{"id":213399,"date":"2025-10-14T19:14:08","date_gmt":"2025-10-14T19:14:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/213399\/"},"modified":"2025-10-14T19:14:08","modified_gmt":"2025-10-14T19:14:08","slug":"paradigm-shift-review-loud-and-immersive-video-art-to-make-your-brain-fold-in-on-itself-video-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/213399\/","title":{"rendered":"Paradigm Shift review \u2013 loud and immersive video art to make your brain fold in on itself | Video art"},"content":{"rendered":"

Do exhibitions have to make sense? The people in charge at the vast, subterranean video art wonderland at 180 the Strand sure don\u2019t seem to think so. In the past they have been masters of immersive art exhibitions in London. Their major debut, The Infinite Mix<\/a>, in 2016, set a standard that all video art shows since have tried \u2013 and largely failed \u2013 to reach. This time, down in the bowels of this enormous concrete behemoth, they\u2019ve chucked a whole bunch of video art at the walls and hoped that some of it would stick. But not much does.<\/p>\n

It starts with Mark Leckey<\/a>\u2019s Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, Pipilotti Rist<\/a>\u2019s Ever Is Over All and Gillian Wearing<\/a>\u2019s Dancing in Peckham \u2013 three of the most important works of video art of the 1990s. Leckey\u2019s film, a paean to rave, youth culture and getting pinged off your nut, still has an impact almost 30 years later. Wearing\u2019s endearingly awkward silent solo danceathon in a Peckham shopping centre is one of the definitive works of its era. And if you\u2019re looking for contemporary influence, then Rist\u2019s video, following a smiling woman down the street as she smashes car windows with a flower, was ripped off by Beyonc\u00e9 in her video for Hold Up<\/a> in 2016.<\/p>\n

Playing with the music video form \u2026 Hip Hop: Shanghai by Cao Fei, 2025. Photograph: Courtesy of the artist, Vitamin Creative Space and Spr\u00fcth Magers<\/p>\n

Nice, got it, it\u2019s going to be a whole exhibition about the 1990s and how the sudden ubiquity of cheap camera and editing equipment led to an explosion of creativity. Right?<\/p>\n

Wrong. Ryan Trecartin comes next, with a long, delirious, barely watchable lo-fi sitcom of mid-2000s weirdos doing weird, mid-2000s things. Then fashion designer Telfar Clemens films a body-popping, riotous, ear-bleedingly fabulous audition of new models in 2025, while pioneering photographer and activist Nan Goldin<\/a> collages together found footage of Donyale Luna<\/a>, the first black supermodel, and then your brain just starts folding in on itself.<\/p>\n

You just walk from room to room thinking nothing but \u2018Huh?\u2019<\/p>\n

By the time you get to Dara Birnbaum<\/a>\u2019s wild, late-70s experimentation in turning Wonder Woman into a disco superstar, or Jos\u00e8fa Ntjam\u2019s CGI video of undulating sea creatures that are \u201cqueering evolution\u201d, you\u2019ve been slapped about by so many contrasting themes and ideas that you can\u2019t tell your arts from your elbow. You just walk from room to room thinking nothing but \u201cHuh?\u201d It\u2019s not that the work is bad (though some of it really is). It\u2019s that there\u2019s no reason for any of it to be in the same show with any other bit.<\/p>\n

Mid-2000s weirdos doing weird, mid-2000s things \u2026 I-Be Area by Ryan Trecartin. Photograph: Courtesy of the artist; Regen Projects, Los Angeles: Spr\u00fcth Magers and Mor\u00e1n Mor\u00e1n<\/p>\n

There are some narrative threads here. Cao Fei<\/a> and Arthur Jafa<\/a> play brilliantly with the music video as art form; Jafa and Martine Syms explore incredibly moving themes of blackness; there\u2019s queerness and fashion in those Telfar auditions and Andy Warhol\u2019s \u201cfashion TV\u201d; social media appear in that Trecartin video and Meriem Bennani<\/a>\u2019s film about lizards in the pandemic. But none of those separate threads are woven into a cohesive exhibition. And what the hell has Derek Jarman\u2019s Super 8 experimentation<\/a> got to do with anything?<\/p>\n

It doesn\u2019t make any sense, in any way. By trying to smoosh a bunch of disparate new video works into a half-baked historical continuum, the curators just look like they\u2019re guessing.<\/p>\n

But in the end it kind of doesn\u2019t matter, because 180 presents work to such a high standard, in such an amazing space, that you still almost get blown away. It\u2019s all loud, immersive, in your face. The Syms work is unreal, the Jafa piece is hallucinatory and uncomfortable, those films from the 1990s are brilliant. If they\u2019d just called the show \u201cSome stuff we quite like\u201d, you wouldn\u2019t spend all your time trying to figure out what the hell they think a paradigm is \u2013 or how any of this shifts it.<\/p>\n

At 180 Studios, London, 15 October\u201321 December.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Do exhibitions have to make sense? The people in charge at the vast, subterranean video art wonderland at…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":213400,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[449,458,459,64,63,460,134],"class_list":{"0":"post-213399","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-design","14":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213399","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=213399"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/213399\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/213400"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=213399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=213399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=213399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}