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.
This event will take place at Nottingham Contemporary.
To correspond with Hollow Earth: Art, Caves & The Subterranean Imaginary all are warmly invited to Channelling Queer Depths: An Evening with Poet Shivanee Ramlochan. Shivanee will give readings from her ground-breaking collection Everyone Knows I am a Haunting (2017), followed by a conversation with PhD queer literary researcher, Tom Lockwood-Moran. A particular point of interest will be Shivanee’s upcoming work of creative non-fiction, Unkillable (2023) how a writer channels their queer self through dangerous, unorthodox and taboo subjects. This event will explore how and why poetry chisels beneath the world’s surface to expose queer depths, particularly informed by Shivanee’s experience of Trinidadian cultures and subcultures.
Free. Booking required.
We are unable to provide British Sign Language interpretation for this event.
This event is partnered with the Formations programme at Bonington Gallery and their free workshop Writing Your Truth with Radical Honesty with Shivanee on Wednesday 16 November.
Find information about getting here and our building access and facilities here.
There are no audio descriptions for this event.
If you have any questions around access or have specific access requirements we can accommodate, please get in touch with us by emailing info@nottinghamcontemporary.org or phoning 0115 948 9750.
Due to COVID precautions, please do not attend this event if you/someone in your household is currently COVID-19 positive, has suspected symptoms, or is awaiting test results.
Staff and visitors are welcome to wear a face covering in all areas.
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.
Tom Lockwood-Moran is a PhD queer literary researcher, funded by Midlands4Cities (AHRC), writing his thesis in English Literature, entitled: ‘Queer Resistance(s): Contemporary Caribbean Communality’. Tom’s project is supervised by experts from both Nottingham Trent University and The University of Leicester. Thomas is currently an Hourly Paid Lecturer in Postcolonial Texts at NTU within English, Culture and Media.
This free, online-in conversation event with writer Gogu Shyamala is part of our Formations series, hosted in partnership with Nottingham Trent University’s Postcolonial Studies Centre. This segment of Formations, CADALFEST, relates to the Celebrating Adivasi and Dalit Arts and Literature Festival (CADALFEST) taking place across India and in Nottingham. CADALFEST is the first international festival series dedicated to artists whose work creatively resists caste discrimination and social exclusion in India.
This event will take start at 4 pm (GMT) and 8.30 pm Indian Standard Time.
Gogu Shyamala will discuss her literary and academic work to mark the republication of her short story collection Father May be an Elephant, and Mother Only a Small Basket, But…, by Tilted Axis Press in March 2022. Her focus on the perspective of Dalit women and children as well as her stories’ celebration of Dalit strength and culture will be explored. Gogu Shyamala will tell us about her choice of, and experimentation with, the short story form, and how she sees her role as writer, academic and activist. We will also discuss land relations and the link to caste, sexual violence, inter-caste love and other key concerns of her fiction and academic writing.
Gogu Shyamala will be in conversation with Sowjanya Tamalapakula, Bethan Evans, Judith Misrahi-Barak and Nicole Thiara and the session will conclude with Q&A with the online audience via YouTube chat.
Tilted Axis is a non-profit press publishing mainly work by Asian writers, translated into a variety of Englishes. Founded in 2015, Tilted Axis are based in the UK, a state whose former and current imperialism severely impacts writers in the majority world. This position informs their practice, which is also an ongoing exploration into alternatives – to the hierarchisation of certain languages and forms, including forms of translation; to the monoculture of globalisation; to cultural, narrative, and visual stereotypes; to the commercialisation and celebrification of literature and literary translation. Tilted Axis values the work of translation and translators through fair, transparent pay, public acknowledgement, and respectful communication. They are dedicated to improving access to the industry, through translator mentorships, paid publishing internships, open calls and guest curation.
Dr. Gogu Shyamala is one of the foremost contemporary Dalit writers in India, as an author, researcher, editor, and biographer writing in Telugu.
Her English collection of short stories, Father may be an elephant and mother only a small basket, but… is a landmark in Indian literature; the collection was also translated into German and some of the short stories into French. She produced an anthology known as Nallapoddu (Black Dawn), which is a collection of 51 Dalit women’s writings (from 1921 to 2002) from across the Telugu-speaking Indian federal states. It has one of critical acclaim in literary world. She wrote a biography of the first Dalit woman legislator, Cabinet member and Endowment Minister in the former state of Andhra Pradesh, India. She worked on domestic violence and Dalit women. She is the co-editor of Anthology of Dalit writing in Telugu published by Oxford University Press. She has participated in the World Conference against Racism, and in literary events in Australia, Germany and Jaipur. Mentoring rural students on access to Higher Education and researching specific causes for dropouts, Gogu Shyamala also made documentary film called Memetla Saduvaale (Merit Interrupted).
Her writings are part of the syllabus in higher education in several Indian states and as well as the University of San Francisco in the USA. Her writings were translated into Indian languages such as Tamil, Malayalam, Hindi, Urdu and Gujarati. She holds a PhD in the area of Dalit Women Biographies, Gender and Caste in Telangana, from the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad. She received several awards including Gandapenderam, she been worked as Research Fellow at Anveshi and as residence fellow at IEA Nantes in France on Dalit folklore and art farms. At present she is working as an independent scholar researching and writing biographies of rural Dalit women. She studies Dalit women’s literature and the history and mythology of Dalit literature as well as collecting palm leaf manuscripts of Dalit Puranas for contemporary scholarly studies.
Sowjanya Tamalapakula holds a PhD in the area of Violence, Gender and Caste from the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad.
Areas of study include gender and intersectionalities with particular emphasis on the issues of Dalit women. She is currently teaching and guiding in the School of Gender Studies at Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Hyderabad. She teaches intersectionalities, sexuality, cinema, media and women’s writing for post-graduate students. She has published in various national and inter-national journals on gender, caste, cinema and media. Her recent paper ‘Caste-ing Queer Identities’ published in NUJS-Law Review journal is a critique on how caste operates in the queer intimate spaces.
Another paper titled ‘Politics of Inter-caste Marriage among Dalits: “Political as Personal”’ has been published in Asian Survey, University of California, Berkeley. She has been invited to contribute a paper ‘“Whatever Happened to Jogta, Jogtin?: Instrumentality of Religion in non-Brahman Cultural Assertion and Marginalization of Dalits’ for the Journal of Critical Philosophy of Race, Penn State University. She contributes regularly to Asian Age, Deccan Chronicle, The Wire, The News Minute, The Citizen, The Print, Youth Ki Awaz, Velivada and Roundtable India.
Bethan Evans is a recently qualified Doctor of Philosophy in English, specialising in black British literature, specifically the black British short story and its position in the publishing industry. Her thesis is titled ‘Publishing Black British Short Stories: The Potential and Place of a Marginalised Form’. Bethan has written articles for the Literary Encyclopedia and the Routledge Companion to Literature and Feminism, and is currently co-editing a special issue of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, due for publication in 2025. She is the Project Officer for ‘On Page and On Stage: Celebrating Dalit and Adivasi Literatures and Performing Arts’.
Judith Misrahi-Barak is Associate Professor at University Paul Valéry Montpellier 3, France, where she teaches English and postcolonial literatures. Her prime areas of specialization are Caribbean and Indo- and Sino-Caribbean literatures in English, diaspora and migrant writing. She has published numerous articles and book chapters in edited collections, among which Tracing the New Indian Diaspora (Om Dwivedi, ed. Rodopi, 2014); Turning Tides: Caribbean Intersections in the Americas and Beyond (Heather Cateau and Milla Riggio, eds. Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers, 2019); or Windrush (1948) and Rivers of Blood (1968): Legacy and Assessment (Trevor Harris, ed. Routledge, 2019). She is General Editor of the series PoCoPages (Pulm, Montpellier). Borders and Ecotones in the Indian Ocean is the latest volume (2020).
http://www.pulm.fr/index.php/collections/horizons-anglophones/pocopages.html
Her latest publications are a chapter on Edwidge Danticat’s short stories (Bloomsbury Handbook on Edwidge Danticat, 2021), an article in a special issue of The Caribbean Quarterly on Sino-Caribbean literature (2021), and Kala pani Crossings: Revisiting 19th century Migrations from India’s Perspective (co-edited with Ashutosh Bhardwaj, Routledge, 2021).
Her monograph entitled Entre Atlantique et océan Indien: les voix de la Caraïbe anglophone was published with Classiques Garnier (Paris, 2021).
Dalit literatures are among her more recent interests, and she was Co-Investigator on an AHRC Research Network series on ‘Writing, Analysing, Translating Dalit Literature’ (2014-16) and is now Co-Investigator on an AHRC Follow-on Funding for Impact and Engagement on ‘On Stage and on Page: Celebrating Dalit and Adivasi Literatures and Performing Arts’ (2020-23).
Caste in Cinema, co-edited with Joshil K. Abraham, is forthcoming with Routledge (November 2022).
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.
Her publications include Salman Rushdie and Indian Historiography: Writing the Nation into Being (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), ‘The Colonial Carnivalesque in Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable and Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing 52: 6 (2016), ‘Subaltern Experimental Writing: Dalit Literature in Dialogue with the World’, Ariel 47:1-2 (2016), pp. 253-80, and with Annapurna Waughray, ‘Challenging Caste Discrimination with Literature and Law: An Interdisciplinary Study of British Dalit Writing’, Contemporary South Asia 21:2 (2013), pp. 116-32. With Judith Misrahi-Barak and K. Satyanarayana, she co-edited the critical volume Dalit Text: Aesthetics and Politics Re-imagined (Routledge, 2019) and special issue on Dalit Literature in the Journal of Commonwealth Literature 54 (1), March 2019 with our Open Access editorial ‘Why Should We Read Dalit Literature’ accessible here.
This free, online-in conversation event with multimedia artists Subash Thebe Limbu and Osheen Siva is part of our Formations series, hosted in partnership with Nottingham Trent University’s Postcolonial Studies Centre. This segment of Formations, CADALFEST, relates to the Celebrating Adivasi and Dalit Arts and Literature Festival (CADALFEST) taking place across India and in Nottingham. CADALFEST is the first international festival series dedicated to artists whose work creatively resists caste discrimination and social exclusion in India.
This event will be streamed live on Bonington Gallery’s YouTube channel. Book your free place now.
In recent times, the rapidly changing socio-political, environmental, and technological changes have centralised focus on reimagining and reconfiguring futures. While the Futurism movement, which began in Italy and spread to other European countries, sought to cleave off from the past and prophesized exciting futures through new technologies, futurisms that emerged from the margins were motivated by different urges – to question Eurocentric ideas of progress, development, scientific rationality, and techno futures. Afrofuturism, Latinx Futurism, and different kinds of Subaltern Futurisms have imagined alternate futures through speculative art and fiction by firmly holding on to the past.
In the Indian subcontinent, artists Subash Thebe Limbu and Osheen Siva have conceptualised Adivasi Futurism and Tamil Dalit Futures respectively. This conversation will discuss how they utilise the anti-caste philosophy that guides their multimodal artwork. It will explore how the artists use speculative art to posit alternate futures that resist caste and privilege their identities. The conversation, moderated by Prof. K.A. Geetha and Priteegandha Naik will discuss Dalit and Adivasi futurism and the potential it offers to dream up new and equal futures.
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 podcast.
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.
Osheen Siva is a multidisciplinary artist from Thiruvannamalai, currently based in Goa. Through the lens of surrealism, speculative fiction and science fiction and rooted in their Dalit and Tamil heritage, Siva imagines new worlds of decolonized dreamscapes, futuristic oasis with mutants and monsters and narratives of queer and feminine power.
K.A. Geetha is an Associate Professor the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, BITS Pilani, Goa Campus, India. Her research interests are Dalit writing, Post-Colonial literatures, Women Studies and Cultural studies. She has worked extensively on the literary production and reception of Tamil Dalit literature.
Priteegandha Naik has submitted her thesis on Dalit-futurism which discussed Dalit Studies, Science Fiction Studies, Science and Technology Studies. She and is currently working as a Research Associate at Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai.