Public Knowledge: Meeting Grounds: Essay as Event - Camden Art Centre

A gathering with contributions from Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Ima-Abasi Okon, Brian Dillon and Alex Balgiu, composed by Paul Bailey.

The Meeting Grounds series invites investigation, and experimentation, with the visual essay as a verb (essaying), an event (a gathering) and as a social form for collective reasoning.

‘If we stop thinking about the form of the essay as the form of a thing, the form of an object, and reconsider it as the form of an activity or action (as in a dancer’s form, or the form of a golfer’s swing, or the form of a tennis player’s backhand), we can locate a consistent and unbroken line of agreement about the nature and the form of the essay to contemporary essayists and theorists; the essay is kineticism incarnate—the embodiment of perpetual mobility, motion and movement’.
- Paul Heilker, The Essay: Theory and Pedagogy for an Active Form (1996).

For this edition at the Camden Art Centre, we will explore essayistic strategies that bring the temporalities, materialities and opacities of language into view, and consider how they might be put to use across contemporary practices of graphic design, literature, performance and installation. 

Guided by a series of propositions shared by our contributors, guests are invited to join the gathering as participants in a rehearsal for an essay yet-to-come. 

‘It is the essayist’s job to gather up the shards and map them where they are, to find patterns out there or make one … about the disconnections and mysteries’. – Rebecca Solnit, The Best American Essays (2019).

Contributors

Contributors

Kameelah Janan Rasheed (she/her) was born in East Palo Alto, CA.Rasheed lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. A learner, Kameelah Janan Rasheed explores writing practices across all species, states of living, states of consciousness, and substrates. With an interest in the poetics and possibilities of loss, ruin, and failure in the reading and writing process, Rasheed is interested in Black knowledge production and fugitivity. 

Rasheed is the author of five artists’ books: in the coherence, we weep (KW Institute for Contemporary Art, 2023); i am not done yet (Mousse Publishing, 2022); An Alphabetical Accumulation of Approximate Observations (Endless Editions, 2019); No New Theories (Printed Matter, 2019); and the digital publication Scoring the Stacks (Brooklyn Public Library, 2021). Her writing has appeared in Triple Canopy, The New Inquiry, Shift Space, Active Cultures, and The Believer.

Her most recent solo exhibitions include KW Institute of Contemporary Art (2023), Art Institute of Chicago (2023), and Kunstverein Hannover (2022). Her upcoming solo exhibition at REDCAT (Los Angeles, CA) will feature new video works.

Ima-Abasi Okon lives and works between London and Amsterdam.

Brian Dillon is an Irish writer based in London. His books include Affinities, Suppose a Sentence, Essayism and In the Dark Room. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, New York Times, London Review of Books, Granta, Yale Review and Dublin Review, among other publications. He is working on a book about Kate Bush, and another on aesthetic education.

Alex Balgiu is an educator, designerwriter and bookgatherer about the age of a Heidelberg GTO 52 press. Concerned with designing spaces for collective creativity and experimenting with various modes of transmission, you can catch him reading, playing and disseminating in Lausanne (Écal), Paris (Doc & Pca), Kyoto (Villa Kujoyama) or the bookshop next door. Or you can pick up Women in Concrete Poetry: 1959-79, a collection of outstanding concrete poems by women edited together with Mónica de la Torre (NY: Primary Information, 2020). Do you love books too much? Then join Bibliomania, an ongoing series of editorial puppet shows created with Olivier Lebrun, touring around the world. Currently learning from the forest and the river.

Paul Bailey is an Irish graphic designer, researcher and educator, currently based in London (UK).