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
The third segment of Formations, our year-long programme delivered in partnership with Nottingham Trent University’s Postcolonial Studies Centre, includes events in January and February under the thematic banner – Formation: Memorials, focusing on the memorialisation of people, places, and histories, through statues and monuments and through writing. We will consider memorialisation in locations including the UK, US, and Pakistan, consider renowned figures and the politics of the statues and other public monuments commemorating them, and invite you to join us for conversations, poetry readings, and writing workshops.
Wednesday 20 January 2021, 6.30 pm – 8 pm
Join a writing session with Eve Makis exploring identity and the meaning of resilience, taking inspiration from seminal works by Maya Angelou. All levels welcome.
All participants will get the chance of having their work edited and included on a spoken word album bringing their written work to life.
Eve Makis is the author of four novels, a life-writing guide and an award-winning screenplay. She’s recipient of the Young Booksellers International Book of the Year Award and the Aurora Mardiganian Gold Medal, her works shortlisted for the East Midlands Book Award and the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize. She teaches fiction on the MA in creative writing at Nottingham Trent University where she is writer in residence for the Postcolonial Studies Centre.
Tuesday 26 January 2021, 4 pm – 5 pm
Annum Salman is a spoken word poet from Pakistan, who has undertaken her Creative Writing MA in Surrey and is currently residing in Karachi. Her book shares her experiences as Pakistani Muslim woman and a foreigner tackling mental health issues, sexism and racism. In line with the theme of memorials, Annum will be joining us live from Pakistan to read from her collection Sense Me and discuss identity, tackling racism and sexism, and her relationship with the UK and Pakistan as a Muslim woman. She will be introduced and in conversation with Ramisha Rafique, postgraduate research student at NTU.
Click here to watch via our Youtube
Wednesday 3 February 2021, 7 pm – 8.30 pm
Slavery and Public History in the UK and US – A Conversation with Dr Jessica Moody and Professor Stephen Small. Chaired by Dr Jenny Woodley, with Purnachandra Naik.
The histories of both the UK and the USA are inextricably bound up with histories of enslavement and of the enslaved. And yet, both countries have failed to fully recognise or interrogate these pasts. Over recent months activists and campaigners have forced a reckoning with the symbols of this history, from the toppling of the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol, to the fall of numerous Confederate statutes in the United States. They have made headline news and provoked debate about what should be done with monuments to enslavers and what should fill the gaps in our public history.
This online event will bring together two leading scholars of public history and collective memories of slavery. Jessica Moody and Stephen Small will join us for a conversation about histories of slavery and their place in contemporary Britain and the USA.
Click here to watch via our Youtube
Wednesday 17 February 2021, 6.30 pm – 8 pm
Creative writing workshop inspired by controversial statues. What would a statue say if it could talk? Would it be indignant about its removal? Curse its creator? What stories could it tell you? What late night assignations has it witnessed? Come along and make things up. Express yourself about public art in a creative way.
All participants will get the chance of having their work edited and included on a spoken word album bringing their written work to life.
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:
#NTUIPOA
Click here to download the symposium handout
The Crafting Anatomies project places the human body at the centre of a multi-disciplinary dialogue; exploring how this entity has been interpreted, crafted and re-imagined in historical, contemporary and future contexts.
This one-day symposium will explore the curious practices of a selection of Crafting Anatomies’ exhibitors, highlighting a preoccupation with the human condition in a breadth of exploratory contexts.
Delegates will also have the opportunity to visit the Crafting Anatomies exhibition in conjunction with this event and see ocularist and Crafting Anatomies exhibitor, John Pacey-Lowrie, as he demonstrates his craft of creating prosthetic eyes.
© Marloes ten Bhömer Courtesy Stanley Picker Gallery
Get involved in an afternoon of talks and discussions with leading artists and academics, crossing the boundaries of arts, science, and computing, developed as part of the multidisciplinary exhibition Sensing Systems by Matt Woodham, on view at Bonington Gallery from 15 February to 28 March. Book your free place on this public event, taking placing at Nottingham Contemporary.
Art and science share a common goal: to challenge common views of reality. As a creative crossroad, the contemporary field of ArtScience has been gaining momentum in recent years. Successful ArtScience merges the objective and the subjective with equal voices. It investigates and shapes the intersection between artistic concepts and developments in science and technology; experimenting with new ways of conceiving knowledge.
In this afternoon symposium, a panel of artists, scientists and ArtScientists will share their interdisciplinary research. Experts in systems across scales, from galaxy evolution to molecular nanotechnology, will discuss common dynamics in nature.
Meghan Gray is an observational extragalactic astronomer with interests in galaxy evolution and large-scale structure. She employs tools such as gravitational lensing to trace distributions of dark matter on large scales and uses multiwavelength observations to examine the luminous properties of galaxies. These observations are often compared against supercomputer simulations to understand how galaxies are influenced by their environments. Meghan will provide insight into large-scale structures and simulating the universe.
Ulrike Kuchner is an extragalactic astronomer as well as a visual artist based in the UK. In her research, Ulrike studies how mass is assembled in the universe and how galaxies form and evolve over their lifetime – which is just short of the age of the universe itself. As an artist and curator, she challenges the frontiers between art and science, translating between the fields without imposing a hierarchy. Ulrike’s art often deals with the themes of humanity and imperfections in data, something we tend to strip away from science. Ulrike will provide insight into art and science and chair the panel discussions.
Andy Lomas is a computational artist, mathematician, and Emmy award winning supervisor of computer-generated effects. His artwork explores how complex sculptural forms can be created emergently by simulating growth processes. Inspired by the work of Alan Turing, D’Arcy Thompson, and Ernst Haeckel, it exists at the boundary between art and science. Andy will provide insight into simulating nature, emergent phenomena, artificial life and art.
Becky Lyon is an artist/researcher examining how humans are impacting evolution. Her practice combines scientific research, thinking-through-making, fiction, and participatory research to imagine a spectrum of new hybrid species, materialities, systems, and ways of relating. Explorations include exploring future environments through scent; contemplating the entanglement of our matter through sculpture and sound and modelling lively forms at Fieldnotes from a Technobiocology. Lyon runs ‘Elastic Nature’, an interdisciplinary art research club exploring the future of nature.
Philip Moriarty is a professor of physics in the School of Physics & Astronomy at the University of Nottingham. His research interests lie in a field sometimes referred to as extreme nanotechnology; he and his colleagues prod, poke, push, and pull individual atoms and molecules with scanning probe microscopes. He has published 140 papers to date, given over 100 invited talks. Moriarty also has a keen interest in public engagement, outreach, and the arts-sciences interface having regularly collaborated on the award-winning Sixty Symbols YouTube channel. Philip will provide insight into chaos, quantum mechanics, surface physics, and the emergence of patterns.
Tom from the gallery attended ‘The University Gallery’ symposium on Friday at the Sluice Art Fair, hosted by NEUSCHLOSS – ‘a group of artists, writers and curators working at or with Northumbria University with specific relation to experimental exhibition or curatorial practices’.
Guest panelists included Gavin Wade (Eastside Projects), Andrea Phillips (Professor of Art and head of Research, Valand Academy, University of Gothenburg) and Prof Matthew Cornford (Head of Fine Art University of Brighton).
The symposium’s quest was to explore the function and role of today’s ‘University Gallery’ by discussing several case studies both past & present, and refer to new research on the subject from Northumbria University.
Although sadly time ran short, the speakers made some very interesting points and this discourse is certainly consistent with the programme/strategic research currently taking place here at Bonington.