Following an online screening and Q&A with artist Subash Thebe Limbu in 2022, we are delighted to present an in-person screening of Ningwasum (2021) and Ladhamba Tayem; Future Continuous (2023), followed by a live Q&A.
The screening (55 mins) will be followed by a discussion and Q&A led by Nicole Thiara where Subash will discuss how his work draws on and develops Indigenous Futurism as well as Adivasi Futurism.
Ningwasum (2021) is a Yakthung science fiction documentary film/video-work narrated by Miksam, a time traveller from a future Indigenous Nation. The film follows two time travellers, Miksam and Mingsoma, played by Subin Limbu and Shanta Nepali respectively, in the Himalayas weaving indigenous folk stories, culture, climate change and science fiction. The film explores notions of time, space and memory, and how realities and the sense of now could be different for different communities. Drawing from Adivasi Futurism and inspired by Afrofuturism and Indigenous Futurism, Ningwasum imagines a future from an Indigenous perspective where they have agency, technology, sovereignty and also their indigenous knowledge, culture, ethics and storytelling still intact.
The plot of Ladhamba Tayem; Future Continuous (2023) depicts a conversation between two indigenous figures from different historical timelines, the first a real 18th century Yakthung warrior called Kangsore fighting the colonial army, and the other an astronaut and time traveler from the distant future. They discuss the space-time continuum from their perspectives, and in doing so, ask the viewers — who exist between the past and future — to investigate their own relationship to the passage of time. The time traveller indicates what the future might look like for us or possibilities we want to strive for, while the warrior reminds us of the fight against colonialism and struggles we shall overcome.
In the future, the Indigenous nationalities will have created a technique called thakthakma – which literally means to ‘weave handloom’, a term inspired by our ancestors’ weaving practice – a technique of entering different timelines or in other words weaving time. So, Subash thinks of his works as weaving stories that are not linear but intricately interwoven. And along the same vein, this work plays with the idea of time as not something rigid but ductile or weavable, which in turn paves the way for questions like how we might want to weave the future.
This event is part of the third series of CADALFEST and organised in collaboration with Formations and the Bonington Gallery. CADALFEST (Celebrating Adivasi and Dalit Arts and Literature Festival) is an international festival series dedicated to the writing and performance arts by writers whose work creatively resists caste discrimination and social exclusion in India: Dalit Adivasi Text.
Happening in Nottingham during the time of this event, we recommend visiting the exhibition Kolam (கோலம்) that has been curated by Raghavi Chinnadurai at Primary, Nottingham. This exhibition explores themes connected to our event, and also features Osheen Siva who exhibited at Bonington Gallery in Spring 2024.
Image: Subash Thebe Limbu, NINGWASUM 2021, video still. Courtesy of the artist.
Subash Thebe Limbu (he/him) is a Yakthung (Limbu) artist from Yakthung Nation (Limbuwan) from what we currently know as Eastern Nepal. He works with sound, film, music, performance, painting and podcast. His Yakthung name is ᤋᤠᤱᤛᤠᤱ Tangsang (Sky).
Subash has MA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins (2016), BA in Fine Art from Middlesex University (2011), and Intermediate in Fine Art from Lalit Kala Campus, Kathmandu. His works are inspired by socio-political issues, resistance and science/speculative fiction. Notion of time, climate change, and indigeneity or Adivasi Futurism as he calls it, are recurring themes in his works.
Subash is the co-founding member of Yakthung Cho Sangjumbho (Yakthung Art Society) and Haatemalo Collective. Based in Newa Nation (Kathmandu) and London. Follow Subash on Instagram.
Manish Harijan is a Nepal born artist who lives in Sheffield, UK. He was the recipient of the NAE Open Future Exhibition Prize in 2023, and the resulting exhibition, Untouchable Utopia, is currently showing at New Art Exchange until 11 January 2025.
The son of a shoemaker from the so-called lower caste or Dalit in Nepal, Manish questions the injustices inflicted upon minorities and the lived experiences of vulnerable populations in all societies around the world. His work traverses East and West, casting iconic images from religion to pop culture, smoothly embedding them in one canvas to create bold, beautiful and thought-provoking paintings. Inspired by Nepali art traditions of Thangka and Paubha, Manish also borrows styles from graphic novels, especially manga and popular superhero comics.
Manish’s compositions reference a variety of subjects from social issues of caste discrimination to art history, merging local stories with the global, fairy tales with current news pieces, mythology with facts — questioning both the portrayal and the portrayed. In 2012, for his first solo exhibition at Siddhartha Art Gallery in Kathmandu, Manish brought together these themes challenging the status quo of tradition, hierarchy, religion and beliefs in Nepal. Unfortunately, the gallery was vandalised and Manish was sent death threats and accused of being anti-Hindu for portraying Hindu gods in superhero costumes. The exhibition was shut down and a court cases were filed; UNESCO issued a press release to support the artist’s freedom of expression.
Deeply affected and saddened by the state of affairs, Manish moved to the UK, where he enrolled in a Master of Fine Arts programme at Sheffield Hallam University. While at University, he redoubled his commitment to explore the rights of marginalised people through art, participating in art projects that gave voice to the rights of populations that are vulnerable, stateless and at high-risk. He graduated in 2019 and was awarded the Dianne Willcocks Lifelong Learning award.
Manish is one of the artists whose paintings has been shortlisted and acquisitions for the UK’s Government Art Collection 2020/21. His works have also been exhibited at Welt Museum in Vienna, Museum of Communication in The Hague, Nepal Art Council in Kathmandu, Yorkshire Art Space in Sheffield, India Art Fair in New Delhi, CKU Copenhagen in Denmark, October Gallery in London, ROSL Gallery in London, Bloc Project Sheffield, Artist’s Journey #3 in the UK and Solo show at Yorkshire art space gallery 2022 at Sheffield UK. Besides paintings, Manish also experiments with installations, sculptures and multimedia. He works at his studio in Yorkshire Art Space
Neeraj Bunkar is a PhD Scholar at the Department of Humanities at Nottingham Trent University with a specific interest in Caste, Dalit, Rajasthani folklore, Oral History and Cinema. He is researching Rajasthan-based Hindi cinema from the Dalit standpoint. He published, ‘Spring Thunder: Adivasi Resistance for ‘Jal, Jangal, Jameen’’ (2022) and the book review, ‘Subalternity at the Centre: A Young Diary Demands Radical Change’ (2024) the Economic and Political Weekly. He regularly contributes to platforms such as Forward Press and RoundTable India.
Nicole Thiara (she/her) is co-lead of Nottingham Trent University’s Postcolonial and Global Studies Research Group and Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded Research Network Series Writing, Analysing, Translating Dalit Literature and its Follow-on Grant On Page and on Stage: Celebrating Dalit and Adivasi Literatures and Performing Arts.
She teaches postcolonial and contemporary literature at Nottingham Trent University. Her area of research is Dalit and diasporic South Asian literature and her current research project is the representation of modernity in Dalit literature.
Mrigakshi Das, from Odisha, India, is a PhD candidate at the School of Arts and Humanities at Nottingham Trent University in the UK. Her research interests include Adivasi and Dalit literature, as well as decolonial and postcolonial studies. Her current research explores Adivasi literature and cinema, focusing on expressions of Adivasi identity and otherness through these mediums.
The CADALFEST series [Celebrating Adivasi and Dalit Arts and Literature Festival] has taken place in various locations in the UK and in India between October 2022 and February 2023, with the opening and final events taking place in Nottingham. These events included poetry, music, drama performances and films, along with Workshops, Masterclasses and public discussions with practitioners of both folk and contemporary performative art forms with the contribution of academic researchers who introduced performances, conducted interviews, contributed to the discussions, and more.
The aim, in the CADALFEST series, is to bring people from different walks of life together, sharing perspectives, enjoying themselves and learning from each other. Creativity and empowering energy channelled through the folk and performing arts productions takes centre stage— the horrors of casteism should not be ignored but the joy of togetherness, limitless creativity and social empowerment strategies should come to the forefront in a much more visible way.
Established in 2020, Formations is an event programme led by NTU’s Postcolonial and Global Studies Research Group in collaboration with Bonington Gallery. The series foregrounds the work of underrepresented writers, academics, artists, intellectuals and activists worldwide who address inequalities of all kinds, often bringing people from different places and working practices together for important conversations.
The Blue Description Project (2023) is a new experimental version of Derek Jarman’s seminal film, Blue (1993). It features expanded accessibility measures including audio description, creative captions and in-person British Sign Language interpretation.
“Moving beyond words.” – Time Out “Extraordinary“ ★★★★★ – The Times
In 1993, Derek Jarman released Blue, an epoch-defining account of AIDS, illness, and the experience of disability in a culture of repressive heteronormativity and compulsory able-bodiedness. Though often referred to as a feature film, Blue never existed exclusively in one medium. It was screened in theatres, simulcast on television and radio, released as a CD, and published as a book, creating opportunities for many different kinds of sensory abilities—visual, aural, and textual—to experience the work.
Conceived by artists and writers Christopher Robert Jones, Liza Sylvestre, and Sarah Hayden, The Blue Description Project creates a new, experimental iteration of Blue on the 30th anniversary of its release and Jarman’s death. Reflecting Blue’s standing as a foundational work of Crip* art, the project challenges ableist hierarchies in art while focusing on the generative possibilities of difference and interdependence.
In 1994, Jarman wrote in Chroma: “If I have overlooked something you hold precious — write it in the margin.” Taking up this invitation to write in the margin, The Blue Description Project builds on the multifaceted nature of Jarman’s work through newly commissioned and expansive accessibility.
*Crip—Cripistemology and the Arts.
The event is open to everyone and is intended as an immersive and collective experience for those who may benefit from accessibility provision or not.
The film screening will have creative captions and audio description that is edited into the main soundtrack of the film. It will also be British Sign Language (BSL) interpreted. The discussion afterwards will be live-captioned and BSL-interpreted.
During the screening, the space will be dim, with only the BSL interpreters illuminated via spotlights. The film soundtrack will play into the space at ‘cinema level’ volume.
The gallery is wheelchair accessible via a lift. Visit our website for general access information for our building.
Visit our YouTube channel to watch a video tour of the journey into our gallery from the street.
Invigilators and staff will be on hand throughout the evening to offer any assistance needed.
Accessible toilets are very close by to the gallery.
If you would like to discuss any further access requirements, or identify a way that we can make your attendance easier then please email us.
The Blue Description Project (BDP) is produced by Liza Sylvestre and Christopher Robert Jones (Crip*—Cripistemology and the Arts) in partnership with Sarah Hayden (Voices in the Gallery). BDP is made possible by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, with support from the College of Fine and Applied Arts at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and additional support from the Southampton Institute for Arts and Humanities HEIF Research Stimulus Fund.
Liza Sylvestre is a transdisciplinary artist and research assistant professor within the College of Fine and Applied Arts at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign where she has co-founded the initiative Crip*—Cripistemology and the Arts. Her work has been shown internationally at venues such as the Weisman Art Museum (Minneapolis), John Hansard Gallery (Southampton), ARGOS (Brussels), and Museum für Moderne Kunst (Frankfurt). Sylvestre has been the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, most recently a Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Fellowship. She has been artist-in-residence at the Weisman Art Museum and the Center for Applied and Translational Sensory Science and in 2019, she received a Citizens Advocate Award from the Minnesota Commission of the Deaf, DeafBlind, and Hard of Hearing. Sylvestre’s work has been written about in numerous publications and books including Art in America, Mousse Magazine, Ocula Magazine, Art Monthly, and SciArt Magazine.
Christopher Robert Jones is an artist and writer based in Illinois. Their research revolves around the “failure” or “malfunctioning” of the body and how those experiences are situated at points of intersection between Queer and Crip discourses. They are a regular contributor to Art Papers magazine and their work has recently been exhibited at the Krannert Art Museum, Gallery 400, and the Weisman Art Museum. Jones is the co-founder of Crip*—Cripistemology and the Arts, a transdisciplinary initiative that is housed within the College of Fine and Applied Arts at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where they are also a research assistant professor.
Sarah Hayden is a writer and Associate Professor in Literature and Visual Culture at the University of Southampton. From 2019–2023, she led “Voices in the Gallery,” a research, writing and curatorial project on intersections of voice, text and access in contemporary art, funded by the AHRC. In 2022, she developed slow emergency siren, ongoing: Accessing Handsworth Songs in partnership with LUX. Recent writings include as if […] wearing anklesocks (for Sarah Browne’s Buttercup) and essays on Charlie Prodger for Secession Vienna and captioning as “unvoiceover” for Angelaki.
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.
The producers of the project wish to thanks everyone who so generously contributed their descriptions to the Blue Description Project. Warm thanks to Elaine Lillian Joseph and Corvyn Dostie. Special thanks to James MacKay, Basilisk Communications, and Zeitgeist Films.
Image credit: Christopher Robert Jones, Liza Sylvestre, Sarah Hayden, Blue Description Project, film still, 2024. Digital movie, captions. 1:20:55. Courtesy of the artists.
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 free, online talk between Irene Lusztig and Patricia Francis – part of the When I Dare to be Powerful conference.
Free and online via YouTube.
Patricia Francis and filmmaker Irene Lusztig will explore and discuss the value of archive in bringing voices and their subjective truths from the past into the present. Irene will also show extracts from a couple of her films including her latest release, Richland.
This is the final in the series of online talks and podcast conversations we have been having as part of the When I Dare To Be Powerful in-person international conference.
Bio:
Irene Lusztig is a filmmaker, visual artist, archival researcher, and amateur seamstress. Her film and video work mines old images and technologies for new meanings in order to reframe, recuperate, and reanimate forgotten and neglected histories. Often beginning with rigorous research in archives, her work brings historical materials into conversation with the present day, inviting viewers to explore historical spaces as a way to contemplate larger questions of politics, ideology, and the production of personal, collective, and national memories. Much of Irene’s current work is centred on public feminism, language, and histories of women and women’s bodies, including her debut feature Reconstruction (2001) the feature length archival film essay The Motherhood Archives (2013) and the ongoing web-based Worry Box Project (2011).
Born in England to Romanian parents, Irene grew up in Boston and has lived in France, Italy, Romania, China, and Russia. Her work has been screened around the world, including at the Berlinale, MoMA, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Anthology Film Archives, Pacific Film Archive, Flaherty NYC, IDFA Amsterdam, RIDM Montréal, Hot Docs, AFI Docs, and BFI London Film Festival and on television in the US, Europe, and Taiwan. She has received grants from the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, Massachusetts Cultural Council, LEF Foundation, New York State Council for the Arts, and Sustainable Arts Foundation and has been awarded fellowships at the MacDowell Colony, the Flaherty Film Seminar, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and Harvard’s Film Study Center. She is the 2016-17 recipient of a Rydell Visual Arts Fellowship and a Fulbright Fellowship in Portugal. She teaches filmmaking at UC Santa Cruz where she is Associate Professor of Film and Digital Media; she lives in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
Join us for a free screening of a newly-translated documentary that explores the emergence of performance art in Cuba in the 1980s. The screening will be followed by a conversation with film director and artist Glexis Novoa.
The 1980s was a decade where a new generation of young artists were introducing a radical new artistic language and testing the bounds of the possible and the permissible in the process.
In the late 1970s and the 1980s multiple approaches towards the role and aesthetics of art in a socialist Cuba abounded. One particular strand saw an emerging generation of artists seeking to break free from what they saw as the bureaucratic and ideologically-orientated institutional systems and their ideas about culture. This change in attitude gave rise to a new visual language that prized interdisciplinary practices, multimedia, appropriated and referenced popular culture, religions, regional history and embraced parody and satire.
By the second half of the 1980s the arts were a site of intense discussion about artistic freedom and the nature of genuinely revolutionary art. Performance art played a key role in the articulation of the ideas and concerns of a budding generation.
Please note, this film contains some discussion of sex and nudity.
The film was initially made for the exhibition Losing the Human Form at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, which looked at art in the 1980s in Latin America.
Taking part as part of Bonington Gallery’s Formations programme in partnership with NTU’s Postcolonial Studies Centre.
Glexis Novoa was born in Holguín, Cuba in 1964. Novoa was one of the most radical influences in the vibrant art scene known as, “The Renaissance of Cuban Art of the 80s”, and was the founder of the Provisional group, pioneers of performance, political activism and collectivist practices.
Novoa established himself in Miami in 1995 and has been sharing his time working in Havana and Miami since 2013. He is recognized for his site-specific wall drawings and ephemeral projects around the world, which exist on the border between ephemeral art and architecture. He frequently focuses on the architecture of power and community as the main subject.
Novoa’s work has been exhibited extensively around the world and is part of numerous museum collections.
This multi-channel video installation from internationally-acclaimed photographer Emily Andersen, explores the work and life of Ruth Fainlight (b.1931) – an American-born poet and writer.
Ruth’s intensely visual poetry and fiction touch on themes of psychological and domestic situations, time, memory and loss. Born in New York City in 1931, she moved to England when she was 15. In 1959 she married the writer, Alan Sillitoe, and her many literary friendships included Sylvia Plath, Jane and Paul Bowles, and Robert Graves.
Andersen’s work is an intimate portrait of Fainlight, now aged 91, presenting fragments of the poet’s life. Taking inspiration from Renaissance triptychs and their depiction of different elements of the same subject across three panels, Somewhere Else Entirely captures the poet and writer at her home in London, making notes, on her walks, and in the seaside town of Brighton where she spent her teenage years.
In Somewhere Else Entirely Fainlight talks off-screen, revealing fascinating insights into her life, her creative process, and how she is ‘in the hands of the poem’. In her voiceover, she movingly recites her poem ‘Somewhere Else Entirely’ composed after the death of her husband.
Alongside the exhibition commissioned an essay by Daniella Schreir, editor of the Feminist Film Journal Another Gaze, which can be read here.
Come along to our launch night on Friday 24 March, 6 pm – 8 pm for a first look round the exhibition, alongside Nottingham Women’s Centre in our Vitrines. There will also be free food from 6 pm. Book your free tickets
Emily Andersen is a London-based artist and graduate of the Royal College of Art. Her work has been exhibited in galleries including:
A number of her portraits are in the permanent collection of The National Portrait Gallery, London. She has won awards including the John Kobal prize for portraiture. Her third book Another Place was published in 2023. She is a Senior Lecturer in theory and practice of photography at the Nottingham School of Art & Design at Nottingham Trent University.
Director, Producer, Cinematographer – Emily Andersen
Additional Cinematographer- Bella Riza
Interviews – Kiki Martins and Emily Andersen
Editor – Jonathan Schmidt-Ott
Sound editor – Liam Larkin
Re-recording mixer- Rainer Heesch
Colourist – Jason R. Moffat
Production Assistant – Kyra Paloma
Image: Ruth Fainlight by Emily Andersen
Katja Hock is a practising artist and a senior lecturer in Photography in the School of Art and Design at Nottingham Trent University. Her latest exhibition will present a slide installation, Stillness and Silence that has been developed over the last three years. The work addresses the importance of historical memory to our present perception of our cultural and social context.
As part of this exhibition Katja Hock will be in conversation with Susan Trangmar, Reader in Fine Art, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. Located in the Bonington Gallery, this event is open the general public and admission is free.
Wanderlust speaks of the places, real, imagined and metaphorical, that we travel to through our practice as artists, designers, thinkers and educators. It invokes the desire to wander exploring the world as we find it, often straying from the path and discovering a new route.
This exhibition is a snapshot survey of experimental practice across the range of disciplines in the School of Art & Design. The works featured demonstrate the complex process of creation undertaken by practitioner / researchers within the School community including academic, technical and support staff. Wanderlust is curated as a dialogic space, where varied and diverse practices are placed in proximity to each other, opening up possibilities of new discourses, collaborations and projects. A series of events will tease and test out these possibilities starting with the private view on Wednesday 12 January 2011.
Twenty Six Years Later from Professor Lei Cox consists of a multiple of new photographs, new video installations and some retrospective video and photography pieces dating from 1985.
Lei’s early work strived to find surreal and unusual in a pre-digital world, starting with raw and untreated shots. Sometimes these were carefully staged, as he cheated with light and shadow. The vast possibilities of blue-screen super impositions, digital effects snd digital sound processing later influenced his work, allowing him to create complete surrealism with Hollywood-like special effects.
His ;later work moved away from this notion, questioning reality against the synthetic. New ideas were contemplated and realised: videos were shot on location in the real world; all single takes, no special effects, and “pure”.
Audio/visual invites conversations about the significance and impact of visual communication (art, design, imagery, media, advertising, maps) and audio communication through music, but also the impact of language choice, and conversation. Events in this segment foreground meaning conveyed by music and art, and invite attention to global artists working in experimental ways with sound and the visual arts.
The Formations programme is an online series of free, public events led by the Postcolonial Studies Centre at Nottingham Trent University in collaboration with Bonington Gallery. The series foregrounds the work of underrepresented writers, academics, artists, intellectuals and activists worldwide who address inequalities of all kinds, often bringing people from different places and working practices together for important conversations.
Friday 6 May 2022, 7 – 8 pm
Ever wondered how you might increase your understanding of cinema? This one-off workshop will offer you the chance to examine films and their content more clearly, giving you the tools to analyse movies and their messages. Including plenty of clips, case studies, and discussion, we will deconstruct imagery, character and visual metaphor affording you the opportunity to appreciate Hollywood and beyond with a deeper understanding of the film making craft.
This workshop is online via Microsoft Teams, spaces are limited.
Wednesday 11 May 2022, 7 – 8 pm
In this online event, artist Kate McMillan will be talking about various projects exploring the postcolonial legacies of former penal colonies, prison islands alongside the ongoing use of extraterritorial detention by countries such as Australia and the United States. We will be talking about of the notion of ‘listening with my feet’ – listening as a decolonial tool on contested ground, and the influence of indigenous thinking on McMillan growing up in Australia. We will also explore McMillan’s collaborative work with Cat Hope considering ways in which systemic silencing of those both displaced and detained as part of colonial and neocolonial modes of government might be listened to differently.
Watch this event on the Bonington Gallery YouTube channel.
Wednesday 15 June 2022, 7 – 8.30 pm
Join us for an evening of music with The Venus Bushfires, interluded with a conversation with Bethan Evans.
The Venus Bushfires is a creative collective of one and many, of which Helen Epega is the only constant member. The Nigerian-British singer-songwriter, composer and performance artist explores the ethereal sounds of the ‘hang’, the power of the talking drum and the quirks of children’s toys cross-fertilising multiple visual and musical styles.
This event will take place at Bonington Gallery.
Watch this event on the Bonington Gallery YouTube channel.
Friday 24 June 2022, 7 – 8 pm
Join us to hear Leone Ross read from her latest novel, This One Sky Day, in discussion with Bethan Evans.
Leone Ross is a novelist, short story writer, editor/copy-editor, and reviewer of fiction. She was born in Coventry England, and when she was six years old migrated with her mother to Jamaica, where she was raised and educated. After graduating from the University of the West Indies in 1990, Ross returned to England to complete a Master’s degree in International Journalism at City University, in London, where she now lives. Ross’s writing is genre-bending and world-tilting, revelling in the magical realist and surrealist.
10 randomly selected people signed up to the event will receive a free copy of This One Sky Day. This event will be online via YouTube Live.