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:
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.
10 am – registration / coffee / creative networking activities / exhibition in foyer
10.30 am -11 am – Introduction from the organisers (Anna, Allan, Margaret) / interview with and performance from Florette
11 am -12.15 pm – Roundtable 1: ‘Narratives’. Chair: Anna Ball. Speakers X4 plus roundtable participants.
12.15 – 1.15 pm – lunch / networking.
1.15 – 2.30 pm – Roundtable 2: ‘Environments’. Chair: Margaret Ravenscroft. Speakers X4 plus roundtable participants.
2.30 -3 pm – Break
3 – 4.15 pm – Roundtable 3: ‘Leading the Conversation’. Chair: Allan Njanji. Speakers: The Other Side of Hope eds x 2, Hira, Usman.
4.15 – 4.30 pm – Break
4.30 – 5.30 pm – Keynote: Prof. Yen Le Espiritu.
5.30 – 6 pm – snacks and drinks
6 – 7 pm – No Direction Home comedy gig.
Yen le Espiritu (keynote)
Dr. Anna Ball is an Associate Professor in Postcolonial Feminisms, Literatures and Cultures at Nottingham Trent University. Anna is the author of Forced Migration in the Feminist Imagination: Transcultural Movements (Routledge 2021) and co-editor of an anthology of writing by women of forced migrant experience, The World Is for Everyone: New Writing by Pamoja Women Together (Palewell 2019). Her research explores the relationship between participatory arts, activism and cultural mobilisation within transnational (often gendered) arenas of forced migration.
Allan Njanji is a filmmaker, refugee, activist, and doctoral researcher at Nottingham Trent University. Allan is completing a practice-led PhD course, which includes the production of a documentary film, Voices, and a podcast series, Revealing the Untold: A Talking Point. T His filmmaking seeks to enable and platform refugee voices, and his films have been used by refugee charities as resource tools for casework and refugee integration practices. He is also on the boards of Nottingham Refugee Forum and Nottingham Arimathea Trust.
Margaret Ravenscroft is a PhD researcher in creative representations of forced migration and spatial justice/ feminist architectures at Nottingham Trent University. Margaret’s written work on representations of race and gender in the built environment has been published in industry press and she has forthcoming publications about gender, race and migration in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing and the Journal of Girlhood Studies. In addition to her research, Margaret oversees the strategic communications, outreach and engagement at Coffey Architects. She led the practice’s longlisted entry, ‘Rights of Passage’, for the 2023 Davidson Prize.
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.
Glexis Novoa was born in Holguín, Cuba in 1964. Novoa was one of the most radical influences in the vibrant art scene known as, “The Renaissance of Cuban Art of the 80s”, and was the founder of the Provisional group, pioneers of performance, political activism and collectivist practices.
Novoa established himself in Miami in 1995 and has been sharing his time working in Havana and Miami since 2013. He is recognized for his site-specific wall drawings and ephemeral projects around the world, which exist on the border between ephemeral art and architecture. He frequently focuses on the architecture of power and community as the main subject.
Novoa’s work has been exhibited extensively around the world and is part of numerous museum collections.
When I Dare to be Powerful International Conference explores the idea of voice as an agent for change and act of resistance.
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:
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.
This multi-channel video installation from internationally-acclaimed photographer Emily Andersen, explores the work and life of Ruth Fainlight (b.1931) – an American-born poet and writer.
Ruth’s intensely visual poetry and fiction touch on themes of psychological and domestic situations, time, memory and loss. Born in New York City in 1931, she moved to England when she was 15. In 1959 she married the writer, Alan Sillitoe, and her many literary friendships included Sylvia Plath, Jane and Paul Bowles, and Robert Graves.
Andersen’s work is an intimate portrait of Fainlight, now aged 91, presenting fragments of the poet’s life. Taking inspiration from Renaissance triptychs and their depiction of different elements of the same subject across three panels, Somewhere Else Entirely captures the poet and writer at her home in London, making notes, on her walks, and in the seaside town of Brighton where she spent her teenage years.
In Somewhere Else Entirely Fainlight talks off-screen, revealing fascinating insights into her life, her creative process, and how she is ‘in the hands of the poem’. In her voiceover, she movingly recites her poem ‘Somewhere Else Entirely’ composed after the death of her husband.
Alongside the exhibition commissioned an essay by Daniella Schreir, editor of the Feminist Film Journal Another Gaze, which can be read here.
Come along to our launch night on Friday 24 March, 6 pm – 8 pm for a first look round the exhibition, alongside Nottingham Women’s Centre in our Vitrines. There will also be free food from 6 pm. Book your free tickets
Emily Andersen is a London-based artist and graduate of the Royal College of Art. Her work has been exhibited in galleries including:
A number of her portraits are in the permanent collection of The National Portrait Gallery, London. She has won awards including the John Kobal prize for portraiture. Her third book Another Place was published in 2023. She is a Senior Lecturer in theory and practice of photography at the Nottingham School of Art & Design at Nottingham Trent University.
Director, Producer, Cinematographer – Emily Andersen
Additional Cinematographer- Bella Riza
Interviews – Kiki Martins and Emily Andersen
Editor – Jonathan Schmidt-Ott
Sound editor – Liam Larkin
Re-recording mixer- Rainer Heesch
Colourist – Jason R. Moffat
Production Assistant – Kyra Paloma
Image: Ruth Fainlight by Emily Andersen
Join Bonington Gallery’s Director, Tom Godfrey for a relaxed lunchtime tour of our current exhibitions, Somewhere Else Entirely by Emily Andersen in our Gallery, and Nottingham Women’s Centre in our Vitrines.
• The event is free to attend with limited capacity.
• Booking is required.
• Please meet in the Bonington Foyer at 12.55 pm for a prompt start.
• The event will last up to an hour, within the gallery.
Join Bonington Gallery’s Deputy Curator Joshua Lockwood-Moran for a relaxed lunchtime tour of our current exhibitions, Somewhere Else Entirely by Emily Andersen in our Gallery, and Nottingham Women’s Centre in our Vitrines.
• The event is free to attend with limited capacity.
• Booking is required.
• Please meet in the Bonington Foyer at 12.55 pm for a prompt start.
• The event will last up to an hour, within the gallery.
Mr Quiver is a durational event that combines the intensity of performance with the intimacy of installation. Exploring themes of identity, theatricality, and our relationship to the land we live on, this performance is built and then destroyed over the space of four hours. Audience members enter the space and leave as they wish, and may walk amongst the performers or sit back and enjoy the spectacle around them.
Rajni Shah (director/performer), Lucille Acevedo-Jones (costume/set designer), and Cis O’Boyle (lighting designer) create three performative loops that weave in and out of synchronisation during the four hours. By repeatedly inhabiting and abandoning the figures of Elizabeth I and a traditional Indian bride, Rajni reveals more and more of her true self during the performance and gently invites the audience to question their own identity.
Complete with haunting original vocals (live and recorded) and a stunning series of costumes, this delicate and probing performance offers up questions and images that will stay with an audience long after leave the event.
Artery is a collaborative project initiated Matt Hawthorn with the artists group Graft. The project aims to performatively map the course of the River Trent from Source to Sea, by inviting artists to use their practice to excavate hidden identities and generate new mythologies which will be recorded onto an interactive map.
The first incarnation of the map which is installed in The Bonington Gallery for Sensitive Skin, features work by five artists from the last three years of the Expo festival for emerging artists, curated by Graft for Future Factory at Nottingham Trent University.
Will Pollard has been making performance, video and installation work for the past 10 years. He recently completed a PhD at the University of Ulster, Belfast. His work is primarily concerned with the fluctuating relationship between the invisible and visible, especially in relation to the vagaries of performance, such as the relationship between the body and the object and the audience and performer. For Sensitive Skin, all these concerns are explored through a video installation.
Situated in the same room, two video projections exist. Like two people facing each other over a table, both are able to see each other, yet ultimately the slippage in their understanding of each other creates an opening.
The fracturing of light against a multitude of small mirrors mediates the light source whilst presenting this fracturing to the space.
The space awakens to the movement of the fractured light, the dimensions of the space are made visible by the light.
What is it to be formed by places you are now removed from?
Where is the ‘site’ of an accident you carry around with you all the time?
Twenty years ago Dan Belasco Rogers stepped off a National Express coach in Nottingham for the first of many times. For the next three years he lived in the city as a student: formative years that ended in 1989 when he returned to London. Years, in which he fell in love, broke bones, broke laws, lost friends and found most of his physical limits.
For these fragments … Dan returns to Nottingham and puts his forty year-old body through the streets he walked as a twenty year-old. He will discover, chart and reveal those events and accidents that have remained in his body and memory. He will chart a personal cartography of association, event and impression that has gone to form his own biography.
these fragments… is a multi-screen video presentation of corresponding journeys and locations in Nottingham, London and Berlin. It is informed by the artists’ practice of collecting with a GPS (Global Positioning System), every journey he has made since 2003.