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.
Bonington Gallery is delighted to present Common Grounds: Counterculture & Confrontation since 1976, the first major survey exhibition of photographer Alan Lodge (b.1953), one of the most significant chroniclers of British counterculture, protest movements, and grassroots activism over the past 50 years.
Common Grounds brings together a wealth of material documenting travelling communities, free festivals, free party and rave culture, environmental campaigns, and anti-war protest since 1976. As a former member of a travelling community, Lodge offers a perspective on people, places, and subcultures that is raw, uncompromising, yet intimate. The strength of Lodge’s work lies not only in its photographic and documentary quality, but also in its evidential power, having on numerous occasions been used to protect and advocate for the very communities it represents.
Featuring over 100 photographs alongside 35mm slide projections, moving image, personal archives, and previously unseen material, Common Grounds will be a spatially ambitious exhibition that provides an expansive overview of Lodge’s practice and a life dedicated to activism. It also includes legal correspondence and documentation from Lodge’s own encounters with police and authorities, foregrounding themes concerning the shifting relationships between collective identity, civil liberty, dissent, environmental responsibility, public space, and state authority.
Lodge’s work has appeared in publications and journals worldwide. His photographs have also been featured in documentaries and films, including Operation Solstice for Channel 4, Jeremy Deller’s BBC documentary Everybody in the Place: an Incomplete History of Britain 1984-1992 (2018) and most recently Aaron Trinder’s documentary Free Party: A Folk History (2023). He was interviewed for Daniel Ward’s film, Lonesome Ghosts (2025), shown at Peer, London and spoke to Stewart Lee about the Battle of the Beanfield in the R4 podcast ‘What happened to Counter-Culture?’
Alan Lodge’s work has been shown in exhibitions across the UK including Radical Landscapes (2022) at Tate Liverpool. International exhibitions include Black & White Surveillance (2020) with TG at the Salon de Normandy, Paris. His work has also appeared in publications & journals including The Guardian, Independent, i-D, Select, Café Royal Books, Sounds, Purple, Huck Magazine, Flash Art, DJ, Radio Times, New Statesmen & Society and Squall. His publications include Stonehenge: Solstice Ritual, a photographic account of the rituals taking place at Stonehenge.
Alan received a BA(hons) (1993) and MA (2013) in Photography from Nottingham Trent University.
A publication featuring an interview between Alan Lodge and Jeremy Deller will be available during the exhibition.
After a brief career as an emergency paramedic in the London Ambulance Service, Alan “Tash” Lodge took up photography and documented the emerging free festival movement in the late 1970s. In 1985, Lodge and his family joined the Peace Convoy on its annual journey to Stonehenge, where he was involved with, and photographed, the clashes between the police and travelers in what became known as the Battle of the Beanfield, resulting in one of the most violent mass arrests in British history.
In 1990, Lodge moved to Nottingham to study photography at Trent Polytechnic (now Nottingham Trent University), where he became involved with the city’s influential music collective DiY Sound System, which held free parties across the UK. Among his most celebrated images are those capturing partygoers at Castlemorton Common in Wiltshire, widely regarded as the largest illegal rave in British history, which led to the introduction of the Criminal Justice Act in 1994.
In recent years Lodge has continued to extensively document his involvement and attendance of public demonstrations and festivals, and is active in various welfare and advice agencies, including Festival Welfare. Lodge is known for his documentation of police surveillance and was a regular contributor to Indymedia UK. His website offers guidance on the rights of photographers documenting public places and demonstrations.
In October 1969 the Bonington Building opened against a backdrop of student protest and demonstration – not against the new building itself – but with local planning decisions to selectively and acceleratedly clear slum housing in the vicinity of the new building, in time for the grand unveiling by the Duchess of Kent.
This presentation acknowledges the themes of student protest in the corresponding exhibition Naeem Mohaiemen: THROUGH A MIRROR, DARKLY, and also in John Dean’s photography within Bonington Vitrines #30: A Semester in Nottingham, 1976, capturing the city 7 year’s on, still in a state of flux and transformation.
This display presents reproductions of newspaper cuttings that reported the event, photos of the protest and the Duchess, in a setting that emulates the window of an abandoned shopfront.
This exhibition explores the rich history of Nottingham Women’s Centre and the fight for women’s rights in the city.
Starting life in a living room during the second wave of feminism in 1971, Nottingham Women’s Centre is one of the oldest organisations of its kind in the country. It was created to support women and fight for equal pay; education and job opportunities; an end to homophobic discrimination; and an end to violence against women – battles still being fought to this day.
Come along to see material from the Nottingham Women’s Library archives, protest placards from Reclaim the Night marches, and more.
Curated by Diana Ali.
Come along to our launch night on Friday 24 March, 6 pm – 8 pm for a first look round the exhibition, alongside Emily Andersen: Somewhere Else Entirely in the Gallery. There will be free food from 6 pm and a performance from the United Voices Choir at 7 pm.