Timothy Mathews’ archive.
Photo: Sharon Kivland
Timothy Mathews has given many critical papers and other interventions in universities in the UK, France, and the USA on writers, thinkers, and painters that have continued to fascinate him, or who have burst through his expectations and defences. This includes topics in twentieth- and twenty-first-century French literature, comparative literature, literary theory, word and image relations, translation, and creative critical writing. Writers and artists with whom he’s engaged in this way include Guillaume Apollinaire, Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Aimé Césaire, Robert Desnos, Marguerite Duras, Max Ernst, Jean Fautrier, Alberto Giacometti, Franz Kafka, Julia Kristeva, Cees Noteboom, W G Sebald, Nancy Spero, Agnès Thurnauer, Antoni Tàpies, and William Kentridge.
More recently he has turned to giving readings of his creative nonfiction, his creative critical writings
- with Ma Bibiothèque, at the Small Publishers Fair (2022), London; at the South London Gallery (2022); at the Miss Read Art Book Fair & Festival, Berlin (2023)
- at the Out of Practice Seminar, School of Advanced Study, University of London (2023)
https://ies.sas.ac.uk/events/out-practice-no-1-showing-rather-telling
- at the CounterText conference, Valletta (2018), and the CounterText symposium in Cambridge (2022), Paris (2023), Naples (2024), and Wrocław (2025)
His focus remains on why it matters to engage with the practice of art in any form.