NTU Festival: The Part Versus the Whole, Surface Gallery 21 – 31 March 2018

Opening Nights: Tuesday 20th and Tuesday 27th March, 6-8pm

Following the success of last year's NTU Festival: The Faraway Nearby, this year's selected Fine Art students will be using a critical and reflective approach to curate group exhibitions in response to the festival's title by exploring concepts such as collectivity and individualism, togetherness and separateness.

The NTU Festival offers selected Fine Art students the opportunity to curate a group exhibition that establishes their practice outside of the university. Surface Gallery 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 Memory-Images Heidi Chan, Que Chan, and Benjamin Rostance Exhibition: 21st – 24th March, Main Gallery Opening Night: Tuesday 20th March, 6-8pm

Memory often presents itself through fragmented images, triggered by visual, auditory and other sensations, interwoven with our perceptions. Reflecting upon these ideas, the artists in Memory-Images explore notions of trace and shadow, gentrification and the passage of time. The gallery space will turn into a “time container” with a variety of media from poetic urban sketching to personal footage, from ready-mades to artistic sculptural assemblage, from meditative performance to immersive installation. Visitors are invited to embark on a visual and auditory journey through which individual and shared memories are recollected and intersected.

Special performance to take place on the opening night

Artists: Heidi Chan, Que Chan, Benjamin Rostance

Capitalism Stole My Virginity Agil Abdullayev and Katie Bishop Exhibition: 21st – 24th March, Project Space Opening Night: Tuesday 20th March, 6-8pm

Capitalism Stole My Virginity brings together 10 emerging artists whose practices explore consumerism in capitalist society. Capitalism is pervasive in today’s globalised society, both URL and IRT. In the digital age, content is rapidly fired into the world, amplifying pre-existing consumerist structures that exploit perceptions, identities, and desires. Capitalism Stole My Virginity, offers an alternative understanding for a range of empirical, aesthetic, and conceptual issues, which traverse and exceed both capitalism and identity. Through video and sculpture, painting and performance, the participating artists interrogate issues relating to private and public life, femininity and masculinity, materialism and politics.

Artists: Agil Abdullayev, Katie Bishop, Pádraig Condron, Charlie Dean, Christos Gkenoudis, Demi Hill, Tiffany Hunt, Phoebe Neil, Jake Moore, Takudzwa Mukomberanwa, Aiden Slee, Tiffany Slowick

Week Two Erm, What? The erm Collective Exhibition: 28th – 31st March, Main Gallery Opening Night: Tuesday 27th March, 6-8pm

The erm Collective presents its first curated show Erm, What? The exhibition goes against what we often define as an art exhibition; testing incomplete works, or elements not quite fully formed conceptually; celebrating these decisions that often happen in the moment. A range of moving image, installation, sound, and writing come together to create a diverse expression of unknowing. There’s a perceived confidence in a work presented in a gallery: ‘That artist must know what they’re doing’. What if they don’t? Artists: Katie Bishop, Heidi Chan, Rosie Elston, Harry Freestone, Marilyn Jones, Megan Kelly, Tiffany Slowik, Emily Stollery

Four Hang, Four Walk, Four Stand Skyward NORN Collective Exhibition: 28th – 31st March, Project Space Opening Night: Tuesday 27th March, 6-8pm

The project space will be transformed into an immersive installation made up of large stalagmite/stalactite-like sculptures, where theatrical lighting and atmospheric looping sound create a landscape filled with fossils of mass production culture. This landscape represents somewhere between prehistoric religion and dystopic future, existing as neither the present nor anything that has occurred before; it sits in its own plane of possibility. NORN collective will perform as the inhabitants of this space. Lacking all memory of the origins of the relics, these characters manufacture new rituals incorporating the artifacts into the barren environment in which they dwell.

Artists: Adam Grainger, Caitlin Hickling, Chloë Laycock, Alison Squires

Artist Talks: Saturday 31st March, 2pm

Free Entry: Everyone Welcome