video days Archives - Bonington Gallery

Video Days takes its title from the 90s skateboard video by Blind Skateboards. Produced in 1991 by American skateboarder and filmmaker, Spike Jonze, the iconic video depicts street and park skating in the US, and is considered one of the most influential skate videos of its time.

For the duration of 25 days the gallery will be transformed into an open cinema. Running daily, Video Days presents a different film or series of short films each day from different decades and genres. The films screened share several common themes, most prevalent is their relationship to the built environment.

The films on display do not come with a British Board of Film Classification (BBFC). We therefore advise that some of the films shown may contain scenes of nudity, discrimination, violence, drugs, imitable behaviour, and language unsuitable for young or vulnerable viewers. If you have any questions prior to visiting the gallery, please get in touch.

WEEK FIVE SCREENINGS

Preceded by a single screening of Ashley Holmes’ Everybody Hustling, 2017. Followed by Q+A hosted by Jonathan P. Watts, visiting Lecturer, BA (Hons) Photography.

Richard Paul, All that is Solid, 2018, (13 mins), shown in 3D.
Looped all day.

A 13-minute video by Richard Paul in which a narrator describes an unspecified city, the materials constituting its construction, and the myths connected to these material elements. Close-up images of crystals, stone and metals float gently in space before the viewer, captured using stereographic photography, rendering them in three dimensions, almost touchable. Meanwhile, a dulcet voice describes wheels rolling over iron pyrite streets, how quartz governs a subterranean electronics systems and how concrete is constructed into towers and geometric barriers. The title of the work is taken from The Communist Manifesto, where Marx and Engels proffer all that is solid, melts into air. As a substance is ingested to induce a hallucination or dream state, the cityscape warps, as does the consciousness of the narrator, who dreams of further, more fantastic materials.

WEEK FOUR SCREENINGS

Beach House, Shingle St, Suffolk Beach House is a film about a unique example of rural modernism, built on the UK coast of Suffolk by architect John Penn. Penn was an architect, painter, musician and poet whose nine houses in East Suffolk are all built with uncompromising symmetry adhering to the points of the compass in their positioning in the landscape they use a limited language of materials and form that were influenced by his time spent working in California with Richard Neutra. They are Californian modernist pavilions in the Suffolk landscape. Beach House is John Penn’s most uncompromising design in terms of idea as form. The film combines an archive film made by Penn himself on completion of the house with experimental sound recordings made during the same period and material recently filmed in the house to explore a convergence of filmic and architectural language and allow the viewer to piece together Beach House in its past and present forms.

John Maybury, Read Only Memory, 1998, (92 mins). Courtesy of Lux, London.
Screening times: 10 am, 11.45 am, 1.30 pm, 15.15 pm

Maybury’s significant contribution to experimental film and video becomes apparent through a complex reworking of his own archive footage.

Reactor, The Gold Ones, 2018, (10 hours).
This special edit of The Gold Ones will run in it’s entirety, 10 am – 8 pm

The project is an evolving narrative, that uses video, performance and installation to explore an imagined future inhabited by characters collectively known as the Gold Ones. When Max Gold’s video transmission first came through in 2014, he named himself ‘one of the Gold Ones’. After tracking Max for a period, filming began in the space known as the Cosmic Care Home (CCH). Initially remaining in what could be described as the outer or back spaces of the CCH, looking through the walls that are at times transparent, or listening in on voices from the other side. This is where the Gold Ones live, and despite their existence on a higher spiritual plane, beyond the limitations of time – the place they inhabit resembles what would be described as a ‘total institution’. They appear to be predominantly cut off from a wider community, and lead an enclosed and bureaucratically controlled existence. What has been seen to date is some semblance of the outer perimeter, or the first entry point into the body of the CCH. It is intended that you will further get to know the Gold Ones through the documentary that is being made here now, and in the future, about who they were and how they exist.

WEEK THREE SCREENINGS

Simon Martin, Carlton, 2006, (9 mins). Courtesy of LUX, London.
Looped all day.

The nine minutes of Simon Martin’s compelling, memorable film Carlton (2006) are devoted to a cultural philosophical meditation upon the Carlton cabinet, designed by Ettore Sottsass in 1981, and a founding example of the work made by the radical design group Memphis, established in Milan that same year. Outlandish, mischievous, heroically quirky – riding a perilous back-curve between supreme aesthetic poise and assuredly knowing kitsch – Memphis design was as much the articulation of an anti-historicist mission statement as it was a deft-footed style surf on the surging tides of 1980s excess.

Berwick Street Collective, Night Cleaners, 1975, (90 mins). Courtesy of LUX, London.
Screening times: 10 am, 11.45 am, 1.30 pm, 3.15 pm

Nightcleaners Part 1 was a documentary made by members of the Berwick Street Collective (Marc Karlin , Mary Kelly, James Scott and Humphry Trevelyan ), about the campaign to unionize the women who cleaned office blocks at night and who were being victimized and underpaid. Intending at the outset to make a campaign film, the Collective was forced to turn to new forms in order to represent the forces at work between the cleaners, the Cleaner’s Action Group and the unions – and the complex nature of the campaign itself. The result was an intensely self-reflexive film, which implicated both the filmmakers and the audience in the processes of precarious, invisible labour. It is increasingly recognised as a key work of the 1970s and as an important precursor, in both subject matter and form, to current political art practice.

A visual testament to Stormzy’s life and upbringing, the film chronicles Stormzy’s inner battles and temptations as he becomes master of his own destiny. “Return of the Rucksack,” “Bad Boys” and “100 Bags,” taken from Stormzy’s award winning debut studio album “Gang Signs & Prayer,” serve as the soundtrack to the film of the same name.

Rollo Jackson, Slimzee’s Going on Terrible, 2014.
Looped all day in sequence.

Slimzee (‘Godfather of Grime’) was the co-founder of Rinse FM and DJ in the UK Garage collective ‘Pay As You Go Cartel’.

Slimzee’s Going on Terrible charts his life, following his early days in pirate radio to receiving a career-threatening Asbo. Features old & new footage and interviews from fellow DJ’s & MC’s and even his own mother.

[CANCELLED] Frank Abbott, Neither Here Nor There: Displaced over 40 years, 1978-2018, live performance, 6 pm – 7 pm

Displaced over 40 years, Frank Abbott performs a live retrospective of his hand-held projector work.

*** Please note the evening performance has been cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances. ***

Mark Leckey, The March of the Big White Barbarians, 2005, (5 mins). Courtesy of LUX, London.
Looped all day.

London’s Public Sculptures are articulated by concrete poetry of Maurice Lemaitre in a free translation by Leckey’s Jack Too Jack.

Eric Baudelaire, Also Known As Jihadi, 2017, (99 mins). Courtesy of LUX, London.
Screening times: 11 am and 1 pm

Produced in the wake of the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, the film traces the journey and trial of a young man from the suburbs of Paris who travelled via Egypt to Syria to join the Al-Nusra Front (al-Qaeda). The subject’s path to radicalism is explored both through judicial transcripts and through a series of landscape shots filmed at the locations traversed by the subject: a biography determined not by what the subject did, but by what the subject saw. In this way, Baudelaire’s film positions itself as both a remake and a test of the landscape theory proposed by Japanese filmmaker Masao Adachi in his 1969 masterpiece A.K.A. Serial Killer, questioning how these landscapes reflect the social and political structures that form the backdrop for this journey of alienation and return.

WEEK TWO SCREENINGS

Jasmine Johnson, L Making Pesto, 2013, (13:37 mins).
Jasmine Johnson, Thieves and Swindlers are not Allowed in Paradise, 2014, (9:20 mins).
Jasmine Johnson, Third Party, 2015, (15:38 mins).
Jasmine Johnson, A Perfect Instrument, 2016, 32:20 mins).
Screening times: 10 am, 11.45 am, 1.30 pm, 15.15 pm

These works are a series of four video portraits by the artist, in which individuals are selected for their proximity to global dilemmas, and for their capacity to articulate human anxieties. This will be the first time they have been presented together.

The Solar Pessimist integrates a 34 minute spoken word monologue performed by actor Peter Hugo Daly (Gangs of New York, Cassandra’s Dream) with a soundtrack by Berlin-based musician Tim Eve (W/ndows, Night Angles) alongside professional lighting techniques including an ‘intelligent’ circular lighting rig and surround sound installation.

It was produced for the vast former industrial space at Spit & Sawdust, Cardiff, as a result of being supported through the Kim Fielding Award 2016—supporting ambitious, experimental approaches to practice across non-traditional gallery sites.

Somewhere between speculative ‘pub chat’ and philosophical diatribe our guiding voice becomes distracted, his thoughts distorted through the joint lenses of conspiracy theory, new-agism and that of the self-righteous contemporary consumer.

Within his meandering thought-processes are propositions about what best to be doing at the end of the world, how zero-gravity pornography will affect us all and…if the sun is a conscious being…what happens when he starts talking back?

For Video Days, Lawrence presents a version of The Solar Pessimist as a single channel video work, the production of which was integrated within the live event itself

NG83: WHEN WE WERE B BOYS, 2016, (74 mins). Filmmakers: Claude Knight (Producer & Director), Luke Scott (Writer & Director), Sam Derby-Cooper (Director).
Screening times: 10 am, 11.30 am, 1 pm, 2.30 pm, 4 pm, 5.30 pm, 6.45 pm

In Degrees of Blindness, Evans considers the different possibilities of perceiving the world, our surroundings, and explores different degrees of vision with varying backgrounds and forms of expression.

Karen Cunningham, Movable Type; Under Erasure, 2016, (13:32 mins).
Looped all day.

Movable Type; Under Erasure was commissioned by Legion TV and first shown at The Showroom, London in 2016. Filmed largely on location at Writing-on-Stone, Canada the work features an original monologue written and read by the eminent theorist and cultural critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.

WEEK ONE SCREENINGS

Blind Skateboards, Video Days, 1991 (24 mins), Dir. Spike Jonze.
Looped all day.

Video Days is a skateboard video released in 1991 by Blind Skateboards, it was produced by American skateboarder and filmmaker, Spike Jonze. It is widely considered to be one of the most influential skate videos of all time, providing early platforms for now legendary skaters including Mark Gonzales, Jason Lee and Guy Mariano.

Forensic Architecture, 77sqm_9:26min, 2016, (27:23 mins).
Screening times: Every 30 mins all day (11 am – 3 pm)

Counter investigating the testimony of Andres Temme in relation to the murder of Halit Yozgat in Kassel, 6 April 2006.
Commissioned by the ‘Unraveling the NSU Complex’ people’s tribunal; Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt (HKW); Initiative 6 April; and documenta14.

Shortly after 17:00 on the 6 April 2006, Halit Yozgat, 21 years old, was murdered while attending the reception counter of his family run Internet café in Kassel, Germany. His was the ninth of ten racist murders committed by a neo-Nazi group known as the National Socialist Underground or NSU across Germany between 2000 and 2007.

At the time of the killing, an intelligence officer named Andreas Temme was present in the shop. Temme was at the time an employee of the State Office for Constitutional Protection (Landesamt für Verfassungsschutz), the domestic intelligence agency for the German state of Hessen. Temme did not disclose this fact to the police, but was later identified from his internet records.

In his interrogation by the police, and in the subsequent NSU trial in Munich, Temme denied being a witness to the incident, and claimed not to have noticed anything out of the ordinary. The court accepted his testimony. It determined that Temme was present at the back room of the internet café at the time of the murder. It also accepted that from his position in the shop it was possible not to have witnessed the killing.

Within the 77 square meters of the Internet café and the 9:26 minutes of the incident, different actors crossed paths — members of migrant communities, a state employee and the murderers — and were architecturally disposed in relation to each other. The shop was thus a microcosm of the entire social and political controversy that makes the ‘NSU Complex’.

In November 2016, eleven years after the murder, an alliance of civil society organisations known as ‘Unraveling the NSU Complex’ commissioned Forensic Architecture to investigate Temme’s testimony and determine whether it could be truthful.

We launch our next exhibition Video Days with a programme of talks, screenings and photography dedicated to the local and international skateboarding community.

In conjunction with local not-for-profit community group Skate Nottingham, we’ll be exploring skateboarding’s potential to drive cultural and social change, particularly through the re-engagement of young skateboarders with education and employment by supporting individual creative and cultural interests.

This event reflects Nottingham’s lively intergenerational skate community, and identify a set of themes that link the local and international significance of skateboarding to the objectives of the open cinema we are creating in the gallery. It also shows the rich texture of disciplines and interests reflected across the entire Video Days programme.

Skateboarding is an activity that reflects a consistent theme within the programme of human-kind’s disruptive and subjective relationship with the built environment.

Attend the preview

Preview programme

Curated by Tom Quigley, who self-publishes Varial Magazine, featuring East Midlands skateboard photography. Alongside Tom’s own work, the exhibition will include contributions from active local skate photographers such as Neil Turner, Vic Camilleri, Dave Bevan, and Andrew Horsley (one of the founders of Sidewalk magazine, the UK and Europe’s longest running skate magazine, and internationally respected skate photographer) and images from Nottingham between the 1970s and 1990s from photographers including Andrew McDermott and Steve Tristram. Tom was recently the subject of the second part of the film series ‘We Can Fly’, and had work featured in the Sneinton Pride of Place collection of photography and visual art published by the Caravan Gallery, 2018.

A talk on skateboarding and Nottingham’s social, cultural and economic development, Chris Lawton Skate Nottingham.

Chris is one of the co-founders of Skate Nottingham. He is a Senior Research Fellow in economics at Nottingham Business School, here at Nottingham Trent University. He is also a feature writer for Caught in the Crossfire magazine, a long-running web-magazine on skateboarding, punk and radical politics. In this short discussion, Chris will talk about examples of skateboarders proactively driving inclusive development in cities around the world, particularly Malmö, Copenhagen and Tampere, and how both the activity and its wider culture and community provide opportunities for Nottingham (like Malmö, a medium-sized post-industrial city with a young population but significant regeneration challenges).

Dan is a skateboarder and academic historian, and is one of the Nottingham skate scene’s most prolific filmers. This short film charts the final year of Nottingham’s large DIY skatepark project, which occupied waste ground next to the BBC Island – earmarked for development as part of Nottingham’s stalled ‘East Side City’ project; amid wider local political interest in the loss of genuine ‘common’ land in the city centre (and thus the radical potential of skateboarders repurposing blighted brownfield space land-banked by property developers and kept out of public use for more than two decades). The original DIY and a later, short-lived guerrilla skatepark in waste ground by BioCity were both demolished by the landowners towards the end of 2017, land which has, for the time being, been returned to its previously unused state.

A montage of Nottingham skateboarding past and present, (20 mins), Neil Turner: 5.40 pm – 6 pm

Neil has been filming skateboarding in Nottingham for almost 20 years, alongside documentary video work and photography, and is currently working on the first full-length video from Forty Two Shop, Nottingham’s only independent skate store. Neil has filmed edits for Sidewalk magazine and has amassed a huge archive of footage of Nottingham skateboarders from the late 90s days of Old Market Square and Broadmarsh Banks through to now, which he will draw from and re-edit specially for this event.

Pieces of Palestine, featuring Isle Skateboards and SkatePal, 2017, (20 mins), Jacob Harris: 6.10 pm – 6.30 pm

A short film featuring the Isle skateboard team’s 2016 visit to the West Bank with award-winning charity SkatePal, to be shown with the permission of Jacob Harris (winner of the Bright Trade Show European Skateboard Awards for both his 2013 independent film Eleventh Hour and Isle’s debut video in 2015, Vase). Pieces of Palestine will help raise awareness and support for two of Skate Nottingham’s young female coaches who will be volunteering with SkatePal in the West Bank this October.

Video Days, 1991, (24 mins), Spike Jonze and Blind Skateboards: 6.30 pm – 7 pm

This is a deep dive into a selection of the artists from our Video Days Exhibition, exploring their work alongside showing their films in the gallery.

Forensic Architecture

Forensic Architecture (FA) is a research agency, based at Goldsmiths, University of London, who undertake advanced architectural and media research on behalf of international prosecutors, human rights organisations and political and environmental justice groups. Forensic architecture is also an emergent academic field developed at Goldsmiths, which refers to the production and presentation of architectural evidence – buildings and urban environments and their media representations.

In recent years FA has successfully tested its methodologies in a number of landmark legal and human rights cases undertaken together with and on behalf of threatened communities, Non-governmental organisations (NGOs), prosecutors and the United Nations (UN).

77sqm_9:26min, 2016, (27:23 mins)
Screening: Saturday 21 April, 11 am – 3 pm
Showing every 30 mins (free, no prior booking required).

Commissioned by the ‘Unraveling the NSU Complex’ people’s tribunal; Haus Der Kulturen Der Welt (HKW); Initiative 6 April; and documenta14.

Karen Cunningham

Karen Cunningham is an artist based in Glasgow whose practice incorporates moving image, sculpture and photography. She studied photography at Edinburgh College of Art, including a study exchange to the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore USA, and completed her MFA at Glasgow School of Art. Her film and video works have been shown throughout the UK and Europe including Tramway, Glasgow; Collective Gallery, Edinburgh; Forum Stadtpark, Graz, Austria and the Malmö Konsthall, Sweden. Interested in the ideas progress and attribution Karen’s work explores the overlapping of emergent and residual aspects within culture and technology often drawing on disciplines such as Science-Fiction and Anthropology which utilise speculative approaches to knowledge and interpretation.

Karen also curates exhibitions, organises events and writes texts. These include the symposium ‘An Endless Theater: the convergence of contemporary art and anthropology in observational cinema’ featuring works by Karen Cunningham, Edward S. Curtis, Geoffrey Farmer, Rosalind Nashashibi, Jean Rouch, Sterling Ruby and John Smith at University of Edinburgh (2013) the online screening and essay series ‘The Anthropology Effect’ for MAP magazine (2013-14) and ‘Viewfinders’ a curated selection of artists film & videos as part of the artists moving image programme at Tramway, Glasgow for ‘Generation’ (2014).

Karen’s film Movable Type; Under Erasure, 2016 will be looped all day on Saturday 28 April.

Commissioned by Legion TV, it was first shown at The Showroom, London in 2016. Filmed largely on location at Writing-on-Stone, Canada the work features an original monologue written and read by the eminent theorist and cultural critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.

Rollo Jackson

Rollo Jackson is a London-based director whose work spans music videos, commercial work, and documentary filmmaking.

Jackson grew up immersed in the UK’s dance music culture. His music films for James Blake, Tate Britain and Warp Records all bear the subtle traces of mid-90s escapades spent clad in Versace prints and box-fresh Reeboks and soundtracked by crackling pirate radio or booming warehouse speakers.

His short film Gang Signs & Prayer will be looped in the Gallery on Wednesday 2 May.

A visual testament to Stormzy’s life and upbringing, the film chronicles Stormzy’s inner battles and temptations as he becomes master of his own destiny. Return of the Rucksack, Bad Boys and 100 Bags, taken from Stormzy’s award winning debut studio album Gang Signs & Prayer, serve as the soundtrack to the film of the same name.

Slimzee’s Going On Terrible will be looped in sequence with Gang Signs & Prayer on Wednesday 2 May.

Slimzee (‘Godfather of Grime’) was the co-founder of Rinse FM and DJ in the UK Garage collective ‘Pay As You Go Cartel’. Slimzee’s Going On Terrible charts his life, following his early days in pirate radio to receiving a career-threatening Asbo. Features old & new footage and interviews from fellow DJ’s & MC’s and even his own mother.

Emily Richardson

Emily Richardson is a UK based filmmaker who creates film portraits of particular places. Her work focuses on sites in transition and covers an extraordinarily diverse range of landscapes including empty East London streets, forests, North Sea oil fields, post-war tower blocks, empty cinemas and Cold War military facilities. She is currently doing a practice-led PhD on modern architectural space in artists’ film and video at the Royal College of Art in London.

Richardson’s film Beach House, 2015 will be screened in the gallery on Tuesday 8 May (looped all day).

Beach House is a film about a unique example of rural modernism, built on the UK coast of Suffolk by architect John Penn. Penn was an architect, painter, musician and poet whose nine houses in East Suffolk are all built with uncompromising symmetry adhering to the points of the compass in their positioning in the landscape they use a limited language of materials and form that were influenced by his time spent working in California with Richard Neutra. They are Californian modernist pavilions in the Suffolk landscape.

Beach House is John Penn’s most uncompromising design in terms of idea as form. The film combines an archive film made by Penn himself on completion of the house with experimental sound recordings made during the same period and material recently filmed in the house to explore a convergence of filmic and architectural language and allow the viewer to piece together Beach House in its past and present forms. More info…

Elijah

Bringing the Video Days event programme to a close, we’re excited to welcome Elijah for a talk and Q&A on Tuesday 15 May, from 6.30 pm – 8.30 pm.

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 soundtracked 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.

As well as plotting his own experience of working in grime, by which a history of grime will emerge, Elijah’s talk will address the interrelations between visual art and music culture. He will 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.

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.

Screening Days

For 25 days, our gallery space will be transformed into an open cinema. Video Days presents a different film or series of short films every day from different decades and genres. The films screened share several common themes; most prevalent is their relationship to the built environment.

Video Days takes its title from the 90s skateboard video by Blind Skateboards. Produced in 1991 by American skateboarder and filmmaker Spike Jonze, the iconic video depicts street and park skating in the US, and is considered one of the most influential skate videos of its time.

Participants who feature in this exhibition include independent research agency Forensic Architecture whose film 77sqm_9:26min documents their counter investigation into evidence relating to the murder of 21-year-old Halit Yozgat in Kassel, Germany. Halit was the ninth of ten racist murders performed by a neo-Nazi group known as the National Socialist Underground (NSU) across Germany between 2000 and 2007.

Video Days also features Paris-based filmmaker Eric Baudelaire, whose 2017 film Also Known As Jihadi traces a young man’s journey to radicalisation. Other films include contributions from photographer and filmmaker Dick Jewell and artists Karen Cunningham and Simon Martin.

Installation view. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Julian Lister.

Screening Days

Associated Events

Skateboarding is an activity that reflects a consistent theme within the programme of human-kind’s disruptive and subjective relationship with the built environment.

In conjunction with local, not-for-profit community group Skate Nottingham, we’ll be exploring skateboarding’s potential to drive cultural and social change, particularly through the re-engagement of young skateboarders with education and employment by supporting individual creative and cultural interests.

This event will reflect Nottingham’s lively intergenerational skate community, and identify a set of themes that link the local and international significance of skateboarding to the objectives of the open cinema we are creating in the gallery, and the rich texture of disciplines and interests reflected across the entire Video Days programme.

We launch this exhibition with a programme of talks, screenings and photography dedicated to the local and international skateboarding community.

From our Blog

Big thanks to everyone who came along to the Preview of Video Days last night! We really enjoyed hosting Nottingham’s skate community for an evening of photos and film screenings – as well as a great talk from Chris Lawton, co-founder of Skate Nottingham. By the end of the evening a mini skate session broke out …inside the gallery…