LONDON — Upon getting into artist and activist Gregg Bordowitz’s There: a Feeling on the Camden Artwork Centre, we first encounter Particles Fields (2025), a poem of 24 components rendered throughout the partitions in a majuscule typeface harking back to memorial lettering. One would possibly surprise if Bordowitz, who lives with HIV, is referencing the deliberate AIDS memorial — the UK’s first — set to even be put in in Camden. In every poem, each phrase is a noun. “WRITING WRITING / COMPULSION FEELING CONTINUITY,” reads one. It looks like an ode to the hypergraphia that additionally issues a few of the different works exhibited: Unbound pocket book pages reveal a every day train of vibrant scribbles embedded with abstractions of the Tetragrammaton, the unpronounceable four-letter Hebrew phrase for God. Its letters additionally seem as a calligraphic motif throughout 12 monotype prints. “I’m trying to defeat the distinction between writing and drawing,” says Bordowitz in an accompanying exhibition video.
Such is the English language that some nouns, after all, are additionally verbs, and sentence fragments leap out of Particles Fields consequently. The free affiliation sparks an instinctive hunt for which means. The irony, although, is that Bordowitz is way extra eager about questions than solutions. In an accompanying exhibition information, he describes the present as “adding up, but never summing up, bits and pieces of a unified field,” with exhibitions themselves consisting of works constructed below one set of protocols whereas additionally being influenced by the distinctive contexts of their particular person areas.
Gregg Bordowitz, “Continuous Red Line” (2002–ongoing), purple splicing tape (picture by Luke Walker, courtesy Camden Arts Centre)
Living proof: The German iteration of the present, which ran at Bonner Kunstverein final 12 months, featured a portray decoding Romanian-French poet and Holocaust survivor Paul Celan’s 1955 “Heimkehr” from which the exhibition’s title additionally derives. Right here, it’s an excerpt from American modernist H.D. Doolittle’s 1944 poetry sequence The Partitions Do Not Fall that’s painted at a slant. Bordowitz painted the poem reflecting Doolittle’s expertise of the Blitz throughout World Struggle II onto the Camden Artwork Centre’s constructing, which survived that very same incendiary bombing marketing campaign. The horrors of warfare join the sister exhibitions. The truth is, simply as at Bonner Kunstverein, the half-inch-thick “Continuous Red Line” (2002–ongoing) runs alongside the partitions roughly three inches from the ground like a thread by each inside area, following every jut and curve, delineating that “unified field.”
However what issues extra to Bordowitz, and by extension us as guests, than some overarching narrative is that there’s an unstated settlement to have interaction totally with every “incident” — which is how Bordowitz refers to his works. His ideas on subjectivity are most explicitly expressed in his efficiency Open Ebook: Letters, Marks, Politics (2024–ongoing). What on earth does it imply to share an emotion, he asks? To watch artwork with one other particular person, concur it makes you each really feel a selected means, and consider you perceive what the opposite means?
There may be maybe no extra becoming testomony to that assumption of shared understanding, this invitation to empathize, than a line spoken in delicate jest in Solely Idiots Smile, a comedic 2017 efficiency lecture peppered with Yinglish (Yiddish-English) through which Bordowitz monologues on his upbringing in an immigrant Jewish household in New York: “You know what I mean?”
Gregg Bordowitz, “Baroque Clouds” (2018–ongoing), plaster, material, and acrylic paint (picture by Luke Walker, courtesy Camden Arts Centre)
There: a Feeling continues on the Camden Artwork Centre (Arkwright Highway, London, United Kingdom) by March 23. The exhibition was organized by Camden Arts Centre in collaboration with Fatima Hellberg and Bonner Kunstverein.
