Stuart Rose, Laxton farmer and Clerk to the Gaits and Commons leads a Guided walk around Laxton Castle, Laxton’s strip farming and manorial system as part of Disclosures II. Photo: Julian Hughes

Histories of the Present

Nottingham Contemporary in 2008

This year has given us the opportunity to work off-site in fascinating locations in and around Nottingham while our building is under construction.  Our purpose has been to begin building an audience and profile for Nottingham Contemporary – locally, regionally, nationally and internationally – through a programme of exhibitions and events that connect the local with the international, and the past with the present. By the time we open this time next year we aim to have developed our own history with the City: its people, its places, its experience, its imagination. The site on which our building stands is one of the most historically significant in Nottingham, and we have commissioned local historian and artist Chris Matthews to write a study of its history, from prehistoric times to the present, which can be downloaded as a PDF from this link. Through this year’s programme we also want to begin to reveal how contemporary art may act as a means through which to think differently about virtually every aspect of the world today. This is an ethos that will underpin our artistic and educational programming in the building once open.

We began this in partnership with New Art Exchange in January with Lace and Slavery, an exhibition and conference that drew historic and poetic relations between lace manufacture in Nottingham and the horror of the slave plantations in the Americas, to mark the end of the Bicentenary of the Abolition of the UK Transatlantic Slave Trade.  This was reflected in British Ghanaian artist Godfried Donkor’s powerful exhibition at The Yard Gallery at Wollaton Hall, the Elizabethan manor in Nottingham that is home to the City’s collection of lace machinery. This became the occasion for far reaching cultural and theoretical reflections by several world-renowned writers - including Kobena Mercer and Kodwo Eshun - at a related conference and series of talks. It is appropriate we began our Histories of the Present with lace: Caruso St John, our architects, have etched a 19th Century lace sample into the distinctive green, scalloped concrete façade of our building on Weekday Cross.

Nottingham was a national byword for political unrest throughout the 18th and 19th Centuries: it was famed for its food riots, Luddites breaking mechanical looms, its notorious slums, and not least, the torching of Nottingham Castle by the people when the House of Lords failed to pass the Reform Bill in 1831. In May we presented Remember Revolution: 68 at 40, a season of films, events and an exhibition marking the 40th anniversary of the tumultuous events in Paris in May 1968, a watershed in recent political history, echoed by numerous uprisings in West and East Europe, the USA and Central America. Alongside a retrospective at Broadway Media Centre of Peter Watkins, arguably Britain’s most radical filmmaker, we brought Marco Scotini’s Disobedience from Milan to Nottingham, an ambitious exhibition-cum-archive featuring some 25 international artists, filmmakers and activists, which offered a global cartography of civil disobedience and radical political action, beginning with the legacy of revolutionary Italy in the 1970s and the influential political philosophy it gave rise to. Swiss artist Luca Frei created an arresting exhibition design for the archive, reminiscent of barricades, visible through shop windows from Mount Street in the City centre.

Following our homage to Byron at Newstead Abbey, Nottingham Contemporary went a few miles up county to the small, picturesque village of Laxton, England's last example of the Open Field system of farming.  Disclosures II: The Middle Ages drew serious and entertaining parallels between Wiki, Creative Commons, Copyleft and Open Source initiatives on the internet and the farmers' legally enshrined shared use of what is now Crown land. It includes newly commissioned and existing work by Olivia Plender shown and performed in Laxton, as well as currently at  the Castle Museum for a month long exhibition.

We end the year with The Impossible Prison, a meditation on the late, great French philosopher Michel Foucault’s extraordinarily influential Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison (1976), which will take the form of an ambitious international exhibition in the former police station adjoining Nottingham’s Galleries of Justice, together with a cross-disciplinary conference examining contemporary applications of his ideas in an age of ubiquitous surveillance by both government and business. Foucault also wrote unconventional histories of sexuality, of madness, and of medicine. He described his method as archaeological: making visible what the thought of an age otherwise does not reveal. The Galleries of Justice, built on the cliff running through the centre of Nottingham, is a literal archaeology of punishment. Visitors to the attraction are lead down four floors of several centuries of the prisons, pits, exercise yards and dungeons.

Foucault also described his books as Histories of the Present. It is our aim in 2008 to understand our present by investigating our past. This has been possible through a wide range of partnerships with local organisations, who we want to thank for their collaboration, along with our main funders, Arts Council of England and Nottingham City Council: New Art Exchange, Newstead Abbey, Broadway Media Centre, the village of Laxton, Nottingham Trent University and the University of Nottingham. I would also like to thank our Education department, together with the inspired artists they are working with, for their engaged and engaging responses to our Histories of the Present for participants of all ages and backgrounds. For their willingness to host the present project, we are grateful to Gillian Crawley, General Manager, and Haidee Jackson, Curator, at Newstead Abbey.


Alex Farquharson
Director