Location: Lecture Theatre 2, Newton Building, NTU City Campus
Nottingham Trent University is delighted to invite Dick Jewell to speak as part of the 2019 Fine Art Live Lecture Series.
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), as well as producing music videos and promos for musicians including Neneh Cherry and Massive Attack
Growing up in Croydon Jewell spent much of his youth “lugging around an Olympus OM-1 Motor Drive, taking portraits of strangers at any opportunity” going on to publishing his first book Found Photos in 1978, the same year he completed his MA in Printmaking at the Royal College of Art.
In anticipation of Jewell’s most significant solo show Now & Then (opening January), take a read of this article on his career as an artist/filmmmaker by Dazed & Confused.
We launch our next exhibition Video Days with a programme of talks, screenings and photography dedicated to the local and international skateboarding community.
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 reflects 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. It also shows the rich texture of disciplines and interests reflected across the entire Video Days programme.
Skateboarding is an activity that reflects a consistent theme within the programme of human-kind’s disruptive and subjective relationship with the built environment.
Email boningtongallery@ntu.ac.uk to confirm your attendance to the Video Days Preview.
An exhibition of photography from local skate photographers: 4 pm onward
Curated by Tom Quigley, who self-publishes Varial Magazine, featuring East Midlands skateboard photography. Alongside Tom’s own work, the exhibition will include contributions from active local skate photographers such as Neil Turner, Vic Camilleri, Dave Bevan, and Andrew Horsley (one of the founders of Sidewalk magazine, the UK and Europe’s longest running skate magazine, and internationally respected skate photographer) and images from Nottingham between the 1970s and 1990s from photographers including Andrew McDermott and Steve Tristram. Tom was recently the subject of the second part of the film series ‘We Can Fly’, and had work featured in the Sneinton Pride of Place collection of photography and visual art published by the Caravan Gallery, 2018.
From transgression to progression: 5 pm – 5.30 pm
A talk on skateboarding and Nottingham’s social, cultural and economic development, Chris Lawton Skate Nottingham.
Chris is one of the co-founders of Skate Nottingham. He is a Senior Research Fellow in economics at Nottingham Business School, here at Nottingham Trent University. He is also a feature writer for Caught in the Crossfire magazine, a long-running web-magazine on skateboarding, punk and radical politics. In this short discussion, Chris will talk about examples of skateboarders proactively driving inclusive development in cities around the world, particularly Malmö, Copenhagen and Tampere, and how both the activity and its wider culture and community provide opportunities for Nottingham (like Malmö, a medium-sized post-industrial city with a young population but significant regeneration challenges).
War & Rees, 2017, (7:17 mins), Daniel O’Neill: 5.30 pm – 5.40 pm
Dan is a skateboarder and academic historian, and is one of the Nottingham skate scene’s most prolific filmers. This short film charts the final year of Nottingham’s large DIY skatepark project, which occupied waste ground next to the BBC Island – earmarked for development as part of Nottingham’s stalled ‘East Side City’ project; amid wider local political interest in the loss of genuine ‘common’ land in the city centre (and thus the radical potential of skateboarders repurposing blighted brownfield space land-banked by property developers and kept out of public use for more than two decades). The original DIY and a later, short-lived guerrilla skatepark in waste ground by BioCity were both demolished by the landowners towards the end of 2017, land which has, for the time being, been returned to its previously unused state.
A montage of Nottingham skateboarding past and present, (20 mins), Neil Turner: 5.40 pm – 6 pm
Neil has been filming skateboarding in Nottingham for almost 20 years, alongside documentary video work and photography, and is currently working on the first full-length video from Forty Two Shop, Nottingham’s only independent skate store. Neil has filmed edits for Sidewalk magazine and has amassed a huge archive of footage of Nottingham skateboarders from the late 90s days of Old Market Square and Broadmarsh Banks through to now, which he will draw from and re-edit specially for this event.
Pieces of Palestine, featuring Isle Skateboards and SkatePal, 2017, (20 mins), Jacob Harris: 6.10 pm – 6.30 pm
A short film featuring the Isle skateboard team’s 2016 visit to the West Bank with award-winning charity SkatePal, to be shown with the permission of Jacob Harris (winner of the Bright Trade Show European Skateboard Awards for both his 2013 independent film Eleventh Hour and Isle’s debut video in 2015, Vase). Pieces of Palestine will help raise awareness and support for two of Skate Nottingham’s young female coaches who will be volunteering with SkatePal in the West Bank this October.
Video Days, 1991, (24 mins), Spike Jonze and Blind Skateboards: 6.30 pm – 7 pm
Video Days is a skateboard video released in 1991 by Blind Skateboards, it was produced by American skateboarder and filmmaker, Spike Jonze. It is widely considered to be one of the most influential skate videos of all time, providing early platforms for now legendary skaters including Mark Gonzales, Jason Lee and Guy Mariano.
Nottingham Trent University (NTU) is delighted to host, in collaboration with New Art Exchange and Nottingham Contemporary, this guest lecture by Keith Piper, BA (Hons) Fine Art alumnus and founding member of the BLK Art Group.
This event coincides with an exhibition of Keith’s work at New Art Exchange, Unearthing the Banker’s Bones, which opens from Friday 31 March to Sunday 2 July 2017. It also coincides with the current group exhibition at Nottingham Contemporary, The Place is Here, which is open until Sunday 30 April.
Keith Piper (born in Malta, 1960) is a leading contemporary British artist, curator, critic and academic. Piper was a founder member of the ground breaking BLK Art Group, an association of black British art students who exhibited together throughout the country between 1982-83. Their work was noted for its boldly political stance and critique on the state of intercommunal, class and gender relations the UK.
Adopting a research-driven approach and using a variety of media, Piper’s work over the past 30 years has ranged from painting, photography and installation through to use of digital media, video and computer based interactivity.
Image: Keith Piper, Unearthing the Banker’s Bones, 2016, film still. A 70th anniversary commission for the Arts Council with Bluecoat and Iniva. © the artist
Nottingham Trent University (NTU) is delighted to invite Alan Michael to speak as part of the 2017 Fine Art Live Lecture Series.
(b.1967 Paisley, Scotland) Alan lives and works in London. His work combines existing styles and codes of painting, photography and text to highlight tensions between displays of labour and casual under-performance. While making allusions to an unresolved relationship between photorealism, Pop and the ‘realness’ of street photography, his works often refer to various processes used to generate the ideas, circuits of reception and, ultimately, the finished works themselves.
Alan is currently exhibiting in a group exhibition entitled All Men By Nature Desire To Know, which is on at Bonington Gallery until Friday 17 February 2017.
Recent solo exhibitions include:
Recent group exhibitions include:
The Fine Art Live Lecture Series is an initiative by Nottingham Trent University’s Fine Art course, whereby creative practitioners are invited to deliver a lecture to current students. The lectures are also open to staff, alumni and the general public.
The lectures take place during term-time only.
To coincide with the In Place of Architecture exhibition in the Gallery from 6 November – 11 December, this symposium brings together photographers, filmmakers, and writers on photography and architecture to examine the role that photography and moving image play in our contemporary interpretation, perception and understanding of the architectural environment.
Keynote speaker: Andrew Higgott, author and co editor of Camera Constructs.
Speakers will include:
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Click here to download the symposium handout
So much of our experience of architecture is not the result of a first-hand encounter, but is the consequence of a photographic image. Photography does not merely facilitate our experience of architecture, it arguably constructs that experience – much of what we see has been decided by the photographer.
In Place of Architecture brought together a group of contemporary artists to explore the role that photography and moving image play in our interpretation, perception and understanding of the architectural environment. Artists included:
Peter Ainsworth, Michele Allen, Emily Andersen, Peter Bobby, Tim Daly, Charlotte Fox, Fergus Heron, Esther Johnson, Andy Lock, Fiona Maclaren (view in IE), Guy Moreton, Martin Newth, Emily Richardson.
A programme of events and activities was also curated to compliment the themes highlighted by the exhibition.
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In July 2015 a group of BArch (Hons) Architecture students from Nottingham Trent University (NTU) participated in a research project, which involved the documentation of invisible memory points in Nottingham.
As part of their research the students visited the National Memorial Arboretum (NMA), a key location for national remembrance in the UK. Most of the images included in this show are a direct response to the commemorative architecture: a visual and textual reaction to the experience of visiting the NMA and other memory points in the UK.
NTU students, David Symons, Emma Hewitt and Rumbi Mukundi worked with three students from Brazil – Marina Martinelli, Felipe Bomfim and Alina Peres – to create a website with an interactive map and blog, as well as a printed tourist map. The idea of the site was to increase awareness of the architecture of memory in Nottingham and beyond.
Visit the website to view the student project.
The group have also printed out a selection of quotes which refer to photography and the visual representation of memory, as well as the experience of architecture.
When visiting the exhibition we invite you to respond to these images and quotes by writing directly onto the wall in order to contribute to the work in progress. Tell us how the image or text makes you feel – do you agree with what they represent?
Responses are invited in any format – it’s up to you.
The project was led by Dr. Ana Souto, Senior Lecturer in Architecture and supported by Prof. Duncan Higgins, Professor of Visual Arts at NTU.
Bonington Gallery is very pleased to present QAI/GB-NGM by Warsaw (Poland) based artist Karol Radziszewski. This exhibition will present archival materials from Radziszewski’s Queer Archives Institute (QAI) that focusses on Central and Eastern European queer history and culture.
Consistent with previous QAI presentations, this exhibition will connect to its locality by featuring materials related to Nottingham’s own queer history and culture. This site specificity is reflected in the title of the exhibition that utilises Nottingham’s International Organization for Standardization (ISO) location code ‘GB–NGM’.
Alongside archival materials from the QAI, the exhibition will feature artworks and ongoing bodies of work by Radziszewski.
Established by Radziszewski in November 2015, the QAI is a non-profit artist-run organization dedicated to the research, collection, digitalisation, presentation, exhibition, analysis and artistic interpretation of queer archives, with a special focus on the countries of the former Eastern Bloc. The QAI is a long-term project open to transnational collaboration with artists, activists and academic researchers. The Institute carries out a variety of activities and projects – from exhibitions, publications, lectures and installations to performances.
Karol Radziszewski (b. 1980) lives and works in Warsaw (Poland), where he received his MFA from the Academy of Fine Arts in 2004. He works with film, photography, installations and creates interdisciplinary projects. His archive-based methodology crosses multiple cultural, historical, religious, social and gender references. Since 2005 he has been the publisher and editor-in-chief of DIK Fagazine. He is the founder of the Queer Archives Institute (2015). His work has been presented in institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art and Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; New Museum, New York; VideoBrasil, São Paulo; TOP Museum, Tokyo; Kunsthaus Graz, Austria; Cobra Museum, Amsterdam; Wroclaw Contemporary Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow and Muzeum Sztuki in Lodz. He has participated in several international biennales including PERFORMA 13, New York; 7th Göteborg Biennial; 4th Prague Biennial; 15th WRO Media Art Biennale and recently The Baltic Triennial 14.
In 2021, The Power of Secrets dedicated to Radziszewski’s archival practice was published by Sternberg Press.
Header image credit: Karol Radziszewski, Afterimages, film still, 2018.
The exhibition has been curated by Tom Godfrey, Director of Bonington Gallery.
Supported by Joshua Lockwood-Moran, Tamsin Greaves (NTU Placement) and Rachael Mackerness (NTU Placement).
Technicians: Harry Freestone, James E Smith, Claire Davies, Emily Stollery.
Thanks to The Sparrows Nest for the generous support, advice and loan of the publications.
A joint exhibition by photographer Chris Barrett and researcher Gianluca Spezza
Under Kim Jong Un’s leadership, North Korea has made a conscious decision to be more proactive in the media world. In 2013 we saw the very first live tweeted image of the North Korean leader, from mainstream Western media.
Icons of Rhetoric (IoR) offered a different approach to documenting North Korea, merging established news media practices with more contemporary ones, drawing particular attention to social media.
“While researching an article about an Instagram account claiming to be the official outlet of North Korean news, I started to think about the visual representation of North Korea.
Chris Barrett, photographer and curator
The idea of the project became a reflection on our engagement with modern media techniques, our consumption of images and our knowledge of this ‘most closed off country in the world’ that is the DPRK, all this interwoven with the notion of democratized propaganda.”
By reinterpreting images that already exist in the public domain, Icons of Rhetoric played on an aesthetic of authenticity.
Read more about the Icons of Rhetoric research project.
Follow #IconsofRhetoric on social media:
@IconsofRhetoric
@KazakhPilot (Gianluca Spezza)
facebook.com/IconsOfRhetoric
instagram.com/iconsofrhetoric
Moving on from the success of Magic Light 2014, Lighting the Future: No Boundaries was an eclectic mix of lighting designs and installations by product and furniture design final year students and alumni from Nottingham Trent University.
All pieces within the show were representations of new and recently created designs, many of which push the boundaries of lighting, materials and design.
Alongside Lighting the Future: No Boundaries, and situated at the entrance of Nottingham Trent University’s Newton building, 170 was a ghostly montage of light inspired by images of the University at night.
Lighting the Future: No Boundaries was part of Nottingham Light Night 2015.
Download your copy of the official Light Night 2015 What’s On Guide
