Fast Forward is designed to promote and engage with women in photography across the globe. We want to provoke new debate and ensure that we are in the news and in the history books. There are millions of women in the world of photography and now is the time to arrest the process of forgetting that so frequently erases women from the burgeoning histories of photography and shed light on new ways of thinking, showing, discussing and distributing our work.

Project Manager: Maria Kapajeva
Research Assistant: Elizabeth Ransom

bookRoom is an experimental post-digital publishing platform, engaged with critical research, curating, and teaching for over 10 years, through a number of interrelated activities; Phd research, conferences, exhibitions, an artist books collection.

bookRoom has become a significant platform for experimentation, conceptualisation, materialisation, and dissemination of research on the interplay between electronic and print culture (2 anthologies/surveys of writings by key international practitioners and thinkers /the book is alive ! (2012), Code X (2015), one publication on working with archive and art activism / RISE WITH YOUR CLASS (2016) and 9 artists publications by UCA researchers and invited artists.

Postdigital’, ‘Publishing’ and ‘Platform’ are key concepts at the heart of all our projects.

Postdigital, as no longer considering digital technologies emerging or new but already deeply imbedded in our lives and in being human.

Publishing as in making public, sharing, disseminating original thinking and practice based research, in 3 formats; open access online, print form and public events.

Platform as a shared and collaborative network and virtual space for multidisciplinary modes of inquiry and production of new knowledge.

bookRoom has involved members of staff across UCA including: James Trafford (School of Communication Design), Simon Aeppli & Harry Whalley (School of Film, Media & Performing Arts) and Rob Mcdonald (School of Further Education).

In the 1980s curator Sandra Drew staged a series of ground­breaking exhibitions in locations around Canterbury. Drew Gallery Projects supported artists in the early stages of their careers, often experimenting with ‘new media’ which didn’t resemble what was broadly accepted as sculpture at the time (video, objects, photography, installation, performance and text.) The development of the archive here at UCA brings together original and related works from these ambitious and impactful shows, telling the story of how these exhibitions came about and explores their incredible legacy.

Drew Gallery Projects’ archive, now gifted to and digitised by UCA, provides an invaluable resource for subsequent generations of students, artists, curators and academics. Accompanying the archive, exhibitions in Canterbury, Folkestone and London during 2018-19, along with a publication celebrating Sandra Drew’s visionary legacy will also form part of the archive. Opening up Sandra Drew’s revolutionary curatorial spirit during the 80s and 90s work to a whole new generation.

Additional support from Georgie Scott, Gallery Curator (Kent).

Where is the Body? Is a University for the Creative Arts based research cluster, inaugurated by a symposium in June 2017. The cluster aims to explore and archive ideas and practices of UCA researchers, as well as establishing connections and dialogue outside the University, and primarily to expand and challenge prior expectations of the relationship of contemporary art (and surrounding cultural and discursive agencies) to the body.

The project originated from common interests of Adrian Lovis, Mary-lou Barratt and Vicky Smith, in recent tendencies for activities (walking, cycling, wild swimming, BASE jumping etc) recognised as leisure and life interests, being brought into the realm of art as means to explore issues of agency, as well as corporeal and sensory experience, both of the body in itself and in its interface with the world.

Flora Parrott joined in 2018, bringing insights from research that situates the body in a cross-disciplinary context between art and geography, emphasizing the cave as an exploratory site of and by the body.

The research cluster seeks to be an expanding resource, including annotated bibliographies and an archive of members’ knowledge base and practices. The spirit of sharing experience is core to the research cluster as a means to identifying routes of research including invitations to dialogue and creative collaboration.

Gestures of Resistance aims to respond to our current general mood of political anxiety and alienation by opening up socio-political critique in order to resist the palpable feeling of disempowerment. Rather than accepting the non-choice of the neoliberal setup of Greece or current right-wing politics both in America and Europe, the artists of Gestures of Resistance reflect on the current state of our political condition, our current housing situation, the state of education and art, liberalism, diversity and pluralism in this moment of historical crisis, whereby the state of today seems to have strong links to the state of the past.

2017 is a meaningful year, in that it marks the 60th anniversary of the Sputnik Shock, a moment of great significance in the establishment of the Cold War which resulted for many people in a struggle for liberation, political freedom and individual identity. 2016 marked significant political events: on the 23rd June 17.4 million British citizens voted to leave the European Union, killing the UK’s membership of the biggest and most prosperous trading bloc in the world. On the 8th November 2016, Donald Trump was elected the American President and the Republicans retained the Control of Congress and Senate. 27 years earlier, on the night of the 8th November 1989, the Berlin Wall came down.