Camden Art Audio

Curator and writer Isabel Seligman discusses Matthew Krishanu’s works on paper and their relationship to his wider painting practice. 

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.  

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 Black neighbourhoods of the post-industrialised city of Detroit.

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 relationship with the Hardcore Continuum movement.

Techno at the End of the Future – Episode 1: London was produced by Zakia Sewell.

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 art, design and media, whilst interweaving historical narratives regarding Goethe’s fascination with the Ginkgo plant.

Dave Beech is an artist and writer. He is a Reader in Art and Marxism at Chelsea, Camberwell and Wimbledon, the University of the Arts, London. He is the author of Art and Labour: On the Hostility to Handicraft, Aesthetic Labour and the Politics of Work in Art (Brill 2020), Art and Postcapitalism: Aesthetic Labour, Automation and Value Production(Pluto 2019) and Art and Value: Art’s Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical and Marxist Economics (Brill 2015), which was shortlisted for the Deutscher Memorial Prize. Beech is an artist who worked in the collective Freee (with Andy Hewitt and Mel Jordan) between 2004 and 2018. His solo art practice revisits the critical traditions of photomontage, documentary photography, digital print, the photo archive and the photobook.

Esther Leslie is a Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck. Her books include Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde; Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry; Derelicts: Thought Worms from the Wreckage; Liquid Crystals: The Science and Art of a Fluid Form, and the milk projects, Deeper in the Pyramid and The Inextinguishable (both with Melanie Jackson).

Conversations are a series of public talks with artists, academics, thinkers, and writers investigating themes, processes, and histories presented in the exhibition programme.

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 contagion effect of folklore born out of cataclysmic events, new mineral formats, and recovering knowledge within charged landscapes affected by geological and ecological transformation.

This recording was made on land occupying the ancestral, traditional and contemporary homelands of the Meškwahki·aša·hina (Fox), Peoria, Anishinabewaki ᐊᓂᔑᓈᐯᐗᑭ, Bodéwadmiakiwen (Potawatomi), and Myaamia people.  The people of these nations were forced from their land through the 1807 Treaty of Detroit.

Kristen Gallerneaux is an artist, curator, and sonic researcher holding a Ph.D. in Art Practice & Media History (UC San Diego), an MA in Folklore (University of Oregon), and an MFA in Art (Wayne State University). She is also the Curator of Communication and Information Technology at The Henry Ford Museum in Detroit, Michigan, where she continues to build upon one of the largest historical technology collections in North America. In 2018, she was a Future Thought speaker at Moogfest and premiered the experimental short film, The Hum. She has presented at Unsound editions Dislocation (2014), Presence (2018), and Intermission (2020). In 2017, she spoke about the history of the Votrax text-to-speech synthesizer and taught an electronic music production workshop at Pop Kultur Berlin. She has written for the Barbican Center, ARTnews, the Quietus, and Herman Miller’s WHY magazine. She has published on wide-ranging topics like mathematics in mid-century design, the visual history of telepathy research, the world’s first mousepad, and car audio bass battles in Miami. Her book, High Static, Dead Lines, is available via Strange Attractor Press and distributed by MIT Press in the United States.

Produced by: Zakia Sewell Music by: Nicolas Gaunin Design by: Mariana Vale

This series has been programmed as part of the Freelands Lomax Ceramics Fellowship.

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 understand their ever-present dialogue with the past.

From the sedimentary strata of mountains to the narratives secreted in our own gestures, Okpokwasili and Williamson discuss the body as an accumulation and amalgamation of historic interactions. They will consider how lineage, past lives and trauma secret themselves in bodies, and how these silences resurface to reveal our entangled pasts, form us in the contemporary and redirect futures.

Okwui Okpokwasili is a Brooklyn-based choreographer, performer and writer. Her performance work has been commissioned by the Walker Art Center, Danspace Project, Performance Space New York, the Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA, the 10th Annual Berlin Biennale, and Jacob’s Pillow, among other institutions. Her work includes two Bessie Award–winning productions: Pent-Up: A Revenge Dance and Bronx Gothic. She has held residencies at the Maggie Allesee National Choreographic Center, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Rauschenberg Foundation Captiva Residency, and New York Live Arts, where she was a Randjelovic/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist. She is currently a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts. Okpokwasili is a 2018 MacArthur Fellow.

Sophie J Williamson is the initiator and convenor of Undead Matter, a multidisciplinary research platform focused on the intimacies of being with the geological. Williamson was Exhibitions Curator at Camden Art Centre (2013 – 21), prior to which she was part of the inaugural team at Raven Row (2009–13) and worked at the Singapore Biennale (2006), Venice Biennale (2007) and Manchester Asian Triennale (2008). Her writing has appeared in frieze, Art Monthly, Elephant and Aesthetica, among others. Residencies and awards include: V-A-C Research Prize Recipient (2020), Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity Curatorial Fellow (2020); and Gasworks Curatorial Fellow (2016). Her anthology, Translation, part of the Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press – Documents of Contemporary Art series, brings together writings by artists, poets, authors and theorists to reflect on the urgency of building empathy in an era of global turmoil.

Produced by: Zakia Sewell Music by: Nicolas Gaunin Design by: Mariana Vale

This series has been programmed as part of the Freelands Lomax Ceramics Fellowship.