Overview
A special screening of Judith Williamson Consumes Passionately in Southern California (1987), followed by a conversation with Williamson, author of Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising (1978), Consuming Passions: The Dynamics of Popular Culture (1986) and Deadline at Dawn: Film Criticism 1980-1990 (1993), and writer and academic Nicolas Helm-Grovas.
BIOGRAPHIES
Judith Williamson is a writer whose work across a range of media has pioneered the political analysis of visual and consumer culture. She has written for both academic and mainstream press, including as film critic for Time Out, City Limits and the New Statesman, and she initiated a column on popular culture for The Guardian in the 1990s. From 2007–17 she wrote a quarterly essay on contemporary advertising for Source magazine. Her 1983 film A Sign is a Fine Investment (BFI) traces the disappearance of work from advertising imagery. After opening at the ICA it was screened at the Chicago and Rotterdam Film Festivals and more recently was selected by John Akomfrah for ‘History is Now’ at the Hayward Gallery. Judith Williamson taught for many years at Middlesex University and is now Emeritus Professor of Cultural History at the University for the Creative Arts.
Nicolas Helm-Grovas is a Postdoctoral Fellow at ICI Berlin. Previously he was Lecturer in Film Studies at King’s College London. His book Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen: Towards Counter-cinema is forthcoming in the Historical Materialism book series published by Brill and Haymarket. His writing has appeared in publications such as Oxford Art Journal, Radical Philosophy, Trafic: Almanach de Cinéma, New Left Review: Sidecar, and in various edited collections. With Oliver Fuke he has organized several exhibitions related to Mulvey and Wollen’s work, most recently Intersections in Theory, Film and Art at Camera Austria in Graz in 2022. With Kodwo Eshun and Oliver Fuke he is currently editing a three-volume collection of writings by Peter Wollen
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