Summer programme highlights

In the galleries
Walter Price: Pearl Lines
May 21 – August 29
The first institutional exhibition in the UK by American artist Walter Price (b. 1989, Georgia, US) comprising new work created during his residency at Camden Art Centre in early 2020, alongside paintings and drawings produced during lockdown in New York. Across his work, Price blurs the boundaries between collective history and individual memory, figuration and abstraction, depicting uncertain urban and domestic landscapes populated by the suggestion of people, objects, images and text. 

Olga Balema: Computer
May 21 – August 29
Computer is Olga Balema’s (b. 1984, Ukraine) first solo exhibition in the UK. Centred around a single flat sculpture, created in her studio and the surrounding streets in New York, it comprises a large digital print of a domestic carpet, repeated in a grid-like arrangement and manipulated through a “banner buzz” digital printing interface, as well as various physical interventions, actions and incisions.

Online
Earth and World 
July 27 – August 10
Earth and World is a new podcast series from Camden Art Audio that takes an expanded view on clay as an earthly material. Examining the politics of geological narratives and the agency of minerals, it reflects on humanity’s fundamental and interwoven relationship with the earth. The series gives a voice to the ongoing research of academics and artists regarding ecology, commerce, indigenous communities, ancestral relations, and the Anthropocene. 

Louise Steel: “Interactions with Clay – The creation of settled communities in the Near East” 
Tuesday, July 27
Building on her ongoing research into the agency of matter, professor Louise Steel examines the history of clay and how the cultural and technological knowledge of the earliest settled farming and urban communities were informed by people’s engagement with, and manipulation of, earthly materials.

Okwui Okpokwasili and Sophie J Williamson: “Being Mud”
Tuesday, August 3
Using Ursula K. Le Guin’s essay “Being Taken for Granite” as a guide, choreographer, performer and writer Okwui Okpokwasili and curator Sophie J Williamson unravel relationships between the body and the soil to consider ways of archaeologically excavating and reading bodies—human, non-human and geological—to understand their ever-present dialogue with the past. 

Kristen Gallerneaux: “Echomaking: Where the Whistles Mingle” 
Tuesday, August 10
On March 20, 1980, Mount St. Helens (traditionally known as Lawetlat’la or Loowit) erupted. A site connected with indigenous whistling spirits known as Tsiatko, Kristen Gallerneaux (Métis-Wendat) uncovers its sonic, material, and poetic resonances by focusing on folklore born from cataclysmic events, new mineral formats, and knowledge held within landscapes affected by geological and ecological transformation.

Earth and World has been programmed as part of the Camden Art Centre Freelands Lomax Ceramics Fellowship.  

In the garden
Camden Art Centre presents Garden Nights, a new seasonal programme of outdoor events located in the unique environment of the Camden Art Centre Garden.

Still House Plants, Bianca Scout, Alpha Maid (DJ)
Friday, July 23, 7–10pm
A summer night of experimental live music in Camden Art Centre’s Garden, headlined by acclaimed UK group, Still House Plants. Bridging elements of sampling, slowcore, and repetition, the trio have developed a fractious, experimental sound with a melting pop heart. They will be joined by Bianca Scout’s spectral sound collages and music selected by Alpha Maid. 

This event has been organised by 33-33 and Camden Art Centre.

Alaya and other films by Nathaniel Dorsky 
Friday, August 27, 8–10pm
A small-scale outdoor screening of silent 16mm films by American experimental filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky. Alaya will be shown alongside three other films made by Dorsky over the last two decades: The Visitant, February, and Avraham. 

The programme has been selected through a dialogue between Nathaniel Dorsky, Olga Balema and Will Rose.