21 March - 31 May 2025
For Colorado-based artist Maia Ruth Lee’s first UK solo exhibition beginning on the Spring Equinox, we imagine the gallery as a worldly and spiritual centre. Installations of sculpture, painting, and luggage across our galleries will explore human life in motion.
Read More8 November 2024 - 15 February 2025
Kolam is an exhibition, an action, a space, an exploration. Mimicking its namesake, it acts as an invitation to Tamil women, Dalit and other marginalised communities to hold space and have voice within contemporary cultural production. Cross the threshold, Cross that line, defy the mythological man. Erase the kolam.
Read More8 June - 17 August 2024
The exhibition will initially comprise three existing works by artists Ashley Holmes, Jasleen Kaur, and Jala Wahid before it is transformed. Framed by a series of live events (e.g., readings, performances, screenings or discussions), the artists will return to the artworks presented in the exhibition and withdraw, change or replace them, allowing us to witness better the connections between the works inhabiting Primary.
Read More1 March - 30 March 2024
Each Begets Each is a collaborative exhibition of new work by Khaya Job and Wingshan Smith. Together, they delve into realms of friendship, myth-making, play, rituals, conversations and sound to weave a tapestry of interconnected experiences. By interrogating and performing archetypes of femininity, the pair engage in the audacious task of imagining a divinity for themselves to create new possibilities for identity and community.
Read More26 January - 17 February 2024
A Material Romance presents new work by Will Harvey with text contribution by Jana Dardouk as part of To & Fro. Will and Jana took the opportunity of connecting to critique the pace of mass consumption by confronting the consequences of its waste and debris. Both artists work within the common ground of art and architecture, their practices seek to challenge our cultural perspectives of ‘waste’.
Read More8 July - 2 September 2023
The Unicorn is Killed and Brought to the Castle Cartoon is an installation of large-scale figurative collage by artist Sam Keogh. These intricate works on paper draw heavily from The Hunt of the Unicorn, a series of seven tapestries made in Flanders at the turn of the 16th century and now housed in The Met Cloisters, New York.
8 - 29 July 2023
As part of Primary’s reopening season, we will host a ‘Residents Series’, a programme of events and activity showcasing and platforming work by Primary’s resident and member community which includes over 60 artists, makers, musicians, curators, and creatives at all stages in their careers, working across all media.
7 October - 9 December 2023
A new multi-media installation featuring two experimental films. THE WALL is a surreal and absurdist take on housing inequality and its psychological effects. Hyperopia is a psychedelic two channel video installation which uses script, disorientating film and editing techniques.
7 October - 9 December 2023
In Courses for Dis-Course(s), artist Roo Dhissou conjures up a space, for dining, eating, cooking and gathering that manifest in a sort of kitchen, dining room, café, restaurant, chill space. The project includes a series of exhibitions and dining events for British South Asian artists that will take place at GLOAM in Sheffield and Primary in Nottingham.
26 January - 30 March 2024
Sonya Dyer’s work intertwines speculative fiction, hard science and mythologies to propose new ways of conceiving where the centre is located in fictional narratives of the future. In this project, hard science meets science fiction, with the Ready Room providing space for cells to relax, strategize and entertain. Recalling HeLa’s dubious genesis, the exhibition contemplates alternate forms of building society – what if the HeLa cells have found a better way to live? HeLa cells were originally taken from the body of Henrietta Lacks, a young Black mother in the USA, and were the first human materials sent into space in 1960.
1 February-13 May 2023 at Bethlem Gallery
Being Present is a group exhibition and event presenting work by artists from Bethlem Gallery, London and Primary, Nottingham. During the Covid-19 pandemic and spanning various lockdowns exhibiting artists participated in Artist Meets, an artist-to-artist support programme which saw artists from paired based on their shared interests or approaches to art production.
16 September-26 November 2022
Attention, Absorption is British Guyanese artist Maybelle Peters' most comprehensive exhibition of work in the UK to date. The show leads on from the When We Worked at Raleigh (WWWAR) project and oral archive between 2020 and 2021 which was delivered in partnership with Nottingham Black Archive.
16 September-26 November 2022
The exhibition Open Code by Nottingham-born artist Mac Collins takes over Primary’s Reading Room. The installation features furniture, objects, and sculpture.
‘Picturing Food Justice’ is a participatory photography project let by artist Kelly O’Brien, that addresses issues around food justice, particularly in Nottingham’s NG7 postcode area. The project is supported through a collaboration between Off Centre Photography Festival, Himmah and Primary.
Read MoreThe spring season is here! Our spring programme is focused around sharing seeds and sharing knowledge.
Read MoreIn her first solo exhibition in the UK, Carmen Argote will present Be loved, part of an expansive new project encompassing video, sound, objects, and works on paper.
September 2021 - December 2021
Read MoreEjaradini is an art installation and garden created by South African artist collaborative MADEYOULOOK (Molemo Moiloa and Nare Mokgotho). The exhibition features archival images, plants, and text on the façade of Primary. Ejaradini reflects on Black urban gardening, land, and plant life in South Africa and Britain through visual and nature-based storytelling.
April - September 2022
Read MoreThe first instalment of a new and evolving work of performance, audio-visual installation, and experimental text, dealing poetically with urgent themes around finance, housing, the body, the voice, and the porous nature of selfhood.
May - July 2021
Read MoreAn expansive and celebratory exhibition marking three years of Making Place, our long-term community programme looking at how we learn from the city and how we use public space. Join us as we reflect on past projects and generate ideas for the future.
May - July 2021
Read MoreA new video installation developed through collaboration and discussion with UK-based immigrants, exploring the entanglement of love, power, and administration.
October 2019 - January 2020
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