Join us for a first look around Emily Andersen’s exhibition Somewhere Else Entirely in the Gallery, and Nottingham Women’s Centre in our Vitrines.
NTU staff and students are welcome for a first look round from the slightly earlier time of 5 pm.
Free food will be available from 6 pm – first come, first served!
The menu will be:
Vegan Balti with Rice & Mixed Salad (V)
Chickpea, spinach & sweet potato Balti served with rice and fresh mixed salad (vegan, vegetarian & gluten free).
Thai Red Chicken Curry with Rice & Mixed Salad
Thai red chicken curry with mangos & sweet peppers served with rice and fresh mixed salad (halal & gluten free).
From 7 pm, the United Voices Choir will sing a selection of songs chosen for their positive and uplifting messages
Photography will be taking place. There is lift and stairs access and an accessible toilet.
This online roundtable is a pre-conference event on Dalit magazines with editors and subject experts from West Bengal and Maharashtra. It is being organised in association with the Network on Dalit and Adivasi Literature and Bonington Gallery as part of our Formations Series.
Conceptualised to draw the attention of researchers working in this field within and outside India, the roundtable will be moderated by Dr Nicole Thiara and Prof Judith Misrahi-Barak.
Funded by the Research Seed Grant Scheme, GITAM (Deemed to be University), the project on Dalit Literature in Marathi and Bangla Little Magazines intends to critically engage with the underrepresented area of Dalit Periodicals within the broad research field of Dalit Studies. It aims to trace and collect periodicals published in Bangla and Marathi (1950-2000) and look into their publication process, circulation and readership.
Besides, it aims to build a digital repository of Bangla and Marathi periodicals to facilitate easier access, a historiographic narrative on the evolution of Dalit literary periodicals in Marathi and Bangla and encourage translations of Dalit writings published in these periodicals.
As part of the outreach programme, a three-day conference is being organised in GITAM, Hyderabad, titled “Vernacular Periodicals and Dalit Writing: Production, Circulation and Reception” from 1st March to 3rd March 2023 in association with the Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore. This conference aims to bring together editors, subject experts, early career scholars and graduate students to initiate a conversation across Indian languages and to reflect upon the vernacular Dalit periodicals critically.
The discussion will primarily focus on:
1) the possibility and scope of research in the area of vernacular periodicals and Dalit writing,
2) the challenges in such research and
3) the significance of such research.
A retired central government employee, Dhurjati Naskar, is an essayist, poet, and novelist from South 24 Parganas of West Bengal. He has been involved in editing periodicals since the early 1970s. Some of the periodicals edited by him are: Bangla Maati (Soil of Bengal), Dakkhin Barasat Sahitya Patra (South Barasat Literary Magazine), Baridhati, Dakhina Path, Baruipur Sambad (Barupipur News), Bharatiya Pundra Samachar (Indian Pundra News) and Pundra-Poundra Badhav. These periodicals, predominantly literary, also published essays concerning the history, ethnonational and folk traditions of the Poundra community. He is a member of Bangla Dalit Sahitya Sangstha (Kolkata), West Bengal Dalit Sahitya Sabha and a founding member of Dr Bhusan Chandra Naskar Archive. He has been a recipient of the West Bengal Sahitya Akademy Award in the year 2019.
Prof. Sipra Mukherjee teaches English at West Bengal State University. Her areas of interest are religion, caste, folklore and orality. She has been a visiting fellow at the department of English University of Hyderabad, School of Cultural Texts and Records, Jadavpur University. She has received many national and international research and travel grants. Some of them are – ICSSR research grant for a research project on ‘Interpreting Folklore: Understanding the relationship between folklore, religion and caste in East India’, 2013-2015; a Research Grant from the University Grant Commission, India, ‘Faiths in the Margins’, 2009; Luce Grant from Comparative Religion Programme, on Religion and Human Security: Negotiating the Power of Religious Non-State Actors, University of Washington, 2008. Besides her research on the intersection between caste and religion, she has been an avid translator. Her translated works include the Autobiography of Dalit writer Manoranjan Byapari, Interrogating My Chandal Life, 2018, and Under My Black Skin Flows a Red River: Translations of Dalit Writings for Bengal, 2021, which she co-edited along with Prof. Debi Chatterjee. She is also a member of Ebong Alap, a voluntary non-profit society which works with youth to encourage critical thought.
Dr Asit Biswas is an Associate Professor of English in West Bengal Education Service, currently posted at P.R. Thakur Government College, Thakurnagar, West Bengal. He completed his PhD research on the film adaptation of western texts in Bengali films from the University of Gour Banga, Malda, West Bengal. He has published seventeen research papers, six Dalit short stories, two Dalit plays and some poems in Bengali. He is the co-editor of the book Shotoborsher Bangla Dalit Sahitya; Dalit Poems, Dalit Literary Horizon (translation of Manohar Mouli Biswas’s book, Dalit Sahityer Digboloy), Songs and Dialogues from Bengal in English Translation and Dalit Protest Unbridled: Two Dozen Plays of Raju Das. He also published the book Pardon Not: Marichjhampi Massacre, a translation of the novel Kshama Nei by Nakul Mallik. Recently his translation of Kalyani Thakur’s novella Andhar Bil O Kichhu Manush (Andhar Bil and Some People) has been published by Zubaan. At present, he is translating a Bangla epic.
Urmila Pawar is a widely known Indian (Marathi) writer. She has been active in the Dalit and feminist movements in India since her early life. She was a part of the Marathi Dalit feminist magazine Aamhi Maitarni which was published during the 90s. She has eleven publications to her credit including the popular Marathi short story collection translated into English as Mother Wit by Prof. Veena Deo (Hamline University, USA), published by Zuban. Her Autobiographical narrative Aydaan translated into English as The Weave of My Life: A Dalit Woman’s Memoirs by Prof. Maya Pandit remains most popular even today (it has been translated into other Indian languages as well – Hindi, Kannada and Tamil). Many of her short stories have been prescribed in the syllabus framework of Indian universities as well as universities abroad (Colombia University, USA).
A bilingual poet, translator, editor, critic and columnist, Dr Chandrakant Patil writes in Marathi and Hindi and occasionally in English. He has several publications – collections of Marathi poems such as Nissandarbh, Ittambhoot, Bayaka ani Itar Kvita, and a collection of Hindi poems Apni Bhasha Ke Sameep to mention a few. Besides, he has also published six critical essay collections and twenty-five collections in Marathi and Hindi translations. He is popularly known for his active engagement in the Little Magazine Movement in Maharashtra during the 1960s and 1970s. He acted as one of the editors and publishers of the highly discussed little magazine Wacha. Besides, he was also one of the founder members of Wacha Prakashan that published the first collections of avant-garde poets of Marathi, such as Bhalchandra Nemade, Manohar Oak, Satish Kalasekar, Dilip Chitre etc. He has been a recipient of national and state-level awards for his various contributions – Sahitya Akademi Translation award (1991), Uttar Pradesh Hindi Sahitya Akademi (1994), Bhasha Vruddhi Sammaan, Govt. Of Maharashtra (2022).
Prof. Dilip Chavan is an academic scholar and a professor of English at SRTM University, Nanded, Maharashtra. His doctoral work, Language Politics under Colonialism: Caste, Class and Language Pedagogy in Western India, was published as a book by Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars in 2013. He writes in Marathi and has published nine books on contemporary social issues such as language, caste, class, imperialism, and women’s education. Some of his notable works are – Phule-Shahu-Ambedkar ani Jativyawastha Ant (1998); Shikshan: Jatvargiya Vastav ani Samatavadi Paryay (1999); Stree Shikshanacha Sangharsha (2007); Dr Ambedkar ani Bhartiya Shikshanatil Jatisanghrsha (2003); Samrajyavad: Bhasha ani Sanskriti (2010); Corona ani Stree-Purush Vishamatecha Prashna (2022). He also has a keen interest in translations from English to the Marathi language (he is working on the Marathi translation of Braj Ranjan Mani’s book Debrahminising History). Besides, he has been a part of the widely read fortnightly ‘Pariwartanacha Watsaru’ as its executive editor. He has been associated with academic institutions, such as the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, Central Institute of Indian Languages (CIIL), Mysore.
A graduate from the University of Hyderabad, Dr Sayantan Mondal is currently an Asst. Professor in the department of English at GITAM, Hyderabad (Deemed to be University). His areas of interest are Reading-Print readership, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Dalit Studies and Translation. Sayantan has been an Erasmus Mundus Fellow at the University of Oxford during 2015-16. He has received the University of Heidelberg Travel Grant 2015 and the University Grants Commission Travel grant 2016. Presently, he is working on a research project titled “Mapping Vernacular Network of Ideas and Recovering the Ephemeral: Dalit Literature in Marathi and Bangla Little Magazines”, along with Dr Jondhale Rahul Hiraman. This project aims to trace Bangla and Marathi Periodicals and the exchange of ideas on the caste question. Some of his published works are – Of Caste-Class and Dalit Writing, 2015; An Introduction to the World of Monoranjan Byapari, 2015; Language and its People: A Comparative insight into the Kurdish and Rohingya Genocide, 2019; Prantik theke Dalit: Nandonikatar Rajniti o Dalit Chetona (From Marginalised to Dalit: Politics of Aesthetics and Dalit Consciousness), 2022; Migration and Cultural Identity: An Introduction, 2022.
Having received a doctorate in English (Cultural Studies) from The English and Foreign Languages University (EFL-U), Hyderabad, Dr Jondhale Rahul Hiraman is an assistant professor of English at GITAM (Deemed to be University), Hyderabad campus. His doctoral research, Religious Conversion and Dalit Experience: A Study of the Meanings of Conversion among the Neo-Buddhists, emphasises the phenomenon of Dalit conversion to Buddhism and studies the conversion movement in Nanded district (Marathwada region, Maharashtra) through collecting and analysing historical records – pamphlets, posters, record books etc. He is a recipient of a prestigious Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi, doctoral fellowship for his doctoral research. He has been publishing in the area of Dalit Studies/literature on issues such as caste, colonial intervention into the caste question, Dalit identity and culture etc. Currently, he is involved in a research project, “Mapping Vernacular Network of Ideas and Recovering the Ephemeral: Dalit Literature in Marathi and Bangla Little Magazines”, along with Dr Sayantan Mondal.
This exhibition explores the rich history of Nottingham Women’s Centre and the fight for women’s rights in the city.
Starting life in a living room during the second wave of feminism in 1971, Nottingham Women’s Centre is one of the oldest organisations of its kind in the country. It was created to support women and fight for equal pay; education and job opportunities; an end to homophobic discrimination; and an end to violence against women – battles still being fought to this day.
Come along to see material from the Nottingham Women’s Library archives, protest placards from Reclaim the Night marches, and more.
Curated by Diana Ali.
Come along to our launch night on Friday 24 March, 6 pm – 8 pm for a first look round the exhibition, alongside Emily Andersen: Somewhere Else Entirely in the Gallery. There will be free food from 6 pm and a performance from the United Voices Choir at 7 pm.
Join Bonington Gallery’s Director Tom Godfrey for this gallery tour of our current exhibition – Patois Banton by Cedar Lewisohn.
Tom will introduce Lewisohn’s artistic practice and the broad array of artwork on show, including a rare opportunity to peek inside several of the large-scale book-works displayed altogether for the first time.
• The event is free to attend with limited capacity.
• Booking is required.
• Please meet in the Bonington Foyer at 12.55pm for a prompt start.
• The event will last up to an hour, within the gallery.
Join Bonington Gallery’s Assistant Curator, Joshua Lockwood-Moran, for this gallery tour of our current exhibition – Patois Banton by Cedar Lewisohn.
Josh will introduce Lewisohn’s artistic practice and the broad array of artwork on show, including a rare opportunity to peek inside several of the large-scale book-works displayed altogether for the first time.
• The event is free to attend with limited capacity.
• Booking is required.
• Please meet in the Bonington Foyer at 12.55pm for a prompt start.
• The event will last up to an hour, within the gallery.
Join us in the gallery from 6 – 8 pm for a first look around Cedar Lewisohn’s exhibition Patois Banton and Spaces of Translation – European Magazines, 1945-65 in our Vitrines.
NTU staff and students are welcome for a first look round from 5 pm.
Menu
Jamaican inspired curried lamb with, squash, ginger and natural yoghurt (GF)
Sweet potato and black bean curry (V, Vg, GF, DF)
Rice and peas (V, Vg, GF, DF)
White cabbage, red onion, yellow pepper, pineapple and parsley slaw (V, Vg, GF, DF)
V = Vegetarian
Vg = Vegan
GF = Gluten free
DF = Dairy free
To coincide with Cedar Lewisohn’s solo exhibition, Patois Banton, join us for a free online in-conservation event between Lewisohn and performance poet, writer and educator Ioney Smallhorne, and artist, graphic designer and singer Honey Williams.
As a starting point the panel will discuss the subject of Jamaican Patois, the English-based creole language spoken primarily in Jamaica and among the Jamaican diaspora – exemplified by the poetry anthology Office Poems, published on the occasion of the exhibition and written in English by Lewisohn and translated into Patois by Joan Hutchinson.
Together, the speakers will talk about their own experience of patois and how it is linked more widely to subjects including identity, history, class, race and gender.
BIOGRAPHIES
Cedar Lewisohn is an artist, writer and curator. He has worked on museum projects for institutions such as Tate Britain, Tate Modern and The British Council. He has published three books (Street Art, Tate 2008, Abstract Graffiti, Marrell, 2011, The Marduk Prophecy, Slimvolume, 2020) He has also edited and self-published numinous publications. Cedar curated the landmark Street Art exhibition at Tate Modern. He was the curator of the project “Outside The Cube” for HangarBicocca Foundation in Milan and in 2018 worked with Birmingham Museums on the project, Collecting Birmingham. He was curator of The Museum of London’s Dub London project and in 2020 was appointed as curator of Site Design for The Southbank Centre, London. www.cedarlewisohn.com
Honey Williams is a creative powerhouse, singer-songwriter, visual artist, designer, DJ, alt-choir director and educator. Honey’s art looks at decolonisation, identity, beauty, power, race and gender. The British Council invited Honey to be a Muralist in Kingston, Jamaica to honour the Windrush Generation. Honey won the Public Choice Award at the NAE Open 2019 for her piece ‘Big Black Truth’. Honey has created special commissions for the Bonington Gallery at the University of Nottingham. Honey has delivered many art and music-based workshops working with various organisations, in 2021, Streetwise Opera Nottingham asked Honey to produce a collaborative mural and weekly workshop for YMCA Nottingham with people who experience homelessness.
Honey’s recent work ‘Shrines’, a series of large-scale self-portraits and immersive afro-futuristic multimedia, live-art performance, and an autobiographical exploration of misogynoir and fatphobia. As a singer-songwriter, Honey has performed and collaborated with world-renowned recording artists, Klashnekoff, Roni Size, Natalie Duncan, Ayanna Witter-Johnson and Jazz Jamaica. Honey was invited to perform at the 300th Anniversary of Karlsruhe, Germany. Honey is the Creative Director of an alt-soul choir called the Gang of Angels that has performed all over the UK. Honey is currently an Associate Artist at City Arts in, Nottingham, UK.
Ioney Smallhorne is a performance poet, writer, educator, with a MA in Creative Writing & Education, earned at Goldsmiths University. She’s a Hyson Green, Nottingham native. Her artistic practice is ignited by her Jamaican heritage, fuelled by the Black British experience, and smoulders with womanness.
Shortlisted for the Sky Arts/Royal Society of Literature fiction award 2021. Winner of the Writing East Midlands/Serendipity Black Ink Writing Competition 2021, longlisted for the Jerwood Fellowship 2017, short listed by Caribbean Small-Axe prize 2016.
As a Spoken Word Educator she works across the East Midlands encouraging people to harness the power of poetry and is the Co-lead facilitator for Gobs Poetry collective in Nottingham.
For 2022, Ioney was the New Art Exchange’s resident artist July-September, where she was developing her project, Jamaica and Her Daughters, a collection of poetry and prose. For 2023 she has received Arts Council funding to translate this project from page to performance, a work in progress sharing will be at New Art Exchange 23rd February. Her short story, First Flight, appears in the first Black British speculative fiction anthology, Glimpse, published by Peepal Tree Press and Ioney has recently been selected for the Apples & Snakes/Joseph Coelho/Otter Barry Books Diversifying Children’s Literature programme.
Join us for a screening of Ningwasum by Subash Thebe Limbu followed by an in-conversation with Subash, Nicole Thiara and Joshua Lockwood-Moran.
Ningwasum is a Yakthung science fiction documentary film work narrated by Miksam, a time traveller from a future Indigenous Nation. The film follows two time travellers, Miksam and Mingsoma, played by Subin Limbu and Shanta Nepali respectively, in the Himalayas weaving indigenous folk stories, culture, climate change and science fiction. The film explores notions of time, space and memory, and how realities and the sense of now could be different for different communities.
Drawing from Adivasi Futurism and inspired by Afrofuturism and Indigenous Futurism, Ningwasum imagines a future from an Indigenous perspective where they have agency, technology, sovereignty and also their indigenous knowledge, culture, ethics and storytelling still intact.
The event will take place online on YouTube. The film is 45 minutes long, and the in-conversation will take place directly after the screening.
The Celebrating Adivasi and Dalit Arts and Literature Festival (CADALFEST) is the first international festival series dedicated to the writing and performance arts by writers whose work creatively resists caste discrimination and social exclusion in India: Dalit Adivasi Text.
This event as part of the festival series in collaboration with Formations and Bonington Gallery.
Subash Thebe Limbu is a Yakthung (Limbu) artist from what we currently know as eastern Nepal. He works with sound, film, music, performance, painting and podcasts.
Subash has an MA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins (2016), a BA in Fine Art from Middlesex University (2011), and an Intermediate in Fine Art from Lalit Kala Campus, Kathmandu.
His works are inspired by socio-political issues, resistance and science/speculative fiction. Indigeneity, climate change, and Adivasi Futurism are recurring themes in his works.
He is based in Newa Nation (Kathmandu) and London.
Visit Subash’s website and Instagram.
Nicole Thiara is Co-Director of Nottingham Trent University’s Postcolonial Studies Centre and Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded Research Network Series ‘Writing, Analysing, Translating Dalit Literature’ and its Follow-on Grant ‘On Page and on Stage: Celebrating Dalit and Adivasi Literatures and Performing Arts’. She teaches postcolonial and contemporary literature at Nottingham Trent University, UK. Her area of research is Dalit and diasporic South Asian literature and her current research project is the representation of modernity in Dalit literature.
Joshua Lockwood-Moran is a curator and artist. He joined Bonington Gallery in 2018 as Assistant Curator, and also is co-director of TG gallery, based in Primary and sits on the MIMA advisory group. Joshua led on the Andrew Logan: The Joy of Sculpture exhibition at Bonington Gallery in 2021 and previously worked as a freelance curator, working on exhibitions in a number of artist-led spaces and institutions. These include All Men by Nature Desire to Know at Bonington Gallery (2017); Viewpoints at The Collection and Usher Gallery, Lincoln (2015) and The 8 Artistic Principles, Attic, Nottingham (2014).
In the aftermath of World War II, hundreds of new journals emerged across Europe. This explosion of print was a reaction to the years of privation and lack of cultural contact between nations. It also responded to public discussion about what might now constitute a ‘European’ identity – an issue central to processes of reconstruction and reconciliation in the post-war period.
Translations were an important component of many journals. They introduced readers to foreign movements, concepts and writers, increasing awareness of cultural similarities and differences and forged alliances across national borders. This exhibition brings together a number of these magazines and highlights the overlooked and mostly unacknowledged translators.
The translators who worked for these journals are remarkable individuals. Some had been ‘silenced’ by censorship in the interwar period. Many were refugees, displaced by war, who used their knowledge of foreign languages to gain a foothold in a post-war world. All were talented figures, passionately committed to the transnational circulation of ideas. They understood that dialogue across cultural, political and linguistic divides was an essential precondition for peace and prosperity in Europe.
This exhibition has been curated by Alison E. Martin, JGU Mainz/Germersheim, Germany and Andrew Thacker, Nottingham Trent University.
This event will take place at Bonington Gallery.
This event has now sold out, please email boningtongallery@ntu.ac.uk to be added to the reserve list
What truths are your poems telling? If not for the reality of your poems, what truths would never be spoken at all? In Poetry as Ferocity Workshop: Writing Your Truth with Radical Honesty, we’ll chart a course for radical honesty in verse, seeking to grow stronger roots for your poems to anchor themselves.
Focusing on work by female Caribbean poets Danielle Boodoo-Fortuné and Safiya Sinclair, we draw on their powerful subversion in writing. Using innovative exercises, we unlock the most potent ways to tell the truth our poems require.
Poets have always been political agitators, defenders of the right to wield uncomfortable truths. What truths do you bring to the table, ready and roaring to be told?
NOTE: This workshop is open to people aged 18 and over. This workshop involves discussion of potentially triggering content and strong language.
Shivanee Ramlochan is an Indo-Trinidadian poet, critic, and essayist, whose first poetry collection, Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting (2017), was shortlisted for the 2018 Forward Prize. Ramlochan’s next work, the creative non-fiction Unkillable, is forthcoming from Noemi Press in Autumn 2023. Shivanee is the Book Reviews Editor for Caribbean Beat Magazine and works closely with Bocas Lit Fest, the Caribbean’s largest literary festival.