NTU Festival: Inside, Outside,Together, Apart
8th – 18th March
Opening Nights: Tuesday 7th and 14th March, 6-8pm

March sees the return of the annual Surface collaboration with Nottingham Trent University, the 12th NTU Festival: Inside, Outside, Together, Apart. 

The art festival will explore our sense of place and belonging. Artists will respond to current events and the changing contexts of art production, paying attention to our recent experiences of the pandemic and lockdown. The need to both belong to a group, and be an individual, is an enduring paradox, one that you are invited to explore through contemporary artworks on display at the NTU Festival 2023.

Each year, the NTU Festival offers selected Fine Arts students from Nottingham Trent University the opportunity to curate a contemporary group exhibition that helps to establish their creative practice. Surface provides a supportive and professional environment for the students to plan and show their work. Two short exhibitions will run concurrently in each week of the festival. 

Week One
Mimesis: Our Journey To Navigate Socio-environmental Space
Jasmine Blakeway / Ellie Miles / Luke Narroway / Alice Spearing
Exhibition dates: 8th – 11th March, Main Gallery
Opening Night: Tuesday 7th March, 6-8pm
Three painters and one installation artist, interacting with a modern world of complex, cosmic relationships, invite you to join them on this journey of internal and external reflection. Mimesis describes the intuitive and imitative representation of nature and human behaviour. We explore mimesis by channelling dynamics between each other, the self, surrounding spaces and the wider world. This exhibition responds to the wider conversation of evolving relationships to others and the planet within this modern era, exploring purpose and active responsibility as emerging artists.

Finding A Way Out Of The Ghetto
Maria Gerguis / Hannah Fletcher-Tomlinson / Nada Khartabil
Exhibition dates: 8th – 11th March, Project Space
Opening Night: Tuesday 7th March, 6-8pm
Finding a way out of the ghetto attempts to give a voice to the migrants' experience in the times of the pandemic and the lockdown. The world collectively shared the experiences of alienation, confinement, isolation, and separation. We gradually lost our agency, as the city broke down to countless social bubbles. The struggle was to survive, as we aspired to find our way out of the ghetto.

Week Two
Hermit Mode
Masah Azar / Andreea Pîslaru
Exhibition dates: 15th – 18th March, Main Gallery
Opening Night: Tuesday 14th March, 6-8pm
The collaborative exhibition sees artists putting our most intimate spaces on public display. Functioning as somewhat of a recap of the past three years, Hermit Mode aims to celebrate humanity’s awkward ways of coping with the effects of nationwide lockdowns, and its subsequent wobbly attempts to return to normalcy.
Mother
Hayley Hannaford Zuzanna Pastuszek
Exhibition dates: 15th – 18th March, Project Space
Opening Night: Tuesday 14th March, 6-8pm
Mother – looking into identity, nature, connection, and the portrayal of human existence within abstraction and earthiness. The exhibiting artists will be drawing from their personal connections and narratives in order to examine the themes of gender, culture, the natural world and non-human concepts. Reflecting on ideas surrounding inner and outer worlds through painting, sculpture and installation works.

Artist Talks: Saturday 18th March, 2pm-4pm

Free Entry: Everyone Welcome