LONDON — Upon coming 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 elements rendered throughout the partitions in a majuscule typeface harking back to memorial lettering. One may 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 seems like an ode to the hypergraphia that additionally considerations among the different works exhibited: Unbound pocket book pages reveal a each 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, in fact, are additionally verbs, and sentence fragments leap out of Particles Fields in consequence. The free affiliation sparks an instinctive hunt for that means. The irony, although, is that Bordowitz is way extra occupied with 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 underneath one set of protocols whereas additionally being influenced by the distinctive contexts of their particular person places.
Gregg Bordowitz, “Continuous Red Line” (2002–ongoing), crimson splicing tape (picture by Luke Walker, courtesy Camden Arts Centre)
Working example: The German iteration of the present, which ran at Bonner Kunstverein final yr, 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 Battle II onto the Camden Artwork Centre’s constructing, which survived that very same incendiary bombing marketing campaign. The horrors of struggle join the sister exhibitions. In reality, 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 via each inside house, 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 absolutely 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 individual, concur it makes you each really feel a selected approach, and consider you perceive what the opposite means?
There’s 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) wherein 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) via March 23. The exhibition was organized by Camden Arts Centre in collaboration with Fatima Hellberg and Bonner Kunstverein.
