Visiting Artist’s Talk – Bergit Arends

For this week's Visiting Artist's Talk (VAT), we welcome Bergit Arends.

Bergit Arends is a curator and researcher. She creates and studies interdisciplinary curatorial and artistic processes, currently focussed on the environment and visual art.

Her recent writing considers the decolonising of natural history museums (Routledge, forthcoming) and plants in artistic practices (Jovis, forthcoming), and has featured in various publications, including Botanical Drift: Protagonists of the Invasive Herbarium (Sternberg Press, 2018). Her award-winning publication Chrystel Lebas. Field Studies: Walking Through Landscapes and Archives was published by Fw:Books in 2018.

Between 2003–13, Arends curated numerous contemporary art projects for the Natural History Museum in London, including: Galápagos (2012–2013); After Darwin: Contemporary Expressions (2009); Mark Dion: Systema Metropolis (2007); The Ship: The Art of Climate Change (2006); and Tania Kovats’ TREE (2009).

Recently, Arends worked in the Collection Care Research Department at Tate and she is now a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of History of Art at the University of Bristol. She holds an MA in Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art and studied Paper Conservation at Camberwell College of Arts (both London).

The Visiting Artist’s Talk (VAT) series hosts talks by an exciting range of arts practitioners from around the world every Monday afternoon from 14:00 to 15:30 during teaching weeks.

All of our talks are compulsory for our Fine Art students but open to anyone else who would like to join us.

For more information, email Nick Thurston.

Image

Klara Hobza, Animaloculomat (2017). Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin. Photo: Carola Radke.