New Contemporaries is old – very nearly venerable. Founded to spotlight art school graduates in the postwar gloom, the annual exhibition started in 1949. The selectors have been professors, students, art world mandarins and even the director of the National Gallery, with skipped years and brewing outrage. It has been shored up by backers as various as British Telecom, the Arts Council, Bloomberg and (bless her) Bridget Riley’s Art Foundation. Every edition is different, and yet always the same: an opportunity for gazing, arguing, star-spotting and generally observing the waterfront of contemporary art.
This year is vital viewing, and not just because it has been so judiciously selected from open submission by a trio of acclaimed mid-career names: Heather Phillipson, Helen Cammock and Sunil Gupta. The 55 artists work in every medium from watercolour, oil and charcoal to tapestry, video and installation. Some are in their early 20s, others in their late 40s (you only have to be a fledgling graduate or postgraduate to apply) so there is an immense range and depth to the show.
But more than that, almost all of the art feels like a sign of the times. Kinship, race and identity politics; immigration, climate breakdown and geographical borders – had the choice not been made more than a year ago, there would undoubtedly be work here about Gaza and Sudan. But their responses to being alive in this world go two ways: some artists are out there like journalists, others in private retreat.
You travel – to Hungary, Ireland, China, Pakistan. The exquisite photographs of Haneen Hadiy (born Glasgow, 1999) show charred Mesopotamian date palms, victims of global heating, stretching into the desert like gondoliers’ poles. An Indian man laments his HIV/Aids diagnosis, alone in bed, before courageously chiming in with a Bollywood song in a film by Charan Singh (Delhi, 1978).
Sam Ayrton Mendes’ (Lisbon, 1993) video collage of black women and children trying to survive white supremacy all around the world is subtly intercut with moments of triumph and joy. It is comparatively long, at 30 minutes, but so due and necessary.
There are quasi-documentaries. Lili Murphy-Johnson (London, 1992) films herself making jewellery by hand, labouring carefully round the clock, before smuggling her rings into a branch of Accessorize, where they become instantly meaningless and cheap. Matthew Burdis (Newcastle, 1993) cuts the memories of a Northumbrian police officer, sent to search the Kielder Forest for wreckage of Pan Am Flight 103 when it exploded over Lockerbie, to a sequence of period photographs. His camera inches over these images just as the speaker searched the forest floor, his colleague coming upon a flight attendant’s jacket that still carried a trace of her perfume; a most delicate work.
One of the show’s stars is the Scottish artist Thomas Cameron (Helensburgh, 1992). His spectral painting of the back of a delivery rider waiting patiently at the buzzer to enter a high rise – his face unseen, his company unnamed – presents us with a stranger in a strange land. Another is Osman Yousefzada (Birmingham, 1977). Suspended from the ceiling, his crimson silk hanging is appliqued with the rear-view silhouette of a woman’s head. Bodying forth from the fabric, her two plaits turn out to be a pair of brutal binding ropes.
A transmasculine cowboy, dressed in nothing but a cowboy hat and chaps, appears against a glowering landscape in a photograph by Alannah Cyan (Dublin, 1999). The photographic self-portraits of Margaret (Weiyi) Liang (China, 1998) are testimony to her own astounding strength as an Asian woman (a girlfriend lies casually on her back, as the artist performs an arduous plank). Harry Luxton (London, 1999) paints the floor with markers attached to his electronic wheelchair to the sound of Lady Gaga’s Born This Way: sardonic, political, funny.
As the political turns personal, the art becomes more diaristic, internal, even domestic, revealing corners of bedsits in paintings and videos, or in films made using mobile or laptop. Several works actually incorporate the saccadic shifts of cursors across glowing screens.
Abi Palmer (Guildford, 1989), who has already had an Artangel commission, introduces the idea of weather to the cats in her flat, in a whimsical film. Bessie Kirkham (Oxford, 2001) paints a precise yet dreamy portrait of her sleeping friend Oscar, a blue boy caught in oil on plywood. Most of these artists were lockdown students, confined to screen and home.
Sarah Cleary’s (London, 1977) primordial chalk forms, to fit in the palm of a hand, look like what they are – talismans to ward off the terrible fate of the unhomed. For Becky – “a 12-year-old shuttled between placements and then held in a locked and windowless room” – Cleary fashions a tiny critter out of London chalk, for the child to have and hold.
The show, arriving from Blackpool’s Grundy Art Gallery, is beautifully organised at Camden Art Centre. Small QR codes replace the usually intrusive wall texts, and all works are given apt presence. Noa Klagsbald’s (Tel Aviv, 1992) photographs of football locker rooms, which completely shift the power dynamics so that male players become models (via Manet and Velázquez) for the female artist, are shown together as a team. And the show concludes with the twinkling finale of Zayd Menk’s (Harare, 2000) massive wall of obsolete technology, complete with defunct computers, a Bakelite phone and elderly CCTV relays that show us all as grey ghosts from the past.
Sequential screenings in small dark rooms mean you have to sit through one artist’s work to get to another – three or four films running back to back – but this feels only fair. For this is an even-handed show. I learned something about Irish graffiti, even while waiting through the Irish choir in one film to get to the women’s choir in another, in the village of Kartal in eastern Hungary. This film, by Alicja Rogalska (Poland, 1979), of women singing of their harsh lives in this remote community, of girls beaten for divorcing, of pea harvesting and sewing and doing all the same work as the men, while keeping the house going, then finding their strength and freedom in this collective choir, was for me the revelation of the show.
But this may not be your experience, which is why New Contemporaries is so valuable. Entrance is free; people amble and natter, look again and argue. New Contemporaries has the atmosphere of the degree shows from which it emerges. It is almost the perfect way to look at art, far away from money and career – democratic, open and unpressurised.
Bloomberg New Contemporaries is at Camden Art Centre, London, until 14 April
