Screenings and live poetry readings followed by a panel discussion with Poet and Writer, Gabriele Tinti, Artist, Franko B and Professor of History of Art at Birkbeck, University of London, Lynda Nead.

In this series of screenings/readings Gabriele Tinti and FrankoB present the combat sport of boxing as a fine art. The artists explore the sense of catharsis that the spectator experiences whilst witnessing the acts of controlled violence and convey its complex, deep and existential impact. Their words transport the audience into the boxing world - depicted as a place to escape into, to transform and become part of the illusion in which you can lose your dreams, your identity and all sense of certainty.

Gabriele Tinti is an Italian poet and writer. He has published "New York Shots" (Allemandi&C. 2011), "The way of the cross" (Allemandi&C. 2012), "All over" (Mimesis Publishing, 2013) and "Last Words" (Skira Rizzoli, 2015). His books of poetry are in the collections of major international poetry centers, such as Poets House of NYC, the Poetry Center of Tucson, AZ, The Poetry Foundation, Chicago, The Poetry Collection, Buffalo and the Poetry Library of the South Bank Centre in London. He has composed poems for ancient works of art like the ‘Boxer at Rest’ at the Museo Nazionale Romano, the ‘Galatian Suicide’ at the Palazzo Altemps, the ‘Victorious Youth’ at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the ‘Heracles’ at the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Naples, at the Metropolitan in New York and at the LACMA in Los Angeles.

Franko B is an Italian performance artist based in London. Since 2009 he teaches sculpture at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Macerata in Italy, and has lectured extensively at a number of art schools, including Saint Martin's School of Art; New York University; the Ruskin School of Fine Art, Oxford; Chelsea College of Art, London; Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee; DasArts, Amsterdam; Goldsmiths' College of Art, London; Zurich University of the Arts; and the Courtauld Institute of Art. . He has worked with many institutions across the world including the Tate Modern, Tate Britain, Tate Liverpool, ICA, and many more.

Lynda Nead is the Pevsner Professor of History of Art at Birkbeck, University of London. Her books include The Haunted Gallery: Painting, Photography, Film c.1900 (2008); Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (2000) and Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain (1988). She has just completed a book called The Tiger in the Smoke: Visual Culture 1945-60, which will be published by Yale University Press. She is a regular contributor to BBC radio (Nightwaves, Front Row, Saturday Review) and to television documentaries (most recently, La Traviata broadcast on BBC2 in2015.) Lynda has also published on the visual cultures of boxing and on boxing photography and is a qualified Amateur Boxing Association of England coach.