Exhibitions programme 2024

January 27–May 5, 2024

Dora Budor
Croatian-born artist Dora Budor’s (b.1984, Zagreb) first institutional exhibition in the UK features a series of newly commissioned works concerned with techniques of the built environment and the various forms of psychosocial control induced by it. The works in the exhibition question received notions of health, well-being, security and protection as an examination of the pastoral power of the present as much as what has shaped the material remains of the past. Proceeding from the formal language of sculpture, Budor analyses how behaviours are regulated through discomfortable modes of prevention to comfortable incentives for productivity and consumption. The exhibition was made between New York and Nottingham, where Budor undertook a production residency in late 2023.

Paul Mpagi Sepuya: Exposure
A major monographic exhibition by the Los Angeles-based artist, Paul Mpagi Sepuya (b. 1982, US) in a UK institution. Sepuya is best known for his intimate studio portraits that explore the relationships between camera, subject and viewer. His photographs are not only images of desire, but also images about the making of images. The history of photography, particularly that of 19th-century daylight studios, forms the basis of Sepuya’s most recent body of work, Daylight Studio / Dark Room Studio. The exhibition at Nottingham Contemporary brings these new explorations, including three new sculptural pieces, into conversation with a selection of works from the past eight years around different ideas and acts of “exposure.” From often unseen moments of queer intimacy, to the traces of people left behind in the studio, the exhibition plays on questions of visibility and invisibility, of the gaze, of what is obscured and what is revealed.

May 25–September 8, 2024

Hamid Zénati
The second-ever institutional exhibition of Algerian- German artist Hamid Zénati (b.1944, Algeria; d.2022, Germany) following his solo debut at Haus der Kunst, Munich. Celebrating Zénati's nearly sixty-year career, this major survey casts him as an inventive, free thinker and artist of his time. A self-taught artist whose job as a translator brought him to Germany in the mid-1960s, Zénati worked compulsively across surfaces and disciplines from textiles, fashion and ceramics to wearable sculpture and photography, using his “all-over” signature style. His inexhaustible wealth of forms, patterns and combinations of colour, material and technique created an abstract visual language entirely his own. His textile paintings freely blend North African modernism, Japanese textile design, Sahrawi patterns, the set designs of Sonia Delaunay, and organic forms found in nature.

Julian Abraham “Togar”
The first solo exhibition in a European and UK museum by multidisciplinary artist, musician and social researcher Julian Abraham “Togar” (b.1987, Indonesia). This exhibition is a collaboration between Nottingham Contemporary's Exhibitions, Learning and Live Programmes and will directly engage local communities of young people in the city, inviting them to participate in the artist's exploratory sonic world. Building on his ongoing OK Studio (2020 – present), a place for music and events and to imagine the role of public space, “Togar” will create a participatory environment centred around a chorus of automated instruments, re-imagined synthesisers, keyboards, ocean drums and live percussive interventions with the aim of offering audiences the chance to “co-experiment, co-explore, co-imagine, co-produce.”

Claudia Martinez Garay
The first solo exhibition in England of Peruvian artist Claudia Martínez Garay’s work. This major new commission will take place in summer 2024, celebrating the artist’s unique perspective and diverse practice with an ambitious site-specific installation in our largest gallery space.

Martínez Garay studied printmaking in Peru and her process of carving out, stenciling, and layering images in site-specific murals or free-standing sculptural objects exemplifies the influence of this early artistic training. Her practice has grown to encompass painting, sculpture, video, and installation, referencing pre-Columbian aesthetics and her Andean heritage, inspired by historic images, propaganda, stories and sounds from her home country. Diving into her indigenous ancestry, and the socio-political history of Peru, she brings to the surface lost narratives from one of the world’s oldest civilisations. The exhibition will provide an opportunity for the artist to further explore her complex relationship with Peru, re-animating past works alongside new research into collections of historical and archaeological objects from the Americas within UK National collections.

This year marks an exciting moment for Martínez Garay, whose exhibition at Nottingham Contemporary coincides with her first solo exhibition in Scotland at Dundee Contemporary Arts, opening August 23, 2024.

September 28, 2024–January 5, 2025

Donald Rodney: Visceral Canker 
A major retrospective of the late British artist Donald Rodney (b.1961, UK; d.1998, UK). Bringing together all that survives of his work across painting, drawing, installation, sculpture and digital media with rare archive materials, the exhibition highlights Rodney’s significance to the recent history of British art. Though Rodney has had a perennial influence on the wider UK artist community, there have been few opportunities to experience the full breadth and complexity of his work. This touring exhibition will highlight the significance of Rodney's work and re-address themes of racial identity, chronic illness, Black masculinity and Britain's colonial past.

The exhibition is presented in partnership with Spike Island and Whitechapel Gallery, where it will tour during 2024–25.