Bonnie Camplin: The Military Industrial Complex

2015 Turner Prize 

Tramway, Glasgow

1st October 2015 – 176 January 2016


Exhibition Text: 


Camplin gathers her expanded practice under a single idea: ‘The Invented Life’. Central to this is what Camplin describes as a ‘myth-science of energy and consciousness research’ in which subjective experience is taken as the primary form of evidence.


Her work spans the disciplines of drawing, film, performance, music and writing as well as immaterial and situational research. Her project for the 2015 Turner Prize, The Military Industrial Complex, took the form of a study room exploring what ‘consensus reality’ is and how it is formed. The project drew from physics to philosophy, psychology, witchcraft, quantum theory and warfare.


Bonnie Camplin was born in the London in 1970 and lives and works in London. She studied at St. Martins School of Art, London, and holds a BFA in Fine Art Film and Video and a Post Grad in Advanced Photography. She works both independently and collaboratively. Recent solo exhibitions have been held at Cabinet London (2013), Michael Benevento in Los Angeles (2012), and Galerie Cinzia Friedlaender, Berlin (2011). She was included in Assembly, A survey of Recent Artists Film and Video in Britain 2008–2013, Tate Britain, London (2013); Sound works, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (2012); Madame Realism, Marres Centre for Contemporary Art, Maastricht (2011); and When the Wind Blows Up You, Chisenhale Gallery, London (2009). She is currently a lecturer in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College.


Bonnie Camplin catalogue essay