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.
Launching our 2019/20 season, we’re delighted to present Waking the Witch: Old Ways, New Rites – an exhibition looking at the importance of craft, ritual and land to the practice of the ever-shifting figure of the witch.
The British Isles have a particularly strong relationship to magic and the occult, with the chants of witchcraft echoing throughout their history. Traditional witchcraft has a strong connection to the earth, and an intimate knowledge of herbs, plants and the elements, as well as the human body. As gatekeepers to altered consciousness, witches have been both feared and sought out for their dealings with the unknown. Historically persecuted as an outsider, the witch has been taken on by artists as a challenging force to prevailing norms, and as a symbol of dissidence.
Looking to symbols, tools and the coven as a space for focusing collective intent, the artists in this exhibition explore the path of the witch as a way for us to connect with the earth and each other.
Ben Jeans Houghton will open the exhibition with an improvised performance, expressing aspects of his own magical practice through a harmonic voice and the spoken word, using repurposed effects pedals, loopers, ritual tools, and costume.
Waking the Witch: Old Ways, New Rites is a UK touring exhibition curated by Legion Projects and supported by Arts Council England.
Verity Birt, Anna Bunting-Branch, Nadine Byrne, Mary Beth Edelson, Fiona Finnegan, Blue Firth, Fourthland, Georgia Horgan, Ben Jeans Houghton, Serena Korda, Candice Lin, Katarzyna Majak, Monica Sjöö, Lucy Stein, Ayesha Tan Jones, Cathy Ward
Bonington Gallery has been a significant part of the cultural landscape of Nottingham for half a century. Its diverse and ambitious artistic programme has consistently presented the forefront of creative practice and through this has gained an national reputation.
The gallery is situated within the Bonington building, first opened on 14 October 1969 by Her Royal Highness the Duchess of Kent. This labyrinth of a modernist building is nestled in the heart of our City Campus and is home to a wide range of creative courses, providing a suitable context for an artistic programme that profiles a wide range of creative practice.
Over the past five decades, we’ve showcased visual and performing arts from across the world, reflected in the ongoing work to establish our archive. We’re committed to making the next 50 years as memorable as the first, starting now.
The Other Film Club presents Penny Slinger: Out of The Shadows (2019), a newly released documentary produced and directed by Richard Kovitch, that focusses on the practice and life of the radical artist, filmmaker and performer Penny Slinger. Out of The Shadows explores overlapping concerns in experimental narratives, female sexuality, the occult, and social taboos, as well as how the personal histories of artists can intertwine through radical alliance.
This event is the first in a series of screenings and discussions organised by The Other Film Club that forms research into the radical feminist and experimental filmmaker Jane Arden (1927-1982). Arden was a close collaborator of Penny Slinger where they co-artistic directed and were members of the feminist theatre group Holocaust. The series is hosted by Paul Bryan (MFA Fine Art student, Nottingham Trent University), with the support of Nottingham Contemporary and in collaboration with Bonington Gallery.
Following the screening, join Penny Slinger and Paul Bryan for an in-conversation exploring Slinger’s artistic practice and feminist surrealism.
Please be aware this film has an 18 certificate and contains explicit sexual images and nudity.
Penny Slinger (b. 1947) is a British-American artist living and working in Los Angeles, California. Slinger created her first book 50% The Visible Woman while at college and exhibited her pioneering Feminist Surrealist collage work in Young and Fantastic at the Institute of Contemporary Art in 1969, followed by two solo exhibitions at the Angela Flowers Gallery, London, in 1971 and 1973. In 1971, Slinger joined Jane Arden’s first all-woman theatre troupe in England called Holocaust and performed in the feature film The Other Side of the Underneath (1972). Her work has been featured in major exhibitions internationally. Slinger’s upcoming solo exhibition Tantric Transformations will be on view from 28 June – 24 August 2019 at Richard Saltoun Gallery, London.
The Other Film Club is a screening programme organised by Paul Bryan that has previously screened films regarding the practices of Sarah Lucas, About Sarah (2014) directed by Elisa Miller, and I Don’t Belong Anywhere: The Cinema of Chantal Akerman (2015), directed by Marianne Lambert. Look out for a forthcoming screening of Jane Arden’s The Other Side of the Underneath (1972), the first feature film directed by a woman in the UK.
Established in 2016 by a collective of eight, The Community is a Paris-based multidisciplinary art institute dedicated to promoting experimental and progressive artistic practice through interdisciplinary programming. Featuring Ethan Assouline, Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann, David Bernstein, Tenant of Culture, Cyrus Goberville, Philippe Hallais and Ruby Hoette.
The Community’s founding was prompted by a long-standing need for a shared space and platform to stimulate ideas and facilitate collaboration across different creative disciplines including art, fashion, music and publishing.
Extending their methodology to the UK, The Community Live in Nottingham transforms Bonington Gallery into a site for learning, experimentation and production through a programme of free to attend weekly workshops and activities delivered by a specially invited group of internationally prominent artists and creatives, accompanied by members of The Community. Over the course of a month, participants will create work within the space whilst reflecting and developing upon previous outcomes – building content through experience and accumulation. Participation will be open to all, reflecting The Community’s desire to ingratiate their practice through dialogue and collaboration with local communities.
The exhibition will culminate with a music and performance event at the gallery and in the city with an opportunity to view completed works on Friday 29 March and Saturday 30 March. Details regarding these activities will be announced soon.
The gallery will be open for viewing throughout the exhibition period, but due to the nature of this being an ‘exhibition-as-process’, we suggest following updates via The Community’s instagram account and on the exhibition website to maximise your experience.
Ethan Assouline, Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann, David Bernstein, Tenant of Culture, Cyrus Goberville, Philippe Hallais, Ruby Hoette
Monday 4 – Saturday 9 March 2019
Ego Altar by David Bernstein
Monday 11 – Saturday 16 March 2019
Ruby Hoette’s Patternmapping Residency
Wednesday 13 – Friday 15 March 2019
Workshop by Tenant of Culture
Monday 18 – Saturday 23 March 2019
Anna’s Weekend by Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann
Monday 25 – Saturday 30 March 2019
Writing Club by Ethan Assouline and Philippe Hallais
Come celebrate the finale of The Community Live in Nottingham with an opportunity to view all of the completed works produced throughout the four weeks of workshops plus a music and sound performance.
The evening will consist of two parts: A live performance by Philippe Hallais that will bring together audio-recorded outcomes from the outcome of week four, the ‘Writing Club’ with artist Ethan Assouline; followed by a Nottingham edition of ‘Permanent Cuts’ – a multidisciplinary and experimental live music session co-curated by Cyrus Goberville of Collapsing Market.
The event will be followed by an off-site event at the King Billy pub in Sneinton with DJ sets by Low Jack, Cyrus, plus others.
Coinciding with his current solo exhibition Now & Then, we’re delighted to screen Dick Jewell’s seminal 2002 documentary Kinky Gerlinky, bringing together footage shot at the legendary club night between 1990 and 1993.
Kinky Gerlinky was the biggest, most fabulous, most stylish nightclub London had ever seen. This documentary, edited from over 200 hours shot on 21 nights in the early nineties, conveys the experience of one full night out at the club. Flamboyant poses on the red carpet, debauchery on the dance floor, glamorous catwalk competitions and extravagant backstage action – this film captures it all.
By nature a fleeting phenomenon, club culture is rarely recorded on film in any depth. Kinky Gerlinky goes the distance, offering unique intimacy with its subject – with most of the action performed directly for the camera; the costumes are out-of-this-world, as are the attitudes. A welcome flashback to wilder clubbing days, it’s also a hilarious in-your-face examination of the cultural and sexual politics of celebrity and glamour.
Now & Then will be Dick Jewell’s most significant solo exhibition in recent years, bringing together a wide range of works produced over a 30-year period. Working across film, photography and photo-collage, Jewell has inhabited both gallery and commercial contexts, exhibiting his work internationally at institutions including the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam) and Serpentine Gallery (London). He has also produced music videos and promos for musicians including Neneh Cherry and Massive Attack.
As the title suggests, Now & Then chronicles progression: both from a technological perspective through the shifting media across Jewell’s work, and also in regards to people, as demonstrated by Jewell re-visiting his seminal 1989 film Headcases (shot on Super 8) whereby he has repeated the same set of questions to the same subjects 30 years on.
Other key works that will be on display include The Box, a huge bank of 200 framed photographs that Jewell took from four TVs over seven days in 1980; Four Thousand Threads, which presents a ‘Chinese Whispers’ version of a Google image search; and an audience participatory work entitled War & Peace, in which visitors are encouraged to take selfies against a backdrop and disseminate them online.
In a world bombarding us with millions of images, Now & Then is just presenting a few thousand.
Fine Art Live Lecture Present: Dick Jewell
Thursday 31 January, 5.15 pm – 7.30 pm
Lecture Theatre 2, Newton building, NTU City Campus
Bonington Film Night #9: Dick Jewell Kinky Gerlinky
Thursday 20 February, 7 pm – 8.30 pm
Bonington Gallery, Bonington building, NTU City Campus
Bonington Vitrines #10: Jewell
Friday 18 January – Saturday 23 February
Bonington Foyer
For our exhibition, The Serving Library v David Osbaldeston, we have highlighting just a few of the 100+ framed objects that make up The Serving Library (TSL) collection, along with the accompanying text from TSL’s website.
The exhibition will feature the collection its entirety, with items as diverse as record sleeves, watercolours, woodcuts, polaroids, drawings, screen-prints, airbrush paintings, a car number plate, and a Ouija board. Together, these varied objects decorate the walls of the library to serve as a toolbox for teaching.
“The sleeve was one of those lovely gifts. We wanted a neutral image and I’d done a rough of a big flagpole and a flag and nothing else. We’d done a gig in Plymouth and were walking along the Hoe and there it was. We all dropped to the ground and looked at it. When you lay on the ground there was nothing else to see, apart from the pole against the sky.”
“Equation for a Composite Design (2): Best Of,” Stuart Bailey, Dot Dot Dot #8, 2004
Dear Paul,
I am the daughter of Richard T. Ganyon. Inventor of all Votrax voice synthesizers in the 1970s and 1980s. He was very much a part of your “Detroit as Refrain” lecture given in Detroit in 2010. I would have loved to have been there to listen to what you had to say about Votrax and Detroit music. You are the only person I’ve found to make the connections that you have in the brief description that I read about it, and I don’t know how to thank you for trying. If you want additional information about the Votrax and things you might not know about regarding its use, please email me. I might surprise you with a story or two.
“I am the Daughter of Richard T. Ganyon,” Paul Elliman, Bulletins of The Serving Library #8, 2014
Dear Philomene, As you know, I’d like to reproduce that deceptively modest painting of yours — the one whose primary colors combine to spell out their composite and form their own frame—on the cover of this last Dot Dot Dot.
“A Word on the Cover,” Stuart Bailey, Dot Dot Dot #20, 2010
This is a RECORD COVER. This writing is the DESIGN upon the record cover. The design is to help SELL the record. We hope to draw your attention to it and encourage you to pick it up. When you have done that maybe you’ll be persuaded to listen to the music — in this case XTC’s Go 2 album. Then we want you to BUY it.
“On Graphic Design, 1979,” Stuart Bailey, Dot Dot Dot #2, 2001
A few years ago a friend of mine said she had just been introduced to Josef Albers. The idea that he was still around was compelling — artists have always tried to keep in historical contact through works from the past. Why not make contact with Albers directly? Adding the words YES and NO to an Albers-designed stencil typeface turned it into a kind of Ouija board, and it’s also an Albers material — his square paintings were made on this board, in 16, 24 and 40 inch sizes.
“A–Z, 0–9, YES/NO,” Paul Elliman, Dot Dot Dot #13, 2006
Is it good enough? Is it even art? I don’t know. It might look like art, it might even look like contemporary art, but I really don’t know if it will be. And to be frank, I don’t mind if it isn’t, it doesn’t change the fact that to me it needs to be done.
“Another Shadow Fight,” Andrew Hunt & David Osbaldeston, Dot Dot Dot #16, 2006
So we were already cutting up our mutual identities and, as we did that, we started to think about why it was so appealing to us. And one of the things that we decided was that we were both at war with binary culture, the idea of male and female, black and white, Christian/Muslim, good/bad — all these different either/ors that you mentioned, which are embedded in most cultures. Again, as Burroughs would say, “Look for the vested interest …”. To control people, to make people behave as stereotypes in order for things to be simple and easy to control. Anarchy and confusion are not necessarily friendly towards control! So, we began to look at that aspect of it. Why be male or female?
“Vested Interest: Mark Beasley in conversation with Genesis Breyer P-Orridge,” Dot Dot Dot #16, 2008 / Cover of Dot Dot Dot #17, 2009
Born awkwardly between eras — drawn by hand in order to be better read by machines — the fälschungserschwerende Schrift bears the marks of both 19th-century guild-enshrined handcraft and 20th-century anonymous automation. And like any technology, it is bound by the political determinants of its design: while its original “tamper-proof ” premise may have proved a Macguffin, these weird-looking letters are an early product of our contemporary surveillance state. What reads to us as a clumsy lack of formal continuity is exactly what makes it legible to a computer. It is an alphabet whose defining characteristic is precisely that it has no defining characteristic, other than having no defining characteristic.
“Fälschungserschwerende Schrift,” Benjamin Tiven, Bulletins of The Serving Library #3, 2012
January 17, 2006. As it turns out, today is Benjamin Franklin’s 300th birthday. Writer, typographer, printer-publisher-politician, inventor, statesman, gentleman, scientist, lover, linguist, librarian and the first Postmaster General of the United States, Franklin was the consummate networker — distributing his ideas far and wide through a dizzying range of practices.
“Post-Master,” David Reinfurt, Dot Dot Dot #12, 2006
For over a decade police forces across the world have been hunting a criminal cartel with a licence to print money. They’ve been distributing the highest quality counterfeit notes ever produced. The forgeries are so realistic that even the experts can’t tell the difference. They’re known as superdollars.
“Superdollars,” David Reinfurt, Dot Dot Dot #14, 2007