Just outside the gallery, you’ll find the Bonington Vitrines – two display cases that present an ever-changing series of projects that run alongside our exhibitions.
For the 15th instalment of our Bonington Vitrines programme, we are delighted to welcome Nomadic Vitrine, a curatorial project run by Recent Activity in Birmingham. Nomadic Vitrine invites artists to respond to a nomadic display case, either using it functionally to present work or intervening with it sculpturally. The vitrine in itself is a redundant sculpture, replacing the gallery as a space for artists to create work in/on/for. It builds on historical notions of display and visibility, both within and beyond the gallery, and is placed in various locations around Birmingham and further afield.
This instalment will be inhabited by Glasgow-based artist Mick Peter. Mick’s playful installations incorporate imagery influenced by illustration and commercial art. His work for Nomadic Vitrine wittily undermines the assumed hushed reverential attitude of the gallery goer. Using the inverted vitrine, the space becomes a site for an unexpected sight gag.
Recent Activity is a curatorial project based in Birmingham, delivering exhibitions and events. It is organised by artist Andrew Gillespie, with support from Ryan Kearney.
Mick Peter lives in Glasgow, UK. He has recently had solo shows at BALTIC, Gateshead (2019), Deborah Bowmann, Brussels (2018/19), Glasgow International (2018), Galerie Crèvecoeur, Paris (2017), Workplace, Gateshead (2016), Tramway, Glasgow (2015), and Drawing Room, London (2016), Popcorn Plaza, part of Generation: 25 Years of Contemporary Art in Scotland, Jupiter Artland (2014) and Almost Cut My Hair, part of Generation: 25 Years of Contemporary Art in Scotland, Tramway Hidden Gardens, (2014). Recent group shows include ‘Voyage au long cours’ at FRACNormandie Caen (2018), Natural Selection’ at Galerie 5, Angers (2016), France and & ‘Corps narratifs’ at the Domaine départemental de Chamarande, Chamarande, France (2016). Puddle, pothole, portal at Sculpture Center, New York (2014), L’Echo at HAB Galerie – FRAC des Pays de la Loire, (2014), Monument at FRAC Basse-Normandie, (2014), British British Polish Polish: Art from Europe’s Edges in the Long 90’s and Today at the Centre for Contemporary Art, and Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, (2013).
In Works from the Hallucinated Archive, Wayne Burrows brings together material by six artists (five real, one fictional) who work across a range of media and traditions but all share an interest in ideas around folklore, spiritual belief and art as psychic manifestation or transmission.
The vitrines and foyer are occupied by works from the fabricated archive of an entirely fictional British artist, Robert Holcombe (1923 – 2003). Gathered into an exhibition that might be read as a scholarly contribution to a previously unknown (and wilfully esoteric) chapter in the story of Post-War British Art. Or perhaps a fiction exploring ideas of authenticity, class and cultural identity by ‘restoring’ to our attention a figure who might plausibly have existed, but failed or refused to fit the standard narratives and frameworks of his time.
This archival fiction is further layered and complicated by its deployment as a framing device for a group of works by five other artists, mostly contemporary, sometimes hallucinatory in effect, and all real. Their shared fascinations with altered states, fringe beliefs, folklore and ritual, play against their own (and our) ingrained sceptical instincts with humour and a strong awareness of absurdity. After all, whatever the precise nature of any particular psychic or paranormal phenomenon might be, such subjective experiences plainly share conceptual ground with the transformative, healing and wish-fulfilling objectives of art itself. Just as a fiction is a very literal kind of alternate reality, a song, a form of spell-casting or invocation, and any film or photograph in existence is a very literal kind of ghost.
The artworks and fictional ephemera featured work together as something that exists between a curated group show and a single installation to generate a kind of ‘Alice in Wonderland’ rabbit-hole: a collage portal into a parallel world that may already exist within the familiar yet often nightmarish one we currently inhabit.
Aslı Anık, Arianne Churchman, Maryam Hashemi, Robert Holcombe, Chloe Langlois, Z.K. Oloruntoba
People have been focused so long on what is inside the vitrine, that nobody has ever looked at the vitrine itself. They are passive agents of display, and it is about time they had their chance to tell their own story!
Curated by the Bonington Student Curatorial Group, this exhibition challenges the notions of the vitrines as display cases and brings them to life as the forefront of the exhibition – to challenge traditionally perceived notions on their use.
By presenting an alternative on the accepted narrative of what these objects are capable of, Complaint will explore the vitrines’ life outside of the gallery, and the pressures which they face in their day to day life.
Curated by the Bonington Student Curatorial Group.
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.
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.
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.
Alan Lodge, Nottingham Trent University (NTU) BA and MA Photography alumnus, comes from a free festival and traveller background. Living in old buses, trucks and caravans, he drove around the country on ‘the circuit’ with his family and friends. Since the late 1970s he has been photographing events and the people around him.
Documenting all aspects of alternative lifestyles and sub-cultures, Alan has photographed many free and commercial events, environment protests, land rights demonstrations, and rave culture. Providing insight that only people who have been accepted into a community can really achieve, his aim has been to present a more positive view of people and communities that are frequently misrepresented.
The process has not been easy, as many people are suspicious of anyone with a camera and their motives. Conflict with the police in more recent years has become a fact of life, as has eviction from land and squats, and difficulties with children’s education when being continually moved on.
Alan had produced work for publications, galleries, events, and public spaces. Moving beyond photography, he has experimented with mixed media involving printed and projected text. During his MA at NTU, Alan specialised in issues surrounding representation, presenting himself in print and audio-visual format. A member of the National Union of Journalists, he is a documentary photographer, a photo-journalist and ‘storyteller’ always on the lookout for another tale to tell.
Founded in 1946, the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London is a membership organisation that seeks to promote an understanding of radical arts and culture. The ICA bulletin has always been instrumental in communicating a multi-disciplinary programme that encompasses music, film, talks, poetry, visual arts and performance to its audience.
The earliest 1950s bulletins function as a simple notice to inform its readership of the ICA’s activities. The uniform visual identity of these early bulletins is partly shaped by the ICA’s conception of itself as an ‘institute’, an organisation whose ethos was equally beholden to the ideas of the laboratory, the university and the professional society, as it was to the modern art gallery or museum.
In the 1960s the bulletin adopted a magazine format, where the listings were supplemented by articles exploring contemporary poetry, music and visual art, alongside critical writings, reviews and polemic. In bringing together these different disciplines, the bulletin evoked in print the interdisciplinary aims of the ICA, and the diverse programming that took place within the gallery space itself. Casting off its 1950s consistency, the bulletin adopts what CHK Design Director, Christian Küsters described as a ‘non-identity’ that characterised the ICA’s representation of self: simultaneously indebted to the self-publishing endeavours of artists, the poetry chapbook and the zine.
Subsequent decades saw the collage-indebted style of the 1960s give way to a muted colour palette and a rationalised identity. These changes culminated in the creation of a new logotype in the 1980s and the subsequent adoption of a new typeface and branding by acclaimed designer Tony Arefin (1962-2000) in the 1990s.
Following a series of re-designs the ICA bulletin has more recently become an online platform. Bringing together event listings with articles and projects conceived by ICA staff, collaborators, students and artists it has retained the characteristic sense of mutability that has typified the bulletin since its inception.
Curated by Daniel Heather.
In the past nine years, Sara MacKillop has published and self-published over 30 book-works. Printed matter has always been at the core of MacKillop’s artistic practice, working directly with the physical form of books and employing reprographic techniques to create her expanded installation works.
MacKillop is a strong supporter of wider independent publishing, demonstrated by her founding of the Artist Self Publishers’ Fair in 2015 at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in London with fellow artist Dan Mitchell, which has continued as an annual event at ICA.
This vitrine exhibition compliments Sara MacKillop’s solo exhibition One Room Living in the Gallery from Friday 3 November – Friday 8 December, whereby she will present a series of works, objects and interactions that make reference to areas within the University that cater for social and recreational activity.
This exhibition is supported by the Elephant Trust.
A collection of design memorabilia and reflections, from the 1980s archive of Juliana Sissons.
We have been delving into the archive of fashion designer and Nottingham Trent University (NTU) lecturer Juliana Sissons. Housed within the Gallery Vitrines, London’s Calling reveals an eclectic collection of Juliana’s personal memorabilia and influences, iconic magazine features, design objects, and video footage from the 1980s.
The 1980s was a decade when civil unrest threatened to undermine the country’s social order. Meanwhile, London’s fashion was at its most novel and diverse. At a time when Vogue was covering trend directions in pastel shade twinsets and pearls, the Face, i-D, and Blitz magazines were embracing the raw creativity in the unique style of London’s youth culture.
Young people were making innovative statements about contemporary life through their dress. Not driven by fashion labels of the time, but preferring to create their own ‘signature’ through eclectic mixes of jumble sale finds, vintage pieces, old theatre costumes, and home sewn garments – pushing ideas outside of their traditional influences.
Young fashion designers emerged in an ad hoc way during the early 80s and were echoed in the anarchic environment of the music industry, and in the nightclubs that sprang up spontaneously across the capital. Creative self-expression was the focus that formed the ethos of London’s clubs in the early 1980s and the hedonistic mix of people who were drawn to this scene encouraged creativity and risk taking in design.
This unique display gives a snapshot of Juliana’s life as a fashion designer in London through the 1980s, working with the likes of Lee Alexander McQueen, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Top of the Pops, Divine, Scarlett Cannon, Leigh Bowery, Isabella Blow, and Judy Blame – capturing the excitement of this unique time of self-expression.
In Conversation with Scarlett Cannon and Juliana Sissons
Wednesday 18 October 2017, 2.15 pm – 4 pm
Join us on Wednesday 18 October as Juliana and Scarlett share their experiences of what it was like to be part of the vibrant, transitional youth culture and clubbing scene in London during the 1980s. London was experiencing a social, cultural and political revolution, paving the way for self-expression and rebellion. The club scene in London was explosive and challenged boundaries; and the fashion that came with it was flamboyant, hedonistic and designed to shock.
To reserve your free place, visit the event booking page on the NTU website. This event is open to students, staff, alumni, and the general public.