Speakers

Etel Adnan's career spans several decades and encompasses a wide range of media --- including painting, drawing, tapestry, film, ceramics, and leporello artist books --- as it does traditions and locations. Adnan was first an author of poetry and prose, often addressing and protesting against the turmoil of the Vietnam War and the Lebanese Civil War. Informing her writing and later her artwork as well, was the landscape, its own history and her emotional and physical response to it. For Adnan, the landscape is mingled with memory, especially a sentiment of displacement, as she was born and raised in Lebanon, but has lived, studied, and worked in France and California throughout her life.

In 2012, Adnan was included in Documenta (13) in Germany. Since then, numerous museums have presented solo exhibitions of the artist's work, including Mudam Luxembourg -- Musée d'art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg City (2019); Aspen Museum of Art, Aspen, Colorado (2019); SFMoMA, California (2018); Zentrum Paul Klee, Switzerland (2018); MASS MoCA, Massachusetts (2018); Institute du Monde Arabe, France (2017); the Serpentine Gallery, England (2016); Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Switzerland (2016); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Ireland (2015); Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Austria (2014-2015); and Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Qatar (2014). Adnan's work is included in major public collections such as the British Museum, England; Centre Pompidou, France; Institut du Monde Arabe, France; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; M+, Hong Kong, China; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, Tunisia; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.  Adnan's work is included in major public collections such as the British Museum, England; Centre Pompidou, France; Institut du Monde Arabe, France; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; M+, Hong Kong, China; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, Tunisia; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Adnan was born in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1925. She currently lives and works in Paris, France.

Cassius Ashcroft (Articulation 2021 London Finalist): Cassius took part at the online event hosted by The Lightbox and went through to the London Final hosted by Clare College, Cambridge. He spoke on Andy Goldsworthy and represented Ibstock School and is currently studying Fine Art, History of Art, and Government and Politics for his A Levels.

Femi Themen (Articulation 2021 Grand Finalist): Femi delivered her presentation on Kwame Akoto-Bamfo's Faux Reedom at one of the first ever online Regional Finals hosted by Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, going on to the Grand Final hosted -- also online -- by the National Gallery. Femi represented King Edward VI Camp Hill School for Girls and is currently in her last year of sixth form and will do an Art and Design Foundation course at Central Saint Martins starting in the autumn term 2021.

David Batchelor is an artist and writer based in London. He was born in Dundee, Scotland in 1955. He studied Fine Art at Trent Polytechnic, Nottingham (1975-1978), and Cultural Theory at Birmingham University (1978-1980).

David's work comprises three-dimensional structures, photographs, paintings and drawings, and mostly relates to a long-term interest in colour and urbanism. He has exhibited widely in the UK, continental Europe, the Americas and, more recently, the Middle East and Asia. Recent exhibitions include 'Chromatology', Ab-Anbar Gallery, Tehran (2017); 'Reef', Handel Street Projects, London (2016); 'Monochrome Archive 1997-2015', Whitechapel Gallery, London (2015); 'Flatlands', Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh and Spike Island, Bristol (2013-14); 'Light Show' (2013-16), Hayward Gallery, London, MAC Sydney, Sharjah Art Foundation and MAC Santiago; 'Chromophilia: 1995-2010', Paço Imperial, Rio de Janeiro (2010); and 'Color Chart', Museum of Modern Art, New York (2008) and Tate Liverpool (2009)

Chromophobia, Batchelor's book on colour and the fear of colour in the West, was published by Reaktion Books, London (2000), and is now available in eight languages. His most recent book, The Luminous and the Grey (2014), is also published by Reaktion. Colour (2008), an anthology of writings on colour from 1850 to the present, edited by Batchelor, is published by Whitechapel, London and MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. His book of photographs, Found Monochromes: vol.1, nos.1-250 (2010), is published by Ridinghouse, London; his suite of drawings, The October Colouring-In Book (2015), is published by Common-Editions, London.

Ashley Bickerton (b. 1959, Barbados, West Indies; lives and works in Bali, Indonesia) was an original member of a group of artists known as Neo-Geo, which emerged in New York during the 1980s. In 1993, he left New York for Bali, Indonesia, where his work took on a distinct tropical exoticism often in sharp contrast to his Neo-Geo work, which was an abstract and geometric exploration of consumerism and industrialisation. However, Bickerton’s investigation of materiality remained a consistent thread throughout his practice. Often blurring the boundaries between media, genre, and subject (photography and sculpture; portraiture and landscape; realism and fantasy), he challenges the parameters of art making, calling into question the value and significance of the art object itself.

Bickerton received his BFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 1982 and continued his education in the independent studies program at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Solo shows of his work have been organized at Newport Street Gallery, London (2017); The FLAG Art Foundation, New York (2017); and Palacete del Embarcadero, Autoridad Portuaria de Santander, Spain (1997).

Independent documentary filmmaker Michael Blackwood has directed and produced more than 150 films about art and culture. Over the course of his career, Blackwood has realised a body of work dedicated to the faithful recording of the lives and creative processes of leading contemporary artists, architects and other cultural figures in the fields of music, dance, philosophy and science in the 20^th^ and 21^st^ centuries.

Blackwood's films are characterised by a direct, anecdotal reportage fostered by the filmmaker's policy of minimal intervention.  Driven by an urgent concern to capture and preserve the true voices of his subjects, Blackwood's objective was to collect a rich documentation that would educate his audiences and promote an unfiltered understanding of contemporary art and its protagonists.

Gregg Bordowitz is a writer, AIDS activist, and film and videomaker. His work, including Fast Trip, Long Drop (1993) and Habit (2001), documents his personal experiences of testing positive and living with HIV within the context of a personal and global crisis. His films, including A Cloud in Trousers (1995) and The Suicide (1996), have been widely shown in festivals, museums, movie theaters, and broadcast internationally. His work was most recently the subject of a career retrospective titled 'Gregg Bordowitz: I Want to Be Well', opened at the Cooley Art Gallery of Reed College, Portland, Oregon, Fall 2018; and the retrospective is traveling to the Art Institute of Chicago, April 4 through July 14, 2019.

His writings are collected in The AIDS Crisis is Ridiculous and Other Writings: 1986-2003. For this book, Bordowitz received the 2006 Frank Jewitt Mather Award from the College Art Association. His book General Idea: *Imagevirus *was published in 2010.

Bordowitz delivered Testing Some Beliefs, an improvisational lecture, at Iceberg Projects (Chicago), Murray Guy (New York), Temple Gallery (Philadelphia), and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (Texas). He wrote and directed Sex Mitigating Death: On Discourse and Drives: A Meditative Poem, presented March 18th, 2011, at the Tate Modern, London. He also directed and wrote an opera titled The History of Sexuality Volume One By Michel Foucault: An Opera, which premiered at Tanzquartier Wien, Austria.

He is Director of the Low Residency MFA program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and is on the faculty of the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.

Bordowitz has received a Rockefeller Intercultural Arts Fellowship and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, among other grants and awards.

Ben Tufnell (b. 1969) is a curator and writer. He was previously a curator at Tate, Director of Exhibitions at Haunch of Venison, and is currently a Director of Parafin, an independent gallery in London. Tufnell has published widely and his books include Land Art (Tate Publishing, 2006) and Frank Stella: Connections (Hatje Cantz, 2012). In 2013-14 he co-curated the Arts Council Collection touring exhibition Uncommon Ground: Land Art in Britain 1967-79, which travelled to four UK museums. As an independent curator and writer Tufnell has collaborated with many international museums including the National Museums and Galleries of Wales, Cardiff, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Henry Moore Institute, Queensland Art Gallery, South African National Gallery, and MUAC in Mexico City, amongst others. His most recent book is In Land: Writings Around Land Art and Its Legacies (2019).Brian Clarke, painter and architectural artist, was born in Oldham, Lancashire, in 1953, and is the most celebrated stained glass artist in the world today.

A lifelong exponent of the integration of art and architecture, Clarke's commitment to total art has developed into a Renaissance engagement with multiple media -- from painting, sculpture, ceramics, mosaic, tapestry, jewellery and furniture, to sets for opera, the ballet, and stadia. Practising in secular and sacred spaces, his architectural collaborations include work with Zaha Hadid, Norman Foster, Arata Isozaki, Oscar Niemeyer, I. M. Pei, Future Systems and other leading figures of Modern and contemporary architecture, creating stained glass designs and art installations for hundreds of projects worldwide.

His practice in architectural and autonomous stained glass, often on a monumental scale, has led to successive innovation and invention in the fabrication of the medium and, through the production of leadless stained glass and the creation of sculptural stained glass works made primarily or wholly of lead, he has radically stretched the boundaries of what the medium can do and express.

Major works include the Pyramid of Peace, Kazakhstan; Victoria Quarter Leeds, the largest stained glass roof in Europe; the Hôtel du département des Bouches-du-Rhône (Le Grand Bleu), Marseilles; the Royal Mosque of King Khalid International Airport, Riyadh; the 13th century Cistercian Abbaye de la Fille-Dieu, Romont; Buxton Thermal Baths' Cavendish Arcade; the Al Faisaliyah Center, Riyadh; Pfizer World Headquarters, Manhattan; Beaverbrook Coach House and Spa at Cherkeley Court; the Stamford Cone, Connecticut; and NorteShopping, Rio de Janeiro. Stage sets and designs for theatre include designs for two productions of Wayne Eagling's Rudolf Nureyev-tribute 'The Ruins of Time', with the Dutch National Ballet; Paul McCartney's World Tour (1989-90) and The New World Tour (1993); and a production of the Robert Ward opera 'The Crucible', directed by Hugh Hudson.

Clarke is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects; Fellow, Trustee, and Council member of the Winston Churchill Memorial Trust; former Visiting Professor of Architectural Art at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London; former trustee and Chairman of the Architecture Foundation; Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts; Honorary Liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Glaziers and Painters of Glass; Hon. Doctor of Law, University of Huddersfield; Doctor of Humane Letters, Virginia Theological Seminary; former member of the Design Review Committee for the Commission of Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE);  Governor of the Capital City Academy Trust; Sole Executor and Chairman of the Estate of Francis Bacon; Trustee and Chairman of the Zaha Hadid Foundation.