On Care:
Helen Cammock and Amal Khalaf
Géza, 306 Maujer
In this special screening of Bass Notes and SiteLines: The Voice as a Site of Resistance and the Body as a Site of Resilience (2022), artist Helen Cammock talks with educator and curator Amal Khalaf.
Together, they unpack the methods, forms, questions, and reasons underpinning Helen’s continued focus on storytelling and how it can function as an act of care. Bass Notes and SiteLines was made in collaboration with a group of social care providers and receivers, and investigates the ways we experience, understand, and communicate the twinned concepts of resistance and resilience.
The work is being screened as part of Rituals of Speaking, a new film-led exhibition series that explores how artists represent the voices of others through collective storytelling.
The screening of Bass Notes and SiteLines will take around 40 minutes and will be followed by the conversation between Helen and Amal of approximately 45 minutes.
Image: still from Bass Notes and SiteLines
Helen Cammock uses film, photography, print, text, song, and performance to examine mainstream historical and contemporary narratives about Blackness, womanhood, oppression and resistance, wealth and power, poverty and vulnerability. Her works often cut across time and geography, layering multiple voices as she investigates the cyclical nature of histories in her visual and aural assemblages. In 2017, she won the Max Mara Art Prize for Women, and in 2019 she was the joint recipient of The Turner Prize. Helen has exhibited and performed worldwide including recent solo shows at the Whitechapel Gallery, The Photographer’s Gallery, and Serpentine Galleries (London, UK); Performing Arts Center STUK (Leuven, Belgium); Collezione Maramotti (Reggio Emilia, Italy); VOID (Derry, Northern Ireland); the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin, Ireland); Kestner Gesellshaft (Hannover, Germany); and Hamburger Kunsthalle (Hamburg, Germany).
Amal Khalaf is a curator and artist and currently Director of Programs at Cubitt and Civic Curator at the Serpentine Galleries, London. She has developed residencies, exhibitions, and collaborative research projects at the intersection of arts and social justice and recently launched Support Structures for Support Structures, a fellowship and grant program for artists working in the field of community practice and spatial politics. Recent projects include Radio Ballads (2019-22), an exhibition and research project in London and Sensing the Planet (2021) a gathering of musicians, artists and climate activists in Dartington, Devon. She is a trustee of Mophradat, Athens; not/nowhere, London and Art Night, London. In 2019, she curated Bahrain’s pavilion for the Venice Biennale, in 2018 she co-curated an international arts and social justice conference called Rights to the City in London, and in 2016 she co-directed the 10th edition of the Global Art Forum, Art Dubai. She is also a founding member of the GCC art collective, whose work has been shown at MoMA PS1, the Sharjah Art Foundation, the Whitney Biennial, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Berlin Biennale, the Fridericianum, Kassel, and the New Museum, New York among others.
