An Endless Archive, 2023

An Endless Archive brings together a series of works exploring the formal qualities and politics of contemporary music-video. Interested in how music-video brings together divergent cultural forms – sound, image, and commodity – into a single container, Kampman understands the music-video both as a repository for overlapping histories and contradictory forces and as an aperture beyond the sum of its parts, a kaleidoscope of deferred combinations that are brought to life by the spectator.

At the centre of the exhibition, Kampman’s video Baby-G (2023) explores the fragmented history of Casio’s iconic Baby-G, launched in 1994 as a line of women’s watches, “the vibrant, active, stylish little sister of the masculine, unbreakable G-SHOCK” as described by the film’s narrator. In a refracted and syncopated narrative that blurs the division between essay film and music-video, Kampman excavates the affective and material histories of these everyday time-keeping devices within the spread of information capitalism.

Presented throughout the exhibition are an archive of cheap commodities, including a series of poker chips cast using the unsold vinyl remainder of Kampman’s own musical past. Kampman looks to these everyday objects as departure points for fantastical explorations of wider social histories and vernacular practices of production, circulation, and consumption.

Solo exhibition, San Mei Gallery, London.

[28 April – 10 June 2023]