A powerful mix of memory and music from the MTV generation
Strange Days: Memories of the Future The Store X, London WC2
On a giant screen in a darkened room, in the bowels of a Brutalist building on the Strand, two Egyptian men are holding a dance-off.
One, middle-aged and heavyset, with a thick moustache and an auburn leather jacket, looks like a shady street-hustler. The other, clean-shaven and less paunchy, is younger and more agile. With solemn expressions, they shimmy and sway, whirling to the intoxicating beats of “shaabi”, a style of working-class music popular in Cairo.
What ritual is being enacted? We cannot say for sure, but the effect is visceral and hypnotic.
Jewel (2010), by the Egyptian artist Hassan Khan, who was inspired by a memory of two men dancing beside a home-made speaker on a Cairo street, is one of 21 works of film and video art to feature in Strange Days, a free pop-up show at London’s The Store X.
Of all the shows of contemporary art mounted to coincide with Frieze, this one – a collaboration with Manhattan’s New Museum – is the hippest and most hyped.
Curated by the museum’s artistic director, Massimiliano Gioni, it aspires to repeat the success of The Infinite
Mix, another spellbinding exhibition of video art staged in the same space two years ago by the Hayward Gallery.
At the heart of Strange Days is the European premiere of Fly Paper (2017), an overly glossy, impressionistic film set in Harlem, by the 37-year-old artist The bigger picture: Strange Days: Memories of the Future justifies the hype and filmmaker Kahlil Joseph – one of the stars of The Infinite Mix, who also collaborated on Beyoncé’s 2016 concept album, Lemonade. See what I mean? Strange Days is as much fashion event as art exhibition.
If you were to watch every second of footage in the show – which champions video art seen at the New Museum over the past decade, but also serves as a short history of recent changes in the genre – you would need to block out more than 11 hours.
Admittedly, six of these are accounted for by a single work, which provides the show’s finale: Ragnar Kjartansson’s A Lot of Sorrow (2013-14), for which the Icelandic performance artist invited indie band The National to perform their track Sorrow again and again, as though stuck in a loop.
Thankfully, Gioni recognises that few people will have the time or inclination to devote more than a few minutes to each work, and stages the exhibition accordingly, keeping the corridors and connecting spaces dark, so that visitors feel they are stumbling through a labyrinth, or experiencing a continuous, unfolding dream, illuminated by visual snippets.
The idea is that the whole thing should feel hallucinatory, fluid and immersive, with people encouraged to keep dipping in and out of individual works, on a quest for digital-era epiphanies amid the gloom.
If anything links these polyphonic artworks, it is a straightforward preoccupation with music. Jewel, A Lot of Sorrow, and Joseph’s music-videolike Fly Paper are all prime examples; so, in a paradoxical way, is Anri Sala’s silent video Three Minutes (2004), which focuses for the duration of the title on a reverberating cymbal, lit by a flickering strobe.
Meanwhile, in The Myth of Progress (2008), Swedish artist Klara Lidén “moonwalks” through New York by night, to the soundtrack of an eerie song by a Swedish band.
It’s exciting to encounter work by artists, weaned on a diet of music videos on MTV and Youtube, using sound with such confidence, because the strong acoustic element makes this show unusually visceral and compelling.