NTU Festival: Thought Forms
17th February - 28th February
Opening Nights: Tuesday 17th and Tuesday 24th February, 6-8pm
This February sees the return of the annual Surface collaboration with Nottingham Trent University with the 15th NTU Festival: Thought Forms.
Following the success of last year's festival, The Push and the Pull, this year's selected Fine Art students will use a critical and reflective approach to curate group exhibitions in response to the festival's theme Thought Forms. They will reflect on ideas such as the relationship between the real and the imaginary.
The NTU Festival offers selected Fine Art students the opportunity to curate a group exhibition that establishes their practice outside the university. Surface provides a supportive and professional environment for the students to plan and show their work. Two exhibitions will run concurrently in each week of the festival.
Week One
The Awful Depths of Endless Space
Velvet Acronyms a.k.a. Anna Li / Simon Raven
Exhibition dates: 18th- 21st February, Main Gallery
Opening Night: Tuesday 17th February, 6-8pm
The Awful Depths of Endless Space is a disco-inspired painting exhibition and live performance imagining a future where disability access reaches outer space.
Laid Bare
Imarni Boyer-Nugent / Abigail Hutchinson-Dodd / Jenna Pink / Hannah Taylor
Exhibition dates: 18th- 21st February, Project Space
Opening Night: Tuesday 17th February, 6-8pm
Who do you present to the world, and who do you hide?
The imaginary version of ourselves is stronger, armoured against vulnerabilities and harsh truths, yet the real, inner self is more raw, honest, and flawed. Laid Bare serves as an example of how personal experiences can be used within artworks to allow us to share the true, inner self that is often too vulnerable to expose in daily life.
Week Two
Radical Optimism
Catherine D’Arcy-Saunders / John William Hancock / Mansi Sudhir Khamkar / Peyton Koole / Sophie Motley / Faith Okorodudu / Ella van der Straaten
Exhibition dates: 25th- 28th February, Main Gallery
Opening Nights: Tuesday 24th February, 6-8pm
Linking the real and the imaginary, Radical Optimism highlights the variance between optimism as a cognitive exercise and Radical Optimism, not only as a cognitive exercise, but as a course of action one takes to pragmatically make optimism manifest into tangible reality.
For Space
Yang Jiang / Sarah Jouni / Roe Quinn / Showthamini
Exhibition dates: 25th- 28th February, Project Space
Opening Night: Tuesday 24th February, 6-8pm
For Space presents four tensions of lived space: institutional ambiguity and refusal faced by trans people, the aftermath and survival of female struggle, the displacement produced by war, and a personal memory that remains tender rather than sharp. Across painting, installation, and spatial interventions, the exhibition brings “space” from background to foreground, as a contested boundary and a possible sanctuary. It asks what it means to hold onto oneself, and to let memory remain intact, after space has been taken or damaged.
Artist Talks: Saturday 28th February, 2pm
The NTU Festival: Thought Forms opens in the Main Gallery and Project Space. As always, there will be a bar with ales from local brewery, Pheasantry.
Free Entry: Everyone Welcome