Nottingham Contemporary present exhibition programme 2023.
Spring 2023: February 11–May 7, 2023
Carolyn Lazard: Long Take
Carolyn Lazard investigates the social and political implications of care through her art and writing. Their work unfolds in drastically diverse ways, calling into question how dominant modes of artmaking and work prioritize efficiency and skill over life itself. Lazard’s work is anchored on issues of access, focusing on dependency and incapacity as sites of abundance and collectivity.
Long Take, Lazard’s first solo exhibition in the UK, is an installation that responds to the history of dancing for the camera, as seen through the lens of accessibility as a creative tool. Lazard analyzes how a performance might be communicated beyond its picture by presenting dance work acoustically rather than visually, and why the visual has been the default and primary vehicle for aesthetic experience.
Rosalind Nashashibi: Hooks
This is the largest UK presentation of paintings by London-based artist Rosalind Nashashibi to date. Hooks is a collection of new and recent works by Nashashibi, the majority of which were created in the last year. The title of the exhibition relates to both the mechanism for shutting a window shutter and the hook of a song, a refrain that niggles or soothes.
These works are crisscrossed by fences and walls and are punctuated by an associative chain of symbols and animals—a cross becomes a bowtie becomes a moth or a pair of cat’s ears. Figures stare out of shuttered windows, their gazes veiled or partially covered. These luminous and fragmentary paintings are more concerned with oozing atmospheres, at times erotic and frustrated, than with coherent storylines.
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Charlotte Johannesson’s work is a mix of the artisanal and the digital. She has spent the last 50 years investigating the formal and conceptual links between the craft technology of the loom and the digital technology of computer programming. Johannesson recognized “excellent synchrony between the two machines” that were her image-making tools from the start.
Textiles, digital graphics, plotter prints, paintings, screenprints, handmade paper works, and lace experiments over the last 50 years are included in this exhibition. Image, pattern, color, texture, material, and language reoccur and play out throughout time and media. The exhibition is conceived as a way of seeking out the internal coherence within Johannesson’s practice, while underscoring the politically and artistically radical nature of her work, positioning her as a forerunner of today’s post-feminist and digital art.
Summer 2023: May 27–September 3, 2023
Kresiah Mukwazhi: Kirawa
Kresiah Mukwazhi’s mixed media collages, sculptural installations, performances, and movies are inspired by her personal experiences with gender-based violence, exploitation, and abuse in Zimbabwe. Mukwazhi has had a long-standing relationship with Harare’s female sex workers. She draws vitality from women’s resilience and the prospect of empowerment and self-organization through her bold and strong art as a sort of visual activism.
For her first institutional solo exhibition, Mukwazhi presents an entirely new body of commissioned work. She describes Kirawa as “a place of sacred resistance, where I expose and push back against socio-political issues forcing women into precarious labour, aiming at reclaiming the sacred power that women are destined to have. The female body, therefore, becomes a site of resistance and a site to question power relations.”
Abbas Zahedi: Holding A Heart in Artifice
Abbas Zahedi’s interdisciplinary activity incorporates philosophy, poetics, and social dynamics, as well as music, sculpture, and other gestures. Zahedi’s focus is in the connections established or formed in specific locations, with an emphasis on how personal and collective histories interweave.
Zahedi continues his continuing research into care, bereavement, and current philosophy in a fresh commissioned installation and expanded engagement program. It provides an opportunity to consider how art, galleries, and the audience are interconnected through reciprocal support networks. Working with staff and service users from a local hospital that specializes in Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation (ECMO)—a life-support therapy that uses an artificial heart-lung machine to oxygenate blood outside of the body—these communal moments transform Nottingham Contemporary’s gallery into a holding site for discussing and sharing experiences with the treatment and its aftereffects.
Eva Koátková creates huge and playful surrealist-inspired scenographies out of sculptures, items, collages, costumes, and writings. Her works, which are frequently activated through performance and storytelling, investigate societal laws and systems, such as the link between the individual and collective society. The exhibition, co-created by the Learning and Exhibitions departments at Nottingham Contemporary, will present new and current works, involving local communities and audience groups by inviting people to participate in adventurous new realms.
Autumn 2023: September 23, 2023–January 7, 2024
Ridykeulous (Nicole Eisenman & A.L. Steiner, with guest dyke Sam Roeck)
Founded in 2005, Ridykeulous is a curatorial initiative concerned with queer and feminist art. Using humour to critique the art world and heteropatriarchal culture at large, Ridykeulous often reinvents language to reflect their sensibilities and concerns. Focussing on installation and moving image, this artist-curated exhibition at Nottingham Contemporary will expand upon Ridykeulous’s 2021 video presentation at Hauser & Wirth in New York, entitled Ridykes’ Cavern of Fine Gay Wine and Videos: Hauser & Werk Bitch: Don’t Be Mad At Us! This will be Ridykeulous’s first institutional exhibition in Europe and will be accompanied by an experimental publication, co-published with MIT Press.
Nottingham Contemporary
Weekday Cross
Nottingham NG1 2GB
United Kingdom
T +44 115 948 9750
[email protected]