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Launch event: Friday 15 March, 6–8 pm. Book free tickets

Don’t miss the first UK exhibition by multidisciplinary artist Osheen Siva, entitled ‘Karuppu’ (கருப்பு – meaning darkness/black in Tamil). The exhibition includes drawings and paintings, collaborative tapestries crafted with local woman artisans, and the incorporation of leather, laden with political and caste contexts in India.

Originally from Thiruvannamalai in South India, and currently based in Goa, Siva is an acclaimed artist whose practice encompasses painting, drawing, performance and public art. As a digital illustrator they have collaborated with leading global brands including Apple, Gucci, and Meta.

Taking a cue from Afrofuturism, Siva’s work brings together science fiction, mythology, heritage, their love of comic books, and the vibrant, joyful colours of South India to create fantastical characters and dreamscapes, reclaiming and reinventing Indian folktales and myths to imagine a decolonised future.

Siva’s work is rooted in their Dalit and Tamil heritage. Dalit translates as ‘broken, divided, split, shattered’ and Dalits are among India’s most marginalised citizens, condemned to the lowest echelons of society by a rigid caste hierarchy. Karuppu – meaning darkness or black in Tamil – carries associations with ‘evil’ in Hindu mythology and is often used in reference to the lower caste and the ‘untouchables’. Siva navigates the complexities of Dalit history, offering a powerful and evocative exploration of identity, resistance, and the quest for a liberated future.

A self-taught illustrator and muralist from Thiruvannamalai, India, Osheen Siva imagines a brave new world of decolonized dreamscapes and narratives of queer power

– BlackStar

Siva’s Dalit Futurism reclaims the word Karuppu, seeking to invert and transform the arbitrary structure of caste through a narrative of mutation and hybridity. The beautiful mutant characters serve as a metaphor, challenging assigned social status and established histories with non-binary fluidity, championing bodily autonomy, and highlighting queer and feminine power.

Central to the exhibition is the reclamation and reinvention of Indian mythologies. Siva’s work critiques Hindu scriptures and ancient Sanskrit texts that perpetuate the discrimination of lower-caste individuals. Deliberately countering the lack of positive imagery associated with Dalit communities, Siva creates progressive depictions, envisioning a future that transcends existing stereotypes.

Exploring their heritage in the farming communities of Tamil Nadu, nature is a recurring motif in Siva’s work. Acting as a dual symbol, the natural world conveys fruitfulness and abundance and also highlights the trauma associated with labour and bondage, creating a complex dialogue between nature and social hierarchy.

Images by Osheen Siva, 2024.

Artist website: https://osheensiva.com/
It’s Nice That: https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/osheen-siva-illustration-140721
Hyperallergic: https://hyperallergic.com/810814/coasting-the-topography-of-south-asian-futurisms/

With audio description and creative captions

history is a living weapon in yr hand is a solo exhibition of new and reconfigured work by London-based artist Onyeka Igwe.

The exhibition will be centred around a new two-screen adaptation of Igwe’s dual timeline experimental film A Radical Duet (2023). The film imagines what happened when two women of different generations, but both part of the post-war independence movement, came together in London to put their fervour and imagination into writing a revolutionary play. The film depicts this process, and envisages what that play would look like, if staged today.

1947 London was a hub of radical anti-colonial activity. International intellectuals, artists, and activists like Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, Sylvia Wynter, C.L.R. James, Kwame Nkrumah, and George Padmore were all in London at the eve of the end of British colonialism. Individually, they were agitating for their respective countries’ national independence, but did they meet? And if they all did, what did they discuss? What did they conjure?

The film will be accompanied by elements of the set design and props from the making of A Radical Duet, taking inspiration from Sylvia Wynter’s ideas on theatrical adaptation. Wynter builds on Brechtian principles of modern epic theatre and advises on how set design can support a theatre to ‘explode [social] fears by bringing them out into the light of day’.

For this exhibition, Igwe will be working with Collective Text, an organisation supporting accessibility in art and film through creative captioning, audio description and interpretation.

A Radical Duet was commissioned by FLAMIN Productions through FILM LONDON Artists’ Moving Image Network with funding from Arts Council England.

history is a living weapon in yr hand is produced in collaboration with Peer Gallery, London, where it will be presented in autumn 2024.

Photographs by Jules Lister

Join us for an insightful gallery tour of our current exhibition, The Art Schools of the East Midlands by John Beck and Matthew Cornford, and the accompanying exhibition, Art [School] Histories in the Vitrines and foyer.

Find out how the exhibitions emerged as part of the Art School Project and uncover stories behind the work and its connections to Nottingham.

• Free, open to all
• 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

Book your free place now

• Book now for Wednesday 8 November, 1 – 2 pm

Join Bonington Gallery’s Director Tom Godfrey for an insightful gallery tour of our current exhibition, The Art Schools of the East Midlands by John Beck and Matthew Cornford, and the accompanying exhibition, Art [School] Histories in the Vitrines and foyer.

Find out how the exhibitions emerged as part of the Art School Project and uncover stories behind the work and its connections to Nottingham.

• Free, open to all
• 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

Book your free place now

• Book now for Tuesday 3 October, 1 – 2 pm

Join us for a first look round a new photographic exhibition by John Beck and Matthew Cornford, focusing on the region’s art schools, and the vital role that they play in the cultural life of our cities.

Accompanying the exhibition, in our Vitrines you can discover archive materials and memories relating to the history of Nottingham School of Art & Design, established in 1843.

Book your free ticket now

• Free, all welcome.
• Free refreshments will be available from 6 pm – first come, first served!
• Enjoy a DJ set by Kay Fabe
• Photography will be taking place.
• There is lift and stairs access and an accessible toilet.

A photographic exhibition focusing on the region’s art schools, and the vital role that they play in the cultural life of our cities.

This exhibition is the latest iteration of John Beck and Matthew Cornford’s ambitious Art School Project, to track down and document all of the UK’s art schools – including the iconic Waverley building at Nottingham Trent University.

Featuring new photographic work depicting all the art school buildings of the East Midlands, or the sites upon which they stood, the exhibition raises questions about the role of the arts in relation to education, community and history and offers a space to reflect on what the future may hold for cultural institutions in our towns and cities.

There will also be a programme of public events exploring the themes of the exhibition, that will be announced soon. In our foyer space, our Vitrines exhibition, Art [School] Histories will present materials dedicated to the history and future of the Nottingham School of Art & Design here at NTU.

Launch event

Come along to our launch night on Thursday 21 September, 6 pm – 8 pm for a first look round the exhibition. Book your free tickets

Photographs by Jules Lister

As part of Nottingham Refugee Week, we are delighted to be presenting a comedy gig by No Direction Home, a pioneering project produced by Counterpoints Arts featuring stand-up comedians from refugee and migrant backgrounds, mentored by award-winning comedian Tom Parry.

Book your free ticket here

Created in partnership with Camden People’s Theatre, it’s an ongoing project of workshops, mentoring and performance for new comics from refugee and migrant backgrounds.

The gig kicks off at 6 pm, but join us for delicious free food and drinks from the Syrian Vegan Kitchen from 5.30 pm.

This is the closing event of the ‘Hostile Environment, Artful Living’ conference that runs at Bonington during the day, and attendees of the conference have automatic entry to the gig. You’re very welcome to drop by to the gig as a stand-alone event, however, and can book a place via Eventbrite.

Check out the full Nottingham Refugee Week programme.

This one day conference, held as part of Nottingham Refugee Week, will explore how creativity can be used to resist the ‘hostile environment’ promoted against refugee and asylum-seeking communities within the UK. 

The day will consist of:

• A series of online talks, workshops, networking and creative activities
• A free lunch, courtesy of the Syrian Vegan Kitchen
• Plus, don’t miss the free comedy gig later in the evening, from refugee-led comedy collective No Direction Home

Registration: 10 am
Conference: 10.30 am – 5.30 pm for free food and drinks from the Syrian Vegan Kitchen
Comedy gig: 6 – 7 pm (a more detailed schedule can be found at the end of this page)

As cited in the IPPR’s ‘Access Denied’ report (September 2020), over the past decade and beyond, the UK has witnessed the mushrooming of an aggressively hostile system that denies basic human need to those seeking sanctuary across numerous sociocultural sectors – from policing, welfare, housing, health and education to Home Office immigration systems themselves.

In response to this pervasive discourse, however, counter-narratives and counter-practices have seeded and grown with astonishing vigour across the breadth of the sociocultural sphere – from the high-profile and high-visibility (arts festivals such as Counterpoints’ ‘Refugee Week’; Charwei Tsai’s film projection ‘Hear Her Singing’ on the Southbank Centre, London; the emergence of the Cities of Sanctuary network) to altogether subtler negotiations and refusals of hostility (‘living maps’ projects whereby newly arrived sanctuary-seekers annotate maps identifying resources of use to new communities, for instance; or refugee-led wellbeing services such as Vanclaron, that operate within Serco-run hotels to nurture positive mental health). While presenting ‘life-sustaining practices’ of creative ‘uprising’ and ‘innovation’ (Espiritu et. al., 2022), this emergent nexus of narratives and practices is yet to be placed in dialogue, and thus mobilised as a site of connective critical agency.

It is the task of ‘Hostile Environment, Artful Living’ to generate a pioneering platform for such essential criticality. Blurring the boundaries between academic discourse and community-engaged activity, this 1-day event presents a series of discursive platforms designed to initiate dialogue between those working ‘artfully’ within and against the hostile environment, across and between the arts, humanities, and community-engaged sociocultural sphere.

The day is organised around three Roundtables: ‘Narratives’, exploring the mobilisation of literary, story-based, festival-based and community-based narratives that ‘artfully’ rewrite the narrative of hostility; ‘Environments’, exploring ‘artful’ negotiations of public spaces such as housing, healthcare and green space; and ‘Leading the Conversation’, presenting ‘artful’ projects developed by creatives of lived refugee experience.

Each panel consists of four ‘headline’ speakers drawn from diverse academic, cultural-creative and community locations, who will offer 10-minute presentations designed to spark debate among the wider roundtable audience. Confirmed speakers include Allan Njanji (also conference co-convenor), filmmaker of lived refugee experience, whose work explores ‘refugee voice’ in documentary journalism; blog developer Hira Aaftab, presenting refugee-led blog Our World Too; editors Rubina Bala and Alexandros Plasatis, presenting refugee-led literary journal The Other Side of Hope; and storytelling producer Naomi Wilds, discussing community-based storytelling with young communities of sanctuary-seekers. We are honoured to be hosting a Keynote (via live weblink) from Yến Lê Espiritu, Distinguished Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego, whose field-defining works on ‘critical refugee studies’ include the recent 2022 Departures and 2014 Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarised Refuge(es).

The day is bookended by performances from artists of lived refugee experience, opening with Florette Fetgo, spiritual artist of Cameroonian heritage, whose public actively contest police hostility in Nottingham; and closing with a gig from refugee-led comedy collective, No Direction Home.

We are proud to be serving complimentary food from the Nottingham-based refugee-led business, the Syrian Vegan Kitchen.

Throughout the day, our emphasis is on establishing collective, transdisciplinary dialogue on ‘hostile environment, artful living’, in the hope that our discussions will form the basis of an eventual edited collection of essays and interviews, and of an AHRC funding application.

Roundtable audience participants are invited from across every discipline and cultural sector, and are welcome to join for some or all of the day. Conference attendance includes complementary lunch courtesy of the refugee-led Syrian Vegan Kitchen, and entry to No Direction Home’s end-of-day comedy gig.

We also welcome posters, displays of projects and ‘cultural interventions’ that fit the theme of the event from participants.

The day’s events take place at Bonington Gallery, Nottingham Trent University city campus, which can be easily reached by tram or bus from Nottingham train station.

Join us for a free screening of a newly-translated documentary that explores the emergence of performance art in Cuba in the 1980s. The screening will be followed by a conversation with film director and artist Glexis Novoa.

The 1980s was a decade where a new generation of young artists were introducing a radical new artistic language and testing the bounds of the possible and the permissible in the process.

In the late 1970s and the 1980s multiple approaches towards the role and aesthetics of art in a socialist Cuba abounded. One particular strand saw an emerging generation of artists seeking to break free from what they saw as the bureaucratic and ideologically-orientated institutional systems and their ideas about culture. This change in attitude gave rise to a new visual language that prized interdisciplinary practices, multimedia, appropriated and referenced popular culture, religions, regional history and embraced parody and satire.

By the second half of the 1980s the arts were a site of intense discussion about artistic freedom and the nature of genuinely revolutionary art. Performance art played a key role in the articulation of the ideas and concerns of a budding generation.

Please note, this film contains some discussion of sex and nudity.

The film was initially made for the exhibition Losing the Human Form at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, which looked at art in the 1980s in Latin America.

Taking part as part of Bonington Gallery’s Formations programme in partnership with NTU’s Postcolonial Studies Centre.

When I Dare to be Powerful International Conference explores the idea of voice as an agent for change and act of resistance.

Book your ticket

Click here to reserve your ticket for the free in person conference

When I Dare to be Powerful International Conference will bring filmmakers, artists, writers and activists together with conceptual thinkers and cultural theorists to answer pressing questions relating to voice as an agent of change.

Centred on voice as a lens through which we conceive of a social alterity that undermines current ideological dominance, we would like to invite proposals from academics, practitioners and activists interested in exploring coming to voice as an act of resistance. Has adequate progress been made in remedying the lived experience of minoritised people? How will social parity be achieved? Can dissent facilitate a space from which an alternative, socio-cultural narrative can thrive?

When I Dare To Be Powerful one-day conference offers a packed programme of events running up to and including the conference itself:

• A series of online talks in partnership with Formations. Link to online talks here.
• A podcasts series of conversations in partnership with New Art Exchange. Link to podcasts here.
• Two keynote speakers. Link to keynote speaker information here.
• Sixteen panellists from around the world. Link to panellist abstracts here.

The conference period begins on 26th April and runs through to the one-day conference in June. Join us in the conversations relating to voice, around which our one-day conference is based.

The conference is free to attend and will take place in person on Wednesday 21st June 2023.

Visit our When I Dare To Be Powerful website to find our more about the conference timetable.