Nottingham Contemporary

Madani imagines the bizarre and purposeless rituals of a male-only domain. An absurd and nightmarish sense of exposure pervades her paintings of groups of men in underwear or sleepwear, blissfully unaware – and evidently enjoying – their own predicaments, and each others’ company. Madani has said that she “let’s the subconscious speak.”

Bodily functions appear in her paintings and digital animations, creating intensely private moments that are strangely shared. Moving outside the body, she describes some of her works as speaking of a sexual, religious or spiritual ecstasy. These are inextricably and disturbingly tangled, critiquing male power cliques. She has said that she uses humour to “bring everyone’s guards down”. In her paintings competitive violence is reduced to an absurd impotence. So called feminine colours or patterns are applied to the macho activities. A new series of works feature children from a traditional learn to read series, books that reflect the conservative gender roles of the 50s. As a teenager newly arrived in the United States, Madani herself used them to learn English. The children appear alongside Madani’s little men who can be good or evil. The original illustrations of the children’s ordered existence are subverted by their anarchic actions. Madani’s work often seems to tell a story. She draws inspiration from the graphic novels of Alan Moore and Robert Crumb. Her work also contains numerous arthistorical references that range from Abstract Expressionism to Minimalism, encompassing in particular Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings and Morris Louis’s poured paint technique. Born in 1981 in Tehran, Tala Madani lives and works in Los Angeles.

Suitable for

• Any age

Website

http://www.nottinghamcontemporary.org/art/tala-madani

This informal seminar offers space to read source material related to the critical reception of WIoM, and discuss it in relationship to the artistic and sexual politics of the 1970s and 80s.

This day of events returns to an exhibition dedicated to this question, Women’s Images of Men, which opened at the ICA in 1980 before travelling across a circuit of UK contemporary art centres. Proposed in protest against the underrepresentation of female artists, it was an open-submission artist-curated exhibition, emphasising figurative representation. With About Time, curated by Cate Elwes, and Issue by Lucy Lippard, it was the first of a consecutive trio of feminist exhibitions at the ICA. Hugely popular, many reviews targeted the theme but paid less attention to its content. This day of activities focuses on the ways in which individual artists responded to Women’s Images of Men, exploring its place within a history of feminist exhibition-making, and its relevance to contemporary gender positions.

Suitable for

• Any age

Website

http://www.nottinghamcontemporary.org/event/womens-images-men-study-session

Isabella Maidment addresses Chetwynd’s exhibition in relation to the re-presentation of live art, and the interface between performance oriented practice and the contemporary art museum, the subject of her collaborative doctoral research, with Tate Modern and UCL.

Suitable for

• Any age

Website

http://nottinghamcontemporary.org/event/isabella-maidment

Created by artists, for families, our kit bags are full of activities and bright ideas to help everyone get the most from our exhibitions, whatever their age or experience of art. Just ask at Reception and pick one up for free.

“A great idea – it helped my children to be able to look at the art in more detail.” Family visitor

Suitable for

• Any age

Admission

Free, Available from Reception

Website

http://www.nottinghamcontemporary.org/event/family-weekends-february

Her sculptures and installations acquire an afterlife in exhibition spaces, occasionally animated by amateur actors and professional dancers as they will be at Nottingham Contemporary. Chetwynd is influenced by popular performing traditions such as medieval mummer plays, carnivals, communes, drag acts and political demonstrations, as well as the history of performance in avant-garde art.

She is at home with the classics and with popular culture – and she uses one to give new meaning to the other. Her performances have referred to the ideas, images and storylines of Giotto, John Milton, Charles Dickens, Karl Marx and Dante, for example, but also Meatloaf, The Addams Family, Star Wars and Starship Troopers. Brought up on film sets (her mother is an Oscar-winning production designer), and studying both anthropology and fine art at university, Chetwynd moves easily between folk traditions, sci-fi, 60s Happenings and contemporary moral issues. Never shy of taking on big issues, her performances and art objects champion the values of the amateur and the art of improvisation.

The exuberance, absurdity, sexiness and delirium of her performances is underpinned by sincerity and commitment to the issues she addresses. These have included the state of democracy, gender politics and personal debt. For this, her first solo exhibition at a public gallery in Britain, Chetwynd presents a selection of recent works around two largescale performative sculptures – a tent-sized Brainbug, leader of a bug colony in Starship Troopers (1997), which is accompanied by a sequence of scaled-down dioramas of film sets, and the grinning Catbus from the 1988 Japanese animated film My Neighbour Totoro. This converts into a video lounge visitors can enter and use. A selection of paintings from Chetwynd’s Bat Opera series feature portraits of individual bats in a heroic 18th century manner. Others are romantic landscapes of swarms of bats rising from caves and ruins.

The extraordinarily hairy Cousin Itt, of Addams Family fame, will be your host and guide to the exhibition, while our Gallery Assistants will be on hand to help translate his rapid, indecipherable bleeps. Marvin Gaye Chetwynd was born in London in 1973 and now lives in Glasgow. She recently changed her name from Spartacus Chetwynd and was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2012.

Suitable for

• Any age

Website

http://www.nottinghamcontemporary.org/art/marvin-gaye-chetwynd

Four fortnightly sessions use Madani’s work as a springboard to explore themes including role of humour, irony and parody in aesthetic critique, the limits of offensive art as a challenge to political correctness, and the gendered and racialised nature of dominant representations of what counts as “disgusting.” The atmosphere will be friendly and open, all are welcome and sessions are free, but booking is required. Led by Tracey Potts & Colin Wright (Centre for Critical Theory, University of Nottingham).

Suitable for

• 18+

Website

http://nottinghamcontemporary.org/event/study-session

Join this course to gain practical knowledge and a deeper understanding of what is meant by the terms installation and intervention. Tutor Chris Lewis-Jones will introduce you to how these ideas manifest themselves in contemporary art and give you the materials and ideas to create your own.

Suitable for

• 18+

Admission

Cost: £126.00 (Free to those on low incomes or in receipt of benefits). For more information or to book a place please contact Caroline Keep on 0115 9858203 or ckeep@wea.org.uk

Website

http://www.nottinghamcontemporary.org/adult-learning

Sat 15 February, Sat 1 and 15 March, 2pm

Watch Marvin Gaye Chetwynd's tent sized Brain Bug come alive in a high energy performance with dancers in Gallery 4.

Chetwynd's internationally renowned performances champion the values of the amateur and the art of improvisation. The exuberance, absurdity, sexiness and delirium of her performances is underpinned by sincerity and commitment to the issues she addresses. These have included the state of democracy, gender politics and personal debt.

The Brain Bug performance is inspired by the film Starship Troopers, and involves 12 specially trained dancers.

The Brain Bug was first presented at the New Museum, New York in 2011 for the exhibition Homemade Tasers.

Gallery 4. Drop in. Free

Suitable for

• Any age

Admission

Free

Website

http://www.nottinghamcontemporary.org/event/brain-bug-performances-0

Alan Read maps out the thinking behind “abandoned practices”, an emerging field of enquiry, proposed within his writing and developed in practice by a widening number of performance-oriented artists and researchers. Drawing a theoretical basis from the work of Isabelle Stengers and Giorgio Agamben, Read’s argument shifts attention to lost, redundant and marginalised practices, over and above those that survive, continue, or are successful in contemporary impact. His talk seeks to identify, recover, and examine examples abandoned for economic, political or disciplinary reason, arguing for the value of a radical inclusivity, rather than reduction.

Live Broadcast Online

Website

http://nottinghamcontemporary.org/event/abandoned-practices-endangered-uses

Ben Taylor, Principal Lecturer in Media & Culture Studies at NTU discusses both exhibitions in relationship to his research interests in the carnivalesque, Mikhail Bakhtin, comedy and food.

Suitable for

• Any age

Website

http://nottinghamcontemporary.org/event/ben-taylor

Madani’s depiction of male subjects and spaces is an often commented on aspect of her work. But why should this be significant – what issues are at stake in the representation of men by women? This day of events returns to an exhibition dedicated to this question, Women’s Images of Men, which opened at the ICA in 1980 before travelling across a circuit of UK contemporary art centres. Proposed in protest against the underrepresentation of female artists, it was an open-submission artist-curated exhibition, emphasising figurative representation. With About Time, curated by Cate Elwes, and Issue by Lucy Lippard, it was the first of a consecutive trio of feminist exhibitions at the ICA. Hugely popular, many reviews targeted the theme but paid less attention to its content. This day of activities focuses on the ways in which individual artists responded to Women’s Images of Men, exploring its place within a history of feminist exhibition-making, and its relevance to contemporary gender positions.

Introduced by Catherine Elwes, Professor of Moving Image Art, UAL and founding Editor of the Moving Image Review and Art Journal.

Followed by a roundtable discussion that re-unites three protagonists in the story of Women’s Images of Men. Catherine Elwes was amongst its artist-organisers. She is joined by art critic Sarah Kent, co-editor with Jacqueline Morreau of the publication that followed it, and Lill-Ann Chepstow Lusty, one of the exhibition’s participating artists. Chaired, and organised in collaboration with Amy Tobin, University of York.

Suitable for

• Any age

Website

http://www.nottinghamcontemporary.org/event/womens-images-men-screening-and-discussion