
Thursdays 12 April and 17 May
doors open 6pm for 6:30 start
At
The Future Laboratory
26 Elder Street
London E1 6BT
Tickets: £6
Our third series of Kitchen Conversations looks at the artistic possibilities to engage with the world around to offer another perspective on current events, history and politics. In times when television, Internet and social media are dominated by a stew of sensationalism, propaganda and reality TV and peppered by fake news offering an unbalanced diet, we are questioning what artists can bring to the table. Can artists reach out across the fence and speak to the non-converted?
Join us for debates over a glass of wine.
KC 06 Thursday 12 April: Speaking Across the Line
With Andrea Luka Zimmerman, Alisa Lebow, Andrew Hoskins and David Campany
Hosted by curator and writer Gareth Evans
The provocation for this discussion is the documentary Erase and Forget by artist Andrea Luka Zimmerman. The film is a compelling and unsettling portrait of Bo Gritz. Lt. Col. James Gordon ‘Bo’ Gritz – “the American Soldier” for the Commander-in-Chief of the Vietnam War. Bo Gritz is one of the most decorated combatants in US history.
Together with documentary filmmaker and scholar Alisa Lebow, writer and curator David Campany and sociologist Andrew Hoskins we will discuss the possibilities and difficulties of speaking across the divide and engaging with those on different sides of the political/social/ideological spectrum.
The discussion will be illustrated by clips from the film. The film is currently released in cinemas around the UK. Please check www.eraseandforget.com for information on screenings.
KC 07 Thursday 17 May: Dancing the Irish Border
With Mairead McClean and Lea Anderson
The provocation for this conversation is a new audio-visual installation Making Her Mark by Mairead McClean. The piece is currently in production and Mairead will share some work in progress material. The original idea was triggered by the Brexit vote and the ensuing issues around the Irish Border. Making Her Mark uses the poetics of performance to explore the concept of borders from multiple view points: from actual borders crossed, to imagined borders being constructed, to borders torn down, to new ones being drawn. Who draws the border? What is considered when it is being drawn? How are physical borders experienced?
Mairead is joined by choreographer Lea Anderson, a longstanding collaborator of The Wapping Project, who is also featured with a new piece of writing in our latest publication, To Step Across the Line.
The publication will be launched at the event. It includes contributions and new writing by Kapka Kassbova, Lea Anderson and Tara Bergin.
Kitchen Conversations London are presented in partnership and with generous support of The Future Laboratory
The Future Laboratory is one of the world’s most renowned and respected futures consultancies. A leader in trend forecasting, consumer insight and strategic innovation, we give clients the confidence to make the right decisions and investments to survive and thrive in the future. The Future Laboratory ethos is simple: to help businesses make the future happen.

Andrea Luka Zimmerman is the co-founder of the artists’ collectives Vision Machine and Fugitive Images and was the winner of the Artangel Open Award 2014 for the collaborative feature Cycle with Adrian Jackson (Cardboard Citizens). Recent exhibitions and projects include Civil Rites, Tyneside Cinema Gallery, Newcastle, UK, (2017/18) Common Ground, Spike Island, Bristol (2017), Real Estates (co-curated with David Roberts), PEER with LUX, London (2015). Andrea’s films have been nominated and shortlisted for the Grierson Award, the Aesthetica Art Prize, the Golden Orange and the Jarman Award, among other prizes. Andrea’s films include Erase and Forget (2017, 88mins) an inquiry into the nature of human conscience and the limits of deniability, which premiered at the 2017 Berlin Film Festival and in the UK at the London Film festival. Estate, a Reverie (2015, 83mins) tracks the passing of the Haggerston Estate in East London and the utopian promise of social housing it once offered, with a spirited celebration of extraordinary everyday humanity. Taskafa, Stories of the Street (2013, 66mins) explores resistance and co-existence through the lives of the street dogs of Istanbul and is voiced by John Berger.
Alisa Lebow is a documentary filmmaker, scholar, and writer, who teaches film studies at University of Sussex. She is known for her groundbreaking work on first person film and questions of ‘the political’ in documentary, most recently innovating in the area of practice-led research, with her interactive database documentary, Filming Revolution about filmmaking in Egypt since the revolution (www.filmingrevolution.org). Filming Revolution will soon be “published” as part of the new digital humanities initiative at Stanford University Press.
Andrew Hoskins is Interdisciplinary Research Professor in the College of Social Sciences at the University of Glasgow. His research connects multiple aspects of emergent digital society: media, memory, conflict, risk, security, and privacy. His latest book (with John Tulloch) is: Risk and Hyperconnectivity: Media and Memories of Neoliberalism (Oxford University Press, 2016) and his edited Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition will be published in August by Routledge. He is founding Editor-in-Chief of the Sage journal of Memory Studies and founding Co-Editor of the Palgrave Macmillan book series Memory Studies. His AHRC Research Leadership Fellowship with the British Army’s Historical Branch in Whitehall and The National Archives exposed the impact of cultural, technological, economic, and policy change on organizations, archivists, and records, and on the history of warfare (archivesofwar.com).
David Campany is a writer, curator and artist, working mainly with photography. David’s recent books include A Handful of Dust (2015), The Open Road: photography and the American road trip (2014), Walker Evans: the magazine work (2014), Gasoline (2013). He has written over two hundred essays for museums and monographic books, and contributes to Frieze, Aperture, Source and Tate magazine. Recent curatorial projects include The Still Point of the Turning World: Between Film and Photography, FoMu Antwerp, 2017; The Open Road: photography and the American road trip (various venues, USA, 2016-); A Handful Dust (Le Bal, Paris, 2015; Pratt Institute New York, 2016; the Whitechapel Gallery London, 2017; The California Museum of Photography, 2018; and Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 2018). For his writing, David has received the ICP Infinity Award, the Kraszna-Krausz Book Award, the Alice Award, a Deutscher Fotobuchpreis, and the Royal Photographic Society’s award for writing.
Mairéad McClean was born and grew up in Beragh, Co Tyrone, Northern Ireland and has lived and worked for the past 25 years in London. She is an award-winning filmmaker who has produced work around the themes of memory, identity and migration. Her recent piece No More, won the inaugural MAC International Art Prize in 2014 and was acquired for the National Collection at The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, through the Hennessy Art Fund. Recent exhibitions and screenings of her work include CCA Glasgow (2015), Whitechapel Gallery, London, (2016), The Carnegie Mellon International Film Festival: Faces of Conflict, Pittsburgh, USA, (2016), The Now and After Exhibition Video Art Festival and Exhibition, Fabrika, Moscow, (2017).
Lea Anderson is a director and choreographer born and based in London who has been making movement-based work since 1984. Lea trained at Central St Martin’s and Trinity Laban and received an honorary doctorate from Darting College of Arts in 2006. Lea is the founder and artistic director of The Cholmondeleys & The Featherstonehaughs dance companies, based in Bristol. Lea was awarded an MBE for services to dance in 2002. Lea was Regents Professor at UCLA in 2014, and is currently artist in residence at the Southbank Centre, London. Lea’s recent work includes Step by Step (2017), a commission by the British Council to create a large-scale, site-specific work on a pre-Incan burial site in Lima, Hand In Glove (2016) – a performed exhibition, at The V&A museum London and touring theatre production Ladies & Gentlemen (2017).