16-20 Sept 2024: [Researcher training] Academic Filmmaking course (with DRMC)
This week-long course in non-extractive filmmaking, led by filmmaker and educator Jigar Ganatra, covered the skills needed by researchers to devise, script, shoot, and edit high-quality ethically-sound films, with appropriate consideration to the subjects and materials featuring in these films (Durham Research Methods Centre in conjunction with the Centre for Visual Arts and Culture)
26 Sept 2024: [Workshop] CVAC Visual Methods: Video essays (Joint CVAC-BFI)
This BFI (British Film Institute)-Durham Centre for Visual Arts and Culture (CVAC) collaborative full-day workshop for academics, delivered by film Journalist and video essayist Leigh Singer, explored how video essays can be used to communicate compelling research stories, brought to life on screen!
02 Oct 2024: [Seminar] Prof Elizabeth Edwards (De Montfort University, Leicester) (with CNCS): The large microhistory of a small book: the Reverend Thomas Perkins' Handbook of Gothic Architecture for Photographers (1897)
07 Oct 2024: CVAC Welcome and Programme Launch
23 Oct 2024: [Masterclass] Prof Ron Dole (Florida State University, USA) (with History): Science Through the Lens: Historical Photographs, Unexpected Narratives, and the Reframing of American Science
A masterclass on using photographs in historical research with Professor Ron Doel (Florida State University), surveying the use of images in 19th century media, along with associated stories and interpretations, and touching into the challenge of likely available materials for researchers writing the history of science in the 21st century.
05 Nov 2024: [Seminar] Dr Tommaso Sabbatini (University of Bristol) (with Music): Féerie and the Sound of Nineteenth-Century Parisian Commercial Theatre
A seminar to reveal the magic of the 'féerie', the French fairy play which was a once ubiquitous genre analogous in some respects to the English Christmas pantomime. With music historian Dr Tommaso Sabbatini (University of Bristol).
20 Nov 2024: [Workshop] Dr Stuart James (Durham University): Digital Twins: Understanding 3D images, and thinking of their methods of creation and reuse
This fascinating and practical workshop covered creating a digital replica of an existing object; suitable for people without any background in computer science, as well as providing worthwhile content for computing specialists.
28 Nov 2024: [Seminar] Oksana Barshynova (art curator, National Art Museum of Ukraine; NAMU, Kyiv) (with the IAS): Ukrainian Avant-Garde: Main Centres, Leading Artists, Key Concepts
This Institute of Advanced Study (IAS) and the Durham Centre for Visual Arts and Culture (CVAC) seminar with Ukrainian art curator Oksana Barshynova (National Art Museum of Ukraine; NAMU, Kyiv), provided insights into the Ukranian Avant Garde. Hosted as part of the IAS Project 'Looking Back to Move Forward: History, Recovery, and Sustainability in Understanding the War in Ukraine on a Global Scale’.
24 Jan 2025: [Seminar] Dr Kay Dickinson (University of Glasgow): Stand-ins and Extras: exploiting Migration's Precarity
Dr Kay Dickinson (University of Glasgow) shared her research revealing how displaced persons fleeing from nations were it can be tricky or dangerous to shoot film productions, e.g. Pakistan, or Iraq, are often drawn into working as underpaid extras and 'local' crew on big budget film productions in their destination locations, which are being used as a substitute for these migrants' home countries.
12 Feb 2025: [Seminar] Dr Vladimír Pažitka (Leeds University) (with Geography): Atlas of Finance: Mapping the Global story of Money
Dr Vladimír Pažitka shared his experience as one of the authors of the remarkable 'Atlas of Finance' - a tour de force beyond data visualisation into the extraordinary, hidden story of money (one of the most compelling stories ever told!!) and its various exploits and shifting forms and identities through time. The seminar explored both some unexpected twists and turns in the story, and the challenges and breakthroughs for the team in seeking to render this epic tale into graphic forms which map the journey of this idea through space and time.
05 Mar 2025: [Book launch and round table discussion] Dr Tom Allbeson (Cardiff University), Dr Pippa Oldfield (Teesside University) and Prof Jolyon Mitchell (University of Edinburgh ) (With St John’s College): 'Picturing Peace: Photography, Conflict Transformation, and Peacebuilding’
Can images help us imagine peace in a world plagued by war? This evening with Dr Tom Allbeson, Dr Pippa Oldfield & Prof Jolyon Mitchell, co-editors of 'Picturing Peace: Photography, Conflict Transformation, and Peacebuilding', explored this question together with contributors Prof Jonathan Long (Durham), and Dr Jennifer Wallace (Cambridge). Their wide-ranging discussion focussed on imagery's power in proposing, creating, visualising and sustaining peace.
13 Mar 2025: [Round table discussion] Dr Deepali Yadav (Banaras Hindu University) in conversation with Durham colleagues Dilshaad Hossain (Anthropology), Prof. Nayanika Mookherjee (Anthropology), Prof. Christina Riggs (History) and Rhodri Sheldrake Davies (MLAC Spanish). Political Cartoons and Visual Satire: Interdisciplinary Perspectives
This discussion of cartoons and other graphic arts across times and cultures explored how the use of the visual, and in particular visual humour, has intersected with histories of resistance, rights, and social critique. The conversation explored how historic and contemporary media have used these images to advance anti-colonial and other political ideas, along with the methodologies that researchers have found helpful when studying these materials.
07 May 2025: [Symposium day] North East Universities Screens Network (NEUSN) Research Sandpit
This gathering of colleagues from across our region's five universities, engaged in screen production and screen studies brought practice-based research into dialogue with theoretical, critical and historical research. The sandpit focussed on three themes: Industry-facing research (e.g. management and policy, sustainability, EDI, investment and entrepreneurship); ‘Cinematic peripheries’ - screen practices that have conventionally been marginalised within the academy or industry (e.g. genres, national /regional cinemas, cutting-edge and experimental filmmakers); and 'Beyond film and TV' - screen culture in the expanded field.
08 May 2025: [Seminar] Sayat Nova Outtakes: Using Archival Film Elements to Re-evaluate Sergei Parajanov’s The Colour of Pomegranates (1969)
In this seminar, writer, curator and filmmaker Daniel Bird shared rare insights into the filmmaking process during the Soviet era, via the 'lens' of Sergei Parajanov’s The Colour of Pomegranates. This film was reedited by Sergei Yutkevich at the order of the USSR State Committee for Cinema, banned when its director was sentenced to the Dnipropetrovsk labour camp, re-emerging after the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Latterly, the discovery in Armenia of ~100 film cans containing fragments of 35mm original camera negatives, including outtakes, have enabled both the preservation and contextualised study of the film’s images and troubled production history.
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