New Contemporaries Live

2-6pm

Free event.

The event will include spoken word, screenings, and sound performances that explore themes of ritual, care, ecologies, hauntology, and repetition from artists Joe Moss x Vengaworld, Abi Palmer, Harmeet Rahal and Faissal El-Malak, Korallia Stergides and Joshua Woolford.

This event accompanies the Bloomberg New Contemporaries exhibition at Camden Art Centre.

The Artists

In his practice, Joe Moss collages pre-existing cultural and material references. Employing techniques like critical distancing and breaking the fourth wall, Moss creates scenarios that present conflicting and often humorous tangles of cultural status. From candid conversations, horror goblins and troupes from Hollywood, his work agitates our perceptions of high and low culture categories to display the tricky nature of the mechanisms of Western culture.

Abi Palmer uses fluctuations in her disabled body as a jumping-off point to make work that is multisensory, fragmented and queer. Abi Palmer Invents the Weather (2023) explores themes of access, isolation and the urgency of climate change, attempting to capture, distil and convey the entire outside world in a series of small ritualistic performances for her indoor cats. 

Harmeet Rahal examines the role of culture and generational trauma in the creation of historical narratives in India. He attempts to recollect marginalised histories and subvert dominant narratives at a time when both joy and atrocity are being erased from official records. Using speculative fiction and the malleability of language, Rahal invites viewers to consider how the stories we tell each other shape our sense of self, community and belonging.

Korallia Stergides explores the vital politics of care in an interdependent world, emphasising nonhuman agencies. Stergides works through various characters to ‘re-mythologise’ autobiographical narratives, reimagining the intimacy of our interspecies relationships and home. The work invites audiences to reorient spatial-material inversions by hosting themselves in different bodies, exploring onomatopoeic parallels, shared gestures and abstracted notions of touch between animals and humans, which in turn monumentalises our ephemerality and vulnerabilities. 

Joshua Woolford creates immersive electronic sound environments. Through layering, repetition and distortion, Woolford builds and transforms their soundscape over time, forming a rhythmic collage of audio samples, experimental electronic sounds and spoken word. Woolford invites us to confront and engage with a fragmented world by introducing open questions, personal experiences, references to popular music and thoughts on global crises throughout. Resulting in a meditative and critically engaged shared experience.