Transformative Futures - Camden Art Centre

Type

Young People

Format

In the Building

Date 18 Oct 2025/27 Jun 2026

Booking information:

Sessions run each Saturday during term time from 2.30-4.30pm

Book

A free weekly collective for young people to discuss, explore and create art together.

Transformative Futures brings young people together to explore different approaches to making art.

Led by a practicing contemporary artist, the weekly sessions are a chance to try out processes and techniques used by artists living and working today – including drawing, video, sound art, assemblage and more.

Through our 2026 spring season, artist and educator Lina Ivanova will lead a series of workshops inspired by themes in our current exhibition programme. These hands-on sessions will explore a range of ways of making imagery from analogue photography through to casting sculptures.

Transformative Futures seeks to foster a supportive, inclusive and anti-racist environment where participants can be creative, work with new material and ideas, find out more about contemporary art and collaborate together.

Who is this for and how to join:

This group is for 15-25 year olds with an interest in art, making and creativity.
Participants are welcome join a Transformative Futures session at any point, just come along and try it out.
No experience is necessary, just an interest in making art. All materials will be provided.
Participants are encouraged to join as many sessions as they can, but there is no expectation to attend every week.
The sessions are particularly aimed at local young people (boroughs of Camden, Brent, Barnet and Harrow) not currently at university.

Transformative Futures will culminate in a takeover event in July 2026, produced by participants. Alongside the workshops additional opportunities such as residencies, open studios and development sessions are available through the year.

If you have any questions please don’t hesitate get in touch with George and Stephanie at learning@camdenartcentre.org

Term Three: April/July Term Two: January/March 2026 Term One: October/ December 2025 Images The Artists

“It's been such an amazing experience. I really enjoyed having a place to develop my art practice, it's not something I always had… I have learned to experiment and try new things without the pressure of the outcome, and let go of perfectionism. I'm taking great value from these sessions.” Youth Collective Participant

Term Three: April/July

This season will explore a range of themes and approaches to making art including collaborative painting, photography, self publishing and curating. Sessions will be led by a range of artists including Charlotte Guérard, Francesca Telling and Ayşe Köklü and more. This season participants will work towards the Transformative Futures Takeover that takes place on 4th and 5th July and will feature work produced through the year.

This three-part workshop explores the idea of Painting in Space: When one medium meets another and opens doors to new possibilities in explorations and experimentations.

Session dates: 18 & 25 April and 2 May

Artist and Educator Francesca Telling leads this hands-on session looking at zines, self- publishing and print making.

To coincide with her new exhibition The Jamaica Project at Camden Art Centre, artist and DJ Ain Bailey will lead this one off session offering participants the opportunity to meet the artist and discuss their practice and process.

Led by photographer Sana Badri this will be the first in a series of monthly photography walks in collaboration with Ceci n’est pas Media.

Each walk will be led by a contemporary photographer exploring an area of North London that has inspired their practice.

Focussing on mobile photography the sessions will explore the process of composing, taking and editing images as an accessible means of image making and storytelling.

Each walk will last around two hours meeting in a different area and ending at Camden Art Centre. After the walk there will be time for a group discussion and debrief on the photos taken and themes explored led by the artists and project team. The photos taken during the walks will form a collective library of images to feature in group publications and an exhibition at the conclusion of the programme.

Detailed joining instructions will be shared with sign ups in advance of the session (please register via Eventbrite).

Term Two: January/March 2026

The Spring Term will explore a range of activities including a series of sessions led by artist Lina Ivanova whose practice spans photography, sculpture and installation. Through the term participants will use a range of image making methods including analogue photographic methods, frottage and casting.

Term One: October/ December 2025

Technological advancements have played a huge role in defining what is deemed sensible, and the imaginaries have remained tied to what was “visible” and measurable through the use of scientific devices.

In this series of hands-on workshops, we will work with the flaws, glitches, and oversights of weather-forecast technologies, from building our own DIY radiosonde (balloons that go up, up and away to send weather data) to installing a weather camera and inverting its use to create poetry or write about fleeting “insignificant” moments and feelings hanging in the air.

Welcoming heads in the clouds, with or without your blue-sky moments, we will create an alternative account of weather writing and atmospheric probing. Running from October to December, each session will take on a different theme, inspired by regular sky soundings specific to our location in Camden.

More detail on each session will be shared with sign ups in advance.

Transformative Futures session led by artist Jack O'Brien at Camden Art Centre, 2024

The Artists

Ayşe Köklü is an artist and researcher based between London and Turkey. Her transdisciplinary practice spans sound-works, participatory radio shows, workshops and DIY technologies, with a key focus on the concept of ‘thresholds’: where power imbalances manifest themselves. Using speculative and performative approaches and Feminist Science & Technology Studies, Ayşe is interested in renegotiating boundaries between institutional authority and informal know-how, immeasurability value, unquantifiable and recognition. Ayşe is a Lecturer and an Arts Learning Producer currently undertaking a practice-based PhD at Goldsmiths (Education & Music). Her project, Learning to Whistle, Whistling to Learn: Developing an arts-based participatory pedagogy for, and with, the endangered Turkish whistled language Islikdili, is supported by the University of London Scholars Programme Studentship award.

Lina Ivanova is a London based artist, originally from Bulgaria. Her practice is process-led, multidisciplinary, primarily including photography and sculpture. Lina constructs multi-media installations as a means of negotiating the notion of place. Often rooted in her experience of migration, Lina’s practice explores narratives of displacement, family, history and heritage. Found objects, public and private archives and industrial materials inform her exploration into the relationship between background, class and status. Having graduated with a BA in Photography (2015), she co-founded Revolv Collective (2017) and completed a Postgraduate Certificate of Education (2018).

Charlotte W G (b.1998, Normandie France) lives and works in London. In 2025 she was the recipient of the Paul Smith – Winsor & Newton International Art Prize 2025 and the Almacantar studio Prize. Her work has been exhibited in the UK at Coleman Project Space 2025, Palmer Gallery 2024, Messums Gallery 2024, the Royal Academy of Arts 2023-2024-2025, amongst others and in France at the Maison Normande in 2021. A core part of Charlotte’s practice involves taking her practice to different environments, which she has done during residencies at La Maison Normande, 2021, Newquay 2022, Porthmeor Studio (St Ives), 2024 and currently at Xenia Artist retreat (North Hampshire) 2026.

Young People