Strange memories depicted in video art at The Store X

Brutalist landmark 180 The Strand opened its doors in London in 2016, reimagined as a hub for art, design, music, food and broadcasting. The Store, 180 The Strand turned the Sir Frederick Gibberd-designed building into a new kind of creative space. Launched with the Hayward Gallery’s first offsite show, titled “The Infinite Mix”, it’s nowadays a place to experience audio-visual art installations, relax over lunch, read magazines and use one of the many broadcasting studios.

During Frieze Art Week 2018, the empty volumes within the concrete and glass building were brought to life by twenty-one internationally established artists, with many of the works making their London or UK debut; including, among the others, Pipilotti Rist, Anri Sala, Mounira Al Solh, Cally Spooner and Ryan Trecartin. “Strange Days: Memories of the Future” is the third major show commissioned by The Store X, but it’s conceived and orchestrated by the New Museum’s Edlis Neeson Artistic Director, Massimiliano Gioni, in collaboration with The Vinyl Factory. Its subtitle is borrowed from a collection of short stories penned by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky in 1920s Soviet Moscow. With irony and humour, Krzhizhanovsky weaves nostalgia and futurism to consider how new technologies, as well as forms of urbanism and the human experience, are imbued with both absurdity and utopian potential.

With the same spirit, but spread over multi-dimensional connections, Fly Paper by Kahlil Joseph represents, for this group show, a sort of an over-timed bond, realized by one of the artists featured in “The Infinite Mix”, the great exhibition of video and sound works curated by Ralph Rugoff in 2016. Moreover, New Museum collaborated on the coproduction of Kahlil Joseph’s piece, who embodied a deeply personal portrait of black cultural life in Harlem, which only premiered at the New Museum in autumn 2017 before making its European debut at The Store X Berlin earlier this year. During the last ten years, since the New York Museum has moved into Bowery building, in December 2007, many other video artists have been shown such as: Phil Collins, Tacita Dean, Nathalie Djurberg, Sharon Hayes, Mathias Poledna, Erik Van Lieshout, Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Artur Żmijewski, but “Strage Days” encompasses a continuous subjective view, an affective anthology teaching us how crossing time by getting through different corporeal and speculative dimensions.

For instance, Jonathas de Andrade’s O Peixe (2016) recalls the first solo museum presentation in the US of the work of Brazilian artist. De Andrade’s fictional ethnographic film, in a series of vignettes shot on 16 mm film, let us witness a sort of animistic ritual, reporting how individual fishermen relates with fishes, as they catch and then hold their prey to their chests. Alternating facial expressions of domination and pathos, the fishermen forcefully yet tenderly embrace each fish until it stops breathing. The gesture that appears as a ritual here, however, is one that the artist has invented, as if to push a deliberately exoticizing portrait to the limits of plausibility. Klara Lidén, Daria Martin and Lili Reynaud-Dewar’s works, almost on the opposite, represent a sort of a visual counterpoint for viewers, bringing them to renowned critical landscapes as Camille Henrot’s Grosse Fatigue (2013), John Akomfrah’s Vertigo Sea (2015) and the madly intimate Pipilotti Rist’s 4th Floor to Mildness, a 2016 video and sound installation in which the watery action can be viewed on two large ceiling screens.