As the second recipient of Camden Art Centre’s Emerging Artist Prize at Frieze, French-Caribbean artist Julien Creuzet (b. 1986 France) will present a new installation commissioned especially for Gallery 3. This will be his first UK institutional exhibition in the UK.
Born in a Parisian banlieue, Creuzet grew up in Martinique and now lives and works in Paris. He places his own lived experience at the heart of his practice whilst allowing the work to shine a light on collective social realities of the Caribbean diaspora, focusing on the troubled intersection between Caribbean histories and the events of European modernity. Creuzet describes his ancestral home, Martinique, as “the heart of my imagination” and the visual and aural languages that collide in his installations migrate and transform through a process of creolisation, entering into a dialogue with the question of emancipation, a spirit of black affirmation and the feeling of the Caribbean diaspora as it exists now.
Creuzet’s multi-disciplinary practice interweaves poetic, sensory, political and social forms and his new commission at Camden will fill the Centre’s Gallery 3 with a dense installation incorporating music, video, poetry and sculpture. His distinctive sculptural language often repurposes found materials – cords, nets, wires, ropes, bags – relics or detritus washed ashore by oceans or the unrelenting progress of history, as well as fragments, materials and objects given to him by other artists that he reincorporates in his assemblages. This installation will involve a series of new suspended and floor-based sculptures which are informed by the insignia on the flags of those Caribbean countries which gained independence after centuries of colonial rule – representations of animals and vegetal forms that composed their motifs. He invites visitors to navigate an environment filled with words and symbols, colours and textures, drawn from the heritage of different cultures – allowing relationships between disparate elements to be drawn out through the imagination.
| Duration | 14 January 2022 - 25 March 2022 |
| Times | see website |
| Cost | Free |
| Venue | Camden Art Centre |
| Address | Arkwright Road, London, NW3 6DG |
| Contact | 02074725500 / info@camdenartcentre.org / www.camdenartcentre.org/ |