Our first exhibition of 2018 is a solo presentation of new work by London-based and Nottingham-originated artist Ruth Angel Edwards. This follows her contribution to our 2016 group exhibition Terraformers, curated by Landfill Editions.
A new commission for Bonington Gallery, this immersive installation considers the inescapable cycles of waste and decay, a by-product of all our consumption, personal or material.
The exhibition explores how these ecologies overlap at different scales – from the futile pursuit of personal purification and ‘clean living’, to the increasingly rapid turnover of cultural ‘content’ in the media and popular consciousness, to the wider perspective of the waste which is polluting our oceans, and threatening our very existence.
Edwards studied Fine Art at Central Saint Martins. Recent exhibitions and projects include Enema Salvatore! , Almanac, Turin, 2017; Light Deception / The Great Imitator, Auto Italia South East, London, 2017; a solo exhibition at Arcadia Missa, London, 2016; Info Pura, The Residence Gallery, London 2016, Derivatives and Futures, Human Resources, Los Angeles, 2016; A British Art Show, MEYOHAS, New York, 2015.
Associated Events
Thursday 25 January, 5.15 pm – 7.30 pm: Fine Art Live Lecture Present: Ruth Angel Edwards
Lecture Theatre 2, Newton building, NTU City Campus
Saturday 3 February, 1 pm – 2 pm (postponed) Ruth Angel Edwards: premier of new video work
Bonington Gallery
Bonington Gallery was delighted to present Publishing Rooms, a commissioned exhibition concept by Andrew and Iain Foxall of Foxall Studio, London.
Over the past decade, mass-publishing has moved from the print houses into the hands of anyone owning a smartphone. Publishing is no longer a privilege, but an involuntary expression of our multiple identities and allegiances.
Exploring themes of self-expression and posterity, Bonington Gallery became a facility for self-publishing.
Set within a constructed environment that combines the appearance of an abstracted newsroom with the functionality of a photo booth, visitors were invited to interact with technological and analogue devices designed and implemented by Foxall. These tools for self-publishing will provide opportunity to further explore our obsessions with mediated forms of self-expression.
Referencing and subverting everything from zine culture to the selfie phenomenon, Publishing Rooms provided opportunities to go beyond the prescribed presets found in our social media outlets, generating new variables for the production of self-imagery and the subjective understanding of ourselves.
Referencing and subverting everything from zine culture to the selfie phenomenon, Publishing Rooms provided opportunities to go beyond the prescribed presets found in our social media outlets, generating new variables for the production of self-imagery and the subjective understanding of ourselves.
Brothers Andrew and Iain started Foxall Studio in 2006 to combine their experience and vision in art, fashion and innovation. As a multi-disciplinary studio, Foxall direct brand-led experiences ranging from brand creation, art direction and magazine design, through to exhibition design.
The brothers work with designers, developers, photographers and artists to create collaborations that challenge the paradigms of brand / experience building. Recent projects include a commissioned brand campaign by British jewellery designer, Jo Hayes Ward; contributions to an installation for Selfridges, London; and a music film released exclusively on Nowness.
Andrew and Iain also regularly lecture and run workshops at The British Council, London College of Communication, The Royal College of Art and Liverpool John Moores.
All the images created within Publishing Rooms were published directly to publishingrooms.com. Here, you can view and save your scanner camera portraits, and view the most recent images made using the Body Scan and Wall Scanner installations. From there, you can also share these elsewhere on the web, with the ability to share them directly to social media platforms. Tag your posts #PublishingRooms on Instagram and Twitter and share your exhibition experience with us.
Our Gallery invigilators and Foxall Studios’ intern Marion will also be kept us up-to-date with the exhibition via the blog. In case you missed it, you can read Andrew and Iain’s introduction to the project and get an early look at the scanner camera development here.
An informal discussion looking at the changing importance of printed matter and whether it still holds up as a relevant and vital contemporary media format. This will take place on 26th April, 1 pm, in the gallery space.
Guest Speakers:
Matt Gill (Raw Print), Andrew Foxall (Foxall Studio), Iain Foxall (Foxall Studio), Hugh Frost (Landfill Editions), Alex Smith (Ideas on Paper), chaired by Tom Godfrey
This exhibition was open as part of the Nottingham Art Weekender on Saturday 14 and Sunday 15 May 2016, where many of the venues listed on the Nottingham Art Map invited the public to take part in their events and exhibitions in a celebration of the visual arts scene in Nottingham.
The Accumulation of Things brings together seven artists whose work deals with shared interests of experience, circumstance and the familiar. Personal histories, both real and imagined, are examined through painting, photography and sculpture.
Aditya Babbar’s photographs capture the complexities of interpersonal relationships by the creation of meticulously directed portraits. His compositions are littered with evidence, from the decor to the posture of the subjects, all the while suggesting at a possible narrative beyond the picture.
Stories, or snippets of stories are told through the language of painting and drawing by Joe Bloom. He invites the viewer to use elements presented before them, together with their own interpretation and experiences, to make decisions on the connotations of the composition.
Photographer Julie Greve’s work takes the form of portraits and staged visual scenarios made in collaboration with groups of girls. Born and raised in a small town in Denmark, a lot of Julie’s work focuses on the areas in which she grew up.
Alicia Jalloul’s sculptures address the paradoxes that exist with the crossing between cultures, whilst Joy Labinjo draws on her British-Nigerian heritage, inviting the viewer to step into preliminary drawings saturated with colours, patterns and people, reconfigured from her family photograph albums.
Evie O’Connor explores class and identify in her works, and her textiles background has heavily informed the stylistic and decorative qualities within her work. She imagines both a beautiful and droll environment, explored through familiar domestic environments. Max Prus produces figurative drawings and paintings, telling stories with complex narratives representing culture and society.
Exhibition curated by Adam Murray. Adam is a lecturer, photographer and curator based in Manchester. He is co-founder of photography collective Preston is my Paris, and most recently he co-curated North: Fashioning Identity with Lou Stoppard at Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool and Somerset House, London.
Special thanks goes to John A Stephens Ltd. for supplying materials for this exhibition.
Join us for a free, online film screening on YouTube curated by artists Sophie Cundale and Ben Gomes.
What You Could Have Won is a contemporary interpretation of chaos, where relics from childhood return to destabilise our notions of reality. The online screening evokes spirits from the past, exploring subconscious energies that lie in the underbellies of power and popular culture. Artists’ works are combined with other video fragments, a drift through cartoonish cynics, unblinking zombie cultures and folkloric futures.
This screening was curated for South London Gallery and is a repeat showing.
The screening includes works by Karen Kilimnik, Jennifer Martin, Chloée Maugile, Chris Michael, and Andrew
Norman Wilson.
One work includes explicit sexual content, suitable for audiences 18+
Mr Blobby Goes Shopping (Extract, sound design by Saul Rivers at CODA): 1 min 40 sec
Sophie Cundale and Ben Gomes, Nativity Part 1, 2016, Mini DV transferred to digital: 3 min 12 sec
Hate to Love (Extract): 1 min
Sunset Beach (Extract): 55 sec
Andrew Norman Wilson, In the Air Tonight, 2020, HD video, colour, sound: 8 min
Karen Kilimnik, Kate Moss at the Beginning, 1996, VHS transferred to HD file: 7 min (Courtesy of the artist and Sprüth Magers Gallery)
Jennifer Martin, Channel 6, 2019, HD video, colour, sound: 7 min 30 sec
Chris Michael, In Your Room, 2019, HD video, colour, sound, 2019: 6 min
Chloée Maugile, At Dawn: Good Manners To Look Good, 2020, 16mm transferred to HD file: 5 min 7 sec (With special thanks to Charlie Hope, Hatty Coward and Nadia Correia for lighting donation)
Sophie Cundale and Ben Gomes, Nativity Part 2, 2016, Mini DV transferred to digital: 11 min
Sophie Cundale (b. 1987) is an artist living and working in London. Previous work has been commissioned by Serpentine Galleries and the South London Gallery; screened at Temporary Gallery, Cologne; Spike Island, Bristol; Govett-Brewster Gallery, New Zealand; Catalyst Arts, AMINI festival, Belfast; VCD festival, Beijing and Innsbruck Biennale, Austria; and hosted on vdrome.org. The Near Room at the South London Gallery is her first major solo exhibition, and travels in November 2020 to Bonington Gallery, Nottingham.
Ben Gomes (b. 1989) is an artist living and working in London. His work includes painting, performance and writing. Recent exhibitions include Get Out of My Office curated by Daniel Neofetou and The Painting Show at All Hallows Church curated by Ruth Angel Edwards. Recent collaborations with Adam Gallagher have been exhibited at Lima Zulu and Auto Italia.
Karen Kilimnik (b.1955) has diverse practice that draws upon the tradition of Romantic painting, and utilises painting, drawing, collage, photography, video and installation to produce nuanced and playful observations of historical codes and symbols. Revelling in both mass and high culture, George Stubbs, Jean-Baptiste Oudry and the ballet are as important for Kilimnik as The Avengers, Kate Moss and pop music, forcing such distinctions to collapse into her own specific mélange of cultural influence and production.
Jennifer Martin (b. 1990) is an artist-filmmaker living and working in London. Recent solo exhibitions and commissions include TEETH, Primary, Nottingham; Channel 6, Turf Projects, London; and Britain Been Rotten, Cypher Billboards, London. She has screened work in the UK and abroad at Art Licks Weekend, London; 36 Kasseler Dokfest, Kassel; B3 Biennial, Frankfurt; and European Media and Art Festival 32, Osnabrück. Martin is a co-director of the artist workers’ cooperative not/nowhere, which is run by black artists and artists of colour and focuses on photochemical film, audio, and digital practices.
Since 2017 Chloée Maugile has written and directed plays and short films for institutions such as The V&A, The Young Vic and The Block. She graduated from Slade School of Art in 2019 and currently lives and works in London. Maugile will be premiering a new work, ‘At Dawn: Good Manners To Look Good’, a short film featuring Anthony Gopaul, Dumas Maugile and Thom Murphy. Directed by Chloée Maugile, filmed by Nina Porter, styled by Thom Murphy and soundtrack created by Conrad Pack.
Artist and researcher Chris Michael lives and works in London and Basildon, UK. Michael engages with ideas orbiting pop-culture, class, nostalgia, fanaticism, desire, transformation, longing & labour. His work has been exhibited and screened internationally at institutions such as the Chisenhale, Whitechapel Gallery, Barbican and Southwark Park Galleries and has worked alongside and spoken at South London Gallery, The Woodmill, UAL and Newham Council among others. Michael is currently a visiting lecturer at the Royal College of Art on MA Visual Communication.
Andrew Norman Wilson (b.1983) is an artist and curator based between Europe and the United States. Recent exhibitions include Hirngespenster at the Kunstverein Braunschweig in 2019 (solo), Picture Industry at Luma Arles in 2018, Dreamlands at the Whitney Museum in 2017, and the Gwangju Biennial in 2016.
October 2020 – September 2021
The Postcolonial Studies Centre at Nottingham Trent University (NTU) and Bonington Gallery is pleased to present Formations, a year-long programme of events in response to Black History Month, Black Lives Matter, and the Decolonisation agenda.
NTU’s Postcolonial Studies Centre invites the public to enjoy a year of events which focus on Black History, Literature, Art, and Critical Thinking as central to global creative and intellectual work. The series begins in October 2020 with a month of events led by artists, writers, theorists and students which critically consider the place and impact of Black History Month. The subsequent yearlong programme is accompanied by commissioned work by artist Honey Williams, which will be launched at the end of October with a special event, and displayed in Bonington Gallery. Themed events running throughout the year are prompted by themes or objects and are centrally concerned with making visible the centrality of Black artists and thinkers, and the patterns and materials that connect global creative and intellectual histories.
The series is developed by the Postcolonial Studies Centre at NTU and directed by Dr Jenni Ramone and Dr Nicole Thiara.
Jenni Ramone is Senior Lecturer in Postcolonial Studies at NTU. Her recent book publications include Postcolonial Literatures in the Local Literary Marketplace: Located Reading, The Bloomsbury Introduction to Postcolonial Writing, Postcolonial Theories, and Salman Rushdie and Translation. Jenni Ramone specializes in global and postcolonial literatures and the literary marketplace. She is pursuing new projects on Global Literature and Gender, and on literature and maternity.
Nicole Thiara is Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded Research Network Series Writing, Analysing, Translating Dalit Literature(2014-16) and On Page and on Stage: Celebrating Dalit and Adivasi Literatures and Performing Arts (2020-21). She teaches postcolonial and contemporary literature, and her areas of research are Dalit, Adivasi and diasporic South Asian literature.
October 2020
Formation: History — Critical Responses to Black History Month
November – December 2020
Formation: Land — Dispossession, Agriculture, Place
Formation: Memorials — The Place and Meaning of Memorials, Statues, and Renowned Figures
Formation: DNA — Identity, Care, Inequality, Disease, and Vaccination
Formation: Milk — Global Practices and Representations of Breastfeeding in Art and Literature
Conference: Patterns of Struggle and Solidarity
Formation: Lace — The Global History of Lace and its use in Colonial Contexts
Formation: Re-Viewing — A look back on the 2020-21 Formations Programme
Bonington Gallery is pleased to present The Near Room (2020), a new moving-image work by the artist Sophie Cundale (b.1987).
The Near Room is a supernatural melodrama about loss that follows the journey of a professional boxer after a near-fatal knockout. The boxer’s disorientations become entangled with the story of a queen living with Cotard delusion, a rare neurological condition inducing the belief in and sensation of death.
The film’s title is taken from the boxer Muhammad Ali’s description of a vivid, hallucinatory space he would enter when in the depths of a fight – “A door swung half open [into a room of] neon, orange and green lights blinking, bats blowing trumpets and alligators playing trombones, snakes screaming. Weird masks and actors’ clothes hung on the wall, and if he stepped across the sill and reached for them, he knew that he was committing himself to his own destruction.” – George Plimpton, Shadow Box (1977).
The boxing scenes were filmed at long established south London boxing club, Lynn AC in Camberwell. The cast includes professional boxer John Harding Jnr., artist Penny Goring, and actor Chris New.
The Near Room is commissioned and produced by Film and Video Umbrella with support from Arts Council England, South London Gallery, Bonington Gallery, Curator Space and The Gane Trust. The film premiered at South London Gallery in April 2020 and due to COVID-19 was extended until September 2020.
Sophie Cundale (b.1987) lives and works in London. Her work has previously been commissioned by the Serpentine Galleries and the South London Gallery; screened at Temporary Gallery, Cologne; Spike Island, Bristol; Govett-Brewster Gallery, New Zealand; Catalyst Arts and Amini festival, Belfast; VCD festival, Beijing and Innsbruck Biennale, Austria; and hosted on vdrome.org. Cundale’s latest film The Near Room opened at South London Gallery in April 2020 and travels to Bonington Gallery, Nottingham in October 2020.
Running time: 32 mins.
Please be aware that this film includes moments of violence and blood, as well as sexual references which some viewers may find offensive and unsuitable for children.
The Near Room will also be available to view online every Sunday during the exhibition.
In response to the COVID-19 crisis, we are currently adapting this exhibition to a new format and will release more information soon. Please check back soon for updates.
The exhibition will continue to be an open call, with new submission requirements to be confirmed.
Bonington Gallery is pleased to be presenting The Captive Conscious, a collection of visual responses to an open call led by our Student Curatorial Group. Creative practitioners from within Nottingham Trent University and beyond are invited to respond in any medium to a piece of writing composed of redacted appropriated texts. The text has been cut, merged, edited and reassembled to form a new piece of writing that can be opened up to interpretation – in response to an imaginary narrative. The Captive Conscious will present an observation of the minds of many, encouraging a truly organic response to language.
Listen to Dutch curator Anselm Franke speak about his career to date in this free public talk. If you would like to attend, please RSVP to confirm your attendance.
Anselm Franke has been Head of Visual Arts and Film at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) since 2013. There, he initiated and curated the exhibitions Parapolitics: Cultural Freedom and the Cold War (2017/18), 2 or 3 Tigers (2017), Nervous Systems (2016), Ape Culture (2015), Forensis (2014), The Whole Earth and After Year Zero (both 2013).
He previously worked as a curator at KW Berlin and as director of the Extra City Kunsthal in Antwerp. In 2005 he and Stefanie Schulte Strathaus founded the Forum Expanded for the Berlin International Film Festival of which he has been co-curator since. He was the chief curator of the Taipei Biennial in 2012 and of the Shanghai Biennale in 2014.
His exhibition project Animism was shown from 2009 until 2014 in collaboration with various partners in Antwerp, Berne, Vienna, Berlin, New York, Shenzhen, Seoul and Beirut. Franke received his doctorate from Goldsmiths College, London.
CAMPUS is a year-long and city-wide independent study programme in curatorial, visual and cultural studies, based on collaborative knowledge production and innovative research practices. It is a free-to-attend programme of monthly closed-door gatherings and free public talks.
Taking place in different locations in Nottingham (Nottingham Contemporary, Primary, Bonington Gallery, Backlit), CAMPUS welcomes participants from different backgrounds who wish to engage in conversations about contemporary debates and further explore interdisciplinary practices. CAMPUS is a space of encounter between researchers, practitioners, activists, scholars, institutions and organisations.
Get involved in an afternoon of talks and discussions with leading artists and academics, crossing the boundaries of arts, science, and computing, developed as part of the multidisciplinary exhibition Sensing Systems by Matt Woodham, on view at Bonington Gallery from 15 February to 28 March. Book your free place on this public event, taking placing at Nottingham Contemporary.
Art and science share a common goal: to challenge common views of reality. As a creative crossroad, the contemporary field of ArtScience has been gaining momentum in recent years. Successful ArtScience merges the objective and the subjective with equal voices. It investigates and shapes the intersection between artistic concepts and developments in science and technology; experimenting with new ways of conceiving knowledge.
In this afternoon symposium, a panel of artists, scientists and ArtScientists will share their interdisciplinary research. Experts in systems across scales, from galaxy evolution to molecular nanotechnology, will discuss common dynamics in nature.
Meghan Gray is an observational extragalactic astronomer with interests in galaxy evolution and large-scale structure. She employs tools such as gravitational lensing to trace distributions of dark matter on large scales and uses multiwavelength observations to examine the luminous properties of galaxies. These observations are often compared against supercomputer simulations to understand how galaxies are influenced by their environments. Meghan will provide insight into large-scale structures and simulating the universe.
Ulrike Kuchner is an extragalactic astronomer as well as a visual artist based in the UK. In her research, Ulrike studies how mass is assembled in the universe and how galaxies form and evolve over their lifetime – which is just short of the age of the universe itself. As an artist and curator, she challenges the frontiers between art and science, translating between the fields without imposing a hierarchy. Ulrike’s art often deals with the themes of humanity and imperfections in data, something we tend to strip away from science. Ulrike will provide insight into art and science and chair the panel discussions.
Andy Lomas is a computational artist, mathematician, and Emmy award winning supervisor of computer-generated effects. His artwork explores how complex sculptural forms can be created emergently by simulating growth processes. Inspired by the work of Alan Turing, D’Arcy Thompson, and Ernst Haeckel, it exists at the boundary between art and science. Andy will provide insight into simulating nature, emergent phenomena, artificial life and art.
Becky Lyon is an artist/researcher examining how humans are impacting evolution. Her practice combines scientific research, thinking-through-making, fiction, and participatory research to imagine a spectrum of new hybrid species, materialities, systems, and ways of relating. Explorations include exploring future environments through scent; contemplating the entanglement of our matter through sculpture and sound and modelling lively forms at Fieldnotes from a Technobiocology. Lyon runs ‘Elastic Nature’, an interdisciplinary art research club exploring the future of nature.
Philip Moriarty is a professor of physics in the School of Physics & Astronomy at the University of Nottingham. His research interests lie in a field sometimes referred to as extreme nanotechnology; he and his colleagues prod, poke, push, and pull individual atoms and molecules with scanning probe microscopes. He has published 140 papers to date, given over 100 invited talks. Moriarty also has a keen interest in public engagement, outreach, and the arts-sciences interface having regularly collaborated on the award-winning Sixty Symbols YouTube channel. Philip will provide insight into chaos, quantum mechanics, surface physics, and the emergence of patterns.
Listen to visual and performance artist Quinsy Gario speak about his career to date in this free public talk. If you would like to attend, please RSVP to confirm your attendance.
Quinsy Gario is a visual and performance artist from the Dutch Caribbean. His most well-known work, Zwarte Piet Is Racisme (2011–2012), critiqued the general knowledge surrounding the racist Dutch figure and practice of Zwarte Piet (Black Pete), later bringing into the open the governmental institutional support that keeps the figure alive in the Netherlands.
He has an academic background in gender studies and postcolonial studies and is a graduate of the Master Artistic Research program at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague. In 2017, he received a Humanity in Action Detroit Fellowship.
Gario is a board member of De Appel, Keti Koti Table, and The One Minutes, a member of the pan-African artist collective State of L3, and is a recurring participant of the Black Europe Body Politics biannual conference series.
CAMPUS is a year-long and city-wide independent study programme in curatorial, visual and cultural studies, based on collaborative knowledge production and innovative research practices. It is a free-to-attend programme of monthly closed-door gatherings and free public talks.
Taking place in different locations in Nottingham (Nottingham Contemporary, Primary, Bonington Gallery, Backlit), CAMPUS welcomes participants from different backgrounds who wish to engage in conversations about contemporary debates and further explore interdisciplinary practices. CAMPUS is a space of encounter between researchers, practitioners, activists, scholars, institutions and organisations.