King’s Arts & Humanities Festival (12 – 23 October 2015)

This year’s Art & Humanities Festival at King’s College London, 12 – 23 October 2014, explores the theme ‘fabrication’. The suggestiveness of fabrication takes us to the core of the arts and humanities. The original meaning of ‘fabricate’ is ‘to make anything that requires skill’, in its sense of making, fabrication covers all forms of creation, fashioning, construction, manufacture. Textile fabric is integral to our material culture, that which we use for clothing, fashion, domestic interiors. But language too is textile: our word ‘text’ comes from the Latin verb for weaving. We fabricate our own texts, studying how the tissue of language is woven together.

We speak of the fabric of the built environment; or of other objects we have created; but also of the fabric of our bodies, and, more metaphorically, of the fabric of society, and of knowledge. But fabrication also carries a more troubling suggestion of how things might be made up: not just invented or imagined, but possibly falsified or forged. Here it covers a range of art-forms operating through illusion, from poetry to fiction to drama, but it also takes in psychology and law: patients confabulating, and witnesses giving false evidence.

Director of the Arts & Humanities Research Institute and Director of the Festival, Professor Max Saunders, commented:

“It captures the critical attitude universities bring to research on texts, artworks or any other material objects. In trying to understand how and why they were made, we also question the reality of the worlds they bring into being…”

The Festival promises to be exciting, thought-provoking and above all, entertaining, with something for everyone. A range of events take place across the Festival, including exhibitions, performances, lectures, readings, roundtables, debates, film screenings, Q&A sessions and guided tours. The vast majority of events are free and all are open to the public.

Highlights of the Festival include:

Resilience, Resistance & Research – Wednesday 14th October
A panel discussion on resilience, the arts, the built environment and contemporary research practices in the arts and humanities. Bringing together leading artist David Cross, architect and architectural historian Jonathan Michael Hill, and art historian and theorist Dr Peg Rawes, this event explores how innovations in research training and practice are informed by ideas about resilience, resistance and making in contemporary arts and architectural theory and practice.

Fabricating Islands – Thursday 15th October
This panel discussion will unravel the complex and fascinating history of the Madras check, a fabric that travelled across the oceans in the colonial period to help fashion national identities in places far removed from the place of their production. What can Madras check reveal to us about British and French imperial rivalry? What identity work does this fabric now do, far removed from its place of production? Does Madras still travel from India to the Caribbean today?

Autobiography & Gaming – Wednesday 21st October
An interactive autobiography & gaming workshop. Can digital technology illuminate the stories we tell about ourselves? Led by Ego-Media researchers, this workshop will use Twine, a tool for creating hypertext games and interactive fictions, to explore the fabrication of autobiographical narratives.

Click here to learn more about this year’s festival.