[mouthfeel], Tramway,
Glasgow, 2024

[mouthfeel] presented a series of works forged through new and old collaborations with artists 皚桐 (Ai Túng) and Sharif Elsabagh, and feminist welding collective Slaghammers.

Camara’s practice builds around their research into archival documents, images, and fragments of language. They look particularly to historical traces that register Black presence as a fugitive undercurrent of Scotland’s entanglement with racial capitalism. In objects, reworked images, texts, sound and video, Camara uses methods of material dissolution and failed speech. Images succumb to liquid decay and testimonies fracture, emphasising the visceral qualities of language as a bodily product.

[mouthfeel] returns Camara to the physical and social geography of Glasgow as a city engineered around currents of colonial and imperial wealth and violence. Time collapses –from the 19th century widening of the River Clyde to accommodate larger trade ships, to the unnamed man who was chased into the river by police in 2019. In the spaces between the document and its incoherence, Camara’s works reveal the accumulation of sediment and sentiment.

Dispersed across the gallery was 皚桐 Aí Túng’s bed of river song, an interweaving tapestry of voices and loops ebbing and flowing through the space. At the intersection and displacement of the aural, visual and tactile, [mouthfeel] brings divergent references into tense relation, suspended but nevertheless on the move: sounds wash, inks run, coins melt, breath waivers, steel rusts, fists clench and rum stains.

皚桐 (Ai Túng)‘s river psalm is availble to listen here.

There is an audio described introduction to the exhibition and the exhibition artworks that can be accessed here.

Audio Description by Collective Text & SoundScribe, 2024
AD Scripting and Recording: Elaine Lilian Joseph
AD Consultant: Kirin Saeed

Sound Translation by Collective Text
Translation Consultant: Klarissa Webster

Camara Taylor Access Worker: Rowan Markson