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
Onyeka Igwe
history is a living weapon in yr hand
13 January – 2 March 2024
Exhibition preview: Friday 12 January 6-8pm
Bonington Gallery presents history is a living weapon in yr hand, a solo exhibition of new and reconfigured work by London based artist Onyeka Igwe. The exhibition follows Igwe’s acclaimed solo exhibition A Repertoire of Protest (No Dance, No Palaver) at MoMA PS1 in New York, earlier this year, and ahead of her inclusion in the exhibition Nigeria Imaginary at the national pavilion of Nigeria at the Venice Biennale 2024.
The exhibition will be centred around a new two-screen adaptation of Igwe’s dual timeline experimental film A Radical Duet (2023). In 1947 London was a hub of radical anti-colonial activity, with international intellectuals, artists, and activists such as Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti and Sylvia Wynter, C L R James, Kwame Nkrumah and George Padmore all in London at this time. Each of them was individually agitating for their respective countries’ national independence, but did they meet, and if so, what did they discuss?
The film features fictional characters inspired by these radical figures. It imagines what happens when two women of different generations, but both part of the post-war independence movement, come together in London to put their fervour and imagination into writing a revolutionary play. The film depicts this process and envisages what that play would look like if staged today.
The film will be accompanied by elements of the set design and props from the making of A Radical Duet, taking inspiration from the Jamaican writer and cultural theorist, Sylvia Wynter’s ideas on theatrical adaptation. Wynter builds on Brechtian principles of modern epic theatre and advises on how set design can support a theatre to ‘explode [social] fears by bringing them out into the light of day’.
For this exhibition, Igwe will be working with Collective Text, an organisation supporting accessibility in art and film through creative captioning, audio description and interpretation.
history is a living weapon in yr hand is produced in collaboration with Peer Gallery, London, where it will be presented in autumn 2024.
Onyeka Igwe is a moving image artist and researcher, born and based in London. 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.
Please contact Sarah Ragsdale sarah@sarahragsdalepr.co.uk
Join us for a first look around history is a living weapon in yr hand, a new exhibition by Onyeka Igwe, a London-born and based moving image artist and researcher. Her work is aimed at the question: how do we live together? She is interested in the prosaic and everyday aspects of black livingness and exploring overlooked histories.
Accompanying the exhibition, An Elegant Marker of Endless Invention in our vitrines highlights key women who embraced creative activities to challenge imperialism.
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.
Ain Bailey is a composer, artist and DJ. She facilitates workshops considering the role of sound in the formation of identity, and the exploration of memory and sound. Past exhibitions include ‘The Range’ at Eastside Projects, Birmingham; ‘RE:Respite’ at Transmission Gallery, Glasgow, Scotland, and a solo show at Cubitt Gallery, London: ‘And We’ll Always Be A Disco In The Glow Of Love’ (2019). In 2020 Bailey and Ego Ahaiwe Sowinski created a composition and print entitled ‘Remember To Exhale’ for Studio Voltaire, London.
Bailey was commissioned by Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge, to create the exhibition ‘Version’, and composed ‘Atlantic Railton’ for the ‘Listening To The City’ sound installation programme in the 2021 Serpentine Pavilion. For 2022, Bailey created the moving image/sound work ‘Untitled: Our Wedding) for the ‘Black Melancholia’ exhibition at CCS Bard, New York, USA and ‘Trioesque’ for Bruckenmusik 27 in Cologne, Germany. She was the 2022-23 Cavendish Arts Science Fellow at Girton College, University of Cambridge.
Forthcoming are solo exhibitions with FACT Liverpool (2024) and Camden Arts Centre (2026).
As part of our current Vitrines exhibition, Art [School] Histories, we have been collecting materials from former Nottingham School of Art and Design students and staff that reflect the more candid and informal moments during their time here. Below are a selection of these submissions – see the full set on the specially constructed noticeboard next to the Vitrines, just outside the gallery entrance.
With thanks to Claire Simpson, Daisy Hayward, Diana Pasek-Atkinson, Lis Evans, Rebecca Efstatiou, Alex Jovcic-Sas, and Giorgio Sadotti. If you have any images or memories you’d like to submit, please email boningtongallery@ntu.ac.uk
We were really pleased to be featured in the Observer Sunday 17th September, as part of an article looking at John Beck and Matthew Cornford’s art school project. You can read the full article here.
The School For Lovers was an exhibition by Sharon Kivland, which took place in November 1998.
The title of the new photographic installations by Sharon Kivland is taken from Mozart’s opera, Cosi fan Tutte. The work is based around the structure of the opera; its arrangement echoes its staging and characterisation. The opera is a work of masquerades and doublings, of couplings which are uncoupled under direction of a libertine, Don Alfonso, sets out to prove to his young friends, Gugliemo and Ferando, that all women are unfaithful and, more than that, anyone can come to fill the place of the Other if the conditions are right; in effect, that desire is essentially the desire of the Other’s desire. Through her work she creates a space of highly formulised attention, an event within which the viewer is drawn like a detective, both intellectually and through desire into pleasure of the gaze.
The archive cabinet contains a recreation of the exhibition plan, images of Kivland’s previous shows, images used in the show, and some of Kivland’s publications. There are also postcards from the artist, to the then Gallery Manager, Stella Cauloutbanis.
Curated by Alex Jovčić-Sas
An exhibiton of women’s artwork being produced now, and influenced by Feminism in the 1980’s. Exhibiton selected by Sutapa Biswas, Sarah Edge and Claire Slattery. This show toured from Cooper Gallery, Barnsley. Part of Anne Frank in the World Programme.
Curated by Joshua Lockwood-Moran
Coinciding with The Art Schools of the East Midlands exhibition, join us for a free event that explores the role of British art schools in shaping fashion, music and club culture over the last 40-50 years.
We will be joined by esteemed writer and curator Paul Gorman, who will discuss his work’s engagement with the significant role played by art schools, their educators and attendees in the broader culture.
Join us as we explore this past and consider it against the wider influence of the notion of the ‘art school’ on other forms of cultural and creative production.
Paul Gorman is a writer, curator and commentator on visual culture. His Books include The Look: Adventures in Rock & Pop Fashion, Mr Freedom – Tommy Roberts: British Design Hero, The Life & Times of Malcolm McLaren and The Wild World of Barney Bubbles. The paperback of his latest book, Totally Wired: The Rise & Fall of the Music Press was published in summer 2023.
Gorman has written for many of the world’s leading publications and curated exhibitions in the UK, continental Europe and the US.
Photo of Paul Gorman by Toby Amies.
HINTERLAND: i) Often uncharted district behind coast or river banks.
Land adjacent to water. ii) Area surrounding city a region, including communities and rural areas, that surrounds a city and depends on it.
Hinterland is a project curated by Jennie Syson comprising a series of offsite works situated along the banks of the River Trent in Nottingham. Different work will manifest alongside water throughout one year, with the first sightings being visible in time for Autumn 2006.
A ‘Hinterland’ evokes thoughts of boundaries or edges. The project is set to develop and grow in stages, happening just on the periphery of the city. By taking the theme of a hinterland as a motif, the identified site presents a viewpoint for revelation or concealment across the panorama of the whole of Nottingham.
The River Trent has 30 tributaries. 30 separate elements in the project will represent the different streams feeding into a larger body of water. As well as being a metaphor for naturally occurring streams, each artist’s individual project will ‘pay tribute’ to the geographical location. Hinterland will draw a contour around the southern edge of the city by following a section of the river, a channel about ½ a mile either side of Trent Bridge.
Bristol-based artist Mariele Neudecker tackles the highly emotive and challenging theme of grief for children in an evocative film installation created in response to Gustav Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children). The commission is the latest in a series of innovative works by Neudecker in which she explores classical music and poetry through film and sculpture.
Bristol-based artist Mariele Neudecker tackles the highly emotive and challenging theme of grief for children in an evocative film installation created in response to Gustav Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children). The commission is the latest in a series of innovative works by Neudecker in which she explores classical music and poetry through film and sculpture.
Bristol-based artist Mariele Neudecker tackles the highly emotive and challenging theme of grief for children in an evocative film installation created in response to Gustav Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children). The commission is the latest in a series of innovative works by Neudecker in which she explores classical music and poetry through film and sculpture.
Bristol-based artist Mariele Neudecker tackles the highly emotive and challenging theme of grief for children in an evocative film installation created in response to Gustav Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children). The commission is the latest in a series of innovative works by Neudecker in which she explores classical music and poetry through film and sculpture.
“Neudecker’s work sensitively explores a highly emotive subject matter. We are delighted that through this commission, she has taken her work in a new direction, combining sculptural form with film and classical music.”
Josephine Lanyon, Director, Picture This
“This installation continues some of our previous explorations of film and music at the venue. Colston Hall provides an unusual but highly appropriate setting for this work, and brings new audiences to both the visual arts and classical music.”
Graeme Howell, Director, Colston Hall
Commissioned by Opera North Projects and Picture This in partnership with Impressions Gallery, Bradford and Colston Hall (now Bristol Beacon), Bristol.
