Helen Cammock: I Will Keep My Soul

The Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought Presents Helen Cammock: I Will Keep My Soul at the U.N.O. Gallery, New Orleans October 14 – December 17, 2023 The Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art & Thought (Rivers) is pleased to present I Will Keep My Soul, a solo exhibition featuring new work by Turner Prize winning artist Helen Cammock. First debuting at Art + Practice in Los Angeles in February 2023, the presentation travels to the University of New Orleans’s U.N.O. Gallery in New Orleans on October 14, 2023. I Will Keep My Soul is the culmination of the British artist’s year-long New Orleans residency with Rivers and the Amistad Research Center. Best known for her narrative cataloging, Cammock weaves the historic and contemporary voices of New Orleans together in an intricate, multimedia exploration of the city’s social history, geography, and community. Visitors will encounter a polyphony of figures—archivists, artists, writers, and musicians to the protagonists of the civil rights movement—whose voices are shared in an amalgamation of film, poetry, performance, archival documents, and borrowed materials. I Will Keep My Soul is rooted in the voice of Elizabeth Catlett, whose papers Cammock discovered during her residency. Cammock was overtaken by Catlett’s struggle for agency, creative autonomy, as well as the artist’s protracted process to realize the Louis Armstrong sculpture in New Orleans’ Armstrong Park. The difficulty to be an artist and an activist – and free – runs deeply across the exhibition. Visitors will have the opportunity to encounter Cammock’s work beyond the limits of the gallery’s walls through the dissemination of poetry as prints (visible in storefronts and on residential properties) across the St. Claude neighborhood Cammock called home during her stay. I Will Keep My Soul will be accompanied by a series of public performances called “The Quill Sessions”, organized in tandem with local musicians and in coordination with Second Saturdays. (Cammock herself learned how to play the trumpet during her residency.) Each set will draw from the history and form of the "Bamboula," a kind of drum of West African origin -- and the name of a popular drum beat and dance that arrived in New Orleans with free and enslaved people from Africa, Cuba, and Haiti in the 18th and 19th century. Its history is intertwined with the history of Congo Square in New Orleans – as a site of both struggle and liberation. In this final chapter, Cammock returns the work to the very community that informed and inspired it. I Will Keep My Soul is accompanied by an eponymous catalog, co-published in March 2023 by Rivers, the California African American Museum (CAAM), and Siglio Press. The exhibition is curated by Rivers’s Jordan Amirkhani, Andrea Andersson, and Jade Flint. A previous iteration of the exhibition was organized by Rivers in partnership with CAAM and presented at Art + Practice in Los Angeles as part of a multi-year collaboration between Rivers and CAAM. Both the exhibition and publication are made possible by the generous support of the RosaMary Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Ruth Foundation for the Arts, The Teiger Foundation, and the generosity of Stephen Reily. Research was conducted through the Amistad-Rivers Research Residency supported by Mellon Foundation. ### About Helen Cammock Helen Cammock was born in 1970 in Staffordshire. Film, photography, print, text, song and performance examine mainstream historical and contemporary narratives about Blackness, womanhood, oppression and resistance, wealth and power, poverty and vulnerability, throughout her practice. Her works often cut across time and geography, layering multiple voices as she investigates the cyclical nature of histories in her visual and aural assemblages. In 2017, Cammock won the Max Mara Art Prize for Women and in 2019 was the joint recipient of The Turner Prize. She has exhibited and performed worldwide with recent solo shows including Bass Notes and SiteLines, Amant, Brooklyn, USA (2023), Helen Cammock: I Will Keep My Soul, Art + Practice, Los Angeles, USA (2023), They Call it Idlewild, Oakville Galleries, Ontario, Canada (2023), behind the eye is the promise of rain, Kestner Gesellshaft, Hannover, Germany (2022), Concrete Feathers and Porcelain Tacks, The Photographer’s Gallery, London, UK (2021), Beneath the Surface of Skin, STUK Art Centre, Leuven, Belgium (2021), Che Si Può Fare (What Can be Done), Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (2019), Che Si Può Fare, Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy (2019) and The Long Note, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland (2019); VOID, Derry, Northern Ireland (2018). Group shows include Breathing, Hamburger Kunstalle, Hamburg, Germany (2022) and Radio Ballads, Serpentine Galleries, London, UK (2022).

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