"Friday FLAVA!" - FRI 7 NOV EXTRA Programme

"FRIDAY FLAVA!" -FRIDAY 7 NOV Programme 11:00 -5:30 PM Friday 7th November 2025, Gallery 2 Handbag Factory

'Flava' denotes an individual's unique personality, style, flair - the 'je ne sais quois' that makes one person different from another.

EXTRA In-show EVENTS: Artist's Talks, "Meet the Artist", Pop-up Art Shop

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EXTRA: "Friday FLAVA" Programme FRI 7 November 11:00am-5:30pm

• Artist's Talk at 14:30 - 14:45 (approx.), Friday 7 NOV 2025

YIN WANG - Through the Moon Gate — A Door to What Remains

Join artist Yin Wang as she shares the inspirations behind her series Through the Moon Gate and other works influenced by traditional Chinese garden architecture.

Blending cultural memory with personal reflection, Yin explores how spaces of absence, longing, and transformation become portals between past and present. This intimate talk invites visitors to step through the “moon gate” — to glimpse what remains, and what continues to evolve through art. (NB This formal talk is scheduled for 14:30 on Friday 7 NOV 2025 but the artist will be availble to talk informally to viewers throughout the day.)

• Artist's Talk at 16:00, Friday 7 NOV 2025

NAHIJA NADEEM- Artist's Talk Saudade

Nahija Nadeem’s practice is deeply informed by emotional introspection and cultural critique, engaging with the layered terrain of memory, identity, and longing. Drawing on psychological and literary perspectives, she explores nostalgia not merely as sentimentality, but as a complex emotional architecture. Nadeem’s work is situated within this duality.

Her personal history growing up as the youngest in a culturally conservative Pakistani household, infuses her practice with themes of suppressed expression, emotional solitude, and the quiet resilience of self-discovery. The societal imperative to suppress rather than express has shaped her artistic voice, compelling her to create works that evoke, challenge, and liberate emotional experience. Her visual language blends traditional artistic training with contemporary aesthetics, often infused with the discourse of saudade, a Portuguese concept that encapsulates an ineffable longing for something lost, unattainable, or imagined. Saudade is not simply melancholic; it is a dreaming state, a poetic yearning that resists closure. Nadeem embraces this emotional ambiguity, allowing her work to dwell in the spaces between hope and loss, presence and absence. Her compositions are not declarations but invitations, spaces where viewers may encounter their own emotional resonances. Her practice is a reclamation of voice, a refusal to be silenced, and a commitment to making art that moves, unsettles, and connects.

• Other Artists' Informal talks by various exhibitng artists including - Dan Waring
• Meet The Artists Various exhibiting artists will be present
• POP-UP Art Shop

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FLAVA the exhibition showcases an exciting array of art and art practice by a group of 14 contemporary artists - each with a unique expression of how they see the world, and their world - the colours, ideas, concerns, joys, aesthetics, stories - that meld artists imagination with the everyday experience of life in the 21st century!

Exhibition open from Thursday 6 - Monday 10 November 2025

ENTRY to the exhibition during usual opening times is FREE of charge.

Opening hours:

Thurs 6 - Mon 10 November 11am-5:30 pm

Private View Thurs 6 November 6-9 PM

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UPDATES

WED 29 OCT 2025 "Friday FLAVA!" - FRI 7 NOV Special in-Show Programme This has been finalised. Please see above for details. Please book FREE ticket(s) to attend (ticketholders will be entitled to a free glass of Italian wine!

OTHER 'FLAVAs' Specials (something different each day!):

• "Saturday FLAVA!" incl. LIVE painting by Tom Mead
• "Sunday FLAVA!" incl. talk by Marina Trani "Why a Talking Statue?"
• "Monday FLAVA!" incl. informal talk by Dan Waring "Sonance"

Download FLAVA Programme of Extra Attractions - here

FRI 24 OCT 2025 - PRESS RELEASE now available

Please download here

TUE 7 OCT 2025

FLAVA - Lauch of FREE Tickets to the PRIVATE VIEWING Please visit this link:

FLAVA 2025

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FLAVA Exhbition Week from Thurs 6 - Mon 10 NOV 2025 WHAT TO EXPECT

PRIVATE VIEW - 6 to 9 PM on Thursday 6th November 2025

GS Wines will offer a FREE glass of quality Italian wine to ticketholders for the Private View event. Entry to the PV is FREE but booking is required.

Other Possible In-Show mini-Events at the Gallery We are planning some subsidiary attractions within the Gallery space for the duration of the show such as:

• artists' shop offering smaller art pieces and artists' original designed merchandise
• curator's guided tour of the artworks
• artist's talk

N.B. These are in development and will be announced when we are able to offer them. Please check Updates for info.

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ARTISTS

1 Marina Trani "My most recent work deals with the themes of identity and the emotional impact of becoming separated."

2 Jude Bridge "Attracted by a fascination for the unusual, I find a thrill in reconfiguring the natural world’s curiosities through my human lens."

3 Sneh Mehra "My work reflects my surroundings, emebdded with the fragments of haphazard growth and deterioration."

4 Zurab Gogidze "Drawing, along with my other passion of story-writing, is way more than a use of free time, it is my very freedom itself"

5 Yasmine Rassouli "In my creative journey, I delve into the blurred boundaries between inner and outer reality, while using light and darkness to evoke a sense of mystery and introspection."

6 Tom Mead "I specifically focus on people and the mindset from my own generation, and what it means to be a young person in Britain today."

7 Yin Wang "I create expressive work to confront the ache of displacement and the fragile threads that bind us to our roots"

8 Dan Waring "I typically use bold colours, strong contrasts and shapes and tend to lean more towards using my imagination to create landscapes with infinite horizons."

9 Nahija Nadeem "My work is deeply influenced by saudade; a quiet ache for what’s lost, distant, or never fully grasped."

10 Carl Engmann "I am an abstract painter dressed up as a figurative one."

11 Melanie Coote "My work is concerned with abstractions of structures,from geometric grid-like frameworks as found in the built environment to more amorphous organic forms from the natural world."

12 Ramón Ravé "I am deeply intrigued by the interplay between living and non-living elemnents which shape our world, captivated by the fragile yet profounf balance that sustains life on this planet."

13 Neha Dewangan "My work is rooted in painterly abstraction, using expressive mark-making and loose, atmospheric techniques to capture feelings and fleeting moments, rather than detailed or realistic images."

14 Maurice Mutua "I work figuratively making paintings and collagraphs that explore my relationship with the world."