NOTTINGHAM.- Nottingham Contemporary announced their 2025–26 programme.
January 25–May 4, 2025
Daniel Lind-Ramos
Daniel Lind-Ramos’ (b. 1953, Loíza, Puerto Rico) first European institutional solo exhibition will showcase five of the artists’ monumental sculptural assemblages, including a newly commissioned work, that evoke the storytelling traditions of his Afro-descendent history. Lind-Ramos was raised by a family of artisans, and originally trained as a painter, before shifting his practice to creating large sculptural assemblages composed of objects found washed up on beaches and mangroves local to his home, or gifted from friends, family and community members.
The artists’ work explores topics ranging from the storytelling culture of Puerto Rico’s Afro-descendent history, the impact of the covid-19 pandemic and the sacred significance of the island’s mangroves and increasingly centres eco-critical themes. Through his use of found objects Lind-Ramos investigates the cycles through which we are all linked, the regenerative power of community and the vital need to protect our ecosystems to safeguard the future.
Allan Weber
Allan Weber’s (b. 1992, Rio de Janeiro) first institutional solo presentation will feature a series of ambitious new site-specific commissions alongside existing works and marks a significant milestone in the artist’s career. Weber’s practice acts as a vehicle to deconstruct the realities of daily life within the favelas in Rio de Janeiro and incorporates tarps used at funk parties, razor blades used to create popular hairstyles, and elements that relate to the work life of people active in mobile food delivery services.
The exhibition draws on a month-long residency in Nottingham where he was immersed in the food delivery network of the city, capturing daily deliveries on discarded 35mm point and shoot cameras and video footage shot by friends, furthering his social practice and interest in informal economies of exchange. This exhibition is co-curated by Pablo León de la Barra, Curator at Large, Latin America at the Salomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation and co-commissioned with De La Warr Pavilion, where it will tour in Summer 2025.
May 24–September 7, 2025
Your Ears Later Will Know to Listen
In summer 2025, Nottingham Contemporary will present an ambitious thematic group exhibition and associated live programme, Your Ears Later Will Know to Listen, in which sound is the leading medium to consider cross-cultural identities, histories, and futures. The exhibition draws on writer and cultural historian Saidiya Hartman’s methods of “foraging” and “disfiguration” to consider how we can reimagine and listen in other ways to our complex pasts.
Through international, multi-generational, cross-disciplinary artistic practices—including new commissions by Satch Hoyt, Raheel Kahn and Dylan Robinson and works by artists including Nguyễn Trinh Thi, Simnikiwe Buhlungu and Hong-Kai Wang—the exhibition, selection of works and associated live programme aims to consider the past as a historical ground to incite emancipatory expressions and practices of reconstitution and solidarity.
This exhibition is the outcome of a partnership between Nottingham Contemporary and University of Nottingham on an AHRC/Midlands4Cities funded Collaborative Doctoral Award.
September 25, 2025–January 4, 2026
Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme: Prisoners of Love
Artist duo Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s newly commissioned solo exhibition will comprise a major new multi-screen audio visual installation, entitled Prisoners of Love. With a deeply embedded, detail-oriented approach to research, Prisoners of Love sits with the writings and songs of prisoners in Palestine, to think how these critical modes of resistance through word and rhythm illuminate the wider conditions of Palestine itself as imprisoned. It illustrates a story of love and loss, a story of refusal to be broken in Palestine and beyond.
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme work together across a range of sound, image, text, installation and performance practices. Their practice is engaged in the intersections between performativity, political imaginaries, the body and virtuality.
Prisoners of Love is co-commissioned by Nottingham Contemporary, Kunstinstituut Melly, and MACBA.
I Gusti Ayu Kadek Murniasih “Murni”
The late Balinese artist I Gusti Ayu Kadek Murniasih “Murni” (b. 1966, d. 2006) was a prolific, multi-disciplinary artist who created artworks as a form of therapy, a diary and exploration of her history, dreams and psyche. Her compositions are an examination of sensuality, pleasure, humour and pain conveyed through a compelling style of colourful, fluid lines and shapes resonant of traditional Balinese painting that are contrasted against sharp, surreal and erotic motifs.
Working during a rule where public expression of women’s sexual desire was taboo, Murni’s refusal to conform shocked audiences. Her fearless, authentic expression has earned her due recognition as an artistic radical and an inspiration to others to centre their own subjectivity in their art. This exhibition, the first institutional solo, will showcase seminal works from Murni’s lifetime, generating new perspectives to further champion her legacy.
January 24–May 3, 2026
Dala Nasser
Dala Nasser’s (b.1990, Lebanon) first institutional solo exhibition in the UK will consist of a major new site-specific commission that departs from notions of self-determination, sovereignty, and nationhood. As an artist working through abstraction and alternative forms of image-making, Nasser integrates sound, performance and film in her practice, but remains quintessentially a painter as she thinks specifically through this medium and its most elementary materials: fabric, pigments, stretcher bars, lines.
Considering materials as witnesses, Nasser has developed a growing body of work that foregrounds non-claimed histories, ecologies of slow violence, colonial theft, and infrastructural failure in times and places where human language has been rendered insufficient or out of reach. Her exhibition will take shape as an archive that proposes a reading of another history of art – one that seeks to document, rather than eradicate, the lives of people who dreamt of independence.
Shahana Rajani
Shahana Rajani (b.1987, Pakistan) is a multi-disciplinary artist exploring the visualities, landscapes and infrastructures of development, militarisation and ecological disturbance in Pakistan. Through community-based and collaborative approaches to research she engages with dissident histories and traditions of representation and relation that sustain practices of ecological resistance in Pakistan. Rajani is a co-founder of Karachi La Jamia (with Zahra Malkani), an experimental project exploring radical pedagogies emerging from struggles around land and water in Karachi.
Rajani will be the first recipient of the new Han Nefkens Foundation South Asian Video Art Production Grant. The grant aims to be a tool for increasing contemporary artistic production in the video art field for artists living in South Asia. Rajani will receive funding for an ambitious newly commissioned work to be presented in partnership with Nottingham Contemporary, UK; Prameya Art Foundation, India; Ishara Art Foundation, UAE; Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan; Parasite, Hong Kong and Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, Belgium.
