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