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.
For the duration of 25 days the gallery will be transformed into an open cinema. Running daily, Video Days presents a different film or series of short films each day from different decades and genres. The films screened share several common themes, most prevalent is their relationship to the built environment.
All films/performances are played on repeat unless specified otherwise.
DISCLAIMER
The films on display do not come with a British Board of Film Classification (BBFC). We therefore advise that some of the films shown may contain scenes of nudity, discrimination, violence, drugs, imitable behaviour, and language unsuitable for young or vulnerable viewers. If you have any questions prior to visiting the gallery, please get in touch.
Monday 30 April
Simon Martin, Carlton, 2006, (9 mins). Courtesy of LUX, London.
Looped all day.
The nine minutes of Simon Martin’s compelling, memorable film Carlton (2006) are devoted to a cultural philosophical meditation upon the Carlton cabinet, designed by Ettore Sottsass in 1981, and a founding example of the work made by the radical design group Memphis, established in Milan that same year. Outlandish, mischievous, heroically quirky – riding a perilous back-curve between supreme aesthetic poise and assuredly knowing kitsch – Memphis design was as much the articulation of an anti-historicist mission statement as it was a deft-footed style surf on the surging tides of 1980s excess.
Tuesday 1 May
Berwick Street Collective, Night Cleaners, 1975, (90 mins). Courtesy of LUX, London.
Screening times: 10 am, 11.45 am, 1.30 pm, 3.15 pm
Nightcleaners Part 1 was a documentary made by members of the Berwick Street Collective (Marc Karlin , Mary Kelly, James Scott and Humphry Trevelyan ), about the campaign to unionize the women who cleaned office blocks at night and who were being victimized and underpaid. Intending at the outset to make a campaign film, the Collective was forced to turn to new forms in order to represent the forces at work between the cleaners, the Cleaner’s Action Group and the unions – and the complex nature of the campaign itself. The result was an intensely self-reflexive film, which implicated both the filmmakers and the audience in the processes of precarious, invisible labour. It is increasingly recognised as a key work of the 1970s and as an important precursor, in both subject matter and form, to current political art practice.
Wednesday 2 May
Rollo Jackson, Gang Signs & Prayer, 2017.
Looped all day in sequence.
A visual testament to Stormzy’s life and upbringing, the film chronicles Stormzy’s inner battles and temptations as he becomes master of his own destiny. “Return of the Rucksack,” “Bad Boys” and “100 Bags,” taken from Stormzy’s award winning debut studio album “Gang Signs & Prayer,” serve as the soundtrack to the film of the same name.
“Young youts like myself, that grow up in the hood, we often don’t know that we are actually the masters of our own destiny … There are so many things that steer us in the wrong direction however, we decide what happens in our own lives and like my album, I endeavoured for this film to portray just that. Derived from my album Gang Signs & Prayer, and written and directed by the legend that is Rollo, I’ll let the visual do the talking.”
Stormzy
Rollo Jackson, Slimzee’s Going on Terrible, 2014.
Looped all day in sequence.
Slimzee (‘Godfather of Grime’) was the co-founder of Rinse FM and DJ in the UK Garage collective ‘Pay As You Go Cartel’.
Slimzee’s Going on Terrible charts his life, following his early days in pirate radio to receiving a career-threatening Asbo. Features old & new footage and interviews from fellow DJ’s & MC’s and even his own mother.
Thursday 3 May
A series of films by Frank Abbott, 10 am – 5 pm
Looped all day.
[CANCELLED] Frank Abbott, Neither Here Nor There: Displaced over 40 years, 1978-2018, live performance, 6 pm – 7 pm
Displaced over 40 years, Frank Abbott performs a live retrospective of his hand-held projector work.
*** Please note the evening performance has been cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances. ***
Friday 4 May
Mark Leckey, The March of the Big White Barbarians, 2005, (5 mins). Courtesy of LUX, London.
Looped all day.
London’s Public Sculptures are articulated by concrete poetry of Maurice Lemaitre in a free translation by Leckey’s Jack Too Jack.
“After doing the thing with the Epstein [sculpture], I went out actively looking for public sculptures, other monumental sculptures … again, this language feels lost to me … I know what they mean but they seem very distant … they felt neglected, and I wanted to try to sing them back, to reanimate them and make them alive again, because they seemed dead”
Mark Leckey.
Saturday 5 May
Eric Baudelaire, Also Known As Jihadi, 2017, (99 mins). Courtesy of LUX, London.
Screening times: 11 am and 1 pm
Produced in the wake of the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, the film traces the journey and trial of a young man from the suburbs of Paris who travelled via Egypt to Syria to join the Al-Nusra Front (al-Qaeda). The subject’s path to radicalism is explored both through judicial transcripts and through a series of landscape shots filmed at the locations traversed by the subject: a biography determined not by what the subject did, but by what the subject saw. In this way, Baudelaire’s film positions itself as both a remake and a test of the landscape theory proposed by Japanese filmmaker Masao Adachi in his 1969 masterpiece A.K.A. Serial Killer, questioning how these landscapes reflect the social and political structures that form the backdrop for this journey of alienation and return.
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.
For the duration of 25 days the gallery will be transformed into an open cinema. Running daily, Video Days presents a different film or series of short films each day from different decades and genres. The films screened share several common themes, most prevalent is their relationship to the built environment.
All films/performances are played on repeat unless specified otherwise.
DISCLAIMER
The films on display do not come with a British Board of Film Classification (BBFC). We therefore advise that some of the films shown may contain scenes of nudity, discrimination, violence, drugs, imitable behaviour, and language unsuitable for young or vulnerable viewers. If you have any questions prior to visiting the gallery, please get in touch.
Monday 23 April
Harm van den Dorpel, more information coming soon.
Tuesday 24 April
Jasmine Johnson, L Making Pesto, 2013, (13:37 mins).
Jasmine Johnson, Thieves and Swindlers are not Allowed in Paradise, 2014, (9:20 mins).
Jasmine Johnson, Third Party, 2015, (15:38 mins).
Jasmine Johnson, A Perfect Instrument, 2016, 32:20 mins).
Screening times: 10 am, 11.45 am, 1.30 pm, 15.15 pm
These works are a series of four video portraits by the artist, in which individuals are selected for their proximity to global dilemmas, and for their capacity to articulate human anxieties. This will be the first time they have been presented together.
Wednesday 25 April
John Lawrence, The Solar Pessimist, 2017, (34 mins).
Looped all day.
The Solar Pessimist integrates a 34 minute spoken word monologue performed by actor Peter Hugo Daly (Gangs of New York, Cassandra’s Dream) with a soundtrack by Berlin-based musician Tim Eve (W/ndows, Night Angles) alongside professional lighting techniques including an ‘intelligent’ circular lighting rig and surround sound installation.
It was produced for the vast former industrial space at Spit & Sawdust, Cardiff, as a result of being supported through the Kim Fielding Award 2016—supporting ambitious, experimental approaches to practice across non-traditional gallery sites.
Somewhere between speculative ‘pub chat’ and philosophical diatribe our guiding voice becomes distracted, his thoughts distorted through the joint lenses of conspiracy theory, new-agism and that of the self-righteous contemporary consumer.
Within his meandering thought-processes are propositions about what best to be doing at the end of the world, how zero-gravity pornography will affect us all and…if the sun is a conscious being…what happens when he starts talking back?
For Video Days, Lawrence presents a version of The Solar Pessimist as a single channel video work, the production of which was integrated within the live event itself
Thursday 26 April (late opening)
NG83: WHEN WE WERE B BOYS, 2016, (74 mins). Filmmakers: Claude Knight (Producer & Director), Luke Scott (Writer & Director), Sam Derby-Cooper (Director).
Screening times: 10 am, 11.30 am, 1 pm, 2.30 pm, 4 pm, 5.30 pm, 6.45 pm
In Degrees of Blindness, Evans considers the different possibilities of perceiving the world, our surroundings, and explores different degrees of vision with varying backgrounds and forms of expression.
Saturday 28 April
Karen Cunningham, Movable Type; Under Erasure, 2016, (13:32 mins).
Looped all day.
Movable Type; Under Erasure was commissioned by Legion TV and first shown at The Showroom, London in 2016. Filmed largely on location at Writing-on-Stone, Canada the work features an original monologue written and read by the eminent theorist and cultural critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
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.
For the duration of 25 days the gallery will be transformed into an open cinema. Running daily, Video Days presents a different film or series of short films each day from different decades and genres. The films screened share several common themes, most prevalent is their relationship to the built environment.
All films/performances are played on repeat unless specified otherwise.
DISCLAIMER
The films on display do not come with a British Board of Film Classification (BBFC). We therefore advise that some of the films shown may contain scenes of nudity, discrimination, violence, drugs, imitable behaviour, and language unsuitable for young or vulnerable viewers. If you have any questions prior to visiting the gallery, please get in touch.
Friday 20 April
Blind Skateboards, Video Days, 1991 (24 mins), Dir. Spike Jonze.
Looped all day.
Video Days is a skateboard video released in 1991 by Blind Skateboards, it was produced by American skateboarder and filmmaker, Spike Jonze. It is widely considered to be one of the most influential skate videos of all time, providing early platforms for now legendary skaters including Mark Gonzales, Jason Lee and Guy Mariano.
Saturday 21 April
Forensic Architecture, 77sqm_9:26min, 2016, (27:23 mins).
Screening times: Every 30 mins all day (11 am – 3 pm)
Counter investigating the testimony of Andres Temme in relation to the murder of Halit Yozgat in Kassel, 6 April 2006.
Commissioned by the ‘Unraveling the NSU Complex’ people’s tribunal; Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt (HKW); Initiative 6 April; and documenta14.
Shortly after 17:00 on the 6 April 2006, Halit Yozgat, 21 years old, was murdered while attending the reception counter of his family run Internet café in Kassel, Germany. His was the ninth of ten racist murders committed by a neo-Nazi group known as the National Socialist Underground or NSU across Germany between 2000 and 2007.
At the time of the killing, an intelligence officer named Andreas Temme was present in the shop. Temme was at the time an employee of the State Office for Constitutional Protection (Landesamt für Verfassungsschutz), the domestic intelligence agency for the German state of Hessen. Temme did not disclose this fact to the police, but was later identified from his internet records.
In his interrogation by the police, and in the subsequent NSU trial in Munich, Temme denied being a witness to the incident, and claimed not to have noticed anything out of the ordinary. The court accepted his testimony. It determined that Temme was present at the back room of the internet café at the time of the murder. It also accepted that from his position in the shop it was possible not to have witnessed the killing.
Within the 77 square meters of the Internet café and the 9:26 minutes of the incident, different actors crossed paths — members of migrant communities, a state employee and the murderers — and were architecturally disposed in relation to each other. The shop was thus a microcosm of the entire social and political controversy that makes the ‘NSU Complex’.
In November 2016, eleven years after the murder, an alliance of civil society organisations known as ‘Unraveling the NSU Complex’ commissioned Forensic Architecture to investigate Temme’s testimony and determine whether it could be truthful.
We launch our next exhibition Video Days with a programme of talks, screenings and photography dedicated to the local and international skateboarding community.
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 reflects 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. It also shows the rich texture of disciplines and interests reflected across the entire Video Days programme.
Skateboarding is an activity that reflects a consistent theme within the programme of human-kind’s disruptive and subjective relationship with the built environment.
Email boningtongallery@ntu.ac.uk to confirm your attendance to the Video Days Preview.
An exhibition of photography from local skate photographers: 4 pm onward
Curated by Tom Quigley, who self-publishes Varial Magazine, featuring East Midlands skateboard photography. Alongside Tom’s own work, the exhibition will include contributions from active local skate photographers such as Neil Turner, Vic Camilleri, Dave Bevan, and Andrew Horsley (one of the founders of Sidewalk magazine, the UK and Europe’s longest running skate magazine, and internationally respected skate photographer) and images from Nottingham between the 1970s and 1990s from photographers including Andrew McDermott and Steve Tristram. Tom was recently the subject of the second part of the film series ‘We Can Fly’, and had work featured in the Sneinton Pride of Place collection of photography and visual art published by the Caravan Gallery, 2018.
From transgression to progression: 5 pm – 5.30 pm
A talk on skateboarding and Nottingham’s social, cultural and economic development, Chris Lawton Skate Nottingham.
Chris is one of the co-founders of Skate Nottingham. He is a Senior Research Fellow in economics at Nottingham Business School, here at Nottingham Trent University. He is also a feature writer for Caught in the Crossfire magazine, a long-running web-magazine on skateboarding, punk and radical politics. In this short discussion, Chris will talk about examples of skateboarders proactively driving inclusive development in cities around the world, particularly Malmö, Copenhagen and Tampere, and how both the activity and its wider culture and community provide opportunities for Nottingham (like Malmö, a medium-sized post-industrial city with a young population but significant regeneration challenges).
War & Rees, 2017, (7:17 mins), Daniel O’Neill: 5.30 pm – 5.40 pm
Dan is a skateboarder and academic historian, and is one of the Nottingham skate scene’s most prolific filmers. This short film charts the final year of Nottingham’s large DIY skatepark project, which occupied waste ground next to the BBC Island – earmarked for development as part of Nottingham’s stalled ‘East Side City’ project; amid wider local political interest in the loss of genuine ‘common’ land in the city centre (and thus the radical potential of skateboarders repurposing blighted brownfield space land-banked by property developers and kept out of public use for more than two decades). The original DIY and a later, short-lived guerrilla skatepark in waste ground by BioCity were both demolished by the landowners towards the end of 2017, land which has, for the time being, been returned to its previously unused state.
A montage of Nottingham skateboarding past and present, (20 mins), Neil Turner: 5.40 pm – 6 pm
Neil has been filming skateboarding in Nottingham for almost 20 years, alongside documentary video work and photography, and is currently working on the first full-length video from Forty Two Shop, Nottingham’s only independent skate store. Neil has filmed edits for Sidewalk magazine and has amassed a huge archive of footage of Nottingham skateboarders from the late 90s days of Old Market Square and Broadmarsh Banks through to now, which he will draw from and re-edit specially for this event.
Pieces of Palestine, featuring Isle Skateboards and SkatePal, 2017, (20 mins), Jacob Harris: 6.10 pm – 6.30 pm
A short film featuring the Isle skateboard team’s 2016 visit to the West Bank with award-winning charity SkatePal, to be shown with the permission of Jacob Harris (winner of the Bright Trade Show European Skateboard Awards for both his 2013 independent film Eleventh Hour and Isle’s debut video in 2015, Vase). Pieces of Palestine will help raise awareness and support for two of Skate Nottingham’s young female coaches who will be volunteering with SkatePal in the West Bank this October.
Video Days, 1991, (24 mins), Spike Jonze and Blind Skateboards: 6.30 pm – 7 pm
Video Days is a skateboard video released in 1991 by Blind Skateboards, it was produced by American skateboarder and filmmaker, Spike Jonze. It is widely considered to be one of the most influential skate videos of all time, providing early platforms for now legendary skaters including Mark Gonzales, Jason Lee and Guy Mariano.
Join us on the penultimate day of Jason Evans’ curated exhibition You’re Gonna Need a Bigger Boat for an informal and open discussion between Evans and Bonington Gallery curator, Tom Godfrey.
Hear more about the objects and works on show and the stories and histories that informed their selection.
All welcome – no prior booking required.
Soft drinks and snacks will be provided.
Image: Clark Brothers, Manchester (est. 1934), Selection of promotional materials (background); Jason Evans, Wool and Clay, 2017, Rug and eroded brick (foreground)
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 Contemporary, Krísis 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.
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)
When artists ‘perform’ states of crisis, do they also ‘perform’ states of regeneration? How can live art ignite new conversations and reflections on crisis?
CCLAP is a three year live art project that began in 2014. It aims to bring together the critical contexts of Southeast Asian live art practice, in conversation with developments within the UK and Europe.
On Thursday 27 October CCLAP presents thought-provoking live performances by Southeast Asian and other international practitioners to address the notion of crisis. The performances will take place as part of the Krísis exhibition preview from 5 pm – 8 pm, RSVP to confirm your attendance.
Lynn Lu (Singapore), Soni Kum (Japan – Korea), Marija Milosevska (Macedonia), Rachel Parry and Little Wolf Parade (UK), Raju Rage (UK), Tuan Mami (Vietnam) » Boedi Widjaja(Singapore)
CCLAP’s 2016 series of indoor and outdoor performances is part of the public programme in association with the exhibition Krísis, curated by Something Human in partnership with Bonington Gallery, Nottingham Trent University and Little Wolf Parade.
CCLAP is kindly supported by Arts Council England, National Arts Council Singapore and City of Skopje.
A special evening of screenings by artists featured in the Mould Map 6 — Terraformers exhibition and previous Mould Map editions.
Ophiux gives a glimpse into a near future that whilst fictional, is not far from reality and is founded on current scientific research. The work imagines a future in which synthetic biology has been fully realized and applied to both advance human evolution and increase life expectancy, and where human biology has been computer programmed. It not only simulates the collection of data from our own bodies but also the sampling of data from other organisms by a speculative pharmaceutical company: ‘Ophiux’.
To conceive the film, Holder has worked in close collaboration with scientists that she met during her residency at Wysing in 2015 – Dr Marco Galardini, a Computational Biologist at the European Bioinformatics Institute at the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Cambridge, and Dr Katrin Linse, Senior Biodiversity Biologist at the British Antarctic Survey, Cambridge.
Ophiux has been co-commissioned by Deptford X where it is set to premiere at their festival in September 2016. It is also being shown as part of a larger project at Wysing Arts Centre from 24 September – 20 November 2016. A tour to other arts and science venues across the UK will be announced at a later date.
The exhibition and film has been made possible with a generous grant from the Arts Council England and in partnership with AND/OR Gallery.
Eschaton is the name of the spaceship that is taking human consciousness to the far reaches of a dying universe. Knowledge and memory are expressed as information from the future. The purpose of this voyage is to deconstruct the fear of infinity. Eschaton’s mission is to survive within death.
Eschaton is the latest film by Copenhagen-based Greek artist and publisher, Stathis Tsemberlidis of cult small press Decadence. Soundtracked by music composed for the film on a modular synth by Panos Alexiadis.
Commissioned by CCA Derry, Bridge Over Troubled Water includes new material filmed across Finland and Lapland that utilises the motif of folk-rock duo Simon & Garfunkel to explore queer time and climate change anxiety.
This Film Night is in association with the exhibition Mould Map 6 – Terraformers
Delivered by Jonathan Chandler and Joseph P Kelly
How do artists and writers create the worlds their characters and stories exist in?
This workshop will introduce you to the creative process behind creating stories and world building. Looking at the representation of ideas through symbols, signifiers and visual storytelling, this workshop will include idea generation, with a focus on using small ideas and starting points to build working, believable environments and situations with examples and reference from relevant comics, art & film. Through writing and drawing you will explore the representation of ideas through style, composition, visual clues and colour.
Participants will work with each other and as individuals to create or develop their ideas, incorporating the structure and clichés of traditional comics and story telling, before developing their own unique take on narrative illustration – perhaps an entire story in one illustration or a tale that unfolds over a twenty panel comic page.
Jonathan has been described by innovative micro-publishers Breakdown Press as the most isolated cartoonist working in the UK today. Catch this rare opportunity to work with the author of small-press gems ‘Johns Worth’ (Landfill Editions) and Another Blue World (Breakdown Press).
Joseph is a multi-talented graphic artist and educator currently working on PayWall – a full-length graphic story set in a detailed post-flood future, the first instalment of which will be published by Landfill Editions Autumn 2016.
Materials: please bring your preferred writing and drawing tools and materials.
Suitable for people aged 14+
Click here to see more from Joseph P Kelly
Click here to see more from Jonathan Chandler
This workshop is in association with the exhibition Mould Map 6 – Terraformers.
Bonington Gallery was pleased to present the fifth in the series of Bonington Film Nights. This screening was the last in the season curated by Joshua Lockwood.
This film screening took place amidst the Publishing Rooms exhibition.
Visit the Facebook event page.