Artist Talk: Denzil Forrester

About

Thu 27 Feb 2020, 6.30pm–8.30pm

Nottingham Contemporary

Free. Booking recommended.

Denzil's Dance, 2019

HD Video, colour, sound, 25'

Join an evening exploring the artistic practice of exhibiting artist, Denzil Forrester, with the artist, Nottingham Contemporary's director Sam Thorne, and writer and director Julian Henriques.

The evening launches with Denzil's Dance, a film directed by Julian Henriques that takes Forrester to Jamaica and follows his sketches of dancers and DJs inside Kingston Dub Club and Uptown Mondayz sessions. In the film, Forrester soaks in Kingston's ever energetic dancehall culture and shares his technique of gestural drawing with a younger generation of Jamaican artists.

In a vinyl-illustrated talk, Henriques discusses Forrester's drawings and paintings; from "thinking through sound" and sonic experience of the dancehalls, to "seeing through sound," or the way Forrester visually represents sound with movement, colour, line and perspective, and "becoming through sound" as a way of exploring auditory imagination where ideas exist beyond space and time, intellect and sensation.

The evening continues with an in-conversation between Forrester and Sam Thorne about the artist's life and work: from his student days, exploring the nightclubs and sound-systems of East London, his time in New York and Rome in the 1980s, to his more recent relocation to Cornwall. The conversation traces 40 years of the artist's work as a painter, as well as educator and curator, by way of his enduring themes: echo, refrain and being together.

Julian Henriques is convener of the MA Scriptwriting and the MA Cultural Studies programmes, director of the Topology Research Unit and a co-founder of the Sound System Outernational practice research group in the Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London. Prior to this, Henriques ran the film and television department at CARIMAC at the University of the West Indies, Kingston, Jamaica. His credits as a writer and director include the reggae musical feature film Babymother and We the Ragamuffin short. Henriques researches street cultures, music and technologies and is interested in the uses of sound as a critical and creative tool. His sound sculptures include Knots & Donuts (2011) at Tate Modern and his books include Changing the Subject (1998), Sonic Bodies (2011) and Sonic Media (forthcoming, 2020).