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.

Architect Charles Renfro, a partner of the New York based architectural firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro, will speak about the importance of the arts within considerations of city building and design, and urban planning. DS+R are celebrated for the work they have done in the cultural sector by integrating architecture, visual art, and the performing arts to produce landmark buildings such as Wooster Group Theatre, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Clyfford Still Museum, Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Munch and Stenersen Museum, and Julliard School. The lecture is presented in partnership with Emily Carr University of Art + Design.

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.