Join us for the launch of the first exhibition in our 2026-27 season, a major survey of photographer Alan Lodge (b. 1953), whose work has documented British counterculture, protest movements and grassroots activism for more than five decades.
Featuring more than 100 photographs alongside 35mm slide projections, moving-image works, personal archives, and previously unseen material, Common Grounds provides an expansive overview of Lodge’s practice and of a life dedicated to activism.
As part of the Bonington Vitrines series, we’re delighted to present The Velvet Acronyms – It’s a Wonderful Protest. A collaboration between artists Anna Li and Simon Raven, the body of work uses satirical ‘crip humour’ to challenge ableism in the arts, from the ghettoisation of disability art to condescendingly ‘celebratory’ forms of inclusion.
Enjoy a free welcome drink, delicious food (first come, first served!) and music.
Bonington Gallery is pleased to present It’s a Wonderful Protest, a new exhibition by The Velvet Acronyms, a collaboration between artists Anna Li and Simon Raven.
Anna & Simon’s work uses satirical ‘crip humour’ to challenge ableism in the arts, from the ghettoisation of disability art to condescendingly ‘celebratory’ forms of inclusion.
The area where the Bonington Vitrines are located will be transformed into an ‘Exclusion Zone’ for performance in which participation is encouraged – from taking part in an absurdly upbeat ‘Wonderful Protest’ to joining a ‘Psychic Music’ ritual aimed at relieving student debt.
The exhibition includes an archive of previously unseen films, prominent performance relics, photographs, posters, and participatory interventions.
Some spaces will intentionally be left unfinished, allowing new documentation and traces of live performances to accumulate during the exhibition.
The Velvet Acronyms (VA) is a collaboration between artists Anna Li (UKR) and Simon Raven (UK). Inspired by Disabled Avant-Garde (DAG), a satirical organisation founded by Aaron Williamson and Katherine Araniello whose work in performance, video, and intervention challenges negative perceptions of disability. Their practice combines crip humour, absurdity, and social critique, positioning disability as a critical and epistemological lens rather than a fixed or medicalised identity.
Anna and Simon bring distinct embodied perspectives into a shared inquiry informed by the social model of disability. Drawing on avant-garde art and experimental performance, VA interrogates cultural, political, and aesthetic structures, pushing disability art beyond representation towards confrontation, irony, and lived experience.
Website: https://www.velvetacronyms.art/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/velvetacronyms/
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@VelvetAcronyms
Image credit: A Wonderful Protest at The King’s Cross station, London, UK. Anna Li, Simon Raven, Aaron Williamson, and Alana Young. Photo by Olena Litvinova. 02 June, 2026.
Join us for an afternoon of live drawing, performance and video art in a specially devised event by Venture Arts, a Manchester-based visual arts organisation working with learning disabled and neurodiverse artists to create and showcase exciting new contemporary visual art.
Free, drop in from 12pm – 5pm.
Bonington Gallery is proud to host a VA Collectives event alongside John Beck and Matthew Cornford’s exhibition, The Art Schools of the East Midlands.
Experience artist Leslie Thompson create a large-scale drawing live in the gallery space. A specially devised performance piece by Greater Manchester-based artist Jackie Haynes will also be presented.
Visitors will also be able to watch videos from Narratives, a six month collaborative residency in Venture Arts’ Conversations Series, which ran in partnership with Manchester Jewish Museum, Castlefield Gallery, The Lowry, Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Race Relations Resource Centre and Project Artworks. The residency brought together 12 artists, some from Venture Arts and some via an open call, to develop shared ideas and create new artwork over 6 months, exploring personal histories and cultural heritage.
The VA Collectives are a series of events, performances, gatherings and happenings that aim to bring artists together to explore themes of relevance to their work, the arts and the world around us. The VA Collectives are the brainchild of Venture Arts, a Manchester-based visual arts organisation working with learning disabled and neurodiverse artists to create and showcase exciting new contemporary visual art.
Both the videos and the resulting drawing by Leslie Thompson will remain in the gallery over the closing weekend for visitors to enjoy.
Videos that will be presented in the gallery:
Beyond the Shelf (2022) Millie Loveday
Falling – A Memory of Her (2022) Horace Lindezey, Dominic Pillai & Alice Merida Richards
The Dying Fly (2022) Jackie Haynes
The Julie Channel (2022) Sarah Boulter
Images by Adam Grainger and Alex Jovčić-Sas
Artist bios
Leslie is based at Venture Arts studios in Manchester and uses paint, ink or ceramics to illustrates his life, his past, his family, growing up in Moss Side in 70s and 80s, entire film sequences and a rich variety of animals, all from memory. Leslie works at extremes of small and large scale, and adds fantasy elements to the real world, combining his mother at the Arndale Market with tv characters and superheroes. Leslie’s work is part of the Government Art Collection and is widely shown, recently at TJ Boulting, London.
Often commissioned to produce live drawings, Leslie has gained a reputation as one of Britain’s most dynamic mural artists. His work has been exhibited widely across the UK, including exhibitions at The Lowry, Salford (2023), TJ Boulting, London (2022), Paper Gallery, Manchester (2022) and in 2019, his work was exhibited in Tokyo. In 2021 Leslie’s intricate piece, ‘Animals from Memory’ was acquired by the Government Art Collection.
Early in 2023 Leslie was selected to take part in a collaborative project between the Royal Society of Sculptors and Art et al. Leslie was also commissioned in 2023 by the Government Art Collection, along with nine other selected British artists, to create new artworks in celebration of the coronation of King Charles III. His work is held in private and public collections across the UK and internationally.
Jackie Haynes is an multi-disciplinary artist with a textiles background which notably included House of Haynes Fancy Dress Hire in Manchester (1998 – 2012). She studied BA Clothing in the late 1980’s which included an industrial placement in Nottingham’s Lace Market.
She currently collaborates with Heather Ross as Artist A & Artist B, whose recent work ‘The Surplus Badge’ was featured in the British Textile Biennial (2023). Jackie recently completed an art practice-based PhD study of the German Dada artist, Kurt Schwitters and is a member of art practice-based research groups, Proximity and ARG. Her newest role is as an artist and research team member with ‘Things of the Least’, a 3-year project focussing on Manchester Art Gallery’s Mary Greg Collection. Screen printing is a recent development of her practice, and she is using print in an Artist Book focussing on her collaborative experiences from Venture Arts’ Narratives residency (2022-2023).
Much of Horace’s work depicts the world around him, his family and memories of his childhood growing up in Hulme and Moss Side, Manchester. For Narratives, Horace concentrated on memories of music that he loves and grew up with in Moss Side, creating lists of songs and singers and wished to transform non Reggae pop-songs which he loves, into new reggae classics. Horace was the main inspiration behind the Narrative group’s “Julie” theme due to his devotion to many women called Julie. The group’s initial “Julie Party” took place at the social club where the residency took place. Horace exhibits widely and this year alone has shown at Kammermachen Festival, Chemnitz, Germany, The Gallery of Everything, London, Portico Library, Manchester and Slugtown Newcastle.
Alice Merida Richards is a musician and ceramicist based in Manchester. In collaboration with Horace, the duo rerecorded a reggae version of Julee Cruise’s ‘Falling’, (Twin Peaks Theme). Horace and Merida created posters and invitations taking aesthetic inspiration from posters and flyers from 80s Moss Side parties and festivals kept in the archive at Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Race Relations Resource Centre.
Manchester based film maker Dominic Pillai also collaborated on a music video for Falling, inspired by the overwhelming style and character of the social club in which the residency took place as well as huge comedy, reggae and supper club influences of Horace’s idols such as Sid James, Sparrow Martin & Julie London.
Millie Loveday’s work has grown from an ancestral discovery from 17th century Jamaica to beginning to build an underwater fantasy world inspired by the history and Afro futurist influences. Millie’s ancestral research revealed a conflicted Jamaican heritage leading her to unearth stories through family objects, statues, relics and ornaments found in her family member’s homes by using them to initiate conversation. Her video traces Cedric, a black baby doll from her mother’s childhood setting off around the world in search of his own identity.
Sarah Boulter is an artist, curator and creative producer. She works with the hyper local, national and international artist-led sector, focussing on collaborative work, inclusivity and artist development. Sarah Boulter documented the entire residency and The Julie Channel is a TV station devoted to all things Narratives. A raw, making-of style documentary of experiments, art and connections made during this collaborative residency.
Thanks to independent curator Abi Spinks for programming and supporting the development of this event in response to The Art Schools of the East Midlands by John Beck & Matthew Cornford.
Header photo credit: Leslie Thompson by Sarah Boulter, 2022.
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.
Re-sensitised Symposium re-visits, reflects and re-lives the last seven years of the Sensitive Skin festival.
It brings together a diverse group of artists, all of whom have been part of the festival since its inception in 2000, pondering on the question ‘How has Sensitive Skin evolved over the past seven years and how has Live Art and Performance practice developed during that period?’
Offering talks, presentations, lectures and an “artists in conversation’ panel throughout the day, the event will culminate in a celebration closing this year’s festival, including two performances from Rajni Shah and Harminder Singh Judge.
Leibniz
‘Religious myth’ is a central theme which surrounds all of Judge’s work; whether through his complex installations, interactive performances, bodily adornments or shrine-like sculptures. His current work in progress, Live Sermon, will be shown at the festival as a short durational performance and sound piece.
Part of Sensitive Skin… a season of interdisciplinary arts
Mr Quiver is a durational event that combines the intensity of performance with the intimacy of installation. Exploring themes of identity, theatricality, and our relationship to the land we live on, this performance is built and then destroyed over the space of four hours. Audience members enter the space and leave as they wish, and may walk amongst the performers or sit back and enjoy the spectacle around them.
Rajni Shah (director/performer), Lucille Acevedo-Jones (costume/set designer), and Cis O’Boyle (lighting designer) create three performative loops that weave in and out of synchronisation during the four hours. By repeatedly inhabiting and abandoning the figures of Elizabeth I and a traditional Indian bride, Rajni reveals more and more of her true self during the performance and gently invites the audience to question their own identity.
Complete with haunting original vocals (live and recorded) and a stunning series of costumes, this delicate and probing performance offers up questions and images that will stay with an audience long after leave the event.
This exhibition explored how the ritualistic activities of these groups and individuals can be realised by actors and interpreted in moving image.
Exhibiting artist Ben Judd used performance and video to explore notions of scepticism and belief, freedom and immersion, by positioning himself and the audience as both participant and observer.
Previous work has explored Ben’s relationship to particular occult and esoteric beliefs such as witchcraft, shamanism and spiritualism; as a sceptic he attempts to test the extent and nature of his own beliefs and preconceptions.
亂 — Confusion, state of chaos.
In the ancient form of mandarin the title represents the creative processes and working practice that facilitated this exhibition. Dance artist Lucia Tong, Dance4 and Nottingham Trent University MA Framework students collaborated to create an immersive and interactive installation – interpreting the meaning of Luàn through movement, installation, photography and textiles.
In September 2012 Nottingham Trent University welcomed the World Event Young Artists 2012 (WEYA), an exciting programme of exhibitions and events as part of the vibrant and globally significant Nottingham finale to the 2012 Cultural Olympiad. This directional and unique event brought together 1,000 artists, from 100 nations, over a period of ten days and was the first of its kind in the world. It was hosted by a number of key partner institutions offering world class venues, of which Nottingham Trent University is proud to be a part.
For full details including event listings and galleries please visit the World Event Young Artists (now UK New Artists) webpages.
