Exhibition: 08 Jan – 14 Feb 2014

‘Amerika’ is an exhibition exploring the different ways in which America is viewed and thought of by non-Americans, and the ways in which these ideas are variously represented by artists in their work.

America has from its inception had a powerful mythic pull for the world beyond it. America, as well as being a place, is a heady, swirling abstraction of ideas, fantasies, dreams and myths, forms of the imaginary which belong no less to the world than to Americans. Our America (we who are not Americans) invokes fierce partisan emotions, and draws us here and there in our relation to our own circumstances as well as the reality of the United States, better and worse. This America, the America of the rest of the world, has been, and continues to be, a material and drive for tremendous cultural production.

Amerika, the exhibition, is a reflection or refraction of the vision of America belonging to the rest of the world, through artwork understood in a broad sense, largely presented in various forms of reproduction. Amerika takes the form of the ever inchoate ways that we find our Americas, like every relation of desire: always becoming; provisional; teasing us with a sense of a totality that is ever just around the corner and never quite present.

Amerika is organised by Alasdair Duncan, with Jack Lovell, and Mike Merkenschlager.

Click here for more information on Amerika and here for Camberwell Space.

Image credit: Magdalena Wisniowska, University of the Arts London