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NEWSLETTER
FEBRUARY/MARCH 2020
   
             
             
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Dear friends and colleagues,

Coming soon to all good coffee shops and foyers near you is the spring edition of our What's On guide. Below is but a sample of the events and exhibitions you'll find inside to keep you entertained as the weather, possibly, swings to the agreeable.

That certainly didn't happen for Odysseus, as we discovered when we ventured in search of Troy at the British Museum last month. To recount the record numbers of you that turned up would 'demand a thousand tongues, a throat of brass and adamantine lungs.' Or an app that checks you in on our phones.

More benevolent than Poseidon, KQ partners spent February blowing issues out into the open – the BMJ published a special edition about racism in medicine – or addressing issues that we'd rather weren't blowing about in the open at all, like the coronavirus.

Whatever the weather, charities and community groups will be working to enrich the lives of local citizensIn March, at the Institute of Physics, we'll be celebrating this work with Community Champions, a community engagement showcase event designed to inspire local organisations and Knowledge Quarter partners to commune and give birth to new collaborations. 

If we can't see you there, but the word birth set you off, then come along to our free KQ Private View of the Foundling Museum's fascinating exhibition Portraying Pregnancy. Funnily enough, it happens to be our Exhibition of the Month below. 

With best wishes,

Knowledge Quarter Team

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KQ Events

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Community Champions 2020

10 March 15:00-17:00 at the Institute of Physics

Community Champions: Place will shine a light on the work that is bringing communities together, including community arts projects, climate change projects, event production, green space initiatives, place-making, and street festivals. It is an opportunity to celebrate organisations working in these areas, and showcase those projects that have been built and nurtured between Knowledge Quarter organisations and community partners.

Photo copyright Opah Cruz.

Book your place here

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KQ Conference Legacy Event: Debunking the Myth of Decolonisation

19 March 15:00-17:00 at the Institute of Physics

Museums, heritage organisations and governments are opening up the conversation around 'decolonising' collections. Our panel of experts from within our membership will explore the tough questions around repatriation and restitution of colonial objects and artefacts.

If you do not work for a Knowledge Quarter partner, but would like the opportunity to share your experience and knowledge in this field, please register your interest via email.

RSVP to attend

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What's On Spring 2020

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Watch out for the next edition of our printed What's On guide, featuring everything you need to let your mind to grow this spring in the Knowledge Quarter. Below is a selection of what's inside the new edition. 

You can visit our What's On site for the pick of the events in the Knowledge Quarter over March.

Find out what's on in March 

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Must-See Exhibitions

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Mobilise! Mobilise! The Firefighters of Holloway

Until 31 March at Islington Museum

Mobilise! Mobilise! celebrates the firefighters who serve at Holloway Fire Station on Hornsey Road, Islington. Artist Niki Gibbs has worked closely with crews to capture evocative scenes of their daily lives.

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Child Survivor’s Drawings of the Genocide in Darfur

Until 1 April, Wiener Holocaust Library

This exhibition features unique testament of child refugees to the ethnic cleansing perpetrated by Sudanese government forces and the Janjaweed militia against non-Arab Darfuri people since 2003. In 2009, the International Criminal Court accepted a number of these drawings as evidence of the crimes committed in Darfur.

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Tom of Finland: Love and Liberation

Opens 6 March at the House of Illustration

The UK’s first public exhibition dedicated solely to gay cultural icon Tom of Finland (born Touko Laaksonen) on the centenary of his birth. This timely exhibition celebrates the artist whose unique aesthetic and homoerotic visions had a profound impact on the likes of Queen and the Village People – despite living and working in a country where both homosexuality and pornography were illegal.

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Cut + Paste: Explore the Building Blocks of Life

Opens 18 March at the Francis Crick Institute

Explore the new pop-up exhibition at the Francis Crick Institute which asks the public some of the big questions around genome editing.

Looking for an interesting place to hold a meeting? The Francis Crick Institute is offering free meeting space for an hour, in exchange for your views of their new exhibition. Book your free meeting slot at the Crick today. Email engage@crick.ac.uk

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More Events

Night at the Vet College
11 March 17:30-22:00 – Royal Veterinary College

Fashion Law Professional Development Workshop
Knowledge Quarter Partners and newsletter subscribers get 10% discount. Call the Short Courses Office to make your booking, quoting that you are a member of the Knowledge Quarter. The number is 020 7514 7015.
12 March 10:00-16:00 – Central Saint Martins

Frame Rush 2020: A two-day festival celebrating the exciting intersections between dance and film
13 and 14 March – The Place

Turing Lecture: Provably beneficial AI with Professor Stuart Russell
24 March 19:00-21:00 – Alan Turing Institute

UCL Culture Late: Revolutionary Encounters
26 March 19:00-21:00 – UCL Art Museum

Bloomsbury Opera presents 'The Magic Flute'
26 and 28 March – Goodenough College

 

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News around the KQ

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Racism in Medicine

In February, the British Medical Journal released a broad special edition on racism in the UK's health services, reflecting the working lives of doctors from ethnic minority backgrounds, the healthcare experiences of ethnic minority patients, as well as highlighting systemic issues prevalent in medical training.

Image from www.bmj.com/racism-in-medicine

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Wellcome Trust Director Jeremy Farrar writes about the international response needed to tackle the Coronavirus.

City, University of London hosted the London Sustainability Conference 2020.
 

 

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Universal Music collaborate with CSM artist Ashton Attzs to design the Brit Awards after party.

British Library celebrate 10 years of its award-winning medieval Manuscripts Blog.

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Jobs and Opportunities in the KQ

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Exhibition of the Month

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Portraying Pregnancy: From Holbein to Social Media
Foundling Museum

Join the Knowledge Quarter Private View of the exhibition, Wednesday, 11 March, 8:30-10:00

The writer Rachel Cusk in her memoir of pregnancy and motherhood, A Life's Work, is memorably candid about her dread of giving birth and her unpreparedness for motherhood. These symptoms she attributes to a vow of silence among mothers, broken only with ominous elliptical remarks about pain, which range from ironic contempt at the word to the reassuring, "accept all the drugs they offer you". On becoming a mother, she finds parents are just as allusive about the end of freedom and sleep. Pregnancy, as experience, is something society has never been comfortable talking about.

Unsurprisingly, expressions of fear or anxiety are muted in the artworks on display at the Foundling Museum, where curator Karen Hearn has covered a brisk 500 years of portrayal, from the medieval fixation on Mary's unpricked purity, through to modern times, and the waters broken by feminist movements and social media.

Although we rarely see signs of stress or anxiety on the sitters, there is plenty of it in the societal forces at work behind the art. The exhibition opens your eyes to a coded language of fertility symbols and furtive gestures. Pregnancy is alluded to beneath dissembling dresses, a hand placed above the subjects bump. The result is that these paintings could be the breeding ground of gossip, secrecy's prattling spawn – who might have got her pregnant? And does the sitter really mean to point to her own fertility or another's infertility? At times the secret language has a political aspect: dynastic anxiety was rife in the age of an unwedded Elizabeth I, for example. Later, the glossy image of the heavily pregnant actor Demi Moore on the cover of Vanity Fair, and its subsequent spin-offs, is still less about pregnancy as an experience and more about empowerment in the face of a number of cultural anxieties, some around the perceived costs to the pregnant subject – costs to beauty, to athleticism, to career – and others to do with wider societal hang ups with the body. There are too many cultural anxieties to name here, and they are perfectly incubated in the exhibition space, so that you start to see pregnancy as a truly postmodern subject for any artist. Simply put, Portraying Pregnancy is the story of taboo, the taboo of life itself.

Patriarchy gave birth to this taboo. The fact that pregnancy has nearly always been portrayed by male artists contributes to the nearly always blank or serene expressions on the faces of the sitters. Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger (1561-1636), Hearn tells us, specialised in pregnancy portraiture, with an acute eye for fashion and decorum. One notable exception features in what is possibly the first self-portrait of a pregnant woman. The artist is Mary Beale (1633-1699), and gazing long enough at the audacity and defiance she has painted in her face will fill you with the self-belief needed to run a marathon, or build your own house, or single-handedly reverse climate change.

The womb-like intimacy of the exhibition space brings you eye to eye with the paintings on display. The most affecting encounter is with a care-free Princess Charlotte Augusta (1796-1817), pregnant with the child whose birth will be the death of her. In a cabinet besides the painting, like a mausoleum, is the same sky-blue sarafan dress she wears in her portrait. It's an extraordinary juxtaposition, and a devastating reminder of how fatal and frightful childbirth once was, whether it was painted into the faces of the sitters or not.

Join the Knowledge Quarter Private View of the exhibition, Wednesday, 11 March, 8:30-10:00

Foundling Museum, 40 Brunswick Square, London WC1N 1AZ

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  For more information please contact Jodie Eastwood
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