Join us for the launch of a new exhibition featuring over 120 works by contemporary working-class artists and photographers.
Curated by photographer, writer and broadcaster Johny Pitts, After the End of History emphasises the perspectives of practitioners who turn their gaze towards both their communities and outwards to the wider world. Find out more.
‘After the End of History: British Working Class Photography 1989 – 2024’ is a Hayward Gallery Touring exhibition curated by Johny Pitts with Hayward Gallery Touring.
Dr Paul Adey is a HE lecturer of Music Performance and Music Business at Confetti Institute of Technologies.
Performing under the artist name of Cappo, he has practiced hip hop lyricism for over two decades. During this time, he has had the privilege of appearing at many of Europe’s premier live music venues, performing alongside artists such as Public Enemy, Skepta, and The Sleaford Mods.
Throughout his career, he has released music on various record labels including Tru-Thoughts and Ninja Tune, and featured live on BBC Radio One (John Peel), BBC Radio 1 Xtra, and BBC Radio 6 numerous times.
Paul’s interdisciplinary research focuses on popular culture, literary devices and musical concepts such as intertextuality and allusion, and the semianalysis of song lyrics. The interdisciplinary nature of Paul’s research links his work to Music, English, Creative Writing, and media studies.
Instagram: @kafka_poe_murakami
X: @CAPPO_GENGHIS
Linktr.ee: @_Cappo_
Claude Money is a record producer and PhD researcher from Nottingham via Singapore and Spain.
Based at Sirkus Studios, he’s been known to work on projects of all genres, but is consistently influenced by the stylings and history of Library Music, Soul, Jazz and Hip-Hop, as well as the traditional folk music of his broad and eclectic cultural background.
Outside of the record industry, he produces music for the screen. He has created bespoke pieces for the BFI and Netflix as well as BBC’s Inside Out, London Fashion Week and the Sailing Grand Prix.
Since 2016, He’s produced a wide variety of tracks for artists including Pete Beardsworth, Emily Makis, Wariko, President T, Window Kid and Snowy. His breakout single was his remix of Misti Blu Two by Amillionsons featuring siblings Taka Boom, Chaka Khan and Mark Stevens, available now on vinyl via Amillionrecords.
Claude’s previous career as a journalist eventually led him to the world of live music. As a promoter he’s worked with headliners such as Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, Talib Kweli, Pharoahe Monch, Saul Williams, KRS One, Children of Zeus, The Pharcyde and Ghostface Killah.
His passion for the culture has now led him full circle. In October of 2024 Claude will begin a new role at the Nottingham Trent University Doctoral School as a researcher where he will be recording and transcribing the oral histories of Nottingham’s hidden Hip-Hop history, a previously unexplored and under-researched area of UK cultural history.
www.sirkus.co.uk
www.instagram.com/claudemoneyofficial
www.soundcloud.com/claudemoneyofficial
Presenting over 120 works across a 35-year period, After the End of History: British Working Class Photography 1989 – 2024 brings together contemporary working class artists who use photography to explore the nuances of working class life in all its diversity.
Launching on Thursday 26 September, 6 pm – Book free launch tickets
The exhibition, curated by Johny Pitts, emphasises the perspectives of practitioners who turn their gaze towards both their communities and outwards to the wider world.
Instead of looking at working-class people, the exhibition will explore life through the lenses of working-class practitioners, who have not only turned their gaze towards their own communities but also out towards the world.
The year 2024 will mark 35 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the symbolic end of Communism. The weakening of the Soviet Union in the 1980s prompted economist Francis Fukuyama to announce the triumph of Western Liberal Democracy as the only viable future for global politics.
The counter-cultural energies of the 1980s, very often powered up by the alternative ideologies embodied by Communism, produced a collective, coherent, politically engaged generation of working-class artists. But after the so-called ‘End of History’, what became of working-class culture? Who identifies as such, and why? What of the working class creative? What kind of images has working-class life produced in the last 35 years?
After the End of History will offer a counterintuitive picture of working-class life today, from Rene Matić’s portrait of growing up mixed race in a white working-class community in Peterborough, to Elaine Constaintine’s documentation of the Northern Soul scene, to Kavi Pujara’s ode to Leicester’s Hindu community, and JA Mortram’s documentation throughout his life as a caregiver. After the End of History will explore the challenges and beauty of contemporary working-class life, in all its diversity today.
Artists in the exhibition include Richard Billingham, Sam Blackwood, Serena Brown, Antony Cairns, Rob Clayton, Joanne Coates, Josh Cole, Artúr Čonka, Elaine Constantine, Natasha Edgington, Richard Grassick, Anna Magnowska, Rene Matić, J A Mortram, Kelly O’Brien, Eddie Otchere, Kavi Pujara, Khadija Saye, Chris Shaw, Trevor Smith, Ewen Spencer, Hannah Starkey, Igoris Taran, Nathaniel Télémaque, Barbara Wasiak, Tom Wood.
‘After the End of History: British Working Class Photography 1989 – 2024’ is a Hayward Gallery Touring exhibition curated by Johny Pitts with Hayward Gallery Touring.
Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, Coventry: 29 March – 16 June 2024
Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea: 3 July – 14 September 2024
Bonington Gallery, Nottingham: 26 September – 14 December 2024
Header image: Eddie Otchere, Goldie, Metalheadz (Blue Note Sessions) Blue Note, Hoxton Square, 1996 © Eddie Otchere
Join us for the launch of three new exhibitions:
Osheen Siva: Karuppu
The first UK exhibition by multidisciplinary artist Osheen Siva is entitled ‘Karuppu’ (கருப்பு – meaning darkness/black in Tamil). 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.
Bonington Vitrines #24: Shahnawaz Hussain: My Nottinghamshire Perspectives in Watercolour
An exhibition of paintings by self-taught Nottingham-based artist Shahnawaz Hussain, which capture key buildings and landmarks across Nottingham and the wider county.
Peepshow: An Illusion Cut to the Measure of Desire
As part of this year’s Light After Dark Film Festival, we are pleased to present Peep Show, an innovatively staged exhibition of archival film curated by feminist collective Invisible Women.
Enjoy music in our Atrium from electronic DJs MOAN and AJA.
MOAN explores self-liberation, sexual pleasures and unique narratives from all over the world through a variety of creative outputs.
An erotic platform that acts as a diary for as many people as possible – with a primary focus on women and non-binary. A safe space and a judgement free zone for experiences, fantasies, fetishes and issues to be discussed through a women and non-binary perspective openly. A narrative not often explored in mainstream media.
Using the power of electronic music & events to connect with the community on a deeper level, to rebel and to create multisensory narratives, which make our activism harder to silence. MOAN events bring people together and are a catalyst for liberation and exploration. If you are interested by this, online mixes are uploaded on SoundCloud for you to listen and all event details are updated through the Instagram.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/moan_zine/
Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/moan-zine
Aja Ireland is an award-winning sound and performance artist making deconstructed club and industrial techno whose live shows are described in The WIRE Magazine as “Shifting from ethereal diffusions to potent explosions.”
The album SLUG was released on Opal Tapes in October 2021. The video GRIME created by IMPATV and AJA, featured on Creative Review’s ‘Best Music Videos of 2021’ who described the track as: “brutal, visceral and unrelentingly noisy”.
Aja’s debut album released in 2018 on Opal Tapes was greeted with critical acclaim and
the artist was featured in VICE, The Quietus, Elephant Magazine, Red Bull Music and The Dazed Magazine. IN 2018, Aja won the PRS Oram Award for innovative music production.
Aja scored the spatial sound design for Joey Holder’s art installations Ophiux, Adcredo The Deep Belief Network (toured at Matt’s Gallery and 6th Athens Bienalle), Semelparous which was shown in The British Art Show and and Cryptic at Two Queens Gallery.
In AJA’s latest project, CRYPTID, an EP, music video, and full audio visual live set will be released later this year for the upcoming 2024 AV performance tour. The visuals project a realm where volcanic, ritualistic circles of standing stones merge seamlessly with projections of microscopic creatures. AJA takes on the persona of a cryptid hybrid, adorned in sculptural fashion nightmares, eating green lasers and morphing into underwater creatures.
Instagram: instagram.com/ajaireland
Facebook: www.facebook.com/musicwithaja
Website: www.ajaireland.co.uk
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.