Jaspar Joseph-Lester

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Host: Roman Vasseur/Jaspar Joseph-Lester

Transmission: Host

Transmission: Host is a series of chapbooks derived from an annual lecture series organised by Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University. Each week a different artist invites a guest speaker. The host selects, presents, and looks after his or her guest. A critical engagement between host and guest is assumed; what exactly that relationship is will be made evident through discussion. There is an ethics of hospitality, of making the stranger welcome. A host has a standard of conduct, and historically, hospitality has been seen as a code, a duty, a virtue, and a law. There is a bond between host and guest, and in the lecture series and the subsequent chapbooks, this bond is formed by the engagement in and the practice of art.

Roman Vasseur acts out epic, often filmic, and political narratives via specific socio-economic realities. In 2000 the transportation of a crate of earth from Transylvania to Los Angeles via London and New York resulted in the merging of a gothic fiction and realities informed by that fiction. The works often question the role of ‘culture’ as component of these grand narratives and recently advocated the ritualized death of a mural artist as an alternative to the use of ‘art’ in urban regeneration. He has exhibited at Jeffrey Charles Gallery, London, the ICA, London, EAST International 06; Pilot:3 in Venice, and most recently at KX Gallery Hamburg in the group exhibition ‘One Way Street’. A paper given at the Tate conference John Stuart Mill Exterminates His Father was published in the first edition of Material, a Los Angeles and London-based journal of writings by artists(2008). Vasseur is currently lead artist for Harlow New Town, Essex.