Gregg Bordowitz: There: a Feeling

17 Jan-23 Mar 2025

Overview

Camden Art Centre is delighted to announce the first institutional solo exhibition in the UK by celebrated American artist, writer and activist Gregg Bordowitz (b. 1964, Brooklyn).

Spanning the breadth of Bordowitz’s practice, including video, installation, performance, poetry, and prints, There: a Feeling will centre around the artist’s enduring commitment to writing as an activity of thought, manifesting across various forms and modalities. In Bordowitz’s ongoing transdisciplinary project, words are gestures, are images, are letters.

There: a Feeling is the second chapter of a partner exhibition, Dort: ein Gefühl, on view at the Bonner Kunstverein, Germany until 2 February 2025.

Bordowitz has realised new site-specific works for Camden Art Centre, which will be grounded in the context of older pieces that draw heavily on lived experience. There: a Feeling, is a testament to survival, ordinary survival, if such a thing can be described. The artist’s growing body of work constitutes a vital and intimate historical testimony which, in his words, “combines daily quandaries with improvised compositions, together adding up, but never summing up, bits and pieces of a unified field. The singular proposition of an exhibition can only be experienced as qualities bursting upon qualities through overlapping episodes of attention, sensation, and perception”.

The exhibition has been conceived and developed in collaboration with Fatima Hellberg and Bonner Kunstverein.

Gregg Bordowitz is a renowned filmmaker, writer, and activist whose work has been exhibited at the Whitney, the New Museum, Artist Space, MoMA (all New York), the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and Tate Modern, among others. A major retrospective of his work, Gregg Bordowitz: I Wanna Be Well, was organised by the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College, in 2018 and subsequently presented at MoMA PS1 and the Art Institute of Chicago.

In the 1980s, his creative practice was focused on responding to the AIDS crisis. He organised and documented a number of protests against government inaction and advocated for health education and harm reduction as a member of the groundbreaking AIDS activist group ACT UP. He also served as a founding member of the 1980s video/film collectives Testing the Limits and Diva TV.

Bordowitz is the author of The AIDS Crisis Is Ridiculous and Other Writings, 1986–2003 (2004), General Idea: Imagevirus (2010), Volition (2010), and Glenn Ligon: Untitled (I Am a Man) (2018).