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Book your free ticket and join us at Bonington Gallery for the Critical Hits Zine Fair.

Marking the launch of our next exhibition Weird Hope Engines (22 March – 10 May) this event celebrates DIY publishing and tabletop gaming with vendors from Nottingham and around the UK including Melsonian Arts CouncilCopy/Paste Co-opWarp MiniaturesRamshackle Games and others. Critical Hits Zine Fair brings together independent publishers, artists, and writers exploring themes of critical worlding, resistance, and alternative futures.

Alongside a diverse range of zines and collectables to purchase, the Fair also features a programme of talks and conversations with artists from the exhibition including Zedeck Siew and Angela Washko, and panel discussions on fantasy illustration, game design and miniature fabrication with Andrew WalterAmanda Lee FranckScrap World, and Alex Huntley.

Critical Hits Zine Fair also features gaming sessions with David Blandy, Angela Washko and Andrew Walter, as well as a film screening programme delving further into the narratives, aesthetics, and communities that shape these immersive worlds, including the documentaries World of Darkness (2017) and Eye of the Beholder: The Art of Dungeons & Dragons (2019).

Event programme:

Talks:

12:00 – 12:45
Drawing Down The Moon: The Art of TTRPG Illustration 
Amanda Lee Franck and Scrap Princess 
Chaired by Andrew Walter 

13:00 – 13:45
Warped Worlds and Ramshackle Realms: Worlds In Miniature
Curtis Fell (Ramshackle Games) and Alex Huntley (Warp Miniatures) 
Chaired by Chris MacDowell 

14:00 – 14:45
Art Can Never Be Games!: What Is An Art Game? 
Tom Kemp and Angela Washko 
Chaired by Jamie Sutcliffe and Rebecca Edwards

15:00 – 15:45
Games Design For Planetary Survival
Chris Bissette, Laurie O’Connell and Zedeck Siew  
Chaired by David Blandy

Game play sessions:

11.30am: David Blandy, Eco Mofos
2pm: Andrew Walter, Swyvers 
3.30pm: Angela Washko, The Council is in Session

Image: Still from the film World of Darkness, 2017

Future Factory, based within Nottingham Trent University, is delighted to preset A + B =CC(an) by Paul Matosic. The exhibition which takes place in Bonington Atrium, runs from 16 – 28 April.

The exhibition had been commissioned by Future Factory ad produced in response to the building of a new arts venue: Centre for Contemporary Art, Nottingham (CCAN)

Matosic’s exhibition incorporates a collection of discarded and mislaid objects that are assembled into a sculptural piece that could resemble a cityscape, and which is literally a snapshot of the waste produces by a consumerist society obsessed by the new. Taking the cultural residue of consumer society and re-presenting this is the gallery makes the comment on the process of regeneration.

Paul said:

“we live in a society that is dominated by a ‘NEW IS GOOD’ sensibility. Every which way we turn we are confronted with opportunities to by new stuff and in doing so dispose of some old stuff.
Actually look forward to the day when we run out of materials to use in my art because that will mean that society has stopped producing the vast amounts od wast that is the hallmark of consumerism.”

Paul Matosic

The leading speciality paper merchant GFSmith celebrates 111 years of redefining how we view paper promotion with this fantastic heritage exhibition.

Having grown from a small family business in the late 1890’s, to a thriving company with over 150 members of staff and a global sales network, the business has adequate reason to celebrate the impact design has played on its success.

This exhibition will showcase material which encompasses both European and American promotions, featuring work from contributors such as Saul Bass, Milton Glaser, Paul Rand, Bill McKay and SEA Design.

‘Perception’ is intricate. The removal of accumulated layers of meaning attached to material culture challenges frequently held perceptions. This exhibition confronts commonly held notions relating to the built environment in the Ajegunle community in Lagos, Nigeria and national identity in the Republic of Ireland. Both of these areas of research relate to physical architecture. However, they move beyond the tangible to explore ‘human’ architecture and identity.

Location: Bonington Atrium and multiple venues across Nottingham

Uniting 250 artists from 25 countries over 7 days, UK Young Artist (UKYA) City Takeover (Now UK New Artists) will span multiple venues across Nottingham, immersing visitors in an array of extraordinary, innovative and contemporary work, from visual arts to performance; music; applied arts; literature; digital arts and moving image.

One of the largest biennials of national and international artists in the world, UKYA City Takeover will be discerning and cutting-edge. Presenting an exemplar survey show of contemporary art, performance and music being made today. Expect to encounter art and performance in cultural spaces as well as unusual places. From caves to cafes; markets to museums; studios to the streets – the City Takeover weaves a rich tapestry of venues across Nottingham.

Bonington Gallery is delighted to host installations, drawings, sculpture and photography from visual artists: Grace StonesJodie WinghamLucie Blissett, Luisa Turuani, Nika Kupyrova and Won Hee Nam.

Check out the full programme over on the UKYA City Takeover website.

In what seems like an intensifying atmosphere of global, media-driven expressions of shock, horror, fear and anxiety – how can we use states of crisis as a way to rethink the future? Can we harness these acutely painful conditions and represent them in a creative way?

Curated by Something Human and presented in partnership with Bonington Gallery, Nottingham Trent University and Nottingham ContemporaryKrísis presented an exhibition and events programme of international visual and performance artists, to engage our audience with multifaceted perspectives on the meaning of ‘crisis’, and its understanding within the current socio-political climate.

Through multidisciplinary artworks, performances, and conversations, Krisis explored how these critical conditions can be reclaimed and reconfigured to drive change through artistic practice.

We’ve invited Something Human to write on our blog – read more about them.

Artists Include:

Sama Alshaibi (Palestine-Iraq), Nicola Anthony (UK), John Clang (Singapore), Dictaphone Group (Lebanon) Collective Creativity (UK), Maryam Monalisa Gharavi (US-Iran), Núria Güell and Levi Orta (Spain-Lebanon), Lynn Lu (Singapore), Marija Milosevska (Macedonia), Rachel Parry (UK), Post-Museum (Singapore), Raju Rage (UK), Aida Silvestri (UK), Srey Bandaul (Cambodia), Tuan Mami (Vietnam), and Boedi Widjaja (Singapore)

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From Our Blog

To coincide with the In Place of Architecture exhibition in the Gallery from 6 November – 11 December, this symposium brings together photographers, filmmakers, and writers on photography and architecture to examine the role that photography and moving image play in our contemporary interpretation, perception and understanding of the architectural environment.

Keynote speaker: Andrew Higgott, author and co editor of Camera Constructs.

Speakers will include:

#NTUIPOA

Symposium Handout

Click here to download the symposium handout

In July 2015 a group of BArch (Hons) Architecture students from Nottingham Trent University (NTU) participated in a research project, which involved the documentation of invisible memory points in Nottingham.

As part of their research the students visited the National Memorial Arboretum (NMA), a key location for national remembrance in the UK. Most of the images included in this show are a direct response to the commemorative architecture: a visual and textual reaction to the experience of visiting the NMA and other memory points in the UK.

NTU students, David Symons, Emma Hewitt and Rumbi Mukundi worked with three students from Brazil – Marina Martinelli, Felipe Bomfim and Alina Peres – to create a website with an interactive map and blog, as well as a printed tourist map. The idea of the site was to increase awareness of the architecture of memory in Nottingham and beyond.

Visit the website to view the student project.

Public Engagement

The group have also printed out a selection of quotes which refer to photography and the visual representation of memory, as well as the experience of architecture.

When visiting the exhibition we invite you to respond to these images and quotes by writing directly onto the wall in order to contribute to the work in progress. Tell us how the image or text makes you feel – do you agree with what they represent?

Responses are invited in any format – it’s up to you.

The project was led by Dr. Ana Souto, Senior Lecturer in Architecture and supported by Prof. Duncan Higgins, Professor of Visual Arts at NTU.


Inscription: The Almshouse Tempera Project presented the work of four contemporary artists who have investigated the historical but still very active form of social housing known as the almshouse, through the early painting medium of egg tempera.

The artists Derek Hampson, Deborah Harty, Atsuhide Ito, and Peter Suchin also included actual material fragments from almshouses within the exhibition, inscribing both the image and the physical presence of the almshouse into the gallery.

Read more about the project.

The project was supported by Arts Council England and Nottingham Community Housing Association.


Views of Matlock Bath channelled visual traditions and tropes from both photography and painting.

George Miles’ sublime large-format photographs explore how the land is used, viewed, and mediated: both physically and through its representations. This much loved local valley, championed for its picturesque qualities by the tastemakers of their times including Byron and Ruskin, bore witness to the consolidation of the English Landscape tradition, the birth of the Industrial Revolution, and of mass tourism.

In this show these interconnections and the relationship they bear upon how we view the landscape were explored through a re-presentation of a selection of images from the book that this exhibition accompanied.