Elijah’s talk will address the interrelations between visual art and music culture, as well as plotting his own experience of working in grime and the history of grime. He will also discuss the importance of inquisitiveness and creativity in work and explore how applying organisational skills learnt in the arts and culture sector could be used in music programming, and vice versa.
Elijah’s lecture will be followed by a Q+A, hosted by Jonathan P. Watts, visiting lecturer in BA (Hons) Photography.
Elijah is a DJ and promoter, and along with Skilliam, co-founder of the grime record label Butterz. In these various roles Elijah has travelled the world and shared stages with some of grime’s biggest names. For six years he hosted his own grime show on Rinse FM. Over the past year Elijah has been Associate Artistic Director at Lighthouse Arts, Brighton, an arts and culture agency producing, supporting and presenting new art, film, music, design and games. Supported by Arts Council England, this initiative promotes diversity in the arts, of which, in the UK, only a small percent of artistic directors are black and minority ethnic.
In 2014, grime began to dominate popular music. In 2015, the Tottenham-based MC Skepta beat both David Bowie and Radiohead to the Mercury Prize. When Stormzy re-recorded the single “Shut Up”, originally a viral YouTube video, it entered the 2015 Christmas UK Singles Chart at number eighteen. Since then, grime has sound-tracked the so-called ‘youthquake’ that, among other things, has been credited with blocking Theresa May and the Conservatives’ hoped-for landslide in last year’s general election. Grime is the music of a generation.
Ashley Holmes’ film Everybody’s Hustling will be played on loop all day on Tuesday 15 May, from 10 am to 5 pm, then played once at the start of this event. View the complete listings for the Video Days: Week Five screenings.
Archivist Dan Heather, curator of the current Bonington Vitrines exhibition Communicating the Contemporary – The ICA Bulletin 1950s to 1990s, will be joining us on Saturday 17 February to discuss the role of the archivist and the value of archives in the contemporary arts.
The talk will examine the place of archives in exhibition making, following the so-called ‘archival turn’ in cultural production; the relationship between the archivist, curator and artist (including the artist-as-archivist); and the growth of art galleries, museums and cultural bodies engaging with their own archive collections to examine and re-evaluate their history.
The talk will also explore alternative approaches to archives and archiving, looking at radical and disruptive ideas around collecting and managing archive material and the value of archives not only as objects for historical enquiry, but as a generative source for new activity.
Dan Heather is currently the Deputy Archivist for Barts Health, an NHS Trust which manages archives and museum objects covering almost 900 years of healthcare and medicine in East London. He was previously the archivist at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA). He has also worked as an archivist in higher education, managing the records of Hornsey College of Art, and in architecture, at Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners.
Nottingham Trent University is delighted to invite Ruth Angel Edwards to speak as part of the 2017 Fine Art Live Lecture Series.
Edwards is a multimedia artist whose work explores the communication of ideology through popular culture. Drawing from mainstream and subcultural youth movements from the past and present, Edwards looks at the way audio and visual content is used to manipulate an audience and disseminate information.
Working between video, audio, sculpture, performance and print, Edwards explores subcultures, tracing their paths and examining the wider socio-economic environments that give rise to them, exposing their failures and flaws and uncovering lost spiritualities and hidden positive potential.
This live lecture coincides with Edwards’ solo exhibition Wheel of the Year – ! Effluent Profundel Zone ! which is showing in Bonington Gallery until Friday 16 February 2018. 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.
Ruth Angel Edwards is a Nottingham born multimedia artist based in London. Her recent exhibitions include: Enema Salvatore! Almanac, Turin, 2017; Light Deception / The Great Imitator, Auto Italia South East, London, 2017; 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.
Here is a selection of photos of a workshop that was delivered by Giorgio Sadotti’s as part of Shapeless Impact Not Time Slow Is (Flits By).
Ahead of his show here at the Gallery in April / May 2015, Simon Callery invited us down to his studio just outside of London. Simon and Gallery Resource Manager Tom Godfrey discuss the process of creating a painting and Simon’s approach to colour, as well as thoughts on collaboration, experimentation and much more.