Cluster Contemporary fair will highlight contemporary visual art practices including all mediums from painting, sculpture, performance, sound and new media. The 2022 fair entitled Pandemonium & Order will give young artists from around the world a platform to express their views on the new world order as it emerges from the chaos and ruins of the old world. Based on the concept that the ideology and global socio-economic structures of our current world order are profoundly unsustainable, Cluster Contemporary wants to champion a new generation of visual artists that explore different prospective realities and break the norms and stigmas defining contemporary culture and ideology.

The art fair will feature individuals and collectives that create experimental digital and audio-visual work, inviting our audience to completely immerse themselves in another reality - a reality for reflection, escape and resurrection. We want to encourage emerging contemporary artists from around the world to use Cluster Contemporary as a framework to experiment freely, push boundaries and engage with contemporary art as a means of survival, expression, reflection and an important tool to collectively shape the present and future of our shared universe.

THE VENUE

OXO Tower Wharf

A vast, untouched four-storey building, The Oxo Tower is a blank canvas with tremendous scope for exhibitions and events. It is a prominent building on the south bank of the River Thames in London. Originally constructed as a power station and then acquired by the Liebig Extract of Meat Company, manufacturers of the Oxo beef stock cubes - which gave its iconic window feature.

At the heart of a thriving neighbourhood with shops, design studios, galleries, restaurants, bars and a range of community programmes and activities - an estimated 300,000 people pass through the riverfront walk every day. It’s on London’s prime cultural trail between the Southbank Centre, Hayward Gallery and Tate Modern.

Opening Night: 3rd Nov | 5:30pm - 8:30pm

Working Hours: 4th - 6th Nov| 11am - 6pm

Find out more about the Fair here:

www.cluster-london.com | director@cluster-london.com | +44 7808 659141

Engineering artificial growing environments so that food can be produced close to the city centre

About this event
Speaker: Richard Ballard - Co-Founder and Farmer-in-Chief, Zero Carbon Farms

Richard Ballard started an agricultural revolution along with business partner Steven Dring in the form of Growing Underground. Located 100ft under the streets of London in disused WW2 Air Raid Shelter, this subterranean urban farm sustainably produces micro-greens and baby leaf using the latest LED technology. The duo are now delivering fresh hyper-local produce to retailers and the London wholesale markets.

Sustainably feeding the city from within the city, Richard is obsessed by all things green tech and the future of cities. In his talk he will explain how the process works and how yields can increase multiple times by optimising the growing environment.

From pigeons to arctic terns to hummingbirds, birds evoke a whole range of emotions in us. Ornithologist Tim Birkhead tells us the stories

About this event
This is a hybrid event - both in person and online. The lecture inhouse will be followed by a brief wine reception in the library. Please book the right ticket!

Since the dawn of human history, birds have stirred our imagination, inspiring and challenging our ideas about science, faith, art and philosophy. Looking to the skies above, we have variously worshipped birds as gods, hunted them for sustenance, adorned ourselves in their feathers, studied their wings to engineer flight and, more recently — thankfully — we have attempted to protect them. I believe that by understanding our past relationships with birds will help us preserve our current empathy for birds. The story is one that merges, history, science and passion.

Tim Birkhead is emeritus professor of behaviour and evolution at the University of Sheffield and a Fellow of the Royal Society. His research on promiscuity and sperm competition in birds re-shaped our understanding of bird mating systems. Tim has been president of the International Society for Behavioural Ecology and the Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour. He has studied guillemots — mainly on Skomer Island — for 50 years. As well as a passion for research, Tim is committed to the public understanding of science as has written several popular science books, including Promiscuity (2000), The Wisdom of Birds (2008), Bird Sense (2012), The Most Perfect Thing: the Inside (and Outside) of a Birds’ Egg (2016). His most recent book is Birds and Us (2022).

This is an in-person event. It will not be recorded.

Palm oil (and its fractions) is simultaneously one of the world’s most popular and unpopular agricultural crops. Popular, as it is an ingredient in countless food and personal care products, due to its versatility and low cost. It is also used increasingly as a source of biofuel. Unpopular, as the huge growth in the use of palm oil combined with the need for hot and wet growing conditions has resulted in oil palm plantations displacing millions of hectares of tropical rainforest, with an environmental cost in terms of loss of habitats and biodiversity, and release of CO2. Various initiatives have been devised to mitigate this including from the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, the recent pledges to reduce deforestation at COP26, and the substitution of palm oil by other oils. However, how effective are these initiatives, to what extent is substitution feasible, and how sustainable are the alternatives compared to palm oil?

Dr Eddy Esselink is uniquely placed to provide a detailed insight into the various issues and questions surrounding the sustainability of palm oil. This evening lecture is being held in memorium of Kurt Berger, former Chair of the SCI Oils and Fats (now Lipids) Group, who worked on the processing of palm oil over many decades.

Dr Eddy Esselink gained his first degree and then PhD in Chemistry from the University of Groningen before going on to Work for Unilever R&D for over 14 years. The latter parts of his time there was spent in the Group Supply Chain with a specific focus on sustainable oils.
Eddy is currently working as Senior Manager for Sustainable Development at MVO – the umbrella organisation for the Netherlands Oils and Fats Industry. Important themes are: sustainable sourcing of oils and fats, Chain of Custody requirements, energy-efficiency improvement, lowering ecological footprint, protein sourcing and the bio based economy. Eddy ran a multi-year programme (2016-2019) with IDH (The Sustainable Trade Initiative), focussing on a 100% sustainable European palm oil supply chain. These activities are combined with chairing the RSPO Trade & Traceability Standing Committee. Eddy also chairs the Dutch Alliance for Sustainable Palm Oil. Over the last few years, this task force has been successful in bringing sustainable palm oil to the Dutch and wider European market.

• 18:00 Registration and refreshments
• 18:30 Welcome and introduction
• 18:40 Palm oil and our future world Dr Eddy Esselink, Sustainable Development at MVO
• 19:25 Q&A
• 19:45 Networking reception
• 20:15 Close

Scientists often talk informally of “beauty” in ideas, experiments and theories - but what do they mean by it?

My recent book with Chinese science photographers Yan Liang and Wenting Zhu offered one answer. Titled “The Beauty of Chemistry”, it presented astonishing photos of chemical processes, many based on the videos Yan and Wenting have made for their “Envisioning Chemistry” project, which has received international acclaim.
I argue that chemistry excels in its sensual allure: its colours, textures, patterns, even smells, speak immediately to the senses and are often what draw chemists to study their subject. All the same, I argue, scientific notions of beauty are complicated and not always compatible with the way the word is used in art and aesthetics. 
 

Philip Ball is a writer and author, who previously worked for many years as an editor for Nature. He has written many books on science and its intersections with the wider culture, including The Self-Made Tapestry, Critical Mass, Bright Earth and Invisible. His latest book is The Modern Myths.

• 18.00 Registration and refreshments
• 18.30 Welcome and introduction
• 18.40 Agrifood science in a time of climate change Professor Graham Moore, John Innes Centre
• 19.25 Q&A
• 19.45 Networking reception
• 20.15 Close

ATTENDEES
To enable us to control the number of visitors into the building, we are asking all delegates to pre-register in advance.  For this reason, registration will close 24 hours prior

• By 2050 there will be an extra two billion people on the planet and there is no more agricultural land to meet the demand for food.
• Climate change presents added challenges to food production, with agriculture currently producing 30% of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions
• With the need to develop climate-resilient crops, modern genetics offers a promising approach to addressing many of these complex issues.
• During this talk, Professor Graham Moore will draw on his own research and that of colleagues at the John Innes Centre, with the focus on prospects for sustainable and eco-friendly crop production in the coming decades.

ATTENDEES
To enable us to control the number of visitors into the building, we are asking all delegates to pre-register in advance.  For this reason, registration will close 24 hours prior to the event and only registered guests will be admitted.
SPEAKER

Professor Graham Moore
Current position. Deputy Director, John Innes Centre, and Programme Lead for BBSRC’s cross-institutional wheat programme, Designing Future Wheat.

Board membership has included: The European representative on the Board of the CGIAR WHEAT programme covering CIMMYT–ICARDA programmes to breed wheat for the resource-poor in the developing World; Board of the G20 Global Wheat Initiative, initiated by the G20 Agricultural Ministers.

Research: Graham developed the concept of cereal synteny, for which he was awarded the Royal Society Darwin Medal; he also characterised the major ancestral event which occurred in wheat, stabilising this cereal and doubling its grain number, so revealing the extraordinary value of this event to agriculture; he was awarded the Rank Prize for Nutrition in 2018 for his contribution to wheat research through developing the synteny concept, a wheat pre-breeding programme and the characterisation of the ancestral event which doubled wheat grain number.

• 18.00 Registration and refreshments
• 18.30 Welcome and introduction
• 18.40 Agrifood science in a time of climate change Professor Graham Moore, John Innes Centre
• 19.25 Q&A
• 19.45 Networking reception
• 20.15 Close