Talk

Viv Albertine and Sue Webster in conversation

Festival of Ideas

Friday 14 September 2018 6 - 7pm

The Benjamin West Lecture Theatre, Burlington Gardens, Royal Academy of Arts

£16, £10 concessions

Priority booking for Friends of the RA opens on Tuesday 22 May 2018 at 10am. Booking opens to the public on Thursday 24 May 2018 at 10am.

Musician, filmmaker and author Viv Albertine and artist Sue Webster discuss how not conforming has shaped and influenced their professional and personal lives – both creatively and spiritually. Their conversation will be chaired by broadcaster and journalist Miranda Sawyer.

Viv Albertine has never shied away from challenges. The guitarist in The Slits – one of the most influential post-punk bands of its era – she studied film in the 1980s and directed for TV and the BFI during the 1980s and 1990s. In 2008, she returned to making music after an absence of nearly thirty years and launched her solo career. In 2013 she published a memoir, the best selling Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys, chronicling her time in The Slits and beyond. In 2015 she made her acting debut in Joanna Hogg’s 2015 film, Exhibition.

This year, Albertine published her second book, To Throw Away Unopened, which explores class, gender, parents, sibling rivalry and anger.

Sue Webster is an artist who established her reputation in the 1990s, working with her then-partner of 25 years, Tim Noble. Together they rose to prominence making abstract shadow sculptures assembled from seemingly random objects. These sculptures, when lit by a single light source transformed into representational self portraits. To make something from nothing became an important part of their DIY signature approach, influenced in part by British Punk. Alongside their shadow sculptures, they also took light sculpture into a different realm, creating signs which perpetually flash out messages of everlasting love, as well as hate.

Webster has curated various exhibitions, happenings and music events as well as guest editing several special editions of magazines. She is currently working on her second visual biography entitled, I Was a Teenage Banshee – My Life Through Siouxsie and the Banshees.

This event will be followed by a Q&A.

£16, £10 concessions

Priority booking for Friends of the RA opens on Tuesday 22 May 2018 at 10am. Booking opens to the public on Thursday 24 May 2018 at 10am.

DJ performance: Rachael Plays Disco

Free

Every Friday and Saturday evening throughout our Festival of Ideas we’ve invited some of our favourite DJs to takeover the Royal Academy, performing eclectic sets of dance, house, disco and electronica in Burlington Gardens' Wohl Entrance Hall.

Resident DJ at Rye Wax in Peckham – and lover of Italo and Eurodisco – Rachael Plays Disco is a regular at London club nights, performing an exciting mix of disco, funk and soul.