Artist Richard Wright and our Director Martin Clark discuss how Wright's artistic practices have been informed and influenced over time. Wright also gives an insight into his site-specific approach to painting and how his wall painting in Camden Art Centre's Gallery Three was manifested, produced and executed.
Artist Gregg Bordowitz and Josephine Pryde discuss what it means to make art in the present moment and explore how established infrastructures shape and influence artistic practice.
To mark the first UK publication of 'American Genius: A Comedy', author Lynne Tillman is joined by Emily LaBarge and Michael Bracewell for a discussion at Camden Art Centre.
Curator and writer Isabel Seligman discusses Matthew Krishanu’s works on paper and their relationship to his wider painting practice.
This episode marks the launch of Hedva's latest book, Your Love is Not Good . It features a reading and discussion with esteemed art critic Philippa Snow. The episode provides an insightful exchange, bridging literature, art, and contemporary issues at the time of recording in Autumn 2023. Johanna Hedva (they/them) is a Korean American writer, artist, and musician, who was raised in Los Angeles by a family of witches, and now lives in LA and Berlin. Hedva is the author of the novels Your Love Is...
The discussion recorded in Autumn 2023 is complemented by readings from Innominate by Pearce and Ill Feelings by Hattrick. These works reflect on the character of "queer evidence" and their shared interest in blending autobiography with historical narrative. Naomi Pearce is a writer and curator. Recent projects include Good Bad Books? At the Barbican (co-programmed with Anna Bunting-Branch) and Almost Conceptual, Matt’s Gallery, both in London. Her writing has been published by Art Monthly, Happ...
With Martin Clark, Darian Leader, Ralph Rugoff and Mohammed Sami Building upon themes and visual quotations from Sami’s exhibition , The Point 0 , this panel discussion examines contemporary painting and its capacity to exist as repositories of information, invoking subjective interpretations of private and public experiences through various material and technical processes.
How can discourses between seemingly disparate disciplines inspire art? Tenant of Culture and historian Arwen P. Mohun reflect on the importance of research in their respective practices and discuss the influence of Mohun’s book Steam Laundries: Gender, Technology, and Work in the United States and Great Britain, 1880-1940 on the exhibit Soft Acid .
This podcast is led by DeForrest Brown Jr, author of Assembling a Black Counter Culture , in conversation with Steve Goodman (aka Kode9 and founder of Hyperdub) and Nkisi (co-founder of NON Worldwide). Collectively they discuss the migration of techno music from North America to Europe with an initial focus on the situated contexts of the dance music scene in London and across the U.K. during the early 1990s. With reference to techno’s spiritual and technological origins, evolution, and relation...
Episode 2 focuses on past, present and future of the Detroit-Berlin axis. By means of an interview collage, writer and Make Techno Black Again activist DeForrest Brown, Jr., Lerato Khathi aka Lakuti (founder of Uzuri Recordings and the Bring Down the Walls initiative), Boris Dolinski (resident DJ at Berghain) and Mark Ernestus (musician and founder of the Hard Wax record store) explore how the rapid growth of techno and club culture in Germany after 1989 relates to the music’s origins in the Bla...
For this episode of Conversations , Dave Beech and Esther Leslie navigate Olga Balema’s installation Computer to examine a range of formal, material and theoretical concerns. With a focus on the geographies of production, digital processes, architectural grids, artistic labour, and how domestic spaces have also functioned as workplaces since the onset of the pandemic. In doing so, they reflect on Walter Benjamin’s writing on the reception, engagement and interaction of the horizontal plane in ar...
On March 20th, 1980, Mount St. Helens (traditionally known as Lawetlat’la or Loowit) erupted. Rocks boiled, rivers evaporated into clouds, and Spirit Lake—a site connected with Indigenous whistling spirits known as Tsiatko—was smothered under a blanket of pyrolized trees. As part of a continuing series of works under the “Echomaking” umbrella, in this audio essay, Kristen Gallerneaux (Métis-Wendat) uncovers the sonic, material, and poetic resonances connected to this story. She will focus on the...
Choreographer Okwui Okpokwasili and curator Sophie J Williamson, consider how time, history and circadian rhythms imprint themselves on our bodies. In Being Taken for Granite, Ursula K. Le Guin described a kinship with mud as a body that yields, reacts, imprints and responds . Taking this text as a guide they will unravel relationships between the body and the soil from which it is born, considering ways of archeologically excavating and reading bodies – human, non-human and geological – to unde...
Professor Louise Steel examines the history of clay and how the cultural and technological knowledges of the earliest settled farming and urban communities were informed by people’s engagements with clay. As one of the first mineral substance to be transformed from a malleable to a durable state. Many societies perceive it as an animate substance permeated with "a spiritual energy and life-force" that retains a "thing-power", allowing it to be shaped into various forms.[1] [2] Building on her on...
John Merrick and Alina Kolar discuss the history of The Radical Thinkers series from Verso. To reflect on how it enabled them to discover and engage with the ideas presented by favoured radical thinkers and the challenges of publishing at large. John Merrick is a writer based in London, where he is an editor at Verso Books. He has had work published in New Left Review, Boston Review, TLS, Jacobin, Tribune, New Statesman, and elsewhere. He is currently writing a book about class, culture and the ...
The New Radical is an online series of conversations between Arts of the Working Class and contributing writers for Verso Books, discussing what the new radical means today. Maya Goodfellow and Alina Kolar speak about the understanding of the word Radical in relation to Immigration and Borders, Affect and Effect of Time, with regards to the ongoing impact of the pandemic, and what is within and beyond our control. Maya Goodfellow is a writer, researcher and academic. She has written for the New ...
The New Radical is an online series of conversations between Arts of the Working Class and contributing writers for Verso Books, discussing what the new radical means today. Aaron Bastani and Alina Kolar try to determine The New Radical between the news, fact and fiction. They examine voices that make up the realm of thinking and unthinking the mainstream and the grass-roots. Aaron Bastani is co-founder and Senior Editor at Novara Media and has a doctorate from the University of London. His rese...
The COVID-19 pandemic has underlined the value and importance of outdoor spaces. Recent studies into public health and well-being state that green environments are associated with reduced levels of depression, anxiety, and fatigue and can enhance both children and adults’ quality of life. However, access is not always a given, nor is everyone encouraged to feel welcome in green spaces. Flock Together is a birdwatching collective for people of colour initiated to challenge and dismantle existing ...
Artist Tamara Henderson in conversation with Gina Buenfeld (Camden Art Centre Exhibitions Curator) co-curator of The Botanical Mind: Art, Mysticism and The Cosmic Tree. They discuss the concerns that run throughout Henderson's work including hypnosis, altered states, life processes, seasonal patterns and vegetal motifs. Conversations are a series of public talks with artists, academics, thinkers, and writers investigating themes, processes, and histories presented in the exhibition programme....
Michael Marder, author of numerous books on plant philosophy, will be in-conversation with Camden Art Centre Director, Martin Clark, to discuss the significance of plants for our lives, ways of thinking, and relationships between human and non-human beings. Michael Marder is Ikerbasque Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country, UPV/EHU, Vitoria-Gasteiz. His work spans the fields of environmental philosophy and ecological thought, political theory, and phenomenology...
What's Love Got To Do With It? is a three-part podcast series about Radical Love. The final episode of this podcast series is a conversation between two friends: Ariana Reines and Sophie Robinson , poets and educators who look to spaces of hospitality for connection and kinship. Sharing their poetry and the experiences that shaped its writing, the pair discuss possibilities for care despite institutional cruelty, getting sober as an act of radical love, and how the Sun and Moon communicate very ...
What's Love Got To Do With It? is a three-part podcast series about Radical Love. In the second episode, poets Alice Notley and Precious Okoyomon converse together for the first time to discuss how they tune into interconnectedness, why dreaming together might forge collective states of belonging, and ask each other how love moves them and the world. Sharing their poetry and its rootedness in their personal histories – as well as their hopes for the future – Notley and Okoyomon render visions of...
What's Love Got To Do With It? is a three-part podcast series about Radical Love. In this first episode, CAConrad and LeAnne Howe share an intensely personal conversation with one another about First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln, who insisted she was tormented by an Indigenous Spirit – a reminder that her husband’s record on racial equality is fraught with violence and oppression; AIDS and loving during the Reagan years; and the new horizons created by the Black Lives Matter movement. Please note: thi...
‘Stop Making Sense : Part 1 – Portals to understanding’ is a two-part online series, curated by Camden Art Centre’s Freelands Lomax Ceramics Fellow, Phoebe Collings-James. The work looks to unravel what it means to facilitate and hold spaces of knowledge sharing. In Part 1, Collings-James invites Serafine1369 and Daniella Valz Gen to consider how their practices of tarot, divination and performance can embody queer thinking around teaching in spaces outside of institutional structures. Rooted in...
For the final podcast of the series, Ros Gray and Shela Sheikh introduce how planting was central to colonialism and explain why it is vital that we recognise the ongoing effects of colonial botany and the plantation system. They discuss how gardens – from botanical collections to municipal parks – are historical sites of exclusion and labour as well as leisure and enjoyment, detailing the hierarchies that exist within these spaces, and describing how artists have actively sought to decolonise t...
Queer Nature explores the little-known, often-overlooked and rare intimate behaviour of the botanical world. Investigating the relationships between ecological thought and queer theory to celebrate the multitude of shapes, gender, sexes and colours that exist around us. Landscape architect Céline Baumann describes the journey that led her to discover and examine diversity within the plant kingdom.
Dr Stephan Harding explains how Gaia Alchemy integrates the sciences of the Earth with alchemical approaches to psyche so we can live harmoniously within the limits of our planet. Although the development of science has given us many benefits, its predominance has made us into detached observers fundamentally disconnected from each other and from nature. And yet, in our own time, science has given us detailed knowledge about the evolution of our Earth – Gaia - whilst depth psychology in the guis...
Musician Sarah Angliss (London, UK) draws on the botanical writing of Hildegard von Bingen, a twelfth-century Christian mystic, to help make sense of her own experiences of illness, healing and the turn of the season while the city is in lockdown. Sarah immerses us in a sonic fever dream, using fragments of Hildegard’s texts on herbal medicine to explore her personal experiences of fever as she examines Hildegard’s ecstatic visions.
The Amazon Rainforest is the world's most abundant pharmacopeia - filled with countless plants that are used traditionally to heal physical, psychological and spiritual ailments. The traditional healers who live here say that they receive their knowledge as transmissions from the plants themselves during periods of solitary retreat in the jungle. In this podcast, Gina Buenfeld - Co-Curator of The Botanical Mind - describes some of her experiences in the Amazon rainforest alongside recordings of ...
Leading scientist of plant cognition, Monica Gagliano (Australia), presents a new understanding of the vegetal world. She argues that, in order to understand plant sentience we need to radically rethink our definitions of intelligence and consciousness to move away from a human-centric model. Through a survey of plant capabilities from sight, smell and touch to communication, the podcast will challenge our notion of intelligence, presenting a vision of plant life that is more sophisticated than ...
