Helen Charman

Irákleion, Shenyang

Commissioning Editor at MAP

I teach English at Clare College, Cambridge. MOTHER STATE is out now @AllenLaneBooks. I'm represented by Emma Paterson @AitkenAlexander 🤹🏻‍♀️

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Articles

Shulamith Firestone’s ‘Airless Spaces’: The Hospital, The World

1 month ago | artreview.com | Helen Charman

How does Firestone’s text read, three decades after it was first published, in a world where popular understanding of ‘mental health’ has fundamentally changed? Shulamith Firestone’s Airless Spaces, the radical feminist writer’s collection of short stories, begins with a dream.
Festival season begins!

2 months ago | vam.ac.uk | Helen Charman

Across March and April, Young V&A kicked off Festival season with I AM Festival and Our Voice, Our Future: A Festival of Childhood. On Tuesday 18 and Wednesday 19 March, I AM Festival, organised in collaboration with A New Direction, brought deaf, disabled, and neurodivergent young people together at Young V&A to empower, celebrate and explore their creativity.
An Egyptian welcome to Young V&A in 2025 • V&A Blog

Mar 9, 2025 | vam.ac.uk | Helen Charman

2025 got off to a flying start at Young V&A with the wonderfully inspiring – and busy – opening of Making Egypt, our second exhibition. Why Making Egypt, here at Young V&A, you may well be asking yourselves. The reason being that, from ancient Egypt, along the river Nile, to contemporary Egypt, creativity was and is, everywhere. And creativity is at the heart of Young V&A.
Marguerite Duras: The Problem of Imagination

Aug 14, 2024 | artreview.com | Helen Charman

Duras’s cinema, restless and wilfully obtuse, interrogated the foibles of human expression in a world locked by politics and moneyCinema ‘knows that it can never replace the written text’, wrote the writer and filmmaker Marguerite Duras in 1977; nevertheless, it ‘sets out to replace it’. It begins, in other words, with certain defeat and, sustained by this tension, makes its way from there. What does it mean to make a practice out of dissatisfaction, of failure?
Young V&A wins Art Fund Museum of the Year 2024

Aug 3, 2024 | vam.ac.uk | Helen Charman

I am delighted to share the wonderful news that after its first year of opening, Young V&A has been awarded the incredible accolade of Art Fund Museum of the Year 2024 – the largest museum prize in the world. Art Fund annually shortlists five outstanding museums for Museum of the Year.
The Case History of Miss Bella B. — Parapraxis

Jul 21, 2024 | parapraxismagazine.com | Helen Charman

Charcot, we are told, was convinced this would simply make her into a poet; Breuer, on the other hand, believed that the obsessive tendency would diminish as her memories increased. For Bella, meanwhile, such an accumulation means the recovery of lost experiences as much as the acquisition of new ones. Bella is curious first about other people’s pasts: “Tell tell tell your Bell Bell.
Mother State

Jul 9, 2024 | penguin.co.uk | Helen Charman

'Intellectually luminous and deeply affecting, Mother State is a remarkable, revelatory and life-changing book, and an indispensable tool and guide in the ongoing struggle towards radical, liberated and collective care' – Daisy Lafarge'With ease and precision, Charman examines all the waged and unwaged labour that create mothers as well as the political processes that produce their vexed relationship to the British state.
Nicolas Party’s Flames of Divine Retribution

Aug 7, 2023 | frieze.com | Helen Charman

‘Who can tell’, begins anthropologist Tim Ingold’s exhibition text for Nicolas Party’s ‘Cretaceous’, ‘of what the sleeping baby dreams?’ Currently on display across The Modern Institute’s Aird’s Lane and Bricks Space, the show – Party’s sixth solo outing at the gallery – comprises 12 works. The first of these is a sleeping infant, titled simply Baby (2023), which, for Ingold, ‘holds the key to this exhibition’, symbolizing an innocent, instinctive connection to the natural world.