Check out i-D‘s recommendation of the best things to watch, see and do this week (1 Ocotber, 2018)… including our current exhibition, The Accumulation of Things!
Thanks to 10 Magazine for featuring The Accumulation of Things as their 10’s To See.
The feature includes a preview of the exhibition, plus interviews with three of the exhibiting artists: Joy Labinjo, Evie O’Connor, and Julie Greve.
Our September/October exhibition has been included in the Dazed & Confused list of “Art shows to leave the house for this month”.
Check out the full feature here, which also includes exhibitions at Tate Modern, Barbican, and Somerset House.
Bonington Gallery curator Tom Godfrey recently caught up with Adam Murray, curator of our September – October exhibition, The Accumulation of Things. Read on to find out more about Adam’s approach to curating and his interest in representations of everyday life – particularly in the north of England – as well as his background in photography and experience as an educator.
Tom Godfrey: The most recent exhibition that you (co-)curated was North: Fashioning Identity that I saw at both the Open Eye Gallery and Somerset House locations. The exhibition took quite a pragmatic and museological approach to presenting a history of fashion (with associated disciplines) connected to a geographical context. The exhibition at Bonington appears to be much looser in concept and suggests a more intuitive approach to putting together an exhibition. I wondered if you could expand a little on these two approaches and what your initial motivations were behind the formation of The Accumulation of Things.
Adam Murray: I agree, the two approaches to the exhibitions, and indeed the exhibitions themselves, are quite different in some ways. However, they are both very much linked by subjects that I have been interested in for many years and I do think that there are similarities, particularly in the way the artists deal with their notion of the familiar.
Since I moved to Preston for university in 2001, the north west of England has been my familiar and the years spent there have been very influential on the work that I have made in the past, for example, Preston is my Paris. This was an ongoing project produced predominantly with Robert Parkinson that dealt with our everyday life in Preston. This then motivated a strong interest in how everyday life and personal experiences inform creative work, as well as a strong interest in representation and identity of the north of England. The latter of which became manifest with the North: Fashioning Identity exhibition that you mention.
With this exhibition at Bonington, I wanted to move away from being so geographically specific and but still engage with work that was clearly about the circumstance, experiences and personal histories of the artists. In my work as a lecturer I also work with and encounter a lot of work by early career practitioners, so I saw the invitation from Bonington as a fantastic opportunity to showcase this. The sourcing of the work has been an intuitive process yes. I encountered all of in the last couple of years at either degree shows, in tutorials or through recommendations by friends. It felt like it came together very naturally.
TG: As evidenced throughout your projects there is a focus and celebration of the so-called ‘regions’ and the practices and associated histories that dwell within them. I wondered whether you could talk about this further, what is it about these geographies that motivates you and the others you work with?
AM: Primarily it is to do with my own experiences and places I have lived. I grew up in Shepshed, a small town not too far from Nottingham, then moved to Preston for university and spent ten years living there. Although I now live in Manchester and partly work in London, I am still active in exploring regional towns and cities. As you mention, this has been a feature of previous projects and exhibitions, I think because I have spent the majority of my life outside of major cities. This has developed my awareness that these places matter. For me, it is not about creating a hierarchy, but it is about encouraging the same exploration of smaller places in a similar way to large urban centres.
As the major ‘creative cities’ are given so much coverage, it is often, not always, but often the work by people from places other than recognised centres, that can offer an alternative and therefore more innovative view on things. I think that is reflected in most of the work in the exhibition. It is also why I am excited to collaborate with Bonington, it is important for these spaces to exist outside of London.
TG: The group exhibitions that interest me always present practices that extend beyond the objects in a room, so the individual contexts, networks and histories represented by the artists protract, conflate and interrupt what might be physically on show. I wondered if you could talk a bit further about how you have brought together this set of practices and what might be represented by the exhibition that we might not see physically in the gallery. The premise that you present at first glance is quite simple, but the array and depth to the practices represented by the exhibition reveals to me something much more complex and nuanced.
AM: All of the artists in the exhibition have produced work whilst being based in Britain for the last few years, so I definitely think that there are a number of narratives and reflections on recent general experiences. However, it was also important for me to work with artists from different backgrounds so that their own personal approach offers a variety of interpretation.
I always try to present work in quite a simple way, without being over theoretical with text etc. It is important for me to create a space that doesn’t feel intimidating and respect that an audience will be able to engage with the work without the need for extensive direction from a curator.
TG: I closely consider Bonington Gallery’s context of being an ‘art school’ gallery when programming and identifying the practices we present. I’m always drawn to people who have a lot of cross-over in their practices, and have done different things and occupied different contexts. I wondered if you could talk about your background, and the different projects you’ve worked on over recent years, and paint a picture of your own relationship to working with/across different artforms.
AM: My background is mainly rooted in photography. I studied photography at university in Preston and as mentioned before, the first major project after this was Preston is my Paris.
Since I was a teenager though I’ve also had a strong interest in fashion photography. This has manifest in different ways but most recently in North: Fashioning Identity which I co-curated with Lou Stoppard. The exhibition included a range of different media and art forms all linked to one subject, the influence of the North of England on Fashion.
I have also worked in Higher Education for 15 years. To begin with it was on the photography course at University of Central Lancashire, then moved on to Fashion Communication at Liverpool John Moores. Now I’m working on Fashion Art Direction at Manchester School of Art and pathway leader for MA Fashion Image at Central Saint Martins. I find it a real privilege to be working with new creative talent, learning what they are about, what they want to communicate and then responding to that. It also appealed to me that Bonington is part of a university.
The main two things that I think link all of this is collaboration and exploring the relationship between different practices. My work simply wouldn’t exist without this and I think putting exhibitions together is the ideal way for me to engage with an audience.
The Accumulation of Things opens with a preview on Thursday 27 September, alongside Bonington Vitrines #8: House of Wisdom.
All images courtesy of Adam Murray.
Last night we welcomed DJ, promoter and Butterz cofounder, Elijah for an engaging lecture and Q&A; tracing his journey into and through different areas of the music industry, exploring the importance of questioning everything, and what happens when “what if?” is turned into “why not?”…
Thanks to writer, critic (and grime fan) Jonathan P Watts for hosting, and to Ashley Holmes, whose 2017 film Everybody’s Hustling set the scene for the evening. It was great to welcome a lot of new faces to the gallery – so big thanks to everyone who joined us, too!
Find out more about Video Days Week Five screenings.
Images: courtesy of Elijah / Butterz
This is a deep dive into a selection of the artists from our Video Days Exhibition, exploring their work alongside showing their films in the gallery.
Forensic Architecture (FA) is a research agency, based at Goldsmiths, University of London, who undertake advanced architectural and media research on behalf of international prosecutors, human rights organisations and political and environmental justice groups. Forensic architecture is also an emergent academic field developed at Goldsmiths, which refers to the production and presentation of architectural evidence – buildings and urban environments and their media representations.
In recent years FA has successfully tested its methodologies in a number of landmark legal and human rights cases undertaken together with and on behalf of threatened communities, Non-governmental organisations (NGOs), prosecutors and the United Nations (UN).
77sqm_9:26min, 2016, (27:23 mins)
Screening: Saturday 21 April, 11 am – 3 pm
Showing every 30 mins (free, no prior booking required).
Commissioned by the ‘Unraveling the NSU Complex’ people’s tribunal; Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt (HKW); Initiative 6 April; and documenta14.
Shortly after 17:00 on the 6 April 2006, Halit Yozgat, 21 years old, was murdered while attending the reception counter of his family run Internet café in Kassel, Germany. His was the ninth of ten racist murders committed by a neo-Nazi group known as the National Socialist Underground or NSU across Germany between 2000 and 2007.
At the time of the killing, an intelligence officer named Andreas Temme was present in the shop. Temme was at the time an employee of the State Office for Constitutional Protection (Landesamt für Verfassungsschutz), the domestic intelligence agency for the German state of Hessen. Temme did not disclose this fact to the police, but was later identified from his internet records.
In his interrogation by the police, and in the subsequent NSU trial in Munich, Temme denied being a witness to the incident, and claimed not to have noticed anything out of the ordinary. The court accepted his testimony. It determined that Temme was present at the back room of the internet café at the time of the murder. It also accepted that from his position in the shop it was possible not to have witnessed the killing.
Within the 77 square meters of the Internet café and the 9:26 minutes of the incident, different actors crossed paths — members of migrant communities, a state employee and the murderers — and were architecturally disposed in relation to each other. The shop was thus a microcosm of the entire social and political controversy that makes the ‘NSU Complex’.
In November 2016, eleven years after the murder, an alliance of civil society organisations known as ‘Unraveling the NSU Complex’ commissioned Forensic Architecture to investigate Temme’s testimony and determine whether it could be truthful.
Karen Cunningham is an artist based in Glasgow whose practice incorporates moving image, sculpture and photography. She studied photography at Edinburgh College of Art, including a study exchange to the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore USA, and completed her MFA at Glasgow School of Art. Her film and video works have been shown throughout the UK and Europe including Tramway, Glasgow; Collective Gallery, Edinburgh; Forum Stadtpark, Graz, Austria and the Malmö Konsthall, Sweden. Interested in the ideas progress and attribution Karen’s work explores the overlapping of emergent and residual aspects within culture and technology often drawing on disciplines such as Science-Fiction and Anthropology which utilise speculative approaches to knowledge and interpretation.
Karen also curates exhibitions, organises events and writes texts. These include the symposium ‘An Endless Theater: the convergence of contemporary art and anthropology in observational cinema’ featuring works by Karen Cunningham, Edward S. Curtis, Geoffrey Farmer, Rosalind Nashashibi, Jean Rouch, Sterling Ruby and John Smith at University of Edinburgh (2013) the online screening and essay series ‘The Anthropology Effect’ for MAP magazine (2013-14) and ‘Viewfinders’ a curated selection of artists film & videos as part of the artists moving image programme at Tramway, Glasgow for ‘Generation’ (2014).
Karen’s film Movable Type; Under Erasure, 2016 will be looped all day on Saturday 28 April.
Commissioned by Legion TV, it was first shown at The Showroom, London in 2016. Filmed largely on location at Writing-on-Stone, Canada the work features an original monologue written and read by the eminent theorist and cultural critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
Images: Courtesy of Karen Cunningham
Rollo Jackson is a London-based director whose work spans music videos, commercial work, and documentary filmmaking.
Jackson grew up immersed in the UK’s dance music culture. His music films for James Blake, Tate Britain and Warp Records all bear the subtle traces of mid-90s escapades spent clad in Versace prints and box-fresh Reeboks and soundtracked by crackling pirate radio or booming warehouse speakers.
His short film Gang Signs & Prayer will be looped in the Gallery on Wednesday 2 May.
A visual testament to Stormzy’s life and upbringing, the film chronicles Stormzy’s inner battles and temptations as he becomes master of his own destiny. Return of the Rucksack, Bad Boys and 100 Bags, taken from Stormzy’s award winning debut studio album Gang Signs & Prayer, serve as the soundtrack to the film of the same name.
The film has also recently been nominated for a Webby Award. You can vote for Gang Signs & Prayer here.
Slimzee’s Going On Terrible will be looped in sequence with Gang Signs & Prayer on Wednesday 2 May.
Slimzee (‘Godfather of Grime’) was the co-founder of Rinse FM and DJ in the UK Garage collective ‘Pay As You Go Cartel’. Slimzee’s Going On Terrible charts his life, following his early days in pirate radio to receiving a career-threatening Asbo. Features old & new footage and interviews from fellow DJ’s & MC’s and even his own mother.
Emily Richardson is a UK based filmmaker who creates film portraits of particular places. Her work focuses on sites in transition and covers an extraordinarily diverse range of landscapes including empty East London streets, forests, North Sea oil fields, post-war tower blocks, empty cinemas and Cold War military facilities. She is currently doing a practice-led PhD on modern architectural space in artists’ film and video at the Royal College of Art in London.
Richardson’s film Beach House, 2015 will be screened in the gallery on Tuesday 8 May (looped all day).
Beach House is a film about a unique example of rural modernism, built on the UK coast of Suffolk by architect John Penn. Penn was an architect, painter, musician and poet whose nine houses in East Suffolk are all built with uncompromising symmetry adhering to the points of the compass in their positioning in the landscape they use a limited language of materials and form that were influenced by his time spent working in California with Richard Neutra. They are Californian modernist pavilions in the Suffolk landscape.
Beach House is John Penn’s most uncompromising design in terms of idea as form. The film combines an archive film made by Penn himself on completion of the house with experimental sound recordings made during the same period and material recently filmed in the house to explore a convergence of filmic and architectural language and allow the viewer to piece together Beach House in its past and present forms. More info…
http://emilyrichardson.org.uk/
Images: courtesy of Emily Richardson and LUX, London.
Bringing the Video Days event programme to a close, we’re excited to welcome Elijah for a talk and Q&A on Tuesday 15 May, from 6.30 pm – 8.30 pm.
Elijah is a DJ and promoter, and along with Skilliam, co-founder of the grime record label Butterz. In these various roles Elijah has travelled the world and shared stages with some of grime’s biggest names. For six years he hosted his own grime show on Rinse FM. Over the past year Elijah has been Associate Artistic Director at Lighthouse Arts, Brighton, an arts and culture agency producing, supporting and presenting new art, film, music, design and games. Supported by Arts Council England, this initiative promotes diversity in the arts, of which, in the UK, only a small percent of artistic directors are black and minority ethnic.
In 2014, grime began to dominate popular music. In 2015, the Tottenham-based MC Skepta beat both David Bowie and Radiohead to the Mercury Prize. When Stormzy re-recorded the single “Shut Up”, originally a viral YouTube video, it entered the 2015 Christmas UK Singles Chart at number eighteen. Since then, grime has soundtracked the so-called ‘youthquake’ that, among other things, has been credited with blocking Theresa May and the Conservatives’ hoped-for landslide in last year’s general election. Grime is the music of a generation.
As well as plotting his own experience of working in grime, by which a history of grime will emerge, Elijah’s talk will address the interrelations between visual art and music culture. He will discuss the importance of inquisitiveness and creativity in work and explore how applying organisational skills learnt in the arts and culture sector could be used in music programming, and vice versa.
Elijah’s lecture will be followed by a Q+A, hosted by Jonathan P. Watts.
Ashley Holmes’ film Everybody’s Hustling will be played on loop all day on Tuesday 15 May, from 10 am to 5 pm, then played once at the start of this event.
» Find out more about Video Days Week Five screenings.
Images: courtesy of Elijah / Butterz
Big thanks to everyone who came along to the Preview of Video Days last night! We really enjoyed hosting Nottingham’s skate community for an evening of photos and film screenings – as well as a great talk from Chris Lawton, co-founder of Skate Nottingham. By the end of the evening a mini skate session broke out …inside the gallery…
A huge thank you again to Skate Nottingham, Varial Magazine, SkatePal, Blind Skateboards and everyone else involved for their support!
A selection of photos from the opening of Lace: Unarchived.
A selection of images from the opening of Ruth Angel Edwards: Wheel of the Year ! Effulent Profundal Zone !
In the lead up to Ruth Angel Edwards’ solo exhibition Wheel of the Year, we made a series of blog posts containing material forwarded to us from Ruth, that offered insight into what informs her practice, and more specifically the work she’ll be presenting here at Bonington.
29 November 2017
Our first post below relates to the modern day phenomenon of ‘Ghost Nets’. Please click onto the image or link below to be taken to the article:
‘What are Ghost Nets?’ [online] Available at: http://oliveridleyproject.org/what-are-ghost-nets/
30 November 2017
Second post from Ruth Angel Edwards, referring to the MS Moby Dada cruiseferry. Click the image to sign the petition:
‘Stop the use of Looney Tunes on Military ships’ [online] Available at: https://www.change.org/p/stop-the-use-of-looney-tunes-on-military-ships
12 December 2017
Ruth Angel Edwards [Evening] post 3, click the image or link to read the report.
‘Investigation launched after one of the ‘worst’ cases of fly-tipping’ [online] Available at: http://www.nottinghampost.com/news/local-news/investigation-launched-after-one-worst-284790
3 January 2018
‘Mutoid Sam and The Notting Hill Carnival’ [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Izel6F8d1qg
3 January 2018
‘Profundal Zone’ [online] Available at: https://aquaticbiomebreakdown.weebly.com/profundal-zone.html
10 January 2018
Ruth’s 6th blog post links us to the the essay: Ghosts Among the Ruins: Towards a Haunted Phenomenology by Mark Horvath & Adam Lovasz
10 January 2018
‘The Lorax (Original)’ [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8V06ZOQuo0k
Here is a selection of news articles from our exhibition Its’ Our Playground: Artificial Sensibility, and a selection of posts from our instagram page on the installation from the show.
It’s Our Playground Artificial Sensibility featured on KubaParis, October 2017.
Lila Matsumoto’s ‘ekphrastic response’ to It’s Our Playground Artificial Sensibility featured on MAP, October 2017.
It’s Our Playground Artificial Sensibility featured on thisistomorrow, October 2017.
Bonington Gallery curator Tom Godfrey caught up with Sara MacKillop to discuss her ongoing fascination with objects, images, sculpture and printed matter (and the overlap between all of these things), ahead of the opening of Sara’s solo exhibition, One Room Living:
Tom: I’m interested in this relationship between printed matter and the sculptural form that is prevalent in your practice. It’s something that you explore in both your publications and gallery exhibitions, where tropes are exchanged between these art-forms that challenges associated terms of engagement, i.e; a book is for handling and a sculpture is for looking at. Could you expand a little on this?
Sara: I think the starting point of this is that I am very concerned with presentation and display when encountering images and objects. Therefore, when there is a printed image I am immediately interested in what it is printed on, if there is something on the other side etc. This is maybe something to do with a use of found or altered objects or images of various kinds and looking at the wrong aspect of them – or approaching it in a non-straightforward fashion.
When making a publication I am very concerned in finding the correct format for what I am going to present and in some cases, the publication can be almost all format. As a result, my publications can appear like a mess of stuff – this wasn’t a plan, but I quite like it. Sometimes a publication is presented as a sculpture in an exhibition. The sculptures quite often have a temporary feel, but can also be presented in more than one way or adapted each time they are shown.
Tom: This exchange between sculpture & printed matter, with its subsequent challenge on a pre-conceived status of sculpture – making it into something that is adaptable and ephemeral – is really interesting.
I wondered if you could talk a bit further about the connection the exhibition makes to the wider environment of the university. The introduction text references an analysis being made towards how the institution’s function is represented across a multitude of different spaces. Could you expand on this and also describe this process of observation you have made from your visits to the gallery?
Sara: On my first visit to the Bonington Gallery I was very conscious of the different uses of space I encountered on the way to the gallery – the cafe, art shop etc. When you arrive at the gallery itself you walk downwards into the space, and there is a series of doors leading to different spaces with different uses from the gallery. In a way it made sense to me for the exhibition to appear as a repository for motifs of these spaces and I am interested to see what happens when they overlap. I had been working with some of these motifs (images of art supplies from promotional material) prior to the exhibition, but the work is mainly developed after initial site visits.
Tom: I’ve followed your work for nearly 15 years and have witnessed what feels like a sustained enquiry into a certain type of source material that could perhaps be described as ‘every-day’. Whereas some artists fetishise certain systems, objects or brands into their work as an attempt to command ownership over them, you manage to preserve an open and democratic feel to your varied output that becomes more reflective of the idiosyncratic attachments we form with certain objects and images we all encounter on a daily basis.
Could you talk more about this ongoing commitment and interest in the materials and source material that informs in your work?
Sara: My interest in an object or image can be initiated by a recognition that it presents something in a way that is better than I could achieve myself. This is often an unintended consequence of its design or presentation; again a result of looking at something in the wrong way or purposely misunderstanding it. It’s not really about identification where I feel it speaks to me – I usually become concerned with how an object or image functions where I’ve seen it, and how it was displayed. I then make changes to the framing / presentation, sometimes working within and/or disrupting the parameters of the format itself, and finally move on to something else. Pen Fence is a good example of this, although I am continuing to use different versions of this.
Tom: Accompanying the exhibition in the main gallery is a presentation of all your published & self-published materials from the past 9+ years. Could you talk about your history within self-publishing?
Sara: The first publication I made was 50 Envelope Windows in 2008. I had all these images of envelope security patterns scanned through the windows of the envelopes, and I hadn’t found a fitting way of presenting them until I tried them as a book. The slight differences and sequences fitted to the turning of the pages of the book perfectly. After that I started having ideas that the end format was a publication and that has continued until now. There are now around 35 publications in total. The publication itself is the artwork. I was working at Donlon Books at the time and they stocked a lot of artist books. It was a good way into learning about the rich history of artist publications.
Also, X Marks the Bökship provided a great place to meet people who make publications and see what was being made. I am attracted to the kind of publication which can have many forms; the way that for quite modest means you can make something, distribute it easily to pre-existing communities and then move on to the next project. I organise the Artist Self Publishers (ASP) Fair with artist, Dan Mitchell. We make a fair that offers free tables and focuses on the publication as artwork. We’ve done it for three years now and hope to continue. I’ve valued the experience of artist self-publishing and the groups of people I have met through it, and so wanted to share this.
Tom: We held a discussion in the gallery in 2015 (to accompany Foxall Studios’ Publishing Rooms exhibition) that looked at the ‘changing importance of printed matter and whether it still holds up as a relevant and vital contemporary media format’. Do you have any views on this?
Sara: Yes – I think printed material is still a very vital material. The availability and affordability of print on demand makes it accessible, which makes it vital. The new context of printed matter as one of many formats to produce and distribute to me actually makes it more interesting.
One Room Living will open with a preview on Thursday 2 November 5 – 7 pm. The exhibition will remain open until Friday 8 December, visit the webpage for more details.
All images courtesy Sara MacKillop.