Directors Message

Welcome to our website. It’s temporary, because like us - and like our building - our online activity is undergoing transformation. So keep coming back to it to see how it changes.

The building itself is at an exciting stage. As I write this, its most distinctive feature – large, green, fluted, concrete panels, ‘etched’ in lace – now more or less clad the entire building. We’re witnessing one of Nottingham’s finest architectural landmarks rising from one of the City’s most historic sites. Already it seems to complement and hold its own with the best of its distinguished neighbours - the Lacemarket’s former warehouses and St Mary’s – which were, of course, equally bold buildings in their day. We feel fortunate to be working with one of this country’s finest architectural practice, Caruso St John, and now cannot wait to move in. We’re looking forward to working with exceptional artists in what are going to be fantastic exhibition spaces. And we want to welcome you to the building, whether you live in Nottingham or are planning to visit.

We are very busy in the meantime. Some of you will notice that we became Nottingham Contemporary a few weeks ago. This has replaced our old working name, CCAN. In making the decision, we wanted to call attention to our desire to play an invaluable role in the life of the city. The name Nottingham is known around the world. This is something we also wanted to make full use of, and amplify, particularly in the sphere of art and ideas. Nottingham Contemporary is in the middle of the City, a city that is itself in the middle of England. The building stands on what was once the centre of the old Saxon town: its market place, town hall and fort. We want to be a kind of market place for the exchange of ideas.

There is little in culture and society that contemporary art doesn’t touch on, and in that sense art can offer a wondrous array of tools with which to consider everything else. The Great Central line also ran through what will soon be our ground floor. We want act as a junction where art and audiences of all kinds meet, and connect the local and international. (The artist and local historian Chris Matthews has elaborated on the historical resonances of the site in the commissioned essay you will find on this site).

These ambitions of ours will be conveyed this year through off-site exhibitions and projects that relate present-day, international concerns with various facets of Nottingham’s history, particularly as borne out by significant sites in and around the City. Coming up is ‘Remember Revolution: 68 at 40’, which examines the global legacy of the events of May 1968, forty years on, and connects these to Nottingham’s own radical heritage. ‘Disobedience’, held in May at what was, Beatties, by the library, is an engrossing exhibition-cum-library of art, film and other artefacts concerned with activism worldwide. Later in the month we will be screening the powerful films of Peter Watkins at Broadway Media Centre, along with other screenings related to 1968. In the summer, we turn our attention to work, life and legend of Lord Byron - poet, dandy, rebel, soldier, socialite, celebrity and sex symbol – through an exhibition of contemporary art works and performances within the house and grounds of Newstead Abbey, his spectral ancestral home.

Another towering figure, Michel Foucault, one of the 20th Century’s most influential thinkers, is the inspiration for an international exhibition and conference at the Galleries of Justice, and its former police station next door. Artists, writers and academics from a wide range of fields will reflect on ways Foucault’s idea of the ‘carceral’, from his landmark ‘Discipline and Punish:  the Birth of the Prison’, can be applied to our digital age, when surveillance and control, whether online, on our streets, within institutions or through the ‘War on Terror’, is increasingly exercised without walls.

We then move on to begin an ongoing exploration of Nottingham’s Twin Cities, in the form of guests from those cities, and exchange between our young people and theirs. By finding out more about our ‘twins’ – Ghent (Belgium), Harare (Zimbabwe), Karlsruhe (Germany), Ljubljana (Slovenia), Minsk (Belarus) and Ningbo (China) - we want to learn about ourselves.

Alex Farquharson
Director
Nottingham Contemporary