Join us for a free tour of current exhibition, Karuppu by Osheen Siva, with BSL interpretation.
Alongside, discover more about Shahnawaz Hussain: My Nottinghamshire Perspectives in Watercolour and Peepshow: An Illusion Cut to the Measure of Desire in our extra gallery spaces.
Free, open to all
Join us for a free tour of current exhibition, Karuppu by Osheen Siva, led by Deputy Curator Joshua Lockwood-Moran.
Alongside, discover more about Shahnawaz Hussain: My Nottinghamshire Perspectives in Watercolour and Peepshow: An Illusion Cut to the Measure of Desire in our extra gallery spaces.
Free, open to all
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
As part of this year’s Light After Dark Film Festival, Bonington Gallery is pleased to present Peep Show, an innovatively staged exhibition of archival film curated by feminist collective Invisible Women.
Only visible through spyholes in the outer perimeter walls of Bonington Gallery; Peep Show brings together a series of archival film fragments that explore the interaction between spectator and subject, eye and body —across the history of film.
Weaving together extracts from early films by women working at the cutting edge of the emerging artform—including Alice Guy Blache, Germaine Dulac and Lois Weber—this innovatively staged exhibition reflects how the medium’s conventions have been shaped by the eyes behind the camera.
Over the course of its transformation from novelty to artform, cinema has continually drawn on its peep show roots to captivate, titillate, and absorb. By drawing inspiration from quietly subversive, once-forgotten work made by early women filmmakers, Peep Show also invites us to question who has shaped this cinematic language, offering a playful potential subversion to dominant aesthetic conventions.
Beware—sometimes this peep show looks back.
Curated by Invisible Women Archive. In collaboration with Bonington Gallery, Nottingham Trent University.
Cinematic codes create a gaze, a world and an object, thereby producing an illusion cut to the measure of desire…
Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema, 1975
A woman performs in a box, alone. Behind glass, in darkness, we watch. She cannot see out, but we can see in. As her body moves we look on; silent, staring, unseen.
Over the past 120 years, cinema has presented us with countless scenes such as these; a dreamworld composed of unconscious impulses, images edited to tease and tantalise, illusions cut to the measure of desire. Before the invention of cinema, early motion picture devices were viewed through box mechanisms, private shows for one. The development of projection allowed moving images to be enlarged and viewed collectively, but the darkness of the auditorium served to reproduce the experience of the peep show. Even as this new artform moved towards respectability, this carnival legacy lived on. Early peep boxes were not exclusively for erotic images, but an explosion of pornographic peep shows in the 1970s reinforced a historic association between the peep show, cinema and sleaze which remains potent.
As the feminist critic Laura Mulvey outlines in her essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975), the language of mainstream filmmaking was designed to capitalise on our subconscious desire for scopophilia (pleasure in looking) which, in a society dominated by heterosexual patriarchal structures, created a coded language built on images of women’s bodies, diced and dissected for our enjoyment. In the dark auditorium we pretend we are alone, that the bodies on screen perform only for us. This is the dream that cinema sells, and the same voyeuristic fantasy lies at the heart of the peep show: what differentiates the eye pushed against a keyhole, from the eye focused down a camera’s viewfinder, from the eye that rests on the cinema screen?
In Peep Show, feminist collective Invisible Women bring together a series of archive fragments which explore the interaction between spectator and subject, eye and body, across the history of film. Weaving together extracts from early films by women working at the cutting edge of the emerging artform – including Alice Guy Blache, Alla Nazimova, Germaine Dulac and Lois Weber – this immersive exhibition reflects how the medium’s conventions have been shaped by the eyes behind the camera. Over the course of its transformation from novelty to artform, cinema has continually drawn on its peep show roots to captivate, titillate and absorb. By drawing inspiration from quietly subversive, once forgotten work made by early women filmmakers, Peep Show also invites us to question who has shaped this cinematic language, offering a playful potential subversion to dominant aesthetic conventions. Beware – sometimes this peep show looks back.
Invisible Women seek out and champion the work of women and filmmakers with marginalised identities who have been overlooked, un-credited or left out of the history of cinema. By drawing attention to these forgotten stories, Invisible Women aim to reinsert female voices into the story of film.
X: @IW_Archives
In its second year, Light After Dark Film Festival: Immersive encounters in cinema is a film festival dedicated to immersive experiences in cinema. Pairing films with performance, music, technology, and art, Life After Dark will give audiences a deep, intimate, and collective encounter with film.
A collaboration between Nottingham Contemporary, Broadway Cinema, Nottingham Playhouse, University of Nottingham and Bonington Gallery, Nottingham Trent University.
Light After Dark Film Festival has been made possible with support from Film Hub Midlands through funds from the National Lottery. Film Hub Midlands support people to watch, show, and make films in the Midlands. Festival Design: @waste_studio
Image credit: Suspense (1913) directed by Lois Webster.