The Other Film Club presents Penny Slinger: Out of The Shadows (2019), a newly released documentary produced and directed by Richard Kovitch, that focusses on the practice and life of the radical artist, filmmaker and performer Penny Slinger. Out of The Shadows explores overlapping concerns in experimental narratives, female sexuality, the occult, and social taboos, as well as how the personal histories of artists can intertwine through radical alliance.
This event is the first in a series of screenings and discussions organised by The Other Film Club that forms research into the radical feminist and experimental filmmaker Jane Arden (1927-1982). Arden was a close collaborator of Penny Slinger where they co-artistic directed and were members of the feminist theatre group Holocaust. The series is hosted by Paul Bryan (MFA Fine Art student, Nottingham Trent University), with the support of Nottingham Contemporary and in collaboration with Bonington Gallery.
Following the screening, join Penny Slinger and Paul Bryan for an in-conversation exploring Slinger’s artistic practice and feminist surrealism.
Please be aware this film has an 18 certificate and contains explicit sexual images and nudity.
Penny Slinger (b. 1947) is a British-American artist living and working in Los Angeles, California. Slinger created her first book 50% The Visible Woman while at college and exhibited her pioneering Feminist Surrealist collage work in Young and Fantastic at the Institute of Contemporary Art in 1969, followed by two solo exhibitions at the Angela Flowers Gallery, London, in 1971 and 1973. In 1971, Slinger joined Jane Arden’s first all-woman theatre troupe in England called Holocaust and performed in the feature film The Other Side of the Underneath (1972). Her work has been featured in major exhibitions internationally. Slinger’s upcoming solo exhibition Tantric Transformations will be on view from 28 June – 24 August 2019 at Richard Saltoun Gallery, London.
The Other Film Club is a screening programme organised by Paul Bryan that has previously screened films regarding the practices of Sarah Lucas, About Sarah (2014) directed by Elisa Miller, and I Don’t Belong Anywhere: The Cinema of Chantal Akerman (2015), directed by Marianne Lambert. Look out for a forthcoming screening of Jane Arden’s The Other Side of the Underneath (1972), the first feature film directed by a woman in the UK.
Coinciding with his current solo exhibition Now & Then, we’re delighted to screen Dick Jewell’s seminal 2002 documentary Kinky Gerlinky, bringing together footage shot at the legendary club night between 1990 and 1993.
Kinky Gerlinky was the biggest, most fabulous, most stylish nightclub London had ever seen. This documentary, edited from over 200 hours shot on 21 nights in the early nineties, conveys the experience of one full night out at the club. Flamboyant poses on the red carpet, debauchery on the dance floor, glamorous catwalk competitions and extravagant backstage action – this film captures it all.
By nature a fleeting phenomenon, club culture is rarely recorded on film in any depth. Kinky Gerlinky goes the distance, offering unique intimacy with its subject – with most of the action performed directly for the camera; the costumes are out-of-this-world, as are the attitudes. A welcome flashback to wilder clubbing days, it’s also a hilarious in-your-face examination of the cultural and sexual politics of celebrity and glamour.
Now & Then will be Dick Jewell’s most significant solo exhibition in recent years, bringing together a wide range of works produced over a 30-year period. Working across film, photography and photo-collage, Jewell has inhabited both gallery and commercial contexts, exhibiting his work internationally at institutions including the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam) and Serpentine Gallery (London). He has also produced music videos and promos for musicians including Neneh Cherry and Massive Attack.
As the title suggests, Now & Then chronicles progression: both from a technological perspective through the shifting media across Jewell’s work, and also in regards to people, as demonstrated by Jewell re-visiting his seminal 1989 film Headcases (shot on Super 8) whereby he has repeated the same set of questions to the same subjects 30 years on.
Other key works that will be on display include The Box, a huge bank of 200 framed photographs that Jewell took from four TVs over seven days in 1980; Four Thousand Threads, which presents a ‘Chinese Whispers’ version of a Google image search; and an audience participatory work entitled War & Peace, in which visitors are encouraged to take selfies against a backdrop and disseminate them online.
In a world bombarding us with millions of images, Now & Then is just presenting a few thousand.
Fine Art Live Lecture Present: Dick Jewell
Thursday 31 January, 5.15 pm – 7.30 pm
Lecture Theatre 2, Newton building, NTU City Campus
Bonington Film Night #9: Dick Jewell Kinky Gerlinky
Thursday 20 February, 7 pm – 8.30 pm
Bonington Gallery, Bonington building, NTU City Campus
Bonington Vitrines #10: Jewell
Friday 18 January – Saturday 23 February
Bonington Foyer
We’re delighted to start 2019 with a solo exhibition by photographer and filmmaker Dick Jewell.
Now & Then will be Jewell’s most significant solo show in recent years, bringing together a wide range of works produced over a 30-year period – spanning film, photography and photo-collage. In the meantime, check out this documentary commissioned by Dazed & Confused (directed by Jamie Roberts), which explores Jewell’s incredible archive of dance footage, with a cast including Vivienne Westwood, Neneh Cherry, Grandmaster Flash, skinheads, B-boys, drag queens and rave dancers – to name just a few…
Dick Jewell: Now & Then opens Friday 18 January. RSVP to join us for the preview on Thursday 17 January, 5 pm – 7 pm.
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
For 25 days, our gallery space will be transformed into an open cinema. Video Days presents a different film or series of short films every day from different decades and genres. The films screened share several common themes; most prevalent is their relationship to the built environment.
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.
Participants who feature in this exhibition include independent research agency Forensic Architecture whose film 77sqm_9:26min documents their counter investigation into evidence relating to the murder of 21-year-old Halit Yozgat in Kassel, Germany. Halit was the ninth of ten racist murders performed by a neo-Nazi group known as the National Socialist Underground (NSU) across Germany between 2000 and 2007.
Video Days also features Paris-based filmmaker Eric Baudelaire, whose 2017 film Also Known As Jihadi traces a young man’s journey to radicalisation. Other films include contributions from photographer and filmmaker Dick Jewell and artists Karen Cunningham and Simon Martin.
Video Days Preview
Thursday 19 April, 4 pm – 7 pm
Skateboarding is an activity that reflects a consistent theme within the programme of human-kind’s disruptive and subjective relationship with the built environment.
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 will reflect 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, and the rich texture of disciplines and interests reflected across the entire Video Days programme.
We launch this exhibition with a programme of talks, screenings and photography dedicated to the local and international skateboarding community.
Read the full programme for the preview event and confirm your attendance.
In collaboration with the NTU Fine Art Live Lecture programme, Bonington Film Night #8 will take the form of a short introduction by writer and curator Amy Budd, followed by a curated selection of films that she has entitled Dirty Pictures.
Dirty Pictures comprises a selection of historic and contemporary diary films, together with examples of surveying films and videos that are explicitly diaristic. Also included are a selection of moving-image works that are more ambiguous. Both personal and expressive in their means of production, they display radical forms of new image-making through poetic renderings of individual observations, memories and reflections.
Amy Budd is a curator and writer based in London. Since 2014 she has been in the role of Exhibitions Organiser and Deputy Director at Raven Row, London. During this time she has curated exhibitions including: 56 Artillery Lane, 2017, co-curated with Naomi Pearce; Machine Vision: Steina and Woody Vasulka, 2016; and Speaking Parts, 2015. She has previously worked at Chisenhale Gallery and was steering committee chair of OUTPOST Gallery, Norwich from 2010-13.
Her writings have been published by Art Monthly, Afterall, This Is Tomorrow, and Kaleidoscope. She curated the screening programme I See It Feelingly for Parallel: ICO Art + Cinema Weekend at Arnolfini, Bristol in 2016, and was Writer-in-Residence for LUX Moving Image Biennial in 2012.
Here is a selection from MOULD MAP 6 — TERRAFORMERS showcasing parts of the screening programme and the #MounldMap6 competition.
13 September 2016
Mould Map and Landfill Editions invite NTU’s current students, staff, alumni and visitors to the exhibition, Mould Map 6 – Terraformers at Bonington Gallery, to design your very own Terraformers armour and enter into our online competition.
Background:
From Saturday 21 September – Friday 21 October, Bonington Gallery plays host to over 50 artists and designers whose work demonstrates a diverse array of comic and narrative art. Mould Map 6 takes the form of an exhibition / walk-through magazine and will include talks, film screenings, performances and open workshops.
Competition brief:
If you had your own armour, what would it be like?
What does it look like, what it is made from, what does it protect you from, and what world do you wear it for? Is it decorative? Is it utilitarian? Is it symbolic? What does it say about you and your world?
To create your armour you can use any materials of your choosing, it can be two or three dimensional, the choice is yours.
Everyone needs armour sometimes, and we want to give prizes for the most exciting, imaginative armour out there.
Prizes:
Judged by Hugh Frost and Leon Sadler, the winning entrant will take home the following prizes:
If the winner is 15 years and over:
A limited edition copy of Mould Map 5, Black Box; and either a copy of Mould Map 4 or Jaakko Pallasvuo’s Pure Shores.
If the winner is 14 years and under:
A copy of Will Sweeney’s Tales from the Greenfuzz 4
How to enter:
To enter, begin by following The School of Art & Design and Bonington Gallery on Twitter and/or Instagram (see below for details).
Use your wildest imagination, design your own armour and show us what it would look like by posting it on using Twitter and Instagram using the hashtag #MouldMap6. Entrants are welcome to include a short description about their design (no essays please!).
The competition is open to entries from 10 am on Saturday 17 September until 12am (midnight) on Wednesday 19 October 2016.The winner will be announced on Friday 21 October via Bonington Gallery and NTU School of Art & Design accounts on Twitter and Instagram. Good luck!
Bonington Gallery:
Twitter: @NTUBonGallery
Instagram: @boningtongallery
NTU School of Art & Design:
Twitter: @NTUArtandDesign
Instagram: @NTUart
See the competition’s terms and conditions (PDF)
03 October 2016
Feeling inspired by the Mould Map 6 — Terraformers exhibition? We’ve teamed up with Landfill Editions to offer you the chance of winning Mould Map goodies…
If you had your own armour, what would it be like? What does it look like, what it is made from, what does it protect you from, and what world do you wear it for? Is it decorative? Is it utilitarian? Is it symbolic? What does it say about you and your world? Everyone needs armour sometimes, and we want to give prizes for the most exciting, imaginative armour out there.
To be in with a chance of winning, design and share your own armour with #MouldMap6 on Twitter or Instagram. Read the full details on how to enter.
Check out this great entry from bethanyhkelly on Instagram. What does your Terraformers armour look like?
03 October 2016
Join us on Wednesday for the first Terraformers film screening event, featuring Ericka Beckman’s 1983 film, You the Better.
DATE: Wednesday 5 October
TIME: 1.15 pm – 2.45 pm
LOCATION: BON 002, Bonington building
Ericka Beckman (b1951) is an American filmmaker who began to make films in the 1970s as part of the Pictures generation. Her films are concerned with the relationship between people and images and how images structure people’s perception of themselves and of reality. Represented by Mary Boone Gallery.
11 October 2016
Join us on Wednesday for the next Terraformers film screening event!
DATE: Wednesday 12 October
TIME: 1.15 pm – 1.45 pm
LOCATION: BON 002, Bonington building
First shown as part of Williams’ debut exhibition at Limoncello, and taking the form of a series of animated monochrome ink drawings, the video weaves a morose fable of a 39 year old man, The Big Scholar, who backs up his secrets to a hard drive in a cave for no-one to find. Probably ever.
13 October 2016
This Friday / Saturday!!! Mould Map 6 — Terraformers Events Series
FRIDAY – TERRAFORMERS / Landing Strip Bar with L-v-L at Syson Gallery 8 pm – 1 am.
SATURDAY – Exhibition open 10 am – 8 pm – Table selling books from Landfill Editions / Mould Map / Famicon Express and others all day.
10 am – 4 pm: Mould Map Workshop 2 — World Making in Visual Story Telling with Jon Chandler and Joseph Kelly.
4.15 pm – 5 pm: Rhys Jones & Ben Price – Post-Capitalist Architecture. Room Bon 002. Discussing projects undertaken as part of their 3rd year studies at NTU, Rhys and Ben will present speculative proposals for post-capitalist built environments followed by a Q & A.
5 pm – 5.45 pm: Hui-Ying Kerr – Magazines of The Japanese Bubble Economy. Room Bon 002. Going into further depth on the issues of hyper-consumerism and representation touched upon in her article within the Mould Map exhibition itself, Hui-Ying will be drawing upon her PhD thesis undertaken at The Royal College of Art and in collaboration with the V&A.
6 pm – 6.45 pm: Dr David M. Bell and Dr Miranda Iossifidis – World-building and Utopianism. Room Bon 002. David M. Bell is interested in the possibilities of utopia(nism) as a form operating within, against and beyond this – and any – reality. He has explored such utopia(nism)s in and through art, fiction, music and education; and currently works on the ‘Imaginaries of the Future’ network at Newcastle University. His first book, Rethinking Utopia, will be published by Routledge in 2017. Miranda Iossifidis is a Lecturer in Contextual and Theoretical Studies at LCC. Her current research interests are at the intersection between urban studies, audiovisual culture and utopianism.
7 pm: Cocktails with Furgastro Bonington Gallery. Join celebrity chef and star of Stefan Sadler’s Dinnerplates, Furgastro for a refreshing drinks-based lucky-dip.
8 pm: Close & head somewhere in town for a drink.
We’re excited to announce the next in our series of Film Nights, featuring films by Jaakko Pallasvuo, Jon Rafman, and Peter Wächtler.
Taking place on Thursday 19 May, this screening will be held in the middle of the Publishing Rooms exhibition – which will also be open to view before the films begin.
Stay tuned for more info coming soon…
Also – don’t forget that our new series of talks, Bonington Lunchtimes, starts tomorrow with Printed Matter?. Join guest speakers Matt Gill, Alex Smith, Andrew & Iain Foxall for an informal discussion examining the importance and relevance of print, chaired by Tom Godfrey. From 1 pm – 2 pm.