How Can We Confirm We Are Viewing the Same Painting?
# Exploring Gregg Bordowitz’s *There: a Feeling* at Camden Art Centre
**LONDON —** Gregg Bordowitz, an artist and activist known for his thought-provoking works on identity, politics, and illness, presents his exhibition *There: a Feeling* at Camden Art Centre. The exhibition, which runs through March 23, 2024, brings together a range of Bordowitz’s artistic practices, from poetry and painting to performance and installation. Renowned for his deeply personal exploration of living with HIV, Bordowitz’s work continues to challenge established narratives around illness, language, memory, and agency.
## **A Poetic Immersion: *Debris Fields***
Visitors to the exhibition are first met with *Debris Fields* (2025), a poem composed of 24 parts, inscribed in a bold, memorial-like typeface across the gallery walls. The poetry consists solely of nouns, creating a fragmented yet evocative language that invites multiple interpretations. Phrases such as “WRITING WRITING / COMPULSION FEELING CONTINUITY” evoke an almost compulsive act of creation, reminiscent of Bordowitz’s documented relationship with hypergraphia — the urge to write endlessly. This work suggests an interplay between grief, history, and endurance, particularly poignant given its possible link to the upcoming AIDS memorial in Camden, the first of its kind in the UK.
The exhibition also features open notebook pages, filled with colorful scribbles and abstract forms. Some are embedded with representations of the Tetragrammaton — the sacred, often unspoken Hebrew name for God — which emerges as a repetitive calligraphic motif across twelve striking monotype prints. Through these works, Bordowitz blurs the boundaries between writing and drawing, exploring how language itself can become a deeply visual and physical experience.
## **Unifying Spaces with the *Continuous Red Line***
One of the exhibition’s defining elements is *Continuous Red Line* (2002–ongoing), a thin band of red splicing tape that runs across the gallery walls, tracing every architectural contour. Installed just three inches above the floor, the line acts as a thread weaving the exhibition’s seemingly disparate works into a cohesive whole. This recurring motif reinforces the artist’s notion of exhibitions as “adding up, but never summing up,” suggesting that meaning is assembled through experience rather than dictated in advance.
This approach is further reflected in the way the Camden presentation differs from its earlier German iteration at Bonner Kunstverein. In Bonn, Bordowitz included a painted interpretation of Romanian-French poet Paul Celan’s Holocaust-themed poem *Heimkehr* (1955). At Camden, however, he has chosen to reference American modernist poet H.D. Doolittle’s *The Walls Do Not Fall* (1944), a meditation on survival written amidst the Blitz. By tailoring each exhibition site with culturally and historically specific elements, Bordowitz underscores the fluidity of artistic meaning.
## **Art as Conversation: Performance and Subjectivity**
A key theme in *There: a Feeling* is the intricate relationship between personal experience and collective understanding. This comes to the forefront in Bordowitz’s performance piece *Open Book: Letters, Marks, Politics* (2024–ongoing), where he questions what it truly means to “share” an emotion. If two people claim that a work of art makes them feel the same way, do they really share an identical emotional experience? Or is the act of interpretation always an individualized journey?
This meditation on communication and assumption extends to *Only Idiots Smile* (2017), a humorous performance lecture infused with Yinglish (a hybrid of Yiddish and English). Here, Bordowitz reflects on his Jewish immigrant upbringing in New York, punctuating his monologue with the phrase: “You know what I mean?” This seemingly casual remark subtly underscores the exhibition’s broader question — do we ever truly understand one another?
## **An Invitation to Engage**
Ultimately, *There: a Feeling* is more than a retrospective of Bordowitz’s work; it is an open-ended exploration of dialogue, engagement, and meaning-making. The exhibition resists clear conclusions, instead inviting visitors to dwell in the ambiguities of language, memory, and shared experience. As Bordowitz himself states, his exhibitions do not provide definitive answers, but rather, they “add up without summing up.”
For those interested in contemporary art’s intersection with activism, philosophy, and personal narrative, *There: a Feeling* is an essential experience. The exhibition invites us to consider not only how we engage with art but also how we engage with each other.
### **Visit the Exhibition**
**Where:** Camden Art Centre, London, United Kingdom
**When:** Runs through **March 23, 2024**
For more details, visit [Camden Art Centre](https://camdenartcentre.org/whats-on/there