In Conversation: Amalia Pica and Richard Taws

Free, in person talk. Arrivals from 6pm.

Venue: The Gallery, 70 Cowcross Street, London, EC1M 6EJ

Join artist Amalia Pica and art historian Richard Taws for a thought-provoking conversation exploring Pica’s multidisciplinary practice, which spans sculpture, installation, performance, and collaborative research. Known for her poetic investigations into language, communication and visual codes, Pica will reflect on key themes in her work, language, communication and community participation, invariably at the service of social protest. Among other works, we will discuss her recent projects developed through partnerships with primatologists and fieldwork in Nigeria and North America on tool use and gesture among great apes to probe the aesthetics, possibilities, technologies, and ethics of interspecies communication. This is an opportunity to hear Pica reflect on the poetic and political dimensions of communication—and the role of art in expanding how we listen to and understand the world around us.

An audience Q&A will be followed by drinks.

This event is part of the Art History Festival, organised by the Association for Art History.

Speaker Biography

Amalia Pica is a London-based artist whose work spans sculpture, installation, performance, and drawing, exploring communication, civic participation, and metaphor. Pica’s solo exhibitions include those at the Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen; Switzerland (2012); MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts (2013); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2013); Museo Tamayo de Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City (2013); Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2014); Kunstverein Freiburg (2016); and Centro de Arte Andaluz Contemporáneo (2019). She represented Argentina in the 54th Venice Biennale (2011) with Venn Diagrams (Under the Spotlight), a poetic reflection on banned educational tools under dictatorship. In 2016, she participated in One, No One and One Hundred Thousand at Kunsthalle Wien, a participatory exhibition challenging curatorial authority. Her work is held in major collections including Tate (London), MoMA and Guggenheim (NY), MACBA (Barcelona), Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes Neuquén (Argentina).

Richard Taws is Professor and Head of the Department of History of Art at University College London, where he specialises in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century visual culture. Much of his work has been on printed images in times of revolution, and on the intersection of art history with histories and theories of science, media, and technology. He is author of Time Machines: Telegraphic Images in Nineteenth-Century France (MIT Press, 2025) and The Politics of the Provisional: Art and Ephemera in Revolutionary France (Penn State University Press, 2013). As a member of the ‘Multigraph Collective’, he co-authored Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in the Era of Print Saturation (University of Chicago Press, 2018). The recipient of fellowships from the Getty, Bard Graduate Center, British Academy, Leverhulme Trust, and Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton, he was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2012. Richard’s writing has appeared in Grey Room, The Art Bulletin, Art History, Oxford Art Journal, Sculpture Journal, Perspective, Cabinet, Nonsite, Journal of Visual Culture, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, and the London Review of Books, among other places, and he is an editor of Oxford Art Journal.