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.
Nottingham Trent University (NTU) is delighted to invite Audrey Reynolds to speak as part of the 2017 Fine Art Live Lecture Series.
Audrey is an artist and writer, her work includes sculpture, painting, text, film and spoken-word audio. She studied at Bath College of Art and at Chelsea College of Art, London.
Audrey 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.
Solo exhibitions include:
Group exhibitions include:
A collection of her writing will be published by AkermanDaly in Spring 2017.
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.
Krísis: critical interventions is a one-day symposium that brings the international network of artistic practices and narratives from the Krísis exhibition and public programme into a day of talks, presentations and performative lectures.
It provides an opportunity for artists, curators, academics and the general public – both local and international – to engage in dialogue; reflecting on the complex topography of Nottingham and the UK, the relationship to the art world and how socio-political issues are addressed in both Nottingham and in international contexts.
Presenters include the international artists involved in Krísis, Nottingham-based activists on refugees and female genital mutilation issues, guest speakers, and Nottingham Trent University lecturers and researchers from the School of Art & Design and School of Arts and Humanities.
Participants will explore the exhibition themes and the artists’ responses and practices which encourage the debate on art as a transformational tool for research on contemporary societal matters.
Krísis: critical interventions is chaired by Professor Duncan Higgins, (NTU School of Art & Design), Dr Roy Smith (NTU School of Arts and Humanities) and Dr Anna Ball (NTU School of Arts and Humanities) in partnership with the curators from Something Human, and Nottingham Contemporary.
This event is part of the public programme in association with the exhibition Krísis. Curated by Something Human and presented in partnership with Bonington Gallery, Nottingham Trent University and Nottingham Contemporary.
Download your copy of the programme (pdf)
Image credit: Sama Alshaibi, Al-Tariqah (The path), 2014 Courtesy of the artist and Ayyam Gallery
Please join us this Thursday evening for a conversation between our current exhibitor Karol Radziszewski and Bonington Gallery Director Tom Godfrey. The conversation will cover a range of topics but remain centred on the tragic situation in Ukraine – the neighbouring country to Poland, Karol’s country of birth and where he is based. Karol will offer insight and perspective unique to where he is situated and his broad network (LGBTQ+ and beyond) of friends and collaborators who are currently gravely affected – either taking cover in Ukraine or seeking refuge elsewhere.
Watch on Bonington Gallery’s YouTube channel.
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