LONDON — Upon entering artist and activist Gregg Bordowitz’s There: a Feeling at the Camden Art Centre, we first encounter Debris Fields (2025), a poem of 24 parts rendered across the walls in a majuscule typeface reminiscent of memorial lettering. One might wonder if Bordowitz, who lives with HIV, is referencing the planned AIDS memorial — the UK’s first — set to also be installed in Camden. In each poem, every word is a noun. “WRITING WRITING / COMPULSION FEELING CONTINUITY,” reads one. It feels like an ode to the hypergraphia that also concerns some of the other works exhibited: Unbound notebook pages reveal a daily exercise of colourful scribbles embedded with abstractions of the Tetragrammaton, the unpronounceable four-letter Hebrew word for God. Its letters also appear as a calligraphic motif across 12 monotype prints. “I’m trying to defeat the distinction between writing and drawing,” says Bordowitz in an accompanying exhibition video.
Such is the English language that some nouns, of course, are also verbs, and sentence fragments leap out of Debris Fields as a result. The free association sparks an instinctive hunt for meaning. The irony, though, is that Bordowitz is far more interested in questions than answers. In an accompanying exhibition guide, he describes the show as “adding up, but never summing up, bits and pieces of a unified field,” with exhibitions themselves consisting of works built under one set of protocols while also being influenced by the unique contexts of their individual locations.
Case in point: The German iteration of the show, which ran at Bonner Kunstverein last year, featured a painting interpreting Romanian-French poet and Holocaust survivor Paul Celan’s 1955 “Heimkehr” from which the exhibition’s name also derives. Here, it is an excerpt from American modernist H.D. Doolittle’s 1944 poetry series The Walls Do Not Fall that is painted at a slant. Bordowitz painted the poem reflecting Doolittle’s experience of the Blitz during World War II onto the Camden Art Centre’s building, which survived that same incendiary bombing campaign. The horrors of war connect the sister exhibitions. In fact, just as at Bonner Kunstverein, the half-inch-thick “Continuous Red Line” (2002–ongoing) runs along the walls roughly three inches from the floor like a thread through every interior space, following each jut and curve, delineating that “unified field.”
But what matters more to Bordowitz, and by extension us as visitors, than some overarching narrative is that there is an unspoken agreement to engage fully with each “incident” — which is how Bordowitz refers to his works. His thoughts on subjectivity are most explicitly expressed in his performance Open Book: Letters, Marks, Politics (2024–ongoing). What on earth does it mean to share an emotion, he asks? To observe art with another person, concur it makes you both feel a particular way, and believe you understand what the other means?
There is perhaps no more fitting testament to that assumption of shared understanding, this invitation to empathize, than a line spoken in subtle jest in Only Idiots Smile, a comedic 2017 performance lecture peppered with Yinglish (Yiddish-English) in which Bordowitz monologues on his upbringing in an immigrant Jewish family in New York: “You know what I mean?”
There: a Feeling continues at the Camden Art Centre (Arkwright Road, London, United Kingdom) through March 23. The exhibition was organized by Camden Arts Centre in collaboration with Fatima Hellberg and Bonner Kunstverein.
