Bristol

Today we went to visit Bristol to visit the exhibition at the Arnolfini gallery. We went to see the exhibition of 'Vertigo Sea' by John Akomfrah. With it being a photography trip I expected the exhibition to include images mounted around a room for us to look at and analyse but it was actually three rooms with moving imagery. The first room was about the slave trade and how man kind and animals are similar which I really didn't understand how that linked to what were learning about at the moment. The second room was a little better as it was still moving imagery but it was showing a whale being cut open. This was clearly showing the cruelty towards animals and what people really want them for. It was quite confusing though because there was three screens that we had to watch near enough at one time in order to understand what was going on as they all linked together. The last room was a little TV screen stuck on the wall saying about how the artist made the films and what he felt about it. I really didn't enjoy the exhibition as it was not what I expected and we weren't allowed to take pictures which is understandable as I didn't expect to be able to take pictures.

As we had already had a bad start to the day I didn't think that it could get any worse so we walked from the gallery down to Nelson Street which we got told was full of graffitti and artwork that people had done. When we walked down the street there was minimal graffitti and very minimal artwork what I could mainly see was new buildings being built of a building site and people walking up and down the street as it linked on to the back streets of Bristol City Centre. The two pictures below are pictures that I got from Nelson Street.

As you can see below there is only a little bit of graffiti on the right hand side of the image. This was pretty much the only graffiti that I saw and found in Nelson Street as we were not allowed to go down the side streets to explore whether there was anymore graffiti down the side streets.

We then moved onto Stokes Croft which I found had more graffitti than Nelson Street! Stokes Croft was a very quirky part of Bristol City Centre with graffiti all over buildings. Again we were not allowed to go down the side streets to investigate further.

Overall, I really didn't enjoy the trip because I didn't feel that we had enough background on the exhibition or the trip at all so we really didn't know what to expect. Next time if we have a trip similar I would like to know more about what we are going to see, I can see that part of the reason I didn't enjoy it is down to me because I could have researched into the exhibition a bit more but I did expect to be told about it a bit more and not to be expected to know about it.