Join us for the launch of three new exhibitions:
Osheen Siva: Karuppu
The first UK exhibition by multidisciplinary artist Osheen Siva is entitled ‘Karuppu’ (கருப்பு – meaning darkness/black in Tamil). Taking a cue from Afrofuturism, Siva’s work brings together science fiction, mythology, heritage, their love of comic books, and the vibrant, joyful colours of South India.
Bonington Vitrines #24: Shahnawaz Hussain: My Nottinghamshire Perspectives in Watercolour
An exhibition of paintings by self-taught Nottingham-based artist Shahnawaz Hussain, which capture key buildings and landmarks across Nottingham and the wider county.
Peepshow: An Illusion Cut to the Measure of Desire
As part of this year’s Light After Dark Film Festival, we are pleased to present Peep Show, an innovatively staged exhibition of archival film curated by feminist collective Invisible Women.
Enjoy music in our Atrium from electronic DJs MOAN and AJA.
MOAN explores self-liberation, sexual pleasures and unique narratives from all over the world through a variety of creative outputs.
An erotic platform that acts as a diary for as many people as possible – with a primary focus on women and non-binary. A safe space and a judgement free zone for experiences, fantasies, fetishes and issues to be discussed through a women and non-binary perspective openly. A narrative not often explored in mainstream media.
Using the power of electronic music & events to connect with the community on a deeper level, to rebel and to create multisensory narratives, which make our activism harder to silence. MOAN events bring people together and are a catalyst for liberation and exploration. If you are interested by this, online mixes are uploaded on SoundCloud for you to listen and all event details are updated through the Instagram.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/moan_zine/
Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/moan-zine
Aja Ireland is an award-winning sound and performance artist making deconstructed club and industrial techno whose live shows are described in The WIRE Magazine as “Shifting from ethereal diffusions to potent explosions.”
The album SLUG was released on Opal Tapes in October 2021. The video GRIME created by IMPATV and AJA, featured on Creative Review’s ‘Best Music Videos of 2021’ who described the track as: “brutal, visceral and unrelentingly noisy”.
Aja’s debut album released in 2018 on Opal Tapes was greeted with critical acclaim and
the artist was featured in VICE, The Quietus, Elephant Magazine, Red Bull Music and The Dazed Magazine. IN 2018, Aja won the PRS Oram Award for innovative music production.
Aja scored the spatial sound design for Joey Holder’s art installations Ophiux, Adcredo The Deep Belief Network (toured at Matt’s Gallery and 6th Athens Bienalle), Semelparous which was shown in The British Art Show and and Cryptic at Two Queens Gallery.
In AJA’s latest project, CRYPTID, an EP, music video, and full audio visual live set will be released later this year for the upcoming 2024 AV performance tour. The visuals project a realm where volcanic, ritualistic circles of standing stones merge seamlessly with projections of microscopic creatures. AJA takes on the persona of a cryptid hybrid, adorned in sculptural fashion nightmares, eating green lasers and morphing into underwater creatures.
Instagram: instagram.com/ajaireland
Facebook: www.facebook.com/musicwithaja
Website: www.ajaireland.co.uk
Join artist Rebecca Beinart for a free online talk where she will share stories and work-in-progress from her long term research into plant-human relationships, medicine and porous bodies.
During this talk she will share a short film made in collaboration with Usha Mahenthiralingam and Freddy Griffiths. The work explores the Island site in Nottingham – that once housed the Boots pharmaceutical factories and is currently under redevelopment – and spills out into histories of plant medicine, land, bioprospecting, pharmaceutical production, and thinking with plants and fungi.
Plants Beyond Empire is a new series of conversations starting in February 2024, as part of Bonington Gallery’s Formations programme, in partnership with NTU’s Postcolonial and Global Studies Research Group. The events will explore a range of creative and community interventions aimed at understanding complex human-plant entanglements within postcolonial Britain and beyond.
**No audio between 04:36 and 07:46, presenter repeats the start of her talk after the screening of the film later in the event. At 22:42 the speaker cut out, which has been cut from the video. This causes a small pause that lasts 6 seconds**
Rebecca Beinart is an artist, educator and curator, based in Nottingham. She develops research-based, collaborative and site-based projects that evolve through long-term engagement with places and people. She makes sculpture, installation and performance, and uses live engagement and public dialogue to reflect on collective histories and futures, social and environmental justice, knowledge-making, and the politics of public space.
Photo credit: Film Stills, Freddy Griffiths. Courtesy Rebecca Beinart.
Alongside our current exhibition, history is a living weapon in yr hand, join us for a free online In-conversation event between our current exhibitor Onyeka Igwe and Dr. Jenni Ramone, Associate Professor of Postcolonial and Global Literatures at NTU.
Together, they will explore topics related to Igwe’s wider practice and the ideas, research and development that informs both the exhibition and Igwe’s 2023 film, A Radical Duet, that is central to the installation.
On the evening there will be the opportunity to pose questions.
Jenni Ramone is Associate Professor of Postcolonial and Global Literatures at NTU, where she directs the Postcolonial and Global Studies Research Group. She is also managing editor of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing. Her forthcoming book is Global Literature and Gender: Twenty-First Century Perspectives, and recent books include Postcolonial Literatures in the Local Literary Marketplace: Located Reading, and The Bloomsbury Introduction to Postcolonial Writing. Her current project is on breastfeeding in literature and art.
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.
Join us for a free, accessible tour of history is a living weapon in yr hand led by Onyeka Igwe (artist) & Elaine Joseph (audio describer), and accompanied by a BSL interpreter.
General access information to the building can be found here
Accessibility information for the exhibition can be found here
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.
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.
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
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).
In acknowledgement of Nottingham School of Art and the wider city’s legacy of bringing pioneering experimental music to local audiences, we are delighted to welcome Nottingham’s Rammel Club to programme an evening of visionary music, sound and performance at Bonington Gallery.
Free tickets – click here to book
“The Rammel Club… is a deceptively vital outlet for underground music.”
– The Wire Magazine
Line up:
Design A Wave
Design A Wave is a long-standing electronic music act from London. At present, the sole member is Tom Hirst. Initiated in the late 1990s, the musical style of the project has varied radically in the subsequent years, taking in and responding to Hauntological pop music, computer and modular synth-based generative music and science fiction soundtrack along the way. This expansiveness in style is reflected in the variety of labels that have released recordings of Design A Wave, which includes Alien Jams, Alter, Bezirk and Rush Hour’s no label amongst many others. Tom Hirst also performs and records in a sibling project American Sound, plays keyboards in the pop/rap act Dean Rodney Jr and the Cowboys, and has collaborated on other projects with artists such as Alice Theobald, Lizzie Homersham and Ayesha Hameed.
Dawn Terry
Dawn plays slow, melancholic, optimistic music for sad people. Based in Newcastle, she is a veteran drone artist, producing work that is heavy, dreamlike, open and hypnotic; long-form minimalist landscapes characterised by an austere openness, barely punctured by hypnotic drumming or slowly intoned vocals.
Paul Paschal
Paul Paschal is an artist, writer and performer living in Nottingham, UK. Most of his work is undertaken in collaboration with Rohanne Udall, currently under the name CHA X5; they have been making performances, exhibitions and curatorial projects since 2013. Their solo exhibition at Gasleak Mountain in Nottingham – which opens on Friday 13th October and runs until the end of the month – presents some studies on managerial anxieties, demonic professions of perfect boundaries and meteoric burnout.
We are also really pleased to be presenting a one night only ‘retrospective’ of Rammel Club gig posters by Daniel Ward, going back 15+ years.
Join us for an insightful gallery tour of our current exhibition, The Art Schools of the East Midlands by John Beck and Matthew Cornford, and the accompanying exhibition, Art [School] Histories in the Vitrines and foyer.
Find out how the exhibitions emerged as part of the Art School Project and uncover stories behind the work and its connections to Nottingham.
Join Bonington Gallery’s Director Tom Godfrey for an insightful gallery tour of our current exhibition, The Art Schools of the East Midlands by John Beck and Matthew Cornford, and the accompanying exhibition, Art [School] Histories in the Vitrines and foyer.
Find out how the exhibitions emerged as part of the Art School Project and uncover stories behind the work and its connections to Nottingham.
Join us for a first look round a new photographic exhibition by John Beck and Matthew Cornford, focusing on the region’s art schools, and the vital role that they play in the cultural life of our cities.
Accompanying the exhibition, in our Vitrines you can discover archive materials and memories relating to the history of Nottingham School of Art & Design, established in 1843.