VENUE: Nottingham Contemporary
Delivered by Collective Creativity, this workshop will look at race and racism, in art and art schools in the UK.
Collective Creativity are an artist group focused on Queer, Transgender and Intersex People of Colour (QTIPoC), within creative practice. They have recently launched a zine titled Serving Art School.
Open to the public and free to attend, this workshop will discuss many of the issues raised within the zine.
Suitable for people aged 16+
To book your place please email AlbaColomo@nottinghamcontemporary.org
This event is part of the public programme in association with the exhibition Krísis. Curated by Something Human and presented in partnership with Bonington Gallery, Nottingham Trent University and Nottingham Contemporary.
In what seems like an intensifying atmosphere of global, media-driven expressions of shock, horror, fear and anxiety – how can we use states of crisis as a way to rethink the future? Can we harness these acutely painful conditions and represent them in a creative way?
Curated by Something Human and presented in partnership with Bonington Gallery, Nottingham Trent University and Nottingham Contemporary, Krísis presented an exhibition and events programme of international visual and performance artists, to engage our audience with multifaceted perspectives on the meaning of ‘crisis’, and its understanding within the current socio-political climate.
Through multidisciplinary artworks, performances, and conversations, Krisis explored how these critical conditions can be reclaimed and reconfigured to drive change through artistic practice.
We’ve invited Something Human to write on our blog – read more about them.
Sama Alshaibi (Palestine-Iraq), Nicola Anthony (UK), John Clang (Singapore), Dictaphone Group (Lebanon) Collective Creativity (UK), Maryam Monalisa Gharavi (US-Iran), Núria Güell and Levi Orta (Spain-Lebanon), Lynn Lu (Singapore), Marija Milosevska (Macedonia), Rachel Parry (UK), Post-Museum (Singapore), Raju Rage (UK), Aida Silvestri (UK), Srey Bandaul (Cambodia), Tuan Mami (Vietnam), and Boedi Widjaja (Singapore)
When artists ‘perform’ states of crisis, do they also ‘perform’ states of regeneration? How can live art ignite new conversations and reflections on crisis?
CCLAP is a three year live art project that began in 2014. It aims to bring together the critical contexts of Southeast Asian live art practice, in conversation with developments within the UK and Europe.
On Thursday 27 October CCLAP presents thought-provoking live performances by Southeast Asian and other international practitioners to address the notion of crisis. The performances will take place as part of the Krísis exhibition preview from 5 pm – 8 pm, RSVP to confirm your attendance.
Lynn Lu (Singapore), Soni Kum (Japan – Korea), Marija Milosevska (Macedonia), Rachel Parry and Little Wolf Parade (UK), Raju Rage (UK), Tuan Mami (Vietnam) » Boedi Widjaja(Singapore)
CCLAP’s 2016 series of indoor and outdoor performances is part of the public programme in association with the exhibition Krísis, curated by Something Human in partnership with Bonington Gallery, Nottingham Trent University and Little Wolf Parade.
CCLAP is kindly supported by Arts Council England, National Arts Council Singapore and City of Skopje.
Krísis: critical interventions is a one-day symposium that brings the international network of artistic practices and narratives from the Krísis exhibition and public programme into a day of talks, presentations and performative lectures.
It provides an opportunity for artists, curators, academics and the general public – both local and international – to engage in dialogue; reflecting on the complex topography of Nottingham and the UK, the relationship to the art world and how socio-political issues are addressed in both Nottingham and in international contexts.
Presenters include the international artists involved in Krísis, Nottingham-based activists on refugees and female genital mutilation issues, guest speakers, and Nottingham Trent University lecturers and researchers from the School of Art & Design and School of Arts and Humanities.
Participants will explore the exhibition themes and the artists’ responses and practices which encourage the debate on art as a transformational tool for research on contemporary societal matters.
Krísis: critical interventions is chaired by Professor Duncan Higgins, (NTU School of Art & Design), Dr Roy Smith (NTU School of Arts and Humanities) and Dr Anna Ball (NTU School of Arts and Humanities) in partnership with the curators from Something Human, and Nottingham Contemporary.
This event is part of the public programme in association with the exhibition Krísis. Curated by Something Human and presented in partnership with Bonington Gallery, Nottingham Trent University and Nottingham Contemporary.
Download your copy of the programme (pdf)
Image credit: Sama Alshaibi, Al-Tariqah (The path), 2014 Courtesy of the artist and Ayyam Gallery
A special evening of screenings by artists featured in the Mould Map 6 — Terraformers exhibition and previous Mould Map editions.
Ophiux gives a glimpse into a near future that whilst fictional, is not far from reality and is founded on current scientific research. The work imagines a future in which synthetic biology has been fully realized and applied to both advance human evolution and increase life expectancy, and where human biology has been computer programmed. It not only simulates the collection of data from our own bodies but also the sampling of data from other organisms by a speculative pharmaceutical company: ‘Ophiux’.
To conceive the film, Holder has worked in close collaboration with scientists that she met during her residency at Wysing in 2015 – Dr Marco Galardini, a Computational Biologist at the European Bioinformatics Institute at the Wellcome Trust Genome Campus, Cambridge, and Dr Katrin Linse, Senior Biodiversity Biologist at the British Antarctic Survey, Cambridge.
Ophiux has been co-commissioned by Deptford X where it is set to premiere at their festival in September 2016. It is also being shown as part of a larger project at Wysing Arts Centre from 24 September – 20 November 2016. A tour to other arts and science venues across the UK will be announced at a later date.
The exhibition and film has been made possible with a generous grant from the Arts Council England and in partnership with AND/OR Gallery.
Eschaton is the name of the spaceship that is taking human consciousness to the far reaches of a dying universe. Knowledge and memory are expressed as information from the future. The purpose of this voyage is to deconstruct the fear of infinity. Eschaton’s mission is to survive within death.
Eschaton is the latest film by Copenhagen-based Greek artist and publisher, Stathis Tsemberlidis of cult small press Decadence. Soundtracked by music composed for the film on a modular synth by Panos Alexiadis.
Commissioned by CCA Derry, Bridge Over Troubled Water includes new material filmed across Finland and Lapland that utilises the motif of folk-rock duo Simon & Garfunkel to explore queer time and climate change anxiety.
This Film Night is in association with the exhibition Mould Map 6 – Terraformers
Delivered by Jonathan Chandler and Joseph P Kelly
How do artists and writers create the worlds their characters and stories exist in?
This workshop will introduce you to the creative process behind creating stories and world building. Looking at the representation of ideas through symbols, signifiers and visual storytelling, this workshop will include idea generation, with a focus on using small ideas and starting points to build working, believable environments and situations with examples and reference from relevant comics, art & film. Through writing and drawing you will explore the representation of ideas through style, composition, visual clues and colour.
Participants will work with each other and as individuals to create or develop their ideas, incorporating the structure and clichés of traditional comics and story telling, before developing their own unique take on narrative illustration – perhaps an entire story in one illustration or a tale that unfolds over a twenty panel comic page.
Jonathan has been described by innovative micro-publishers Breakdown Press as the most isolated cartoonist working in the UK today. Catch this rare opportunity to work with the author of small-press gems ‘Johns Worth’ (Landfill Editions) and Another Blue World (Breakdown Press).
Joseph is a multi-talented graphic artist and educator currently working on PayWall – a full-length graphic story set in a detailed post-flood future, the first instalment of which will be published by Landfill Editions Autumn 2016.
Materials: please bring your preferred writing and drawing tools and materials.
Suitable for people aged 14+
Click here to see more from Joseph P Kelly
Click here to see more from Jonathan Chandler
This workshop is in association with the exhibition Mould Map 6 – Terraformers.
Delivered by James Langdon and Peter Nencini
This workshop will introduce you to the mysterious science of pataphysics, as a resource for designers.
Pataphysics is the invention of a nineteenth-century French author, Alfred Jarry, defined by him as the “science of imaginary solutions.”
Pataphysics continues today as an International College dedicated to Jarry’s idea that every event in the world is a unique happening, not subject to any general or repeatable laws.
Drawing on the College’s ideology and publications, this workshop will explore exceptions and discontinuities in simple design exercises.
Materials: please bring your preferred writing and drawing tools and materials.
Suitable for people aged 18+
Click here to see more from James Langdon
Click here to see more from Peter Nencini
This workshop is in association with the exhibition Mould Map 6 – Terraformers.
Bonington Gallery was pleased to present the fifth in the series of Bonington Film Nights. This screening was the last in the season curated by Joshua Lockwood.
This film screening took place amidst the Publishing Rooms exhibition.
Visit the Facebook event page.
Pool by Lorna Green was a gallery-filling installation accompanied by music composed by Mark Hewitt on display at the Bonington Gallery from 19 October – 11 November 1992. As each of Green’s sculptures are site-specific, her ideas and designs for the sculpture changed throughout the planning process, as demonstrated by the archival drawings, correspondence, and even a packet of sample materials. In the end, the over 4,500 whole and smashed bricks sprayed with the aquatic colours of blue, green and purple, created the gallery-wide impression of a draining pool. About the exhibit, Green wrote, “My first impression of the Bonington Gallery was that it was like a swimming pool. You enter by going down the steps, the echoes are reminiscent of a pool and the shape and scale of the gallery confirms that impression. I hope viewers will walk through and around the forms, absorb the sound and the colours and gradually let the installation work for them.” NTU students helped Green install the sculpture.
Curated by Brianna Frazier Selph
Curated by Joshua Lockwood
In association with LUX.
For the fourth screening of this season, Bonington Gallery is pleased to present four films by: Ursula Mayer, Laure Prouvost, Rachel Reupke, and Matthew Richardson.
The selected films explore formal exchange within relationships – whether these are between actors in the films – or directed at us, the viewer.
In Mayer’s film, the ambiguous melodrama continually addresses an ambivalent ‘you’. The indirect narrative adopted by Mayer leaves the viewer left unclear as to who is being addressed; are they referring to each other? Could they be addressing us as the viewer? Perhaps they are talking to themselves?
Comparatively, the ‘you’ in Prouvost’s film seduces the viewer. Offering inviting and pleasant images, which we are shown only briefly. The images are interspersed with a sharp intake of breath, contributing to the creation of a sensory and seductive viewing experience.
In Reupke’s film, a man and woman meet for a drink in several nondescript locations, the same actors playing differing characters. The scenes are drawn out, creating the illusion that we are looking at a 2D image. The lack of action and dialogue within the film is used by Reupke to create a void; into which other emotions can be projected.
Throughout Richardson’s High Definition video, a male protagonist is observed, followed and conversed with, across a variety of quotidian London locations. The video picks up and loses narrative threads amidst an accidental, junk-experience, this is made further ambiguous by the video’s lack of sound. The blurry, yet intimate portrait, begets social documentary or a make-believe fashion shoot, in an illusory location. It could be understood as as a product that unilaterally emerges from fictions of: a social subgroup, a highly self-aware friendship, or a city in its own right.
Image: MATTHEW RICHARDSON, Untitled, 2015, digital still, HD video. Courtesy of the artist.
