Starting on 13 August, the new season will feature workshops, galleries and more...
Nottingham's New Art Exchange are launching their new season this month, featuring a powerful programme highlighting anti-racist work and young Black artists.
To kick things off, the visual arts centre will be hosting a takeover day on Saturday 14 August. With a focus on spirituality and the self, this will offer free workshops including self-portraiture, lucid dreaming, creative writing, tarot readings and more.
In their main gallery space, 4UBU takes place from Saturday 14 August and will run until Saturday 9 October. This will offer something different and unique, inviting the community into the gallery not only to see works but to engage with visual arts, books, film/moving image, sound and sculptures, as well as an interactive drawing area. Inspired by recent discussions around the fight for racial equality, 4UBU seeks to express the joys of black life in multiple forms.
It will be an informal space for play, learning and community activity, and will host two active studios for artists-in-residence Mac Collins, an emerging designer, and Sofia Yala, a visual artist. Centred around community building, reclamation, redistribution of power in the organisation and celebrating Black life, 4UBU is a process and not an exhibition nor a project.
Cindy Sissikho, NAE’s Curator & Special Projects Producer, says, “4UBU originated in light of the protests after the death of George Floyd in the US. As an organisation that champions artists that are systemically underrepresented within the arts and culture sector, we felt an urgency to re-examine our own working practices regarding anti-racism.
“It is Black-led and has been a chance for Black staff within the organisation to reclaim the focus from injustice and pain to owned agency and joy with a strong local focus.”
The first UK solo exhibition for Nigerian-American experimental storyteller Arit Etukudo, winner of the NAE Open’s 2019 Exhibition Prize, also takes place in the Mezzainine Gallery between Saturday 14 August and Saturday 9 October. Etukudo’s practice focuses on the ideas of identity and life experience.
Questioning ideas around existentialism, The Christening is a mixed-media video installation which was inspired by a moment where the artist nearly drowned in a swimming pool and experienced an extreme state of solitude.
The exhibition includes a new series of work titled The Things It Carried (2021) too, which is a mixed media triptychs installation - a portrait of a body that is in process.
New Art Exchange is to host a special launch for the event on Friday 13 August with live DJ sets by Harleighblu and Where It's Warm, and live drawing by Honey Williams.
You can find out more about the new season on the New Art Exchange website and book onto their takeover workshops online.
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