The Forum’s Christmas Fair is an opportunity for members to show and sell their handmade arts and crafts, in our elegant and popular venue. Always well attended, the event is seen by many as a traditional part of their Christmas shopping experience.

This year’s fair runs from the 1st until the 23rd December with a Private view on Friday 2nd. Why not join us for some festive nibbles and a glass of mulled wine?

Creative Christmas is a curated show, exhibitors are selected based on the quality and uniqueness of their work, ensuring a broad range of beautiful, high quality artefacts.

SoCo Artists is a group of professional artists, based in East Sussex which presents a challenging programme of exhibitions, public arts, events and talks in an eclectic range of venues, taking their work to a wide and varied audience.

SoCo Artists Miscellany is our annual show for members and returns to Hastings Arts Forum for 2016. A rich mix of talents and media will make for an interesting and challenging show in this seafront gallery.

Further information can be found on the SoCo website.

Wheel n Come Again is a dynamic arts and film programme funded by Film Hub SE and Arts Council England. It presents an autumn series of  film screenings across Brighton and Hastings, showing short and feature length films from the African and Caribbean diaspora, with artists presenting and engaging audiences in their explorations and responses to the themes. Futher information on the whole season can be found on the Legacy Film website

The exhibition at Hastings Arts Forum includes installations and photographs, canvasses and projections.

A unique aspect of Wheel n Come Again is that it brings together 4 Black female film curators/programmers (Althea Wolfe, Issey Osman, Maria Cabrera and Debbie Plentie) and 4 Black female artists – Tokini Fubara (animation), Monika Akila Richards (spoken word), Leslie Farah Marem (photography) and Carla Armour (mixed media/installation)-  who will create new art works in response to the films, exhibiting and presenting these along the way.

Film showing during the Hastings exhibition:

Tuesday 8th November, 7pm – ‘Pelo Malo (Bad Hair)’, Mariana Rondón (2013, 85 mins, Venezuela)

Friday 11th November, 7pm – ‘What My Mother Told Me’, Frances Anne Solomon (1995, 57 mins, Trinidad & Tobago) & ‘Auntie’, Lisa Harewood (2013, 16 mins, Barbados)

Pelo Malo (Bad hair)
Junior is nine years old and has stubbornly curly hair, or “BAD HAIR”. He wants to have it straightened for His yearbook picture, like a fashionable pop singer with long, ironed hair. This puts him at odds With his mother Marta.

The more Junior tries to look beautiful and make His mother love him, the more she rejects him.

He will find himself cornered, facing a painful decision.

What My Mother Told Me
Exquisitely beautiful and profoundly moving, What My Mother Told Me is a dramatic journey towards self-discovery. The story focuses on Jesse, a young woman from England, who goes to Trinidad to bury her father. Reluctantly she agrees to meet her mother, whom she thought had abandoned her when she was a child. Her mother tells her stories, revealing a troubled and violent marriage, and Jesse is forced to face the truth about her past.

Auntie
Focuses on an often ignored side effect of migration — the disruption and heartache caused to the lives and relationships of the people left behind.

Surface Tension is a collection of paintings by Kate Gritton and Valerie Grove.

The work of Kate Gritton and Valerie Grove emerges from a mutual fascination with the textures, colours and shapes of nature and landscape. However, each artist interprets what they see in a very different way.

Kate Gritton’s attention is below the surface and how constant shifts in earth, rock, water and light underlie the perceptible landscapes we inhabit.  For Valerie Grove, it is the texture and material of the surface itself that becomes the ultimate focus.