BLOOMBERG.- New Contemporaries returns to Camden Art Centre after more than 20 years, showcasing a new generation of emerging artists in the UK. The exhibition coincides with an annual artist development programme, supporting our 2023 cohort to successfully transition from education into professional practice.
Bloomberg New Contemporaries features fifty-five of the most exciting emerging and early-career artists from UK art schools and alternative peer-to-peer learning programmes, selected by internationally renowned artists Helen Cammock, Sunil Gupta and Heather Phillipson.
The resulting exhibition presents an important picture of emerging artistic practices and the urgent lived concerns driving artists in the UK today.
The selected artists for Bloomberg New Contemporaries are: Savanna Achampong, Bunmi Agusto, Ahaad Alamoudi, Adama Dercilia Bari, Alexandra Beteeva, Cai Arfon Bellis, Matthew Burdis, Thomas Cameron, Yingming Chen, Helen Clarke, Sarah Cleary, Alannah Cyan, Nina Davies, James Dearlove, Harriet Gillett, Haneen Hadiy, Joseph Ijoyemi, Jennifer Jones, Bessie Kirkham, Noa Klagsbald, Iga Koncka, Emily Kraus, Margaret (Weiyi) Liang, Harry Luxton, Ranny Macdonald, Jil Mandeng, Anne McCloy, Phyllis McGowan, SAM (Ayrton Mendes), Zayd Menk, Efrat Merin, Rhys Morgan, Joe Moss, Lili Murphy-Johnson, Elena Njoabuzia Onwochei-Garcia, Abi Palmer,
Emerson Pullman, Harmeet Rahal, Daniel Rey, Alicja Rogalska, Luke Anthony Rooney, Jeremy Scott, Holly Sezer, Emma Sheehy, Charan Singh, Jame St Findlay, Korallia Stergides, Samuel Thompson-Plant, Jiayi Wang, Sidney Westenskow, Georg Wilson, Joshua Woolford, Hester Yang, Osman Yousefzada and Samuel Zhang.
Reflecting current artistic concerns and approaches spanning a breadth of disciplines, themes explored in the exhibition include care, kinship, collectivity, climate justice, world-building, geographical borders, and identity politics.
Through costume, textiles, performance, moving image and painting, artists including Savanna Achampong, Bunmi Agusto and Jame St Findlay navigate embodied identities and reflect on their lived experience through fantasy and dream.
Melodrama, cliché, the surreal and cinematic devices also inform many of the artists’ approaches. Fact, fiction, and memory are blurred and reinvented in the works of Jennifer Jones, Matthew Burdis and Elena Njoabuzia Onwochei-Garcia.
Identity is explored through familial, romantic and non-human relationships through various approaches by Korallia Stergides, Charan Singh and Ranny Macdonald.
Pagan rituals and the use of sacred symbols are also enacted through the works of Iga Koncka, Osman Yousefzada and Sarah Cleary, as forms of care or protection.
The complex matrix of geographies, borders, environmentalism, the natural environment, racialised oppression and socio-political structures intersect in many of the artists’ works, including Hester Yang, Harmeet Rahal and Samuel Zhang who each draw from archival materials and first-hand research and experiences.
Agriculture and extractivism are interrogated through the works of Helen Clarke, Joseph Ijoyemi and Haneen Hadiy in a consideration of our dependence upon, and abuse of, the land and the planet’s resources.
Kiera Blakey, Director of New Contemporaries said, “New Contemporaries is thrilled to return to Camden Art Centre which shares a deep commitment to supporting emerging artists. Fifty years since our initial collaboration marks a great history of championing artists for both organisations. The cultural landscape has changed enormously in that time, and we know our platform is more vital than ever. We look forward to connecting the urgent voices of emerging artists today with new audiences in London.”
Martin Clark, Director of Camden Art Centre said, “We are delighted to welcome New Contemporaries back to Camden Art Centre after more than 20 years. We have been supporting and promoting young artists since the 1960s, and we hosted New Contemporaries in the 1970s, 80s, 90s and early 2000s. At a time when it is harder than ever for young artists to find a platform at the start of their careers, this exhibition continues to be a vital and prestigious opportunity for a new generation of creatives to get their work out there.”
The exhibition also coincides with a new collaboration between New Contemporaries and Gertrude that seeks to empower and support artists in the commercial sector. New Contemporaries artists are granted a unique opportunity to establish a profile on the Gertrude app that serves as a platform for artists to cultivate their audience, effectively promote and market their art and exhibitions, and attract future sales and industry interest. Our aim is to establish a formal system that equips artists for the practical realities of the art industry within the nuanced and frequently misunderstood conventions of commercial galleries New Contemporaries has also produced an online platform to complement the exhibition which features all of the artists’ works alongside newly commissioned texts by early-career writers, providing an opportunity to delve into each artist’s practice.
New Contemporaries 2023 Selectors
Helen Cammock uses film, photography, print, text, song and performance to examine mainstream historical and contemporary narratives about Blackness, womanhood, oppression and resistance, wealth and power, poverty and vulnerability. Her works often cut across time and geography, layering multiple voices as she investigates the cyclical nature of histories in her visual and aural assemblages. In 2017, Cammock won the Max Mara Art Prize for Women, and in 2019 was the joint recipient of The Turner Prize. She has exhibited and performed worldwide including recent solo shows at the Whitechapel Gallery, The Photographer's Gallery and Serpentine Galleries (London, STUK Art Centre (Leuven); Collezione Maramotti (Reggio Emilia); VOID (Derry/ Londonderry); the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin); Kestner Gesellshaft (Hannover) and Hamburger Kunstalle (Hamburg). She has three upcoming solo shows Art + Practice (Los Angeles), Amant (New York) and Oakville Galleries (Toronto).
Sunil Gupta (New Contemporaries alumni 1983) has been involved with independent photography as a critical practice for many years focusing on race, migration and queer issues. A retrospective was shown at The Photographers’ Gallery, London (2020/21) and has moved to The Image Center, Toronto. He is a Professorial Fellow at UCA, Farnham. His latest book is ‘We Were Here: Sexuality, Photography, and Cultural Difference, Selected Writings by Sunil Gupta (2022) and his current exhibitions include ‘Sunil Gupta: Songs of Deliverance, Part I and Part II’, Hammersmith Hospital, London. His work is in many private and public collections including Tokyo Museum of Photography; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Metropolitan, Museum of Art, New York; Royal Ontario Museum, Tate and the Museum of Modern Art. His work is represented by Hales Gallery (New York, London), Materià Gallery (Rome), Stephen Bulger Gallery (Toronto) and Vadehra Art Gallery (New Delhi).
Heather Phillipson (New Contemporaries alumni 2008) works in a variety of media including video, sculpture, music, large-scale installations, online works, text and drawing. Recent solo exhibitions include Tate Britain's Duveen Galleries commission, London (2021-22); the Fourth Plinth commission, Trafalgar Square (2020-22); Almost Gone – an audio collage for BBC Radio 3 (2020), and major commissions for BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead (2018) and Art on the Underground’s flagship site at Gloucester Road underground station (2018). Recent group exhibitions include British Art Show 9 (UK, touring); Shanghai Biennale, China (2021); Garden of Earthly Delights, Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin (2019) and Sharjah Biennial, UAE (2019). Phillipson was nominated for the Turner Prize 2022 and received the Film London Jarman Award in 2016 and the European Short Film Festival selection from the International Film Festival Rotterdam in 2018. She is also an award-winning poet. In 2023 she produced a new commission for the Imperial War Museum in partnership with Glynn Vivian Gallery, Swansea.
New Contemporaries
Since its foundation in 1949, New Contemporaries has been dedicated to supporting early career professional experience to recently graduating artists in the UK. Following a revised organisational structure and name change in 1988 (from Young Contemporaries to New Contemporaries) the organisation has expanded its support and services to new career artists.
Each year New Contemporaries works with a group of selectors, composed of artists and its alumni, for the annual survey exhibition, selected from a pool of applications, gathered through a nation-wide open call to all artists in higher education and alternative schooling. The group exhibitions composed of shortlisted artists take place in and outside London, organised in collaboration with different institutional partners.
Today New Contemporaries delivers mentoring programmes, national and international opportunities and peer-to-peer learning. Through partnerships with national collections, New Contemporaries provides a platform for artists to be acquired at an early phase in their careers. Since 2014, New Contemporaries has developed a range of studio bursaries to further support the artists and aiming to make their practices sustainable in the long term.
New Contemporaries is an Arts Council of England National Portfolio Organisation. Bloomberg Philanthropies is the title sponsor of the annual exhibitions since 2001. New Contemporaries receives further support from The Bridget Riley Art Foundation, national trusts and foundations and international agencies.
Camden Art Centre: 19 January – 14 April 2024
Camden Art Centre is a place for world-class contemporary art exhibitions and education. Situated in Hampstead, North London (charity number 1065829) Camden Art Centre is a place for art and artists; a place for the curious, the novice and the expert alike. It’s a place to see, to make, to learn and to talk about contemporary art, whether in our building, attending off-site projects or via our digital forums. Founded by artists in 1965, the Centre continues to be a space for the most vital and diverse mix of practices and ideas and is dedicated to supporting artists at every stage of their careers.
