Bonington Gallery is pleased to present It’s a Wonderful Protest, a new exhibition by The Velvet Acronyms, a collaboration between artists Anna Li and Simon Raven.
Anna & Simon’s work uses satirical ‘crip humour’ to challenge ableism in the arts, from the ghettoisation of disability art to condescendingly ‘celebratory’ forms of inclusion.
The area where the Bonington Vitrines are located will be transformed into an ‘Exclusion Zone’ for performance in which participation is encouraged – from taking part in an absurdly upbeat ‘Wonderful Protest’ to joining a ‘Psychic Music’ ritual aimed at relieving student debt.
The exhibition includes an archive of previously unseen films, prominent performance relics, photographs, posters, and participatory interventions.
Some spaces will intentionally be left unfinished, allowing new documentation and traces of live performances to accumulate during the exhibition.
The Velvet Acronyms (VA) is a collaboration between artists Anna Li (UKR) and Simon Raven (UK). Inspired by Disabled Avant-Garde (DAG), a satirical organisation founded by Aaron Williamson and Katherine Araniello whose work in performance, video, and intervention challenges negative perceptions of disability. Their practice combines crip humour, absurdity, and social critique, positioning disability as a critical and epistemological lens rather than a fixed or medicalised identity.
Anna and Simon bring distinct embodied perspectives into a shared inquiry informed by the social model of disability. Drawing on avant-garde art and experimental performance, VA interrogates cultural, political, and aesthetic structures, pushing disability art beyond representation towards confrontation, irony, and lived experience.
Website: https://www.velvetacronyms.art/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/velvetacronyms/
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@VelvetAcronyms
Image credit: A Wonderful Protest at The King’s Cross station, London, UK. Anna Li, Simon Raven, Aaron Williamson, and Alana Young. Photo by Olena Litvinova. 02 June, 2026.
Bonington Gallery is delighted to present Common Grounds: Counterculture & Confrontation since 1976, the first major survey exhibition of photographer Alan Lodge (b.1953), one of the most significant chroniclers of British counterculture, protest movements, and grassroots activism over the past 50 years.
Common Grounds brings together a wealth of material documenting travelling communities, free festivals, free party and rave culture, environmental campaigns, and anti-war protest since 1976. As a former member of a travelling community, Lodge offers a perspective on people, places, and subcultures that is raw, uncompromising, yet intimate. The strength of Lodge’s work lies not only in its photographic and documentary quality, but also in its evidential power, having on numerous occasions been used to protect and advocate for the very communities it represents.
Featuring over 100 photographs alongside 35mm slide projections, moving image, personal archives, and previously unseen material, Common Grounds provides an expansive overview of Lodge’s practice and a life dedicated to activism. It also includes legal correspondence and documentation from Lodge’s own encounters with police and authorities, foregrounding themes concerning the shifting relationships between collective identity, civil liberty, dissent, environmental responsibility, public space, and state authority.
Alan Lodge’s work has been shown in exhibitions across the UK including Radical Landscapes (2022) at Tate Liverpool. International exhibitions include Black & White Surveillance (2020) at the Salon de Normandy, Paris. His work has also appeared in publications & journals including The Guardian, Independent, i-D, Select, Café Royal Books, Sounds, Purple, Huck Magazine, Flash Art, DJ, Radio Times, New Statesmen & Society and Squall. His publications include Stonehenge: Solstice Ritual, a photographic account of the rituals taking place at Stonehenge.
Alan received a BA(hons) (1993) and MA (2013) in Photography from Nottingham Trent University.
After a brief career as an emergency paramedic in the London Ambulance Service, Alan “Tash” Lodge took up photography and documented the emerging free festival movement in the late 1970s. In 1985, Lodge and his family joined the Peace Convoy on its annual journey to Stonehenge, where he was involved with, and photographed, the clashes between the police and travelers in what became known as the Battle of the Beanfield, resulting in one of the most violent mass arrests in British history.
In 1990, Lodge moved to Nottingham to study photography at Trent Polytechnic (now Nottingham Trent University), where he became involved with the city’s influential music collective DiY Sound System, which held free parties across the UK. Among his most celebrated images are those capturing partygoers at Castlemorton Common in Wiltshire, widely regarded as the largest illegal rave in British history, which led to the introduction of the Criminal Justice Act in 1994.
In recent years Lodge has continued to extensively document his involvement and attendance of public demonstrations and festivals, and is active in various welfare and advice agencies, including Festival Welfare. Lodge is known for his documentation of police surveillance and was a regular contributor to Indymedia UK. His website offers guidance on the rights of photographers documenting public places and demonstrations.
Lodge’s work has appeared in publications and journals worldwide. His photographs have also been featured in documentaries and films, including Operation Solstice for Channel 4, Jeremy Deller’s BBC documentary Everybody in the Place: an Incomplete History of Britain 1984-1992 (2018)and most recently Aaron Trinder’s documentary ‘Free Party: A Folk History’ (2023). He was interviewed for Daniel Ward’s film, Lonesome Ghosts(2025), show at Peer, and spoke to Stewart Lee about the Battle of the Beanfield in the R4 podcast ‘What happened to Counter-Culture?’
In October 1969 the Bonington Building opened against a backdrop of student protest and demonstration – not against the new building itself – but with local planning decisions to selectively and acceleratedly clear slum housing in the vicinity of the new building, in time for the grand unveiling by the Duchess of Kent.
This presentation acknowledges the themes of student protest in the corresponding exhibition Naeem Mohaiemen: THROUGH A MIRROR, DARKLY, and also in John Dean’s photography within Bonington Vitrines #30: A Semester in Nottingham, 1976, capturing the city 7 year’s on, still in a state of flux and transformation.
This display presents reproductions of newspaper cuttings that reported the event, photos of the protest and the Duchess, in a setting that emulates the window of an abandoned shopfront.
Join us for a free guided tour of of Ibiye Camp’s solo exhibition layt de kam at Bonington Gallery, and her newly commissioned artwork in NTU’s new Design and Digital Arts building close by.
The tour will be led by Tom Godfrey, Curator and Director of Bonington Gallery.
This event will last up to an hour. Please meet at the entrance to Bonington Gallery for a prompt start at 1.00 pm. Free and open to all, booking required.
Ibiye holds an MA in Architecture from the Royal College of Art, and BA (Hons) in Fine Art, from the University of the Arts London, Central Saint Martins. Ibiye’s Thesis project titled Data: The New Black Gold was awarded the School of Architectures Dean’s Prize and was nominated for the RIBA Silver Medal Award.
Ibiye has presented her work at The Sharjah Architecture Triennial titled Rights of Future Generations in 2019 and Triennale Milano The State of the Art of Architecture conference in 2020. She showed in the Istanbul Biennial titled Empathy Revisited in 2020, and MAAT – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology’s exhibition titled X is Not a Small Country in 2021 and the 13th Shanghai Biennale titled Bodies of Water in 2021, and London’s Art Festival, Deptford X in 2022. In 2023 Ibiye was included in the Venice Architectural Biennial within the group exhibition Guests from the Future, and in 2024, was included in Unseen Guests, a project organized by Iniva as part of the British Pavilion’s public programme at the 60th Venice Biennial.
Ibiye Camp, Rhiarna Dhaliwal and Emmy Bacharach run a BA Studio titled Digital Native at the Design Academy Eindhoven.
Join us for a free guided tour of of Ibiye Camp’s solo exhibition layt de kam at Bonington Gallery, and her newly commissioned artwork in NTU’s new Design and Digital Arts building close by.
The tour will be led by Tom Godfrey, Curator and Director of Bonington Gallery.
This event will last up to an hour. Please meet at the entrance to Bonington Gallery for a prompt start at 1.00 pm. Free and open to all, booking required.
Ibiye holds an MA in Architecture from the Royal College of Art, and BA (Hons) in Fine Art, from the University of the Arts London, Central Saint Martins. Ibiye’s Thesis project titled Data: The New Black Gold was awarded the School of Architectures Dean’s Prize and was nominated for the RIBA Silver Medal Award.
Ibiye has presented her work at The Sharjah Architecture Triennial titled Rights of Future Generations in 2019 and Triennale Milano The State of the Art of Architecture conference in 2020. She showed in the Istanbul Biennial titled Empathy Revisited in 2020, and MAAT – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology’s exhibition titled X is Not a Small Country in 2021 and the 13th Shanghai Biennale titled Bodies of Water in 2021, and London’s Art Festival, Deptford X in 2022. In 2023 Ibiye was included in the Venice Architectural Biennial within the group exhibition Guests from the Future, and in 2024, was included in Unseen Guests, a project organized by Iniva as part of the British Pavilion’s public programme at the 60th Venice Biennial.
Ibiye Camp, Rhiarna Dhaliwal and Emmy Bacharach run a BA Studio titled Digital Native at the Design Academy Eindhoven.
On the occasion of Ibiye Camp’s solo exhibition at Bonington Gallery and the newly commissioned artwork displayed in NTU’s Design and Digital Arts Building, we are delighted to welcome Ibiye to give a talk about her recent work and wider practice, followed by a Q&A led by Bonington Gallery Curator & Director, Tom Godfrey.
The talk will take place in the Bonington Lecture Theatre, just next door to the gallery, and is free and open to all, booking required.
Ibiye holds an MA in Architecture from the Royal College of Art, and BA (Hons) in Fine Art, from the University of the Arts London, Central Saint Martins. Ibiye’s Thesis project titled Data: The New Black Gold was awarded the School of Architectures Dean’s Prize and was nominated for the RIBA Silver Medal Award.
Ibiye has presented her work at The Sharjah Architecture Triennial titled Rights of Future Generations in 2019 and Triennale Milano The State of the Art of Architecture conference in 2020. She showed in the Istanbul Biennial titled Empathy Revisited in 2020, and MAAT – Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology’s exhibition titled X is Not a Small Country in 2021 and the 13th Shanghai Biennale titled Bodies of Water in 2021, and London’s Art Festival, Deptford X in 2022. In 2023 Ibiye was included in the Venice Architectural Biennial within the group exhibition Guests from the Future, and in 2024, was included in Unseen Guests, a project organized by Iniva as part of the British Pavilion’s public programme at the 60th Venice Biennial.
Ibiye Camp, Rhiarna Dhaliwal and Emmy Bacharach run a BA Studio titled Digital Native at the Design Academy Eindhoven.
Join us for the first academic walkthrough of our exhibition programme as we welcome Marco Bohr, Associate Professor in Design and Digital Art at Nottingham School of Art & Design.
This event marks the beginning of a series of short, informal, academic-led talks and tours of the Bonington Gallery exhibition programme. These sessions provide our academic colleagues with an opportunity to share insights, spark discussion, and share research that resonates with the themes of our exhibitions.
Marco’s research is concerned with the role that images play in the shaping of a variety of discourses related to politics, gender, identity, sexuality, censorship, ethics and disasters. Drawing on his background as an exhibiting photographer, Marco’s research interest is principally focused on the photographic image — not only as a medium of visual expression but also as a research methodology and a tool for political activism.
Marco’s research interest also extends to visual propaganda, cinema, documentary and essay film. His book “Visual Counterculture in Japan” was recently published by Bloomsbury.
Join us for a free guided tour of Bonington Gallery’s latest exhibitions with BSL interpretation.
Book your free ticket and enjoy a guided tour of layt de kam, a solo exhibition by Ibiye Camp, led by the Gallery’s Director, Tom Godfrey.
Along with an introduction to the exhibition, Tom will talk through the accompanying Vitrines exhibition, Through Our Eyes, In Our Words.
This event will last up to an hour. Please meet inside Bonington Building in the foyer space outside the Gallery doors at 12.55 pm. Free and open to all, booking required.
Bonington Gallery presents A Semester in Nottingham, 1976, an exhibition of photographs by Baltimore-based John Dean. Captured during his time as a visiting student to Nottingham Trent University (NTU) in 1976, these photographs offer a powerful glimpse into Nottingham life during a transformative era.
This exhibition marks a poignant return to the institution — formerly Trent Polytechnic — where John studied as a visiting student nearly fifty years ago.
Armed with a camera and a quiet curiosity, John immersed himself in the rhythms of Nottingham life. Over the course of a single semester, he wandered the city’s streets and parks — Hyson Green, Market Square, the Arboretum — capturing striking black-and-white portraits of residents going about their daily lives. The resulting images are both documentary and deeply personal, offering a rare and intimate glimpse into the everyday lives of Nottingham’s people during a transformative era.
First developed in Trent’s own darkrooms (situated next door to the gallery), these photographs have remained largely unseen for decades. Now, they return to the place of their origin, standing as a testament to the power of observational storytelling, told through the eyes of a visitor to the city.
John has since built a distinguished career as a producer and videographer, creating historical and educational media for museums and non-profit organisations across the United States and beyond. Yet photography remains his first and most enduring creative language — a medium through which he continues to explore the intersections of memory, environment, and human experience.
John Dean is a Baltimore-based photographer, videographer who graduated with a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. He regularly works with museums, non-profit organisations and editorial platforms on the creation of educational and historical media and content.
In addition to institutional work, John’s independent photographic practice has taken him across the world, exploring historic and cultural sites of significance, such as excavation sites in Greece and sacred spaces in Istanbul. As a long time mentor and arts advocate, John is consistently guided by a curiosity for human stories.
BBC News – Friends recreate 1976 street play photograph
BBC News – ‘It’s amazing being back in Nottingham 50 years on’
BBC News – American photographer’s 1976 city shots on display
The Guardian – Becky the dog steals the show: John Dean’s best photograph
Artdoc – John Dean A Semester in Nottingham, 1976
The Notts Edit – The Baltimore photographer presenting a look back to life in 1970s Nottingham
Leftlion – A semester in Notts: US photographer John Dean’s snapshot of Nottingham in the 70s
Nottinghamshire Live – Unseen photos of Nottingham taken in 1976 show a changing city
Join us for the launch of our latest exhibitions — new film and textile work by multi-disciplinary artist Ibiye Camp, exploring the complex interplay between infrastructure, care, and resilience along the coast of West Africa.
layt de kam critically examines the deployment of temporary power ships along West African coasts as a response to energy shortages. The work reflects both hope and uncertainty, emphasising the fragility of these energy solutions while honouring the resilience of coastal communities.
Accompanying layt de kam in our Vitrines is Through Our Eyes, In Our Words, an exhibition presenting stories of ageing, belonging, and inclusion among middle-aged and older-aged LGBT+ people in Britain.
Enjoy a free welcome drink, delicious food (first come, first served!) and music by multidisciplinary artist Fauzia.
All welcome but reserve your free ticket to avoid disappointment.
