Established in 2016 by a collective of eight, The Community is a Paris-based multidisciplinary art institute dedicated to promoting experimental and progressive artistic practice through interdisciplinary programming. Featuring Ethan Assouline, Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann, David Bernstein, Tenant of Culture, Cyrus Goberville, Philippe Hallais and Ruby Hoette.
The Community’s founding was prompted by a long-standing need for a shared space and platform to stimulate ideas and facilitate collaboration across different creative disciplines including art, fashion, music and publishing.
Extending their methodology to the UK, The Community Live in Nottingham transforms Bonington Gallery into a site for learning, experimentation and production through a programme of free to attend weekly workshops and activities delivered by a specially invited group of internationally prominent artists and creatives, accompanied by members of The Community. Over the course of a month, participants will create work within the space whilst reflecting and developing upon previous outcomes – building content through experience and accumulation. Participation will be open to all, reflecting The Community’s desire to ingratiate their practice through dialogue and collaboration with local communities.
The exhibition will culminate with a music and performance event at the gallery and in the city with an opportunity to view completed works on Friday 29 March and Saturday 30 March. Details regarding these activities will be announced soon.
The gallery will be open for viewing throughout the exhibition period, but due to the nature of this being an ‘exhibition-as-process’, we suggest following updates via The Community’s instagram account and on the exhibition website to maximise your experience.
Ethan Assouline, Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann, David Bernstein, Tenant of Culture, Cyrus Goberville, Philippe Hallais, Ruby Hoette
Monday 4 – Saturday 9 March 2019
Ego Altar by David Bernstein
Monday 11 – Saturday 16 March 2019
Ruby Hoette’s Patternmapping Residency
Wednesday 13 – Friday 15 March 2019
Workshop by Tenant of Culture
Monday 18 – Saturday 23 March 2019
Anna’s Weekend by Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann
Monday 25 – Saturday 30 March 2019
Writing Club by Ethan Assouline and Philippe Hallais
Come celebrate the finale of The Community Live in Nottingham with an opportunity to view all of the completed works produced throughout the four weeks of workshops plus a music and sound performance.
The evening will consist of two parts: A live performance by Philippe Hallais that will bring together audio-recorded outcomes from the outcome of week four, the ‘Writing Club’ with artist Ethan Assouline; followed by a Nottingham edition of ‘Permanent Cuts’ – a multidisciplinary and experimental live music session co-curated by Cyrus Goberville of Collapsing Market.
The event will be followed by an off-site event at the King Billy pub in Sneinton with DJ sets by Low Jack, Cyrus, plus others.
New Contemporaries, one of the longest running and most well-recognised platforms for emerging artists in the UK, has only presented a separate and specific ‘live show’ for installation, film and performance work twice in its 70 year history. Curated by Nottingham Trent University PhD candidate Emily Gray, Not a Live Show presents an exploration into this little known and barely documented history.
Celebrating its 70th anniversary in 2019, New Contemporaries’ history tracks the birth of the Arts Council, the explosion of arts education and a turn to youth culture, as well as the major developments in artistic practice. It has helped launch the careers of innumerable artists, including those whose meteoric rise have come to epitomise the British art scene. Participants include renowned figures such as David Hockney, Bruce McLean, Anthony Gormley, Mona Hatoum, Gillian Wearing and Tacita Dean, to name a few.
Designated as ‘third area’ art, the inclusion of this work within New Contemporaries was hard fought for. Hosted at ACME Studios in Covent Garden and the London Film Co-Op, Camden, this was at the epicentre of experimental and performative activity during this period. Many of the concerns raised within these works remain central to student discourse today. Subsequently folded into the main exhibition, the expanded field of artistic practice continues to be a challenge within the New Contemporaries format today.
Emily Gay is a current PhD candidate at NTU examining ‘Archives and Contemporaneity’ in partnership with Bloomberg New Contemporaries. Previously she has managed artist residency programmes and exhibitions in the US and Scotland, before completing her Masters in Curatorial Practice at Glasgow School of Art and Glasgow University.
Coinciding with his current solo exhibition Now & Then, we’re delighted to screen Dick Jewell’s seminal 2002 documentary Kinky Gerlinky, bringing together footage shot at the legendary club night between 1990 and 1993.
Kinky Gerlinky was the biggest, most fabulous, most stylish nightclub London had ever seen. This documentary, edited from over 200 hours shot on 21 nights in the early nineties, conveys the experience of one full night out at the club. Flamboyant poses on the red carpet, debauchery on the dance floor, glamorous catwalk competitions and extravagant backstage action – this film captures it all.
By nature a fleeting phenomenon, club culture is rarely recorded on film in any depth. Kinky Gerlinky goes the distance, offering unique intimacy with its subject – with most of the action performed directly for the camera; the costumes are out-of-this-world, as are the attitudes. A welcome flashback to wilder clubbing days, it’s also a hilarious in-your-face examination of the cultural and sexual politics of celebrity and glamour.
Now & Then will be Dick Jewell’s most significant solo exhibition in recent years, bringing together a wide range of works produced over a 30-year period. Working across film, photography and photo-collage, Jewell has inhabited both gallery and commercial contexts, exhibiting his work internationally at institutions including the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam) and Serpentine Gallery (London). He has also produced music videos and promos for musicians including Neneh Cherry and Massive Attack.
As the title suggests, Now & Then chronicles progression: both from a technological perspective through the shifting media across Jewell’s work, and also in regards to people, as demonstrated by Jewell re-visiting his seminal 1989 film Headcases (shot on Super 8) whereby he has repeated the same set of questions to the same subjects 30 years on.
Other key works that will be on display include The Box, a huge bank of 200 framed photographs that Jewell took from four TVs over seven days in 1980; Four Thousand Threads, which presents a ‘Chinese Whispers’ version of a Google image search; and an audience participatory work entitled War & Peace, in which visitors are encouraged to take selfies against a backdrop and disseminate them online.
In a world bombarding us with millions of images, Now & Then is just presenting a few thousand.
Fine Art Live Lecture Present: Dick Jewell
Thursday 31 January, 5.15 pm – 7.30 pm
Lecture Theatre 2, Newton building, NTU City Campus
Bonington Film Night #9: Dick Jewell Kinky Gerlinky
Thursday 20 February, 7 pm – 8.30 pm
Bonington Gallery, Bonington building, NTU City Campus
Bonington Vitrines #10: Jewell
Friday 18 January – Saturday 23 February
Bonington Foyer
Complementing the exhibition The Serving Library v David Osbaldeston, here we present available copies of a family of publications that continue to feed The Serving Library’s archive of objects; each item in the gallery is the source of an illustration that usually triggered an essay in one of the journals on display.
Founded in 2000 in Amsterdam by graphic designers Peter Bilak, Stuart Bailey, Jurgen X Albrecht and Tom Unverzagt, Dot Dot Dot was published biannually for 20 issues over 10 years, gradually drifting from its founding subject to sprawl across the humanities according to the ebb and flow of its editorial makeup. Albrecht and Unverzagt left after the third issue and David Reinfurt supplanted Bilak in the mid-2000s.
In 2011, Bailey, Reinfurt and Angie Keefer established The Serving Library as a non-profit institution in New York to explore the new possibilities afforded by digital publishing, at which point Dot Dot Dot morphed into the institution’s house journal Bulletins of The Serving Library. The enterprise continues to be powered by www.servinglibrary.org, a website that simultaneously distributes and archives component ‘bulletins’ in distinct online and print formats. These bulletins comprise essays and related contributions, assembled and released each season on common themes such as time, psychedelia, fashion, sports, colour and perspective. For practical and conceptual reasons the last three print editions of Bulletins of The Serving Library shrank to half that of the original format.
Francesca Bertolotti-Bailey joined the editorial team in 2016 and helped set up a physical incarnation of The Serving Library in Liverpool as a base for teaching with a regular public programme of talks and events, then in 2017 the name and format changed once more to yield its current incarnation as Serving Library Annual – a hefty A4 volume now published every autumn. This year’s instalment, hot off the press, speaks to the subject of translation.
Ahead of the exhibition we’ll be highlighting just a few of the 100+ framed objects that make up The Serving Library collection over on our blog, along with the accompanying text from TSL’s website.
Emily Andersen is a London-based artist and senior lecturer in photography at Nottingham Trent University. Her work has been exhibited and published both nationally and internationally for over 25 years.
We’re delighted to host London-based artist Emily Andersen’s latest solo exhibition and accompanying book launch of Portraits: Black & White published by Anomie Publishing in October 2018.
Andersen has built up a remarkable portfolio of photographic work including many high-profile artists, musicians, writers, poets, film directors, actors and architects, with Peter Blake, Derek Jarman, Zaha Hadid, Arthur Miller, Helen Mirren, Michael Nyman and Eduardo Paolozzi among those featured in this publication of black-and-white portraits.
The book features an essay by contemporary art critic Jonathan P. Watts, exploring the lives of some of Andersen’s many sitters, and discusses her practice within the wider critical debates of photography since the late 1980s.
The Portraits: Black & White book launch and Emily Andersen’s solo exhibition preview will take place on Thursday 1 November from 5 pm to 7 pm.
Email boningtongallery@ntu.ac.uk to reserve your free place at this event.
Emily Andersen graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1983. Her work has been exhibited in galleries worldwide including The Photographers’ Gallery, London; The Institute of Contemporary Art, London; The Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; The Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh; The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art; Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai; and China Arts Museum, Shanghai. Her portraits are in the permanent collection of The National Portrait Gallery, London, and in other public collections including The British Library, London, and The Contemporary Art Society, London. She has won awards including the John Kobal prize for portraiture.
Founded in New York in 2011 and based in Liverpool since 2016, The Serving Library (TSL) is a non-profit organisation that serves as a publishing platform, a seminar room, a collection of framed objects, and an event space. The enterprise is rooted in a journal published biannually as Dot Dot Dot from 2000–10, Bulletins of The Serving Library from 2011–17, and now annually as The Serving Library Annual, released simultaneously online (for free) and in print (for a fee) every autumn.
This autumn Bonington Gallery will showcase TSL’s collection of framed objects; each one the source of an illustration that has appeared in one of the journals. The 100+ collection includes items as diverse as record sleeves, watercolours, woodcuts, polaroids, drawings, screen-prints, airbrush paintings, a car number plate, and a Ouija board. Together, these varied objects decorate the walls of the library to serve as a toolbox for teaching.
The space will be further populated by a new work by occasional Serving Library contributor David Osbaldeston, who – in response to a theme of translation – has produced a new series of images exploring how visual essentials such as black, white and repeating shapes progress through a sequence of depicted forms. As a system of signs that become open to subjective interpretation, each image is assisted by a single word, which could be seen either as an associative descriptor or erratic linguistic type.
Ahead of the exhibition we’ll be highlighting just a few of the 100+ framed objects that make up TSL collection over on our blog, along with the accompanying text from TSL’s website.
Exhibition photography courtesy of Jules Lister.
For 25 days, our gallery space will be transformed into an open cinema. Video Days presents a different film or series of short films every day from different decades and genres. The films screened share several common themes; most prevalent is their relationship to the built environment.
Video Days takes its title from the 90s skateboard video by Blind Skateboards. Produced in 1991 by American skateboarder and filmmaker Spike Jonze, the iconic video depicts street and park skating in the US, and is considered one of the most influential skate videos of its time.
Participants who feature in this exhibition include independent research agency Forensic Architecture whose film 77sqm_9:26min documents their counter investigation into evidence relating to the murder of 21-year-old Halit Yozgat in Kassel, Germany. Halit was the ninth of ten racist murders performed by a neo-Nazi group known as the National Socialist Underground (NSU) across Germany between 2000 and 2007.
Video Days also features Paris-based filmmaker Eric Baudelaire, whose 2017 film Also Known As Jihadi traces a young man’s journey to radicalisation. Other films include contributions from photographer and filmmaker Dick Jewell and artists Karen Cunningham and Simon Martin.
Video Days Preview
Thursday 19 April, 4 pm – 7 pm
Skateboarding is an activity that reflects a consistent theme within the programme of human-kind’s disruptive and subjective relationship with the built environment.
In conjunction with local, not-for-profit community group Skate Nottingham, we’ll be exploring skateboarding’s potential to drive cultural and social change, particularly through the re-engagement of young skateboarders with education and employment by supporting individual creative and cultural interests.
This event will reflect Nottingham’s lively intergenerational skate community, and identify a set of themes that link the local and international significance of skateboarding to the objectives of the open cinema we are creating in the gallery, and the rich texture of disciplines and interests reflected across the entire Video Days programme.
We launch this exhibition with a programme of talks, screenings and photography dedicated to the local and international skateboarding community.
Read the full programme for the preview event and confirm your attendance.
For our latest Bonington Vitrines exhibition we’ve invited contributions from the public, staff and students to share their memories of the Bonington building (past and present), in the form of photographs, newspaper clippings, plans, stories, anecdotes and general collectables.
The Bonington building was opened in 1969 by Her Royal Highness the Duchess of Kent. A labyrinth by design, the three-story building offers extensive and state-of-the-art facilities in the support of art and design education in Nottingham. At the heart of the building is a purpose built exhibition space, Bonington Gallery – one of the oldest art galleries in Nottingham.
Join us on Saturday 17 March for a guided tour of Nottingham Trent University’s (NTU) Lace Archive. Please arrive at Bonington Gallery ten minutes prior to your tour departure time.
The archive is comprised of approximately 75,000 lace items, bequeathed to the University by local companies and the Nottingham Lace Federation. It includes single pieces of lace, manufacturers’ sample books, portfolios of photography and design, prize-winning examples from international lace competitions, as well as books on lace history and teaching aids used throughout the archive’s life.
As part of the tour, visitors will have special access to view:
The collection is considered to be of local, national and international importance and exists as a unique resource for research, design education and teaching practice.
These tours are in association with Bonington Gallery’s Lace Unarchived exhibition, which is open to the public from Friday 23 February to Thursday 29 March 2018.
All tours will last approximately 40 minutes.
Due to the capacity of the Lace Archive, numbers are capped at six people per tour. Places will be allocated on first come first served basis. The tours are open to the public and free to attend.
Reserve your free place.