Video Days takes its title from the 90s skateboard video by Blind Skateboards. Produced in 1991 by American skateboarder and filmmaker, Spike Jonze, the iconic video depicts street and park skating in the US, and is considered one of the most influential skate videos of its time.
For the duration of 25 days the gallery will be transformed into an open cinema. Running daily, Video Days presents a different film or series of short films each day from different decades and genres. The films screened share several common themes, most prevalent is their relationship to the built environment.
All films/performances are played on repeat unless specified otherwise.
DISCLAIMER
The films on display do not come with a British Board of Film Classification (BBFC). We therefore advise that some of the films shown may contain scenes of nudity, discrimination, violence, drugs, imitable behaviour, and language unsuitable for young or vulnerable viewers. If you have any questions prior to visiting the gallery, please get in touch.
Friday 20 April
Blind Skateboards, Video Days, 1991 (24 mins), Dir. Spike Jonze.
Looped all day.
Video Days is a skateboard video released in 1991 by Blind Skateboards, it was produced by American skateboarder and filmmaker, Spike Jonze. It is widely considered to be one of the most influential skate videos of all time, providing early platforms for now legendary skaters including Mark Gonzales, Jason Lee and Guy Mariano.
Saturday 21 April
Forensic Architecture, 77sqm_9:26min, 2016, (27:23 mins).
Screening times: Every 30 mins all day (11 am – 3 pm)
Counter investigating the testimony of Andres Temme in relation to the murder of Halit Yozgat in Kassel, 6 April 2006.
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.
We launch our next exhibition Video Days with a programme of talks, screenings and photography dedicated to the local and international skateboarding community.
In conjunction with local not-for-profit community group Skate Nottingham, we’ll be exploring skateboarding’s potential to drive cultural and social change, particularly through the re-engagement of young skateboarders with education and employment by supporting individual creative and cultural interests.
This event reflects Nottingham’s lively intergenerational skate community, and identify a set of themes that link the local and international significance of skateboarding to the objectives of the open cinema we are creating in the gallery. It also shows the rich texture of disciplines and interests reflected across the entire Video Days programme.
Skateboarding is an activity that reflects a consistent theme within the programme of human-kind’s disruptive and subjective relationship with the built environment.
Email boningtongallery@ntu.ac.uk to confirm your attendance to the Video Days Preview.
An exhibition of photography from local skate photographers: 4 pm onward
Curated by Tom Quigley, who self-publishes Varial Magazine, featuring East Midlands skateboard photography. Alongside Tom’s own work, the exhibition will include contributions from active local skate photographers such as Neil Turner, Vic Camilleri, Dave Bevan, and Andrew Horsley (one of the founders of Sidewalk magazine, the UK and Europe’s longest running skate magazine, and internationally respected skate photographer) and images from Nottingham between the 1970s and 1990s from photographers including Andrew McDermott and Steve Tristram. Tom was recently the subject of the second part of the film series ‘We Can Fly’, and had work featured in the Sneinton Pride of Place collection of photography and visual art published by the Caravan Gallery, 2018.
From transgression to progression: 5 pm – 5.30 pm
A talk on skateboarding and Nottingham’s social, cultural and economic development, Chris Lawton Skate Nottingham.
Chris is one of the co-founders of Skate Nottingham. He is a Senior Research Fellow in economics at Nottingham Business School, here at Nottingham Trent University. He is also a feature writer for Caught in the Crossfire magazine, a long-running web-magazine on skateboarding, punk and radical politics. In this short discussion, Chris will talk about examples of skateboarders proactively driving inclusive development in cities around the world, particularly Malmö, Copenhagen and Tampere, and how both the activity and its wider culture and community provide opportunities for Nottingham (like Malmö, a medium-sized post-industrial city with a young population but significant regeneration challenges).
War & Rees, 2017, (7:17 mins), Daniel O’Neill: 5.30 pm – 5.40 pm
Dan is a skateboarder and academic historian, and is one of the Nottingham skate scene’s most prolific filmers. This short film charts the final year of Nottingham’s large DIY skatepark project, which occupied waste ground next to the BBC Island – earmarked for development as part of Nottingham’s stalled ‘East Side City’ project; amid wider local political interest in the loss of genuine ‘common’ land in the city centre (and thus the radical potential of skateboarders repurposing blighted brownfield space land-banked by property developers and kept out of public use for more than two decades). The original DIY and a later, short-lived guerrilla skatepark in waste ground by BioCity were both demolished by the landowners towards the end of 2017, land which has, for the time being, been returned to its previously unused state.
A montage of Nottingham skateboarding past and present, (20 mins), Neil Turner: 5.40 pm – 6 pm
Neil has been filming skateboarding in Nottingham for almost 20 years, alongside documentary video work and photography, and is currently working on the first full-length video from Forty Two Shop, Nottingham’s only independent skate store. Neil has filmed edits for Sidewalk magazine and has amassed a huge archive of footage of Nottingham skateboarders from the late 90s days of Old Market Square and Broadmarsh Banks through to now, which he will draw from and re-edit specially for this event.
Pieces of Palestine, featuring Isle Skateboards and SkatePal, 2017, (20 mins), Jacob Harris: 6.10 pm – 6.30 pm
A short film featuring the Isle skateboard team’s 2016 visit to the West Bank with award-winning charity SkatePal, to be shown with the permission of Jacob Harris (winner of the Bright Trade Show European Skateboard Awards for both his 2013 independent film Eleventh Hour and Isle’s debut video in 2015, Vase). Pieces of Palestine will help raise awareness and support for two of Skate Nottingham’s young female coaches who will be volunteering with SkatePal in the West Bank this October.
Video Days, 1991, (24 mins), Spike Jonze and Blind Skateboards: 6.30 pm – 7 pm
Video Days is a skateboard video released in 1991 by Blind Skateboards, it was produced by American skateboarder and filmmaker, Spike Jonze. It is widely considered to be one of the most influential skate videos of all time, providing early platforms for now legendary skaters including Mark Gonzales, Jason Lee and Guy Mariano.
