To accompany the exhibition Back to the Future in the Lamb Gallery, this special event features three short talks exploring aspects of 1950s science fiction cinema and literature.

Dr Keith Williams (Humanities) will give a talk on H G Wells, Hollywood and the Cold War. He will consider how Hollywood directors ‘updated’ the themes of Wells’s best-known science fictions to reflect the political context of America in the 1950s and negotiate McCarthyism. Are Bryon Haskin’s The War of the Worlds (1953) and George Pal’s The Time Machine (1960) anything more than anti-Communist propaganda or do the original anti-colonial and social critiques of these 1890s novels show through and produce more ambiguous messages?

Rachel Harrison (Humanities) will talk on 1950s Feminist SF: The Housewife Heroines in Space. She will be looking at who was writing feminist SF in the US in the1950s, what the driving force for this mode of writing was in terms of ongoing social and political movements, some key identifiers of this period of feminist SF (specifically the heroines), and how this period of feminist SF paved the way for the more widely recognised surge in feminist fiction in the following decades.

Matthew Jarron (Museums) will speak on The Road to the Stars: Soviet Science Fiction Cinema. The USSR took an early lead in the post-war space race and this talk will look at three key films of the 1950s to see how Soviet cinema reflected this, painting a very different picture to the paranoid American films discussed earlier by Keith.

Please meet in the Lamb Gallery for an informal viewing of the exhibition before we move to room T9 (second floor) for the talks.

A reading event exploring infection, intimacy, species and metaphor by Daisy Lafarge based on her 2023 book Lovebug.
 

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Biography

Daisy Lafarge is a writer based in Glasgow. She is the author of the novel Paul (Granta 2021), which was a New York Times Editor’s Choice, and the poetry collection Life Without Air (Granta 2020), which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Lovebug, a book on the poetics of infection, is published by Peninsula Press in 2023.

About the exhibition

The Scale of Things is a group exhibition of three moving image works that consider relations between humans and non-humans forming an exploration through history, intimacy and spirituality. Presenting the Scottish premiere of Grace Ndiritu’s Becoming Plant (2022), alongside Saodat Ismailova’s The Haunted (2017), and on its fiftieth anniversary, Margaret Tait’s Aerial (1974).

These works are brought together by a desire to unsettle how we imagine and see ourselves as part of nature. Understanding the recurring need for intimacy, to feel a connection that is commeasurable with our ability to impact and control, the exhibition approaches desire itself; the desire to plunge our bodies deep into the earth and transcend the bounded individualism of being ‘human.’

Co-curated by Sophia Yadong Hao (Cooper Gallery, DJCAD) and Professor Sarah Perks (Teesside University).

Read more on our exhibition page.
 

Access

Cooper Gallery is located to the right side of the DJCAD buildings on Perth Road. The entrance is via double doors which face onto a car park.

The gallery is on two floors. Ground floor has ramped access. First floor is accessible by an internal lift and six steps with a handrail. Wheelchair access is via a stairclimber. Please email in advance if you require lift or stairclimber access.

First floor is also accessible via 24 steps. Two flights of 12 steps with handrails are separated by a landing.

Exhibition video is subtitled and captioned in English. Audio will be played aloud via speakers. Seating is provided and/or additional seating available, please ask an invigilator. 

For all enquiries please email: [email protected]

Toilets

The ground floor has a wheelchair accessible toilet. The toilet is gender neutral.

Interpretation

Large print versions of the exhibition information handout are available, please ask our Guides. If you require alternative formats for material in exhibitions please email or ask our Guides.

Climate change is causing rapid changes in the mountain cryosphere, including the recession and thinning of glaciers, and the warming and thawing of permafrost. These responses make mountain environments more unstable, raising the prospect of hazardous events that threaten people and infrastructure. Most notable among these are (1) glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs), where glacier recession leads to the development of meltwater lakes that then burst catastrophically, and (2) mass movements, such as rock and ice avalanches and debris flows, where valley slopes become less stable as a consequence of glacier thinning and/or permafrost thaw. We’ll explore some selected case studies in this talk that illustrate hazards in the rapidly changing mountain cryosphere, and some of the steps we are taking to understand these problems with a view to developing solutions.

Please contact [email protected] if you wish to join online.

Location:

Geography Junior Lab, 1st Floor Tower Extension