This May, the Belkin Art Gallery is pleased to be participating in the 2013 PWIAS International Roundtable Discussions through A Biocultural Hinge: Theorizing Affect and Emotion Across Disciplines and Speculative Cities.

Composer Dorothy Chang and director Adam Henderson create a re-imagining of Gertrude Stein’s For the Country Entirely. A Play in Letters, part of Stein’s experimental stream-of-consciousness writing series Word Portraits. The production features actors Kurt Evans, Lucia Frangione, Cara McDowell, and Alan Marriott, and musicians Mark Ferris and Domagov Ivanovic on violin, Marcus Takizawa on viola, and Rebecca Wenham on cello. This is the pilot episode of Adam Frank’s Radio Free Stein, a large-scale serial sound project that aims to render a number of Stein’s eighty plays into recorded dramatic and musical form.

A Biocultural Hinge: Theorizing Affect and Emotion Across Disciplines, organized by Adam Frank, UBC Department of English, and Shelly Rosenblum, UBC Belkin Art Gallery, explores questions surrounding the recent interest in the emotions, which has been evident across a wide range of disciplines such as philosophy, literary criticism, sociology, geography, history, anthropology, academic and clinical psychology, the neurosciences, and the visual and performing arts. For a full description of the project, click here.

Speculative Cities, a collaborative project between the Belkin Art Gallery and Emily Carr University of Art + Design, is designed to foster an international dialogue on the contemporary city, focusing on port cities and cities that have reinvented themselves in the past forty years, by bringing together architects, urban planners, artists, curators and scholars from Dubai and Panama City. For a full description of the project, click here.