New Contemporaries is old – almost venerable. The annual exhibition, created to highlight art school graduates in the post-war gloom, began in 1949. Its selectors included professors, students, art world mandarins and even the director of the National Gallery, with years skipped and outrage growing . It has been supported by funders as diverse as British Telecom, the Arts Council, Bloomberg and (bless her) Bridget Riley’s Art Foundation. Each edition is different and yet always the same: an opportunity to stare, argue, star-spot and generally observe the waterfront of contemporary art.
This year is crucial viewing, and not just because it has been so judiciously selected from open entries by a trio of critically acclaimed mid-career names: Heather Phillipson, Helen Cammock and Sunil Gupta. The 55 artists work in every medium, from watercolor, oil paint and charcoal to tapestry, video and installation. Some are in their early 20s, others in their late 40s (you only need to be an aspiring graduate or postgraduate student to apply), so the show has enormous range and depth.
New Contemporaries has the atmosphere of the grade shows from which it emerges
But more than that, almost all art feels like a sign of the times. Kinship, race and identity politics; immigration, climate collapse and geographical borders – if the choice had not been made more than a year ago, there would undoubtedly be work here on Gaza and Sudan. But their reactions to life in this world go both ways: some artists are there as journalists, others in private retreat.
You travel – to Hungary, Ireland, China, Pakistan. The beautiful photographs of Haneen Hadiy (born Glasgow, 1999) show charred Mesopotamian date palms, victims of global warming, stretching like gondolier poles in the desert. An Indian man laments his HIV/AIDS diagnosis, alone in bed, before courageously singing a Bollywood song in a Charan Singh film (Delhi, 1978).
Sam Ayrton Mendes’ video collage (Lisbon, 1993) of black women and children trying to survive white supremacy around the world is subtly alternated with moments of triumph and joy. It’s relatively long, 30 minutes, but so important and necessary.
There are quasi-documentaries. Lili Murphy-Johnson (London, 1992) films herself making jewelery by hand, working carefully around the clock, before smuggling her rings into a branch of Accessorize, where they immediately become 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, into a series of historical photographs. His camera glides over these images just as the speaker scans the forest floor. His colleague came across a flight attendant’s jacket that still had a trace of her perfume in it; an extremely delicate work.
One of the stars of the show is the Scottish artist Thomas Cameron (Helensburgh, 1992). His spectral painting of the backside of a delivery man patiently waiting for the buzzer to enter a high-rise building – his face unseen, his company nameless – presents us with a stranger in a strange land. Another is Osman Yousefzada (Birmingham, 1977). His crimson silk pendant hangs from the ceiling and features appliqués depicting the rear view of the silhouette of a woman’s head. Her two braids emerge from the fabric and turn out to be a pair of cheeky binder ropes.
A transmasculine cowboy, wearing nothing but a cowboy hat and chaps, appears against a menacing landscape in a photograph by Alannah Cyan (Dublin, 1999). The photographic self-portraits of Margaret (Weiyi) Liang (China, 1998) testify to her own astonishing strength as an Asian woman (a friend lies casually on her back while the artist performs a heavy plank). Harry Luxton (London, 1999) paints the floor with markers attached to his electronic wheelchair to the sound of Born This Way by Lady Gaga: sardonic, political, funny.
As the political becomes more personal, the art becomes more diary-like, internal and even domestic, making corners of sitting rooms visible in paintings and videos, or in films made using mobile or laptop. Several works actually feature the saccadic shifts of cursors across glowing screens.
Abi Palmer (Guildford, 1989), who has already had an assignment from Artangel, introduces the idea of the weather to the cats in her flat in a playful film. Bessie Kirkham (Oxford, 2001) paints a precise but dreamy portrait of her sleeping friend Oscar, a blue boy captured in oil on plywood. Most of these artists were lockdown students, confined to the screen and at home.
Sarah Cleary’s original chalk shapes (London, 1977) fit in the palm of a hand and look like what they are: talismans to avert the terrible fate of the unmarried. For Becky – “a 12-year-old who went back and forth between placements and was then kept in a locked room with no windows” – Cleary creates a little creature out of London chalk, which the child can hold and hold.
The show, from the Grundy Art Gallery in Blackpool, is beautifully organized at the Camden Art Centre. Small QR codes replace the usually intrusive wall texts and all works are given appropriate presence. Noa Klagsbald’s (Tel Aviv, 1992) photographs of football locker rooms, which completely shift the power dynamic so that male players become models (via Manet and Velázquez) for the female artist, are shown together as a team. And the show ends with the sparkling finale of Zayd Menk’s (Harare, 2000) vast wall of outdated technology, complete with defunct computers, a Bakelite phone and older CCTV relays that show us all as gray ghosts of the past.
Successive screenings in small dark rooms mean you have to flick through one artist’s work to get to another – three or four films in a row – but this only feels fair. Because this is a balanced 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), about women who sing about their hard lives in this remote community, about girls who are beaten because they are divorced, about harvesting peas and sewing and doing the same work as the men, while they keeping the house running, and then finding their strength and freedom in this collective choir, was the revelation of the show for me.
But this may not be your experience, which is why New Contemporaries is so valuable. Entrance is free; people stroll and chat, look again and argue. New Contemporaries has the atmosphere of the grade shows from which it emerges. It is almost the perfect way to look at art, far away from money and career – democratic, open and pressure-free.