ICA is closed from the 30 May – 3 June inclusive.
16 July – 30 August 2025
Presented in conjunction with Connecting Thin Black Lines 1985 – 2025, To Learn To Dance With Fireflies, First Accept The Dark: 5 films by Helen Cammock brings together moving image works that trace, complicate, and reimagine histories of Black life, resistance, and creativity across time and geography.
The title is drawn from a print produced by Cammock as part of I Will Keep My Soul (2022), created during her residency with the Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art and Thought in New Orleans. The phrase invites a reckoning with what lies beneath cultural production – to understand the structural violence, silence, and appropriation that shape how we engage with the aesthetics and expressions of marginalised communities. It is a call to move slowly, to listen deeply, and to stay with the darkness that precedes illumination.
Informed by archival research and intimate collaborations with artists, activists, and musicians, this body of work considers how cultural memory and lived experience intertwine. The season spans lyrical meditations on colonial history (There’s a Hole in the Sky Parts I & II), reflections on idleness as resistance (They Call It Idlewild), intergenerational dialogue (Changing Room), and the transformative potential of lament, as both emotional expression and political gesture (Che Si Può Fare).
The films collectively form a visual and sonic archive, attentive to both individual testimony and collective struggle. Across these works, Cammock mobilises film, voice, song, and text to unearth buried narratives and centre expressive forms often unheard. Cammock’s work offers not only critique, but also an invitation into new ways of seeing, feeling, and being in relation – with the past, with each other, and with the possibility of transformation.
Curated by Black feminist artist-researcher, writer, and curator Nydia A. Swaby, To Learn To Dance With Fireflies, First Accept The Dark: 5 films by Helen Cammock invites a collective reckoning with the past and a reorientation toward futures shaped by relation, resistance, and radical tenderness.
Presented in conjunction with Connecting Thin Black Lines 1985 – 2025, To Learn To Dance With Fireflies, First Accept The Dark: 5 films by Helen Cammock brings together moving image works that trace, complicate, and reimagine histories of Black life, resistance, and creativity across time and geography.
The title is drawn from a print produced by Cammock as part of I Will Keep My Soul (2022), created during her residency with the Rivers Institute for Contemporary Art and Thought in New Orleans. The phrase invites a reckoning with what lies beneath cultural production – to understand the structural violence, silence, and appropriation that shape how we engage with the aesthetics and expressions of marginalised communities. It is a call to move slowly, to listen deeply, and to stay with the darkness that precedes illumination.
Informed by archival research and intimate collaborations with artists, activists, and musicians, this body of work considers how cultural memory and lived experience intertwine. The season spans lyrical meditations on colonial history (There’s a Hole in the Sky Parts I & II), reflections on idleness as resistance (They Call It Idlewild), intergenerational dialogue (Changing Room), and the transformative potential of lament, as both emotional expression and political gesture (Che Si Può Fare).
The films collectively form a visual and sonic archive, attentive to both individual testimony and collective struggle. Across these works, Cammock mobilises film, voice, song, and text to unearth buried narratives and centre expressive forms often unheard. Cammock’s work offers not only critique, but also an invitation into new ways of seeing, feeling, and being in relation – with the past, with each other, and with the possibility of transformation.
Curated by Black feminist artist-researcher, writer, and curator Nydia A. Swaby, To Learn To Dance With Fireflies, First Accept The Dark: 5 films by Helen Cammock invites a collective reckoning with the past and a reorientation toward futures shaped by relation, resistance, and radical tenderness.
Helen Cammock, There’s a Hole in the Sky Part II: Listening to James Baldwin, 2016, 11 min. 10 sec.
Helen Cammock lives and works in North Wales and London. Her interdisciplinary practice spans film, photography, print, text, song and performance, and engages with historical and contemporary narratives around Blackness, womanhood, oppression and resistance, wealth and power, poverty and vulnerability. Moving fluidly across time and geography, her works often layer multiple voices and perspectives to explore the cyclical nature of history through poetic, visual and aural assemblage. She was awarded the Max Mara Art Prize for Women in 2017 and was a joint recipient of the Turner Prize in 2019.
Cammock has exhibited and performed internationally, with recent solo shows including Bass Notes and SiteLines, Amant, Brooklyn (2023); I Will Keep My Soul, Art + Practice, Los Angeles, and UNO Gallery, New Orleans (2023); They Call it Idlewild, Oakville Galleries, Ontario (2023); Concrete Feathers and Porcelain Tacks, The Photographer’s Gallery, London (2021); and Che Si Può Fare, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2019). Her recent group exhibitions include Soft Impressions, Dundee Contemporary Arts (2024); Breathing, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg (2022); and Radio Ballads, Serpentine Galleries, London (2022). Upcoming group shows include Connecting Thin Black Lines 1985–2025 at the ICA, London (2025). Her forthcoming solo show at Kate MacGarry will open in September 2025. She is represented by Kate MacGarry, London.
Nydia A. Swaby is a Black feminist artist-researcher, writer, and curator. Her practice engages archives, autoethnography, photography, the moving image, and the imagination to explore the gendered, diasporic, and affective dimensions of Black being and becoming. Nydia is a member of the editorial board of Feminist Review and co-edited its special issue on Archives. She holds a PhD from the Centre for Gender Studies at SOAS, University of London, and has previously worked at the ICA and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
Nydia was the inaugural Caird Research Fellow jointly based at Royal Museums Greenwich and UCL’s Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery. She is currently a Whose Heritage Curatorial Fellow at Royal Museums Greenwich and serves on the advisory board for the Atlantic Worlds Gallery at the National Maritime Museum. Her first book, Amy Ashwood Garvey and the Future of Black Feminist Archives, was published by Lawrence Wishart in October 2024 as part of its Radical Black Women series. She is the curator of Our Eyes as Commonly Tender: Visual Justice in the Filmmaking of Pratibha Parmar and To Learn to Dance with Fireflies, First Accept the Dark: Five Films by Helen Cammock, both presented as part of Connecting Thin Black Lines, 1985–2025.
Bios
Helen Cammock lives and works in North Wales and London. Her interdisciplinary practice spans film, photography, print, text, song and performance, and engages with historical and contemporary narratives around Blackness, womanhood, oppression and resistance, wealth and power, poverty and vulnerability. Moving fluidly across time and geography, her works often layer multiple voices and perspectives to explore the cyclical nature of history through poetic, visual and aural assemblage. She was awarded the Max Mara Art Prize for Women in 2017 and was a joint recipient of the Turner Prize in 2019.
Cammock has exhibited and performed internationally, with recent solo shows including Bass Notes and SiteLines, Amant, Brooklyn (2023); I Will Keep My Soul, Art + Practice, Los Angeles, and UNO Gallery, New Orleans (2023); They Call it Idlewild, Oakville Galleries, Ontario (2023); Concrete Feathers and Porcelain Tacks, The Photographer’s Gallery, London (2021); and Che Si Può Fare, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2019). Her recent group exhibitions include Soft Impressions, Dundee Contemporary Arts (2024); Breathing, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg (2022); and Radio Ballads, Serpentine Galleries, London (2022). Upcoming group shows include Connecting Thin Black Lines 1985–2025 at the ICA, London (2025). Her forthcoming solo show at Kate MacGarry will open in September 2025. She is represented by Kate MacGarry, London.
Nydia A. Swaby is a Black feminist artist-researcher, writer, and curator. Her practice engages archives, autoethnography, photography, the moving image, and the imagination to explore the gendered, diasporic, and affective dimensions of Black being and becoming. Nydia is a member of the editorial board of Feminist Review and co-edited its special issue on Archives. She holds a PhD from the Centre for Gender Studies at SOAS, University of London, and has previously worked at the ICA and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
Nydia was the inaugural Caird Research Fellow jointly based at Royal Museums Greenwich and UCL’s Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery. She is currently a Whose Heritage Curatorial Fellow at Royal Museums Greenwich and serves on the advisory board for the Atlantic Worlds Gallery at the National Maritime Museum. Her first book, Amy Ashwood Garvey and the Future of Black Feminist Archives, was published by Lawrence Wishart in October 2024 as part of its Radical Black Women series. She is the curator of Our Eyes as Commonly Tender: Visual Justice in the Filmmaking of Pratibha Parmar and To Learn to Dance with Fireflies, First Accept the Dark: Five Films by Helen Cammock, both presented as part of Connecting Thin Black Lines, 1985–2025.
Programme
Wednesday 16 July, 7pm
Helen Cammock: There’s a Hole in the Sky Parts I & II + performance
Helen Cammock’s two-part video work There’s a Hole in the Sky (2016) explores the entangled legacies of colonialism, migration, and appropriation through a lyrical blend of poetry, song, and image. The screening is accompanied by a live performance in which Cammock extends the film’s concerns through spoken word and song.
Wednesday 13 August, 7pm
Helen Cammock: Changing Room, They Call It Idlewild + Q&A
This screening presents two deeply personal and politically resonant works by Helen Cammock: They Call It Idlewild (2020) and Changing Room (2014), followed by a conversation with curator Nydia A. Swaby.
Saturday 30 August, 1 - 9pm
Helen Cammock: Che Si Può Fare
The final screening in this series features Che Si Può Fare (2019), a deeply moving and formally inventive work by Helen Cammock that explores lament as both an emotional expression and a political gesture.
Wednesday 16 July, 7pm
Helen Cammock: There’s a Hole in the Sky Parts I & II + performance
Helen Cammock’s two-part video work There’s a Hole in the Sky (2016) explores the entangled legacies of colonialism, migration, and appropriation through a lyrical blend of poetry, song, and image. The screening is accompanied by a live performance in which Cammock extends the film’s concerns through spoken word and song.
Wednesday 13 August, 7pm
Helen Cammock: Changing Room, They Call It Idlewild + Q&A
This screening presents two deeply personal and politically resonant works by Helen Cammock: They Call It Idlewild (2020) and Changing Room (2014), followed by a conversation with curator Nydia A. Swaby.
Saturday 30 August, 1 - 9pm
Helen Cammock: Che Si Può Fare
The final screening in this series features Che Si Può Fare (2019), a deeply moving and formally inventive work by Helen Cammock that explores lament as both an emotional expression and a political gesture.
no. 236848.