self, with Damian Cox and Marguerite LaCaze (2003), and Pantheism: A non-theistic concept of deity (1994). Levine has also edited Racism in Mind, with Tamas Pataki (2004), and The Analytic Freud: Philosophy and Psychoanalysis (2000).

Combining music, dance and story-telling, this performance will be an unforgettable opportunity to experience the riches of the Balinese performing arts.

Featuring some forty musicians and dancers from the Indonesian Institute of Arts, Denpasar.

Presented as a free ticketed event by the Consulate General of the Republic of Indonesia in partnership with The University of Western Australia.

Wednesday 14 November 2012, 12.30pm - 1.30pm, The Sunken Garden, UWA

RSVP essential: [email protected] / 08 6488 7836

There are two glaring omissions from orthodox models and theories of economic growth: the planet and the human families and communities which live within it. These models neglect the fact that the human economy is embedded in the biosphere which consists of living things, the products of living things and the necessary resources and conditions for living things to survive and thrive. This lecture will explore whether women have a special role to play in remedying this neglect.

The Australian Government has acknowledged the rise of Asia in the 21st century as the paradigm through which it will shape its relationship with its neighbours. The recent White Paper on Australia in the Asian Century by Dr Ken Henry has outlined a roadmap for greater engagement by strengthening economic, educational, cultural and personal links with the Asian region at all levels of Australian society and government.

A panel of experts would explore these ideas and beyond to answer the question: How does Australia sustain cooperative and mutually beneficial relations with its neighbours in the Asian Century.

The panel discussion commemorates the active role played by Mr Sadiq Bux (1930-2010) in building strong personal and commercial links between Australia and the Asian region.

The centre acknowledges the contribution of the Bux family for organising this seminar.

A Public Lecture by Louise Adler, CEO and Publisher-in-Chief, Melbourne University Publishing.

In 2010, Melbourne University Publishing (MUP) acquired the rights to a collection of titles by one of Australia’s most outstanding novelists, Christina Stead, including her masterpiece, 'The Man Who Loved Children', and her remarkable novels 'Letty Fox: Her Luck' and 'For Love Alone'.

Christina Stead, who grew up in Sydney but spent much of her life overseas, is renowned for her penetrating psychological characterisations and satirical wit. Amazingly, many of her works were not published in Australia until the 1960s and soon fell out of print, despite the critical praise that 'The Man Who Loved Children', in particular, received internationally.

In this talk Louise Adler will discuss MUP’s decision to bring Christina Stead’s remarkable literary oeuvre to a new audience.

Cost: free, but RSVP required via http://www.ias.uwa.edu.au/lectures/adler

The Institute of Advanced Studies at UWA and the Chair of Australian Literature are pleased to present this research symposium.

Starting out from Sydney, Christina Stead lived and worked across Europe, England and the United States, only returning to Australia at the end of her long life. Recently Stead has been the focus of renewed debates about the status of Australian writers in relation to the greater world of literature: does Stead belong to her native Australia or to the world republic of letters? Where does such a great cosmopolitan belong?

Underlying these debates is a set of cultural changes in literary proprietorship, in the ways writers, including their lives and works, are subject to ownership. What does the history of Christina Stead and her work tell us about the cultural domains, including the national, within which we read her life and work? How are Stead’s proliferating fictions of twentieth-century politics, society and sexual relations valued now?

This symposium will also explore the ‘unofficial’ or unrevealed aspects of literary proprietorship including ownership of and rights in archives, biography, letters, executorship, as well as the contradictions of critical work, such as introductions, essays and prefaces, designed to maximize the circulation of books and the understanding of fiction, and the restrictions of the copyright regimes, past and present. The symposium aims to progress our understanding of Christina Stead’s value in the global literary system.

Cost: Standard - $70, Students/Concession Card Holders - $65. Register online http://www.ias.uwa.edu.au/conf/stead

Join Chantal for this fascinating exploration of the tale of Little Red Riding Hood. By focusing on the trope of ‘the girl in the forest’, this paper suggests how and why the fairytale works to evoke the possibilities of a feminine agency and sensibility.

This public talk is part of broader Public Program of the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery and accompanies the current exhibition LOOK. LOOK AGAIN.

Visit the gallery website for more information.

In this talk, Donna Franklin - artist, curator and academic at Edith Cowan University - presents a survey of established women artists who engage with bio-politics, ethics, art and the life sciences, recently shown in Creatures of the Future Garden.

This talk is presented by SymbioticA, The Centre of Excellence in Biological Arts, UWA and is an accompanying event to the current exhibition LOOK. LOOK AGAIN, from the Cruthers Collection of Women's Art.

For more information on the broader public program at the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, visit the Gallery website.

The Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery presents a conversation with artists Danielle Freakley, Siné MacPherson and Carol Rudyard in discussion with Felicity Johnston, curator of the Cruthers Collection of Women's Art.

The artists discuss their work currently exhibited in LOOK. LOOK AGAIN - a unique survey exhibition of historic and contemporary works of art made by women in Australia - at the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery. This is a wonderful opportunity to meet the artists and learn more about their work.

Free to all.

This public event is part of the broader Public Program of the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery and accompanies the current exhibition LOOK. LOOK AGAIN.

Visit the gallery website for more information.

In this public talk, John Cruthers, curatorial advisor to the Cruthers Collection of Women's Art, provides a personal reflection on the collection and on the act of private collecting.

The Cruthers Collection of Women's Art is Australia's largest specialist collection of Women's Art with over 600 works that was donated to the University of Western Australia by Sir James and Lady Sheila Cruthers in 2007.

Over 130 works are currently displayed at the current exhibition titled LOOK. LOOK AGAIN, at the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery (20 October 2012 - 15 December 2012).

John will discuss the role of his mother Lady Sheila Cruthers, her relationships with young artists and her hopes for the Collection. He will also reveal some of his personal favourites within the Collection and the stories of their making or acquisition.

Mythology is the first solo exhibition of Tasmanian-based artist Anna Cocks. After completing a Bachelor of Fine Arts at UWA in 2008, Anna re-located to Hobart in 2010 to do Honours at the Tasmanian School of Art. This exhibition brings together a selection of 'stories' and images, mostly completed during that year, that speak of everyday experiences, encounters and relationships in a new environment. Anna is currently undertaking a studio-residency at CAST (Contemporary Art Space Tasmania) and working at MONA, the Museum of Old and New Art.

The exhibition will be open from 12-5pm on both days.

Join Stephen Scourfield as he takes you on a pictorial journey through his new novel As the River Runs, a powerful ode to one of Australia’s most stunning regions. In the Kimberley water is plentiful, but in Perth it’s precious, and political. When ex-greenie Dylan Ward takes a group of city pollies through the wild river country, their journey takes some unexpected turns.

As a novelist, photographer and travel editor of The West Australian, Stephen weaves stories and images together.

THINGS TO KNOW This talk runs for an hour with time for questions. Books will be available for sale and signing by the author.

Tickets $29 Concession available