Exhibitions programme 2023

Spring 2023: February 11–May 7, 2023

Carolyn Lazard: Long Take
Through art and writing, Carolyn Lazard explores the social and political dimensions of care. Their work unfolds in radically different ways, questioning how dominant forms of artmaking and work value efficiency and ability over life itself. Lazard’s practice is rooted in questions of access, centring dependency and incapacity as a site of abundance and collectivity.

For their first UK solo exhibition, Lazard presents Long Take, an installation that responds to the legacy of dance for the camera, considered through the lens of accessibility as a creative tool. By presenting dance work sonically rather than visually, Lazard considers how a performance might be communicated beyond its image and why the visual has been the default and primary vehicle for aesthetic experience.

Rosalind Nashashibi: Hooks
This exhibition is the largest UK presentation to date of London-based artist Rosalind Nashashibi’s paintings. Hooks brings together a selection of new and recent works, most of which Nashashibi made during the past year. The exhibition title refers to the mechanism for closing a window shutter, as well as to the hook in a song, a refrain that niggles or soothes.

These works are punctuated by an associative chain of symbols and animals—a cross becomes a bowtie becomes a moth or a pair of cat’s ears—and are crisscrossed by fences and walls. Figures peer through shuttered windows; gazes are filtered or partially obscured. Luminous and fragmented, these paintings are concerned less with clear narratives than with seeping atmospheres, by turns erotic and frustrated.

Charlotte Johannesson
The work of Charlotte Johannesson represents a synthesis between the artisanal and the digital. Over the past 50 years, she has explored the formal and conceptual connections between the craft technology of the loom and the digital technology of computer programming. From the outset, Johannesson saw “great synchronicity between the two machines” that became her tools for making images. 

This exhibition brings together textiles, digital graphics, plotter prints, paintings, screenprints, handmade paper works and lace experiments made over the past 50 years. Image, pattern, colour, texture, material and language recur and play out across time and different mediums. The exhibition is conceived as a way of seeking out the internal coherence within Johannesson’s practice, while underscoring the politically and artistically radical nature of her work, positioning her as a forerunner of today’s post-feminist and digital art.

Summer 2023: May 27–September 3, 2023

Kresiah Mukwazhi: Kirawa
Kresiah Mukwazhi’s mixed media collages, sculptural installations, performances and videos are informed by her personal experiences and observations of gender-based violence, exploitation and abuse in her native Zimbabwe. Over many years, Mukwazhi has developed a long-term engagement with female sex workers in Harare. Using her bold and powerful work as a form of visual activism, she draws vitality from women’s resilience and the possibility of empowerment and self-organisation.

For her first institutional solo exhibition, Mukwazhi presents an entirely new body of commissioned work. She describes Kirawa as “a place of sacred resistance, where I expose and push back against socio-political issues forcing women into precarious labour, aiming at reclaiming the sacred power that women are destined to have. The female body, therefore, becomes a site of resistance and a site to question power relations.”

Abbas Zahedi: Holding A Heart in Artifice
Abbas Zahedi’s interdisciplinary practice blends philosophy, poetics and social dynamics with sound, sculpture and other gestures. With an emphasis on how personal and collective histories interweave, Zahedi’s interest lies within the connections found or formed around specific contexts.  

In a newly commissioned installation and expanded engagement programme, Zahedi continues his ongoing investigations into care, grief and contemporary philosophy. Specifically, it affords an opportunity to think about how art, galleries and the public are interconnected through mutual support systems. Working with staff and service users from a local hospital specialising in Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation (ECMO)—a life-support therapy that uses an artificial heart-lung machine to oxygenate blood outside of the body—these communal moments transform Nottingham Contemporary’s gallery into a holding site to discuss and share experiences of undergoing the treatment and its after-effects.

Eva Koťátková
Eva Koťátková combines sculptures, objects, collages, costumes and texts into vast and playful scenographies inspired by surrealism. Often activated through performance and storytelling, her installations explore social rules and structures, like the relationship between the individual and collective society. Co-developed by Nottingham Contemporary’s Learning and Exhibitions teams, the exhibition will present new and existing works, engaging local communities and audience groups by inviting them to participate in exploratory new worlds.

Autumn 2023: September 23, 2023–January 7, 2024

Ridykeulous (Nicole Eisenman & A.L. Steiner, with guest dyke Sam Roeck)
Founded in 2005, Ridykeulous is a curatorial initiative concerned with queer and feminist art. Using humour to critique the art world and heteropatriarchal culture at large, Ridykeulous often reinvents language to reflect their sensibilities and concerns. Focussing on installation and moving image, this artist-curated exhibition at Nottingham Contemporary will expand upon Ridykeulous’s 2021 video presentation at Hauser & Wirth in New York, entitled Ridykes’ Cavern of Fine Gay Wine and Videos: Hauser & Werk Bitch: Don’t Be Mad At Us! This will be Ridykeulous’s first institutional exhibition in Europe and will be accompanied by an experimental publication, co-published with MIT Press.

Acknowledgments
Carolyn Lazard: Long Take is co-commissioned by Nottingham Contemporary, the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania and the Walker Art Center. With in-kind support from Le Mark Group Ltd.

Rosalind Nashashibi: Hooks is generously supported by GRIMM gallery.

Charlotte Johannesson is generously supported by the Swedish Arts Grants Committee; the Embassy of Sweden, London; Hollybush Gardens; and the Charlotte Johannesson Exhibition Circle: Eleanor Cayre and ArtAV.

Kresiah Mukwazhi: Kirawa is a collaboration with Secession, Vienna, where it will be presented from 17 February to 16 April 2023.

Abbas Zahedi: Holding a Heart in Artifice is generously supported by the Henry Moore Foundation and Belmacz.