Join us for a free guided tour of Bonington Gallery’s latest exhibition with BSL interpretation.
Book your free place and enjoy a tour of Bonington Gallery’s third exhibition of the season, Weird Hope Engines curated by David Blandy, Rebecca Edwards and Jamie Sutcliffe, led by the Gallery’s Director Tom Godfrey.
Along with an introduction to the exhibition, Tom will talk through the accompanying Vitrines exhibition Nottingham Subcultural Fashion in the 1980s.
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.
Donald Rodney (b.1961, d.1998) studied at Nottingham Trent Polytechnic, now Nottingham Trent University, between 1981 and 1985. Here, Rodney’s practice moved from painting to an experimental multimedia approach, through which he established an artistic language addressing subjects including racial identity, Black masculinity, chronic illness, and Britain’s colonial past.
Sketchbooks were an integral part of Donald Rodney’s practice from 1982 onwards. His sketchbooks contain: preliminary studies for artworks, records of past exhibitions and various writings; glimpses of Rodney’s diverse personal, cultural, social, and political influences. This vitrine exhibition collates archival material to present a snapshot of Rodney’s time as a student in Nottingham, amid his involvement with local, national, and global socio-political discourses. Rodney began using sketchbooks at the age of twenty-two as a student, and he filled forty-eight sketchbooks by the time of his death in 1998 from complications related to sickle cell disease.
Rodney met fellow artist Keith Piper at Nottingham Trent Polytechnic, and together they moved in with electronics student Gary Stewart. At their address — 3 Lindsey Walk, Hyson Green Flats — Rodney, Piper, and Stewart provided a meeting place for artists, writers, makers, and thinkers: fellow students, local community members, and persons from their national networks. The BLK Art Group was also formed by Rodney and fellow students in 1983, using 3 Lindsey Walk as its address. The BLK Art Group was a collective of young Black artists and curators who exhibited primarily in Birmingham and London. This was an important and necessary group, but BLK Art Group has also been retrospectively attached to activities by British artists in the 1980s who were not affiliated with the collective. This attachment has been critiqued as a reduction and conflation of an important reality: that there were many unique, different, and individual Black British artists working across the UK long before The BLK Art Group, throughout the 1980s, and, of course, far beyond and into the present day.
Rodney, and fellow students, also engaged in artistic activity outside of Nottingham Trent Polytechnic, by organising exhibitions, conferences, talks, and events across the midlands and nationally. These included The First National Black Art Convention of 1982, at Wolverhampton Polytechnic, and Pan-Afrikan Connection, which involved a series of exhibitions in Bristol, Nottingham, Coventry, and London between 1982-1983.
For further insight into Donald Rodney’s life and art, please visit Donald Rodney: Visceral Canker at Nottingham Contemporary until 5 January 2025. This exhibition includes all of Donald Rodney’s surviving artworks including painting, drawing, and installation, as well as sculpture and digital media.
This exhibition has been curated by Joshua Lockwood-Moran with the exhibitions team at Nottingham Contemporary.
Launch event
Join us for the launch of this exhibition and After the End of History: British Working Class Photography 1989 – 2024 on Thursday 26 September 2024, 6 – 8 pm. Book your free ticket now.
Bonington Gallery is pleased to present Knees Kiss Ground by London based artist Motunrayo Akinola (b.1992).
Motunrayo explores themes related to faith, migration, belonging, colonialism and postcolonialism using everyday materials, domestic imagery, historical imagery and text. His work manifests predominantly through sculpture, installation, performance, sound and drawing.
As a British-born Nigerian who is comfortable in both spaces, Akinola’s work investigates systems and subtle cultural codings that maintain a sense of othering. He creates environments that question societal positions on contemporary issues by re-contextualising familiar objects and materials – interrupting quick associations and creating points of access into othered perspectives.
Motunrayo’s interest in attitudes towards migration stems from his dual upbringing in London and Lagos, Nigeria. Work created during recent years explores postcolonial power dynamics and the psychology of ownership. By noting subtle gaps in cultural knowledge, his work encourages a new understanding about the possession of space.
Having studied both architecture and art, Motunrayo is interested in the impacts the built environment has on human experience. For this exhibition, Motunrayo will present works including a full-scale replica of a shipping container made from cardboard, a site-specific drawing that documents a private performance in Bonington Gallery, and several works that use light to explore the relationship between light and religious or spiritual rituals, such as the Biblical association of light as a revelatory presence.
This exhibition has been produced in partnership with South London Gallery where Motunrayo spent six months on the Postgraduate Residency programme in 2023/24, culminating in the solo exhibition Knees Kiss Ground. This iteration of the exhibition is an expansion on the works created during that period.
Motunrayo Akinola is a London-based artist who uses images of the home and everyday materials to explore comfort and belonging. He creates sculptures, installations, sound and drawings. He studied at RA Schools, graduating in 2023. As a British-born Nigerian who has spent time in and now feels comfortable in both countries, Akinola’s work exposes the nuanced differences between the two places.
Bonington Gallery have partnered with South London Gallery to deliver their 13th Postgraduate Residency, an open submission six-month residency that provides an early-career artist with a rare opportunity to produce a new body of work, which is then exhibited at the SLG and in this instance at Bonington Gallery. The residency is open to artists who have completed a BA, and have undertaken a period of self-directed, peer-led or postgraduate study in the year prior to the residency. This can include alternative, peer organised and non-accredited programmes from an institution, collective or art school in the UK as well as an MA, MFA, PGDip, MRes.
The SLG has an international reputation for its contemporary art exhibitions by established, mid-career and younger artists and programme of film and performance events. Its highly regarded, free education programme includes a peer-led young people’s forum; family workshops; artist-led projects and commissions on local housing estates; and a programme for looked after children.
The Postgraduate Residency is supported by The Paul and Louise Cooke Endowment.
Press
Floorr Magazine
Corridor8 review by Jade Foster
Join us for a free tour of current exhibition, Karuppu by Osheen Siva, with BSL interpretation.
Alongside, discover more about Shahnawaz Hussain: My Nottinghamshire Perspectives in Watercolour and Peepshow: An Illusion Cut to the Measure of Desire in our extra gallery spaces.
Free, open to all
Join us for a free tour of current exhibition, Karuppu by Osheen Siva, led by Deputy Curator Joshua Lockwood-Moran.
Alongside, discover more about Shahnawaz Hussain: My Nottinghamshire Perspectives in Watercolour and Peepshow: An Illusion Cut to the Measure of Desire in our extra gallery spaces.
Free, open to all
Bonington Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of paintings by Nottingham based artist Shahnawaz Hussain which capture key buildings and landmarks across Nottingham and the wider county.
Based in Nottingham, Shahnawaz Hussain is a self-taught artist who has been practicing and making art for the past 8 years.
Mostly working in acrylic, oil and watercolour; Shahnawaz travels across Nottinghamshire visiting locally significant buildings and landmarks that either possess a Nottingham Civic Society plaque or are otherwise connected with a famous Nottingham personality or lost industry. Some paintings also depict places and locations that are personal to the artist, such as his house.
In his experimental artworks, form, colour and texture are interwoven and applied via a broad range of perspective techniques, in turn exploring meaning, scale and depth-of-vision to reveal in great detail the underlying nature and composition of his subjects.
Shahnawaz has a particular interest in buildings from the ages of high architecture, particularly those from Victorian, Georgian, Tudor, Arts and Crafts and Baroque styles.
Having lived in Nottingham for most of his adult life he has observed the evolution of the city and wider county over many years, witnessing heritage architecture being irreplaceably lost, or used for purposes different to what was originally intended.
Shahnawaz is an Alumni Fellow at Nottingham Trent University, graduating in 1999 in MSc Multimedia Engineering. His personal website can be visited here, and more information about his practice can be read via this downloadable PDF document created by the artist.
Alongside our current exhibition, history is a living weapon in yr hand, join us for a free online In-conversation event between our current exhibitor Onyeka Igwe and Dr. Jenni Ramone, Associate Professor of Postcolonial and Global Literatures at NTU.
Together, they will explore topics related to Igwe’s wider practice and the ideas, research and development that informs both the exhibition and Igwe’s 2023 film, A Radical Duet, that is central to the installation.
On the evening there will be the opportunity to pose questions.
Jenni Ramone is Associate Professor of Postcolonial and Global Literatures at NTU, where she directs the Postcolonial and Global Studies Research Group. She is also managing editor of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing. Her forthcoming book is Global Literature and Gender: Twenty-First Century Perspectives, and recent books include Postcolonial Literatures in the Local Literary Marketplace: Located Reading, and The Bloomsbury Introduction to Postcolonial Writing. Her current project is on breastfeeding in literature and art.
Onyeka Igwe is a London-born and based moving image artist and researcher.
Her work is aimed at the question: how do we live together? Not to provide a rigid answer as such, but to pull apart the nuances of mutuality, co-existence and multiplicity.
Onyeka’s practice figures sensorial, spatial and counter-hegemonic ways of knowing as central to that task. For her, the body, archives and narratives both oral and textual act as a mode of enquiry that makes possible the exposition of overlooked histories.
She has had solo/duo shows at MoMA PS1, New York (2023), High Line, New York (2022), Mercer Union, Toronto (2021), Jerwood Arts, London (2019) and Trinity Square Video, London (2018). Her films have screened in numerous group shows and film festivals worldwide.
Currently, she is Practitioner in Residence at the University of the Arts London and she will participate in the group show ‘Nigeria Imaginary’ in the national pavilion of Nigeria at the upcoming 60th Venice Biennial in 2024. She was awarded the New Cinema Award at Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival 2019, 2020 Arts Foundation Fellowship, 2021 Foundwork Artist Prize and has been nominated for the 2022 Jarman Award and Max Mara Artist Prize for Women. Onyeka is represented by Arcadia Missa Gallery.
Presented alongside Onyeka Igwe’s solo exhibition history is a living weapon in yr hand, discover a selection of materials selected by the artist, that highlight key women who embraced creative activities to challenge imperialism and imagine new Pan-African realities.
In looking into the history of Pan-Africanism from the 1930s up until Howard Macmillan’s famous Winds of Change speech in 1960, many famed and celebrated men emerge as having spent time in the UK before rising to prominence in Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia as political leaders. The women are lesser known and celebrated, but figures like Amy Ashwood Garvey, Katherine Dunham, Una Marson, Sylvia Wynter and Funmilayo Ransome Kuti played their part using music, poetry, dance and theatre to challenge imperialism and imagine new Pan-African futures.
Join us for a first look round the exhibition on Friday 12 January from 6–8 pm.
Book your free ticket
Images by Jules Lister
Onyeka Igwe is a London born, and based, moving image artist and researcher. Her work is aimed at the question: how do we live together? Not to provide a rigid answer as such, but to pull apart the nuances of mutuality, co-existence and multiplicity.
Onyeka’s practice figures sensorial, spatial and counter-hegemonic ways of knowing as central to that task. For her, the body, archives and narratives both oral and textual act as a mode of enquiry that makes possible the exposition of overlooked histories. She has had solo/duo shows at MoMA PS1, New York (2023), High Line, New York (2022), Mercer Union, Toronto (2021), Jerwood Arts, London (2019) and Trinity Square Video, London (2018). Her films have screened in numerous group shows and film festivals worldwide.
Currently, she is Practitioner in Residence at the University of the Arts London and she will participate in the group show ‘Nigeria Imaginary’ in the national pavilion of Nigeria at the upcoming 60th Venice Biennial in 2024. She was awarded the New Cinema Award at Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival 2019, 2020 Arts Foundation Fellowship, 2021 Foundwork Artist Prize and has been nominated for the 2022 Jarman Award and Max Mara Artist Prize for Women. Onyeka is represented by Arcadia Missa Gallery.
Join us for a free, accessible tour of history is a living weapon in yr hand led by Onyeka Igwe (artist) & Elaine Joseph (audio describer), and accompanied by a BSL interpreter.
General access information to the building can be found here
Accessibility information for the exhibition can be found here
Onyeka Igwe is a London-born and based moving image artist and researcher.
Her work is aimed at the question: how do we live together? Not to provide a rigid answer as such, but to pull apart the nuances of mutuality, co-existence and multiplicity.
Onyeka’s practice figures sensorial, spatial and counter-hegemonic ways of knowing as central to that task. For her, the body, archives and narratives both oral and textual act as a mode of enquiry that makes possible the exposition of overlooked histories.
She has had solo/duo shows at MoMA PS1, New York (2023), High Line, New York (2022), Mercer Union, Toronto (2021), Jerwood Arts, London (2019) and Trinity Square Video, London (2018). Her films have screened in numerous group shows and film festivals worldwide.
Currently, she is Practitioner in Residence at the University of the Arts London and she will participate in the group show ‘Nigeria Imaginary’ in the national pavilion of Nigeria at the upcoming 60th Venice Biennial in 2024. She was awarded the New Cinema Award at Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival 2019, 2020 Arts Foundation Fellowship, 2021 Foundwork Artist Prize and has been nominated for the 2022 Jarman Award and Max Mara Artist Prize for Women. Onyeka is represented by Arcadia Missa Gallery.
Elaine Lillian Joseph is an audio describer based in London and Birmingham. She has a BA in Modern Languages (German) and English Literature and trained as a describer at ITV under Jonathan Penny. She is a founding member of SoundScribe, a global majority collective of audio describers and consultants and a member of Collective Text, an organisation supporting accessibility in art and film through creative captioning, audio description and interpretation. The question that galvanises her practice is how can we honour the labour of access work and create a service that powerfully resonates with users? Collaboration and anti-discrimination activism is key to her work.
A selection of recently completed projects include Eve Stainton’s Impact Driver at the Institute for Contemporary Arts in London, an online screening of Hofesh Shechter’s Political Mother and a newly commissioned audio described track for Black Audio Film Collective’s Handsworth Songs.
Join us for a free tour of history is a living weapon in yr hand by Onyeka Igwe, led by Gallery Director Tom Godfrey.
Free, open to all