As part of this year’s Light After Dark Film Festival, Bonington Gallery is pleased to present Peep Show, an innovatively staged exhibition of archival film curated by feminist collective Invisible Women.
Only visible through spyholes in the outer perimeter walls of Bonington Gallery; Peep Show brings together a series of archival film fragments that explore the interaction between spectator and subject, eye and body —across the history of film.
Weaving together extracts from early films by women working at the cutting edge of the emerging artform—including Alice Guy Blache, Germaine Dulac and Lois Weber—this innovatively staged exhibition reflects how the medium’s conventions have been shaped by the eyes behind the camera.
Over the course of its transformation from novelty to artform, cinema has continually drawn on its peep show roots to captivate, titillate, and absorb. By drawing inspiration from quietly subversive, once-forgotten work made by early women filmmakers, Peep Show also invites us to question who has shaped this cinematic language, offering a playful potential subversion to dominant aesthetic conventions.
Beware—sometimes this peep show looks back.
Curated by Invisible Women Archive. In collaboration with Bonington Gallery, Nottingham Trent University.
Cinematic codes create a gaze, a world and an object, thereby producing an illusion cut to the measure of desire…
Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema, 1975
A woman performs in a box, alone. Behind glass, in darkness, we watch. She cannot see out, but we can see in. As her body moves we look on; silent, staring, unseen.
Over the past 120 years, cinema has presented us with countless scenes such as these; a dreamworld composed of unconscious impulses, images edited to tease and tantalise, illusions cut to the measure of desire. Before the invention of cinema, early motion picture devices were viewed through box mechanisms, private shows for one. The development of projection allowed moving images to be enlarged and viewed collectively, but the darkness of the auditorium served to reproduce the experience of the peep show. Even as this new artform moved towards respectability, this carnival legacy lived on. Early peep boxes were not exclusively for erotic images, but an explosion of pornographic peep shows in the 1970s reinforced a historic association between the peep show, cinema and sleaze which remains potent.
As the feminist critic Laura Mulvey outlines in her essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975), the language of mainstream filmmaking was designed to capitalise on our subconscious desire for scopophilia (pleasure in looking) which, in a society dominated by heterosexual patriarchal structures, created a coded language built on images of women’s bodies, diced and dissected for our enjoyment. In the dark auditorium we pretend we are alone, that the bodies on screen perform only for us. This is the dream that cinema sells, and the same voyeuristic fantasy lies at the heart of the peep show: what differentiates the eye pushed against a keyhole, from the eye focused down a camera’s viewfinder, from the eye that rests on the cinema screen?
In Peep Show, feminist collective Invisible Women bring together a series of archive fragments which explore the interaction between spectator and subject, eye and body, across the history of film. Weaving together extracts from early films by women working at the cutting edge of the emerging artform – including Alice Guy Blache, Alla Nazimova, Germaine Dulac and Lois Weber – this immersive exhibition reflects how the medium’s conventions have been shaped by the eyes behind the camera. Over the course of its transformation from novelty to artform, cinema has continually drawn on its peep show roots to captivate, titillate and absorb. By drawing inspiration from quietly subversive, once forgotten work made by early women filmmakers, Peep Show also invites us to question who has shaped this cinematic language, offering a playful potential subversion to dominant aesthetic conventions. Beware – sometimes this peep show looks back.
Invisible Women seek out and champion the work of women and filmmakers with marginalised identities who have been overlooked, un-credited or left out of the history of cinema. By drawing attention to these forgotten stories, Invisible Women aim to reinsert female voices into the story of film.
X: @IW_Archives
In its second year, Light After Dark Film Festival: Immersive encounters in cinema is a film festival dedicated to immersive experiences in cinema. Pairing films with performance, music, technology, and art, Life After Dark will give audiences a deep, intimate, and collective encounter with film.
A collaboration between Nottingham Contemporary, Broadway Cinema, Nottingham Playhouse, University of Nottingham and Bonington Gallery, Nottingham Trent University.
Light After Dark Film Festival has been made possible with support from Film Hub Midlands through funds from the National Lottery. Film Hub Midlands support people to watch, show, and make films in the Midlands. Festival Design: @waste_studio
Image credit: Suspense (1913) directed by Lois Webster.
Join us for a free, accessible tour of history is a living weapon in yr hand led by Onyeka Igwe (artist) & Elaine Joseph (audio describer), and accompanied by a BSL interpreter.
General access information to the building can be found here
Accessibility information for the exhibition can be found here
Onyeka Igwe is a London-born and based moving image artist and researcher.
Her work is aimed at the question: how do we live together? Not to provide a rigid answer as such, but to pull apart the nuances of mutuality, co-existence and multiplicity.
Onyeka’s practice figures sensorial, spatial and counter-hegemonic ways of knowing as central to that task. For her, the body, archives and narratives both oral and textual act as a mode of enquiry that makes possible the exposition of overlooked histories.
She has had solo/duo shows at MoMA PS1, New York (2023), High Line, New York (2022), Mercer Union, Toronto (2021), Jerwood Arts, London (2019) and Trinity Square Video, London (2018). Her films have screened in numerous group shows and film festivals worldwide.
Currently, she is Practitioner in Residence at the University of the Arts London and she will participate in the group show ‘Nigeria Imaginary’ in the national pavilion of Nigeria at the upcoming 60th Venice Biennial in 2024. She was awarded the New Cinema Award at Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival 2019, 2020 Arts Foundation Fellowship, 2021 Foundwork Artist Prize and has been nominated for the 2022 Jarman Award and Max Mara Artist Prize for Women. Onyeka is represented by Arcadia Missa Gallery.
Elaine Lillian Joseph is an audio describer based in London and Birmingham. She has a BA in Modern Languages (German) and English Literature and trained as a describer at ITV under Jonathan Penny. She is a founding member of SoundScribe, a global majority collective of audio describers and consultants and a member of Collective Text, an organisation supporting accessibility in art and film through creative captioning, audio description and interpretation. The question that galvanises her practice is how can we honour the labour of access work and create a service that powerfully resonates with users? Collaboration and anti-discrimination activism is key to her work.
A selection of recently completed projects include Eve Stainton’s Impact Driver at the Institute for Contemporary Arts in London, an online screening of Hofesh Shechter’s Political Mother and a newly commissioned audio described track for Black Audio Film Collective’s Handsworth Songs.
Join us for a free tour of history is a living weapon in yr hand by Onyeka Igwe, led by Gallery Director Tom Godfrey.
Free, open to all
Join us for an afternoon of live drawing, performance and video art in a specially devised event by Venture Arts, a Manchester-based visual arts organisation working with learning disabled and neurodiverse artists to create and showcase exciting new contemporary visual art.
Free, drop in from 12pm – 5pm.
Bonington Gallery is proud to host a VA Collectives event alongside John Beck and Matthew Cornford’s exhibition, The Art Schools of the East Midlands.
Experience artist Leslie Thompson create a large-scale drawing live in the gallery space. A specially devised performance piece by Greater Manchester-based artist Jackie Haynes will also be presented.
Visitors will also be able to watch videos from Narratives, a six month collaborative residency in Venture Arts’ Conversations Series, which ran in partnership with Manchester Jewish Museum, Castlefield Gallery, The Lowry, Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Race Relations Resource Centre and Project Artworks. The residency brought together 12 artists, some from Venture Arts and some via an open call, to develop shared ideas and create new artwork over 6 months, exploring personal histories and cultural heritage.
The VA Collectives are a series of events, performances, gatherings and happenings that aim to bring artists together to explore themes of relevance to their work, the arts and the world around us. The VA Collectives are the brainchild of Venture Arts, a Manchester-based visual arts organisation working with learning disabled and neurodiverse artists to create and showcase exciting new contemporary visual art.
Both the videos and the resulting drawing by Leslie Thompson will remain in the gallery over the closing weekend for visitors to enjoy.
Videos that will be presented in the gallery:
Beyond the Shelf (2022) Millie Loveday
Falling – A Memory of Her (2022) Horace Lindezey, Dominic Pillai & Alice Merida Richards
The Dying Fly (2022) Jackie Haynes
The Julie Channel (2022) Sarah Boulter
Images by Adam Grainger and Alex Jovčić-Sas
Artist bios
Leslie is based at Venture Arts studios in Manchester and uses paint, ink or ceramics to illustrates his life, his past, his family, growing up in Moss Side in 70s and 80s, entire film sequences and a rich variety of animals, all from memory. Leslie works at extremes of small and large scale, and adds fantasy elements to the real world, combining his mother at the Arndale Market with tv characters and superheroes. Leslie’s work is part of the Government Art Collection and is widely shown, recently at TJ Boulting, London.
Often commissioned to produce live drawings, Leslie has gained a reputation as one of Britain’s most dynamic mural artists. His work has been exhibited widely across the UK, including exhibitions at The Lowry, Salford (2023), TJ Boulting, London (2022), Paper Gallery, Manchester (2022) and in 2019, his work was exhibited in Tokyo. In 2021 Leslie’s intricate piece, ‘Animals from Memory’ was acquired by the Government Art Collection.
Early in 2023 Leslie was selected to take part in a collaborative project between the Royal Society of Sculptors and Art et al. Leslie was also commissioned in 2023 by the Government Art Collection, along with nine other selected British artists, to create new artworks in celebration of the coronation of King Charles III. His work is held in private and public collections across the UK and internationally.
Jackie Haynes is an multi-disciplinary artist with a textiles background which notably included House of Haynes Fancy Dress Hire in Manchester (1998 – 2012). She studied BA Clothing in the late 1980’s which included an industrial placement in Nottingham’s Lace Market.
She currently collaborates with Heather Ross as Artist A & Artist B, whose recent work ‘The Surplus Badge’ was featured in the British Textile Biennial (2023). Jackie recently completed an art practice-based PhD study of the German Dada artist, Kurt Schwitters and is a member of art practice-based research groups, Proximity and ARG. Her newest role is as an artist and research team member with ‘Things of the Least’, a 3-year project focussing on Manchester Art Gallery’s Mary Greg Collection. Screen printing is a recent development of her practice, and she is using print in an Artist Book focussing on her collaborative experiences from Venture Arts’ Narratives residency (2022-2023).
Much of Horace’s work depicts the world around him, his family and memories of his childhood growing up in Hulme and Moss Side, Manchester. For Narratives, Horace concentrated on memories of music that he loves and grew up with in Moss Side, creating lists of songs and singers and wished to transform non Reggae pop-songs which he loves, into new reggae classics. Horace was the main inspiration behind the Narrative group’s “Julie” theme due to his devotion to many women called Julie. The group’s initial “Julie Party” took place at the social club where the residency took place. Horace exhibits widely and this year alone has shown at Kammermachen Festival, Chemnitz, Germany, The Gallery of Everything, London, Portico Library, Manchester and Slugtown Newcastle.
Alice Merida Richards is a musician and ceramicist based in Manchester. In collaboration with Horace, the duo rerecorded a reggae version of Julee Cruise’s ‘Falling’, (Twin Peaks Theme). Horace and Merida created posters and invitations taking aesthetic inspiration from posters and flyers from 80s Moss Side parties and festivals kept in the archive at Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Race Relations Resource Centre.
Manchester based film maker Dominic Pillai also collaborated on a music video for Falling, inspired by the overwhelming style and character of the social club in which the residency took place as well as huge comedy, reggae and supper club influences of Horace’s idols such as Sid James, Sparrow Martin & Julie London.
Millie Loveday’s work has grown from an ancestral discovery from 17th century Jamaica to beginning to build an underwater fantasy world inspired by the history and Afro futurist influences. Millie’s ancestral research revealed a conflicted Jamaican heritage leading her to unearth stories through family objects, statues, relics and ornaments found in her family member’s homes by using them to initiate conversation. Her video traces Cedric, a black baby doll from her mother’s childhood setting off around the world in search of his own identity.
Sarah Boulter is an artist, curator and creative producer. She works with the hyper local, national and international artist-led sector, focussing on collaborative work, inclusivity and artist development. Sarah Boulter documented the entire residency and The Julie Channel is a TV station devoted to all things Narratives. A raw, making-of style documentary of experiments, art and connections made during this collaborative residency.
Thanks to independent curator Abi Spinks for programming and supporting the development of this event in response to The Art Schools of the East Midlands by John Beck & Matthew Cornford.
Header photo credit: Leslie Thompson by Sarah Boulter, 2022.
Join us for a first look around history is a living weapon in yr hand, a new exhibition by Onyeka Igwe, a London-born and based moving image artist and researcher. Her work is aimed at the question: how do we live together? She is interested in the prosaic and everyday aspects of black livingness and exploring overlooked histories.
Accompanying the exhibition, An Elegant Marker of Endless Invention in our vitrines highlights key women who embraced creative activities to challenge imperialism.
Onyeka Igwe is a London born, and based, moving image artist and researcher. Her work is aimed at the question: how do we live together? Not to provide a rigid answer as such, but to pull apart the nuances of mutuality, co-existence and multiplicity.
Onyeka’s practice figures sensorial, spatial and counter-hegemonic ways of knowing as central to that task. For her, the body, archives and narratives both oral and textual act as a mode of enquiry that makes possible the exposition of overlooked histories. She has had solo/duo shows at MoMA PS1, New York (2023), High Line, New York (2022), Mercer Union, Toronto (2021), Jerwood Arts, London (2019) and Trinity Square Video, London (2018). Her films have screened in numerous group shows and film festivals worldwide.
Currently, she is Practitioner in Residence at the University of the Arts London and she will participate in the group show ‘Nigeria Imaginary’ in the national pavilion of Nigeria at the upcoming 60th Venice Biennial in 2024. She was awarded the New Cinema Award at Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival 2019, 2020 Arts Foundation Fellowship, 2021 Foundwork Artist Prize and has been nominated for the 2022 Jarman Award and Max Mara Artist Prize for Women. Onyeka is represented by Arcadia Missa Gallery.
Ain Bailey is a composer, artist and DJ. She facilitates workshops considering the role of sound in the formation of identity, and the exploration of memory and sound. Past exhibitions include ‘The Range’ at Eastside Projects, Birmingham; ‘RE:Respite’ at Transmission Gallery, Glasgow, Scotland, and a solo show at Cubitt Gallery, London: ‘And We’ll Always Be A Disco In The Glow Of Love’ (2019). In 2020 Bailey and Ego Ahaiwe Sowinski created a composition and print entitled ‘Remember To Exhale’ for Studio Voltaire, London.
Bailey was commissioned by Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge, to create the exhibition ‘Version’, and composed ‘Atlantic Railton’ for the ‘Listening To The City’ sound installation programme in the 2021 Serpentine Pavilion. For 2022, Bailey created the moving image/sound work ‘Untitled: Our Wedding) for the ‘Black Melancholia’ exhibition at CCS Bard, New York, USA and ‘Trioesque’ for Bruckenmusik 27 in Cologne, Germany. She was the 2022-23 Cavendish Arts Science Fellow at Girton College, University of Cambridge.
Forthcoming are solo exhibitions with FACT Liverpool (2024) and Camden Arts Centre (2026).
Join us for a free workshop reimagining an alternative history of Nottingham School of Art – one that rejected the government strategy of 1843, and embraced local radical activism and self-organisation.
Get hands on with editing and remixing existing and new source material, and help create and expand this parallel universe.
Free and open to all. The structured workshop will run from 1–3 pm, followed by an informal opportunity for further exploration until 5 pm.
In a fictional parallel world, the Nottingham Independent Arts School is a thriving institution focused on people, planet and possibility. It offers space to think, to make and to share skills. The school is deeply integrated with the local community and guided by a focus on care and cross-disciplinarity.
This fictional vision was created by a group of participants who came together a few months ago to imagine an alternative history for Nottingham School of Art & Design. While the real-world School is rooted in a government plan to support British manufacture, the origins of its fictional equivalent lie in Nottingham’s radical history.
You are invited to this afternoon workshop to contribute to the next instalment of the parallel-world thought experiment. We will build on and extend the Nottingham Independent Arts School fiction, editing and remixing historical materials from the real-world Nottingham School of Art & Design via hands-on exploration to create a series of speculative documents that illustrate the history of the invented School.
Another Nottingham is part of Fashion Fictions, founded by Dr Amy Twigger Holroyd in 2020. The project brings people together to imagine, explore and enact engaging fictional visions of alternative fashion cultures and systems as an unconventional route to real-world change.
The Nottingham Independent Arts School fiction (World 209, Exploration A) was contributed by Elsa Ball, Sally Cooke, Tom Fisher, Rick Hall, Fo Hamblin, Joyce Lee, Joshua Lockwood-Moran, Alex Vincent Turner, Amy Twigger Holroyd, Sue Walton and Lorraine Warde, with input in the preparation phase from Amanda Briggs-Goode, Toby Ebbs, Tom Godfrey and Simon Holroyd
In acknowledgement of Nottingham School of Art and the wider city’s legacy of bringing pioneering experimental music to local audiences, we are delighted to welcome Nottingham’s Rammel Club to programme an evening of visionary music, sound and performance at Bonington Gallery.
Free tickets – click here to book
“The Rammel Club… is a deceptively vital outlet for underground music.”
– The Wire Magazine
Line up:
Design A Wave
Design A Wave is a long-standing electronic music act from London. At present, the sole member is Tom Hirst. Initiated in the late 1990s, the musical style of the project has varied radically in the subsequent years, taking in and responding to Hauntological pop music, computer and modular synth-based generative music and science fiction soundtrack along the way. This expansiveness in style is reflected in the variety of labels that have released recordings of Design A Wave, which includes Alien Jams, Alter, Bezirk and Rush Hour’s no label amongst many others. Tom Hirst also performs and records in a sibling project American Sound, plays keyboards in the pop/rap act Dean Rodney Jr and the Cowboys, and has collaborated on other projects with artists such as Alice Theobald, Lizzie Homersham and Ayesha Hameed.
Dawn Terry
Dawn plays slow, melancholic, optimistic music for sad people. Based in Newcastle, she is a veteran drone artist, producing work that is heavy, dreamlike, open and hypnotic; long-form minimalist landscapes characterised by an austere openness, barely punctured by hypnotic drumming or slowly intoned vocals.
Paul Paschal
Paul Paschal is an artist, writer and performer living in Nottingham, UK. Most of his work is undertaken in collaboration with Rohanne Udall, currently under the name CHA X5; they have been making performances, exhibitions and curatorial projects since 2013. Their solo exhibition at Gasleak Mountain in Nottingham – which opens on Friday 13th October and runs until the end of the month – presents some studies on managerial anxieties, demonic professions of perfect boundaries and meteoric burnout.
We are also really pleased to be presenting a one night only ‘retrospective’ of Rammel Club gig posters by Daniel Ward, going back 15+ years.
HINTERLAND: i) Often uncharted district behind coast or river banks.
Land adjacent to water. ii) Area surrounding city a region, including communities and rural areas, that surrounds a city and depends on it.
Hinterland is a project curated by Jennie Syson comprising a series of offsite works situated along the banks of the River Trent in Nottingham. Different work will manifest alongside water throughout one year, with the first sightings being visible in time for Autumn 2006.
A ‘Hinterland’ evokes thoughts of boundaries or edges. The project is set to develop and grow in stages, happening just on the periphery of the city. By taking the theme of a hinterland as a motif, the identified site presents a viewpoint for revelation or concealment across the panorama of the whole of Nottingham.
The River Trent has 30 tributaries. 30 separate elements in the project will represent the different streams feeding into a larger body of water. As well as being a metaphor for naturally occurring streams, each artist’s individual project will ‘pay tribute’ to the geographical location. Hinterland will draw a contour around the southern edge of the city by following a section of the river, a channel about ½ a mile either side of Trent Bridge.
Bristol-based artist Mariele Neudecker tackles the highly emotive and challenging theme of grief for children in an evocative film installation created in response to Gustav Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children). The commission is the latest in a series of innovative works by Neudecker in which she explores classical music and poetry through film and sculpture.
Bristol-based artist Mariele Neudecker tackles the highly emotive and challenging theme of grief for children in an evocative film installation created in response to Gustav Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children). The commission is the latest in a series of innovative works by Neudecker in which she explores classical music and poetry through film and sculpture.
Bristol-based artist Mariele Neudecker tackles the highly emotive and challenging theme of grief for children in an evocative film installation created in response to Gustav Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children). The commission is the latest in a series of innovative works by Neudecker in which she explores classical music and poetry through film and sculpture.
Bristol-based artist Mariele Neudecker tackles the highly emotive and challenging theme of grief for children in an evocative film installation created in response to Gustav Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children). The commission is the latest in a series of innovative works by Neudecker in which she explores classical music and poetry through film and sculpture.
“Neudecker’s work sensitively explores a highly emotive subject matter. We are delighted that through this commission, she has taken her work in a new direction, combining sculptural form with film and classical music.”
Josephine Lanyon, Director, Picture This
“This installation continues some of our previous explorations of film and music at the venue. Colston Hall provides an unusual but highly appropriate setting for this work, and brings new audiences to both the visual arts and classical music.”
Graeme Howell, Director, Colston Hall
Commissioned by Opera North Projects and Picture This in partnership with Impressions Gallery, Bradford and Colston Hall (now Bristol Beacon), Bristol.
We are delighted to welcome Birmingham based artist-educator Shannon Thomson for a ‘micro-residency’ during John Beck and Matthew Cornford’s exhibition, The Art Schools of the East Midlands. Shannon will explore Nottingham School of Art & Design’s architectural, social and cultural history through the process of personal and collective collage making.
For two days, Shannon will be working within the gallery, cutting and splicing source material from our archive with photography and ephemera gathered by the artist herself.
Visitors to the gallery will be welcome to join in with the activity and create their own collages, contributing to a collective dialogue about the subject of art school pasts, presents and futures.
Shannon will return to the gallery on Saturday 25th November, 10 am – 1 pm for a session with our Saturday Art Club group. Visitors to the gallery that day will be able to observe this activity taking place inside the gallery.
As an artist and educator, Shannon Thomson‘s current body of work delves into the intricate relationship between pedagogy and creative expression, shedding light on the transformative power of arts education.
Thomson’s work currently draws inspiration from art school archives, most recently Birmingham School of Art.
Through examining archival material, Thomson seeks to unravel the complex narrative of educational systems and their influence on shaping artistic identity.