Join award winning filmmaker Andrea Luka Zimmerman for a screening of Art Class (2020, 49 minutes) followed by a Q&A with Andrea, led by members of the NMG associate cohort, supported by LUX Nottingham.
Art Class is a filmed performance lecture playing on, and exploring, the perennial tension between the two key words in its title. It uses the tropes of scholarly presentation and personal confession alongside extracts from the artist’s work, guest interventions, martial arts and meditation exercises and evidentiary found material. The sequence tests the limits of access that working-class artists have to cultural production and to the relevant institutions circulating these outcomes. Alternately playful and provocative, serious and satirical, Art Class favors wit over weaponizing and reflection over rhetoric but does not pull its punches when it comes to the real obstructions to working class creative progress, or to the strategies necessary to overcome such outmoded hindrances.
Watch on the Bonington Gallery YouTube channel.
Access: There is full level leading to access and seating space in the auditorium. Art Class will be screened with subtitles. The screening and Q&A will take place in person and a recording will be made available online after the event.
Andrea Luka Zimmerman is a Jarman Award winning artist, filmmaker and cultural activist whose work focuses on aspects of working class experience, and that of people living on the margins of society, that are seldom seen or discussed.
Films include the Artangel-produced Here for Life (2019), which received its world premiere in the Cineasti Del Presente international competition of the Locarno Film Festival (winning a Special Mention), Erase and Forget (2017), premiering at the Berlin Film Festival (nominated for the Original Documentary Award), Estate, a Reverie (2015) (nominated for Best Newcomer at the Grierson awards) and Taskafa, Stories of the Street (2013), written and voiced by the late John Berger.
Selected exhibitions include ‘Art Class’ at METAL and LUX, ‘Shelter in Place’ at Estuary Festival, ‘Civil Rites’, the London Open, Whitechapel Gallery, ‘Common Ground’ at Spike Island, Bristol and ‘Real Estates’ at Peer Gallery. Andrea co-founded the cultural collectives Fugitive Images and Vision Machine (collaborators on Academy Award® nominated feature documentary ‘The Look of Silence’).
This event is part of the NMG Development Programme (2021 – 2022). The project will include an expansive programme of free discussions, workshops and activities centred around NMG associates and available to the general public. This event has been supported by Bonington Gallery.
Take a look at the film credits
Johan Sandborg, Pro Rector, Bergen Academy of Art and Design Norway; newly appointed Visiting Professor at Nottingham Trent University.
Duncan Higgins, Professor of Visual Art, Nottingham Trent University; Academic Chair, Bonington Gallery; Professor in Fine Art, Bergen Academy of Art and Design Norway.
To coincide with the opening of the Returns exhibition, we’re delighted to host the UK premier book launch of three new publications – In a Place Like This. Their focus, an on-going artistic research project, exploring both personal and historical traditions concerned with a relationship to the representation of violence.
In a Place Like This explores the echoes of places, people and the impact of terrible histories. The central question to the research is the difficulty we face when we try to communicate our most intimate experiences to others.
Sandborg and Higgins have focused on the language of imagery, what it may represent and how to make ideas and emotions visible. This exploration is neither an explanation nor a mystification; rather it attempts to propose visual discussions.
In a Place Like This is assembled as a montage, an interwoven idea, in an attempt to review a narrative within the spaces in which it is inscribed.
Read more about In a Place Like This
Between 11 – 17 April 2014, Emma Cocker (Senior Lecturer in Fine Art), will be joined by artist Nikolaus Gansterer (Vienna) and choreographer Mariella Greil (Vienna), inhabiting Bonington Gallery as an experimental ‘method laboratory’ (entitled Beyond The Line) for staging an encounter between choreography, drawing and writing; between body, mark and text.
Beyond The Line is conceived as a pilot project in preparation for Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line (2014 – 2016), a large-scale international, interdisciplinary collaboration involving Cocker, Gansterer and Greil for exploring the points of slippage as the practices of drawing, dance and writing enter into dialogue, overlap and collide. Through processes of reciprocal exchange, dialogue and negotiation between the key researchers, Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line will interrogate the interstitial processes, practices and knowledge(s) produced in the ‘deviation’ for example, from page to performance, from word to mark, from line to action, from modes of flat image making towards transformational embodied encounters. Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line is funded by FWF/PEEK art based research grant of Austria.
In this research seminar, Cocker, Gansterer and Greil will reflect and elaborate on their collaborative research, and introduce the key ideas and concerns of their forthcoming project, Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line.
Please join us for a celebratory launch of two new publications:
Traci Kelly‘s ‘Seers-in-Residence’, with contributions from Emma Cocker, Simon Cross, Ben Judd and Joanne Lee (a Nottingham Trent University/Bonington Gallery publication)
‘This publication emerges from an invitation for four researchers to spend time as Seers-in-Residence with Traci Kelly’s monoprint installation ‘Feeling It For You (Perspective)’, which was part of From Where I Stand I Can See You in January 2013. The resulting book documents the creative and critical ideas explored by participants, and reflects upon the possibilities for this innovative model for research.’
Designed by Joff + Ollie
Joanne Lee‘s ‘Gumming up the Works’, Issue #3 from the Pam Flett Press independent serial
‘This third issue fantasizes about luminous constellations of dropped chewing gum on the street, confronts a horrible compulsion to seek out the hard stuff glued under desks or in the recesses of train carriages, before finding itself fixated upon various species of lumps, heaps and piles; ultimately the writing explores creative work as a sort of digestion or composting, and suggests we have quite a lot to learn from worms’
Designed by Dust
There will be drinks and nibbles in the Atrium, followed by a live vocal performance by Denise Boyd as we relocate to Bonington Lecture Theatre for introductions to the publications, and a series of short readings. Click here to join the events page on Facebook.
On the occasion of our exhibition Waking the Witch: Old Ways, New Rites, please join us for an evening with poet Geraldine Monk. The evening will consist of a reading by Monk, followed by an in-conversation with NTU Research Fellow Linda Kemp and finish with a Q&A session.
First published in the 1970s, Geraldine Monk’s poetry has appeared extensively in the UK and the USA. Monk’s major collections of poetry include Interregnum (1994), Escafeld Hangings (2005), Ghost & Other Sonnets (2008), They Who Saw the Deep (2016), and numerous other books and collaborations. She is an affiliated poet at The Centre for Poetry and Poetics, University of Sheffield.
Geraldine Monk was born in Lancashire close to Pendle Hill, which achieved notoriety in 1612 as the epicentre of witchcraft and the subsequent Lancashire Witch Trials in Lancaster which resulted in 10 people being hanged. Growing up with the legend of the witches laid the foundations for her most celebrated collection of poetry Interregnum (1994) and a subsequent rearrangement of the monologues in Pendle Witch Words (2012). Exploring present-day and historical abuse and misuse of what Monk calls ‘language-magic’, she gifts the witches’ words they could never have owned or uttered in their lifetime.
Linda Kemp is a Research Fellow in the Social Work, Care and Community department at NTU. Their research is interdisciplinary, drawing on creative writing, sound performance and social research. Linda’s writing on Monk’s poetry can be found in On Repetition: Writing, Performance and Art (ed. Kartsaki, 2016). Linda also co-organises event programmes of poetry and sound performance.
The intention will be to make the evening as open as possible, and we will welcome contributions from the audience throughout the event. Light refreshments will be provided.
If you would like to attend this event please RSVP to confirm your attendance.
Our first exhibition of 2018 is a solo presentation of new work by London-based and Nottingham-originated artist Ruth Angel Edwards. This follows her contribution to our 2016 group exhibition Terraformers, curated by Landfill Editions.
A new commission for Bonington Gallery, this immersive installation considers the inescapable cycles of waste and decay, a by-product of all our consumption, personal or material.
The exhibition explores how these ecologies overlap at different scales – from the futile pursuit of personal purification and ‘clean living’, to the increasingly rapid turnover of cultural ‘content’ in the media and popular consciousness, to the wider perspective of the waste which is polluting our oceans, and threatening our very existence.
Edwards studied Fine Art at Central Saint Martins. Recent exhibitions and projects include Enema Salvatore! , Almanac, Turin, 2017; Light Deception / The Great Imitator, Auto Italia South East, London, 2017; a solo exhibition at Arcadia Missa, London, 2016; Info Pura, The Residence Gallery, London 2016, Derivatives and Futures, Human Resources, Los Angeles, 2016; A British Art Show, MEYOHAS, New York, 2015.
Associated Events
Thursday 25 January, 5.15 pm – 7.30 pm: Fine Art Live Lecture Present: Ruth Angel Edwards
Lecture Theatre 2, Newton building, NTU City Campus
Saturday 3 February, 1 pm – 2 pm (postponed) Ruth Angel Edwards: premier of new video work
Bonington Gallery
Review of “In My Blood It Runs” (Dir. Maya Newell), 2019, by Rebecca Rees, BA (Hons) Creative Writing (year 1), Nottingham Trent University.
The sombre figure of a young boy visiting his grandfather’s grave to restore his healing powers sounds like the premise to a Hollywood blockbuster. But this is just one of the many real-life scenes from Maya Newell’s poignant 2019 documentary “In My Blood it Runs.” A gritty, joyful piece based on the Aboriginal people of Australia, the documentary is a scintillating collaboration of breath-taking landscape, child-like innocence and what it means to be Aboriginal.
The ground-breaking film follows the life of Dujuan a young boy living in his town’s Aboriginal camp: Happy Valley, who is believed to have healing powers amongst his people. He is bright and intuitive but clearly troubled. We see him constantly run away from home and school and his admirable fearlessness around nature and the bush that he loves. Much of the film is shown through Dujuan’s eyes, giving the viewer a first-hand glimpse into his Indigenous community. The range of diverse people we meet throughout the documentary are self-aware and vibrant and we are left with some meaningful quotes such as “you have to learn about the past so it can help you for the future” and “learn both ways so that when you get your land back you know what to do with it.”
With Organisations such as Black Lives Matter and Show Racism the Red Card gaining notoriety in recent years, there is a real danger of racial pieces such as this being lost amongst the many. The fly on the wall film manages to stand out from the masses due to its unapologetic approach and focus on the harsh reality of Aboriginal life. The Peabody nominated documentary succeeds in truly centring around its chosen subject rather than taking the usual ironic route of “white saviourhood.” There are various moments during the film that flash back to early 20th century Australia. The piece aims to address the racism towards Aboriginal people, and the film shows us a clear contrast between the propaganda being preached during these clips and the lives of the modern-day Aboriginals. The switch between the two is managed seamlessly, avoiding what could have easily been confusing or pointless.
The film has managed to achieve a good balance between child-led and directed scenes leading to organic and often emotional viewing. The soundtrack, composed by Benjamin Speed, is a mysterious mix of orchestral instruments coupled with a loud flurry of everyday sounds, which makes for a hectic, dream-like state throughout the documentary. This is undoubtedly an ingenious nod to the chaos in which Dujuan lives his life, surrounded by structural racism, in an education system unintended for, and biased against Aboriginal children. The documentary makes excellent use of the magnificent Australian landscape and is eighty-five minutes of bright colour and natural beauty combined.
As someone who knows little about Aboriginal culture this piece answered a lot of questions I wasn’t even aware I had. What language do they speak? How are their families structured? What do they eat, wear, do? I found the documentary to be eye-opening whilst remaining respectful to the Arrente and Garrwa tribes. The decision to include both English and the Arrente language adds to the authenticity of the film and once again, reflects the director’s obvious compassion and understanding towards the issues faced by Aboriginal people.
Throughout the documentary, there are frank discussions about the country’s criminal justice system. We are shown harrowing scenes of Juvenile centres in Australia where racism and physical abuse are rife. The film ends by telling us that 100 percent of young people in these violent centres are Aboriginal. Despite this, the documentary is not one of doom and gloom, but rather, a triumphant protest of prejudice and an important lesson to learn and grow from.
The documentary is truly a colourful journey into the lives of First Nation families. Though heart-warming and educational, it manages to serve its purpose in shining the light on racism in Australia and urging us to treat children like Dijuan equally.
If you don’t wish to be challenged to make a difference, then by all means give this astounding film a miss. However if you would like to be part of the change you can watch a screening of “In My Blood it Runs” on the Bonington Gallery website or YouTube channel as part of their 2021 Formations series.
Likewise, you can support the movement against racism in Australia’s juvenile and education systems by visiting the website: www.inmyblooditruns.com
October 2021 – September 2022
The Formations programme is led by the Postcolonial Studies Centre in collaboration with Bonington Gallery. The series foregrounds the work of underrepresented writers, academics, artists, intellectuals and activists worldwide who address inequalities of all kinds, often bringing people from different places and working practices together for important conversations.
In 2020-21 the series presented events focused on Black History, Literature, Art, and Critical Thinking as central to global creative and intellectual work. Events running throughout the year were prompted by the themes History, Land, Memorials, DNA, Milk, and Lace. Artists, writers and thinkers considered the structures, patterns, and materials that connect global creative and intellectual histories. Many of the events are still available to watch on Bonington Gallery’s YouTube channel.
In 2021-22 the centre will continue to explore the Inequalities by engaging with global writers, artists, and thinkers, in three themed segments: Indigeneity (October-December), Love (January – March), and Audio/Visual (May-August). In April, postgraduate researchers from the Postcolonial Studies Centre will host a conference, building on Patterns of Struggle and Solidarity, last year’s Formations conference. This year’s segments help us to develop solidarities across communities and to pose urgent questions about persistent inequalities.
Everyone is welcome to join us for free events which intend to bring together people from all over the world in important and exhilarating conversations. Events this year will include film screenings, book launches, interviews, exhibitions, conversations, and creative writing workshops and interviews delivered by prizewinning novelist Eve Makis.
The series is developed by the Postcolonial Studies Centre at NTU and directed by Dr Jenni Ramone and Dr Nicole Thiara.
Jenni Ramone is Associate Professor of Postcolonial and Global Literatures at NTU. Her recent book publications include Postcolonial Literatures in the Local Literary Marketplace: Located Reading, The Bloomsbury Introduction to Postcolonial Writing, Postcolonial Theories, and Salman Rushdie and Translation. Jenni Ramone specializes in global and postcolonial literatures and the literary marketplace. She is pursuing new projects on Global Literature and Gender, and on literature and maternity.
Nicole Thiara is Principal Investigator on the AHRC-funded Research Network Series Writing, Analysing, Translating Dalit Literature(2014-16) and On Page and on Stage: Celebrating Dalit and Adivasi Literatures and Performing Arts (2020-21). She teaches postcolonial and contemporary literature, and her areas of research are Dalit, Adivasi and diasporic South Asian literature.
October – December 2021
Formation: Indigeneity — Rights and land access, sustainability, global inequalities.
The first segment of 2021-22 pays attention to the concept of indigeneity, and to indigenous people, communities, landscapes, artists, writers, and groups. Often considered controversial and closely associated with activism and protest related to rights and land access, indigenous artists and writers are creating some of the most innovative work and asking important questions about sustainability of all forms in New Zealand, Australia, Pacific Islands, Northern Europe, and North and South America. This segment brings together creative work by indigenous writers and artists from separate locations, to forge conversations about the ways in which indigenous scholarship, activism, and creativity is central to global questions of inequality.
January – March 2022
Formation: Love — The transformative nature of the everyday feeling of love.
Destiny Ekaragha once said that Black British filmmakers were not expected to make films about ordinary family stories and everyday things – like love. This segment foregrounds the transformative nature of the everyday feeling of love in art, writing, and research, while it also helps us to think about how the concept of love is defined, understood, and restricted, if love is understood and represented in limited ways. Events in this segment consider the expression, meaning, contexts, and impact of love by exploring the work of artists, writers and thinkers, emphasising questions of gender, sexuality, race, and culture.
4-7 April 2022
Hosting a wide range of presenters from across the globe, papers explore contemporary topical issues of decolonisation and its socio-political structures. The conference is open to discussions and deconstructions of long-held dominant ideologies and narratives which function to sustain the invisibility of colonial and empirical legacies in the contemporary world.
May – August 2022
Formation: Audio/Visual — Global artists, experimental sound and the visual arts.
Audio/Visual invites conversations about the significance and impact of visual communication (art, design, imagery, media, advertising, maps) and audio communication through music, but also the impact of language choice, and conversation. Events in this segment foreground meaning conveyed by music and art, and invite attention to global artists working in experimental ways with sound and the visual arts.
Listen to Dutch curator Anselm Franke speak about his career to date in this free public talk. If you would like to attend, please RSVP to confirm your attendance.
Anselm Franke has been Head of Visual Arts and Film at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) since 2013. There, he initiated and curated the exhibitions Parapolitics: Cultural Freedom and the Cold War (2017/18), 2 or 3 Tigers (2017), Nervous Systems (2016), Ape Culture (2015), Forensis (2014), The Whole Earth and After Year Zero (both 2013).
He previously worked as a curator at KW Berlin and as director of the Extra City Kunsthal in Antwerp. In 2005 he and Stefanie Schulte Strathaus founded the Forum Expanded for the Berlin International Film Festival of which he has been co-curator since. He was the chief curator of the Taipei Biennial in 2012 and of the Shanghai Biennale in 2014.
His exhibition project Animism was shown from 2009 until 2014 in collaboration with various partners in Antwerp, Berne, Vienna, Berlin, New York, Shenzhen, Seoul and Beirut. Franke received his doctorate from Goldsmiths College, London.
CAMPUS is a year-long and city-wide independent study programme in curatorial, visual and cultural studies, based on collaborative knowledge production and innovative research practices. It is a free-to-attend programme of monthly closed-door gatherings and free public talks.
Taking place in different locations in Nottingham (Nottingham Contemporary, Primary, Bonington Gallery, Backlit), CAMPUS welcomes participants from different backgrounds who wish to engage in conversations about contemporary debates and further explore interdisciplinary practices. CAMPUS is a space of encounter between researchers, practitioners, activists, scholars, institutions and organisations.
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.
