10 October 2022
Monday 8pm, £4
The Pig, 37 White Rock, Hastings TN34 1JL

Of the talk Ben writes “This talk is about a book project I’m working on about art, cultural memory and the early UK rave scene. It looks at the different meanings that have been assigned to Acid House and Rave during the twenty-five years that followed, from the 1994 Criminal Justice Act to the thirtieth anniversary of the ‘Second Summer of Love’ in 2019, tracing an idiosyncratic history of Britain after Thatcher.

“Work by Vinca Peterson, Jeremy Deller, Jason Evans, Laura Oldfield-Ford, Mark Leckey, Molly McIndoe and Stuart Griffiths situate diverse cultural and political phenomena—free festivals, Northern Soul, the miner’s strike; New Labour, Brexit, ‘the End of History’; the 2008 Financial Crash, austerity, the resurgent left of Corbynism—within the orbit of rave, its effects, and its histories.

“The talk is also about a desire for the potential futures rave once promised: ‘Acid Communist’ visions of collective joy that may yet come to fruition.”

Ben Burbridge is a writer, curator and academic. He is Professor of Visual Culture and Head of the Department of Art History at The University of Sussex. A former editor of Photoworks magazine, his publications include Revelations: Experiments in Photography (MACK 2015), Photography Reframed: New Visions in Photographic Culture (I.B.Taurus 2018) and Photography After Capitalism (Goldsmiths Press 2020).

Image: © Jason Evans, Nobody is in the Place, 2010

Information: Prof. Ben Burbridge at Sussex University
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