Bloomberg New Contemporaries - Camden Art Centre

New Contemporaries, a celebration of exciting new artistic talent in the UK, returns to Camden Art Centre.

Camden Art Centre is delighted to welcome New Contemporaries back to its galleries after more than 20 years. Bloomberg New Contemporaries features 55 of the most exciting artists emerging 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 offers a distinctive snapshot of current artistic concerns and approaches spanning a breadth of disciplines and presents an important picture of emerging artistic practices: taking the pulse of contemporary art and the urgent lived concerns that are driving artists in the UK today. It is a unique platform that provides emerging artists, many of whom live outside London, the opportunity to present their work to a wider audience, alongside a programme of artist development opportunities to support the growth of their practice.

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 while identity is explored through familial, romantic, and non-human relationships and systemic ableism is probed at in various approaches by Korallia Stergides, Charan Singh and Ranny Macdonald. Pagan rituals and the use of sacred symbols are 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 that draw from archival materials and first-hand research and experience. 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.

New Contemporaries has been supporting emerging and early-career artists from established and alternative art programmes since 1949. It has provided development opportunities for artists, helping them to successfully transition from education into more established pathways.

 

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The Artists

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.

Meet five of the Bloomberg New Contemporaries artists

About Bloomberg 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. For more information visit newcontemporaries.org.uk or follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter @NewContemps.

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