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Do exhibitions have to make sense? The people in charge at the vast, subterranean video art wonderland at 180 the Strand sure don’t seem to think so. In the past they have been masters of immersive art exhibitions in London. Their major debut, The Infinite Mix, in 2016, set a standard that all video art shows since have tried – and largely failed – to reach. This time, down in the bowels of this enormous concrete behemoth, they’ve chucked a whole bunch of video art at the walls and hoped that some of it would stick. But not much does.
It starts with Mark Leckey’s Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, Pipilotti Rist’s Ever Is Over All and Gillian Wearing’s Dancing in Peckham – three of the most important works of video art of the 1990s. Leckey’s film, a paean to rave, youth culture and getting pinged off your nut, still has an impact almost 30 years later. Wearing’s endearingly awkward silent solo danceathon in a Peckham shopping centre is one of the definitive works of its era. And if you’re looking for contemporary influence, then Rist’s video, following a smiling woman down the street as she smashes car windows with a flower, was ripped off by Beyoncé in her video for Hold Up in 2016.
Nice, got it, it’s 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?
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 collages together found footage of Donyale Luna, the first black supermodel, and then your brain just starts folding in on itself.
By the time you get to Dara Birnbaum’s wild, late-70s experimentation in turning Wonder Woman into a disco superstar, or Josèfa Ntjam’s CGI video of undulating sea creatures that are “queering evolution”, you’ve been slapped about by so many contrasting themes and ideas that you can’t tell your arts from your elbow. You just walk from room to room thinking nothing but “Huh?” It’s not that the work is bad (though some of it really is). It’s that there’s no reason for any of it to be in the same show with any other bit.
There are some narrative threads here. Cao Fei and Arthur Jafa play brilliantly with the music video as art form; Jafa and Martine Syms explore incredibly moving themes of blackness; there’s queerness and fashion in those Telfar auditions and Andy Warhol’s “fashion TV”; social media appear in that Trecartin video and Meriem Bennani’s 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’s Super 8 experimentation got to do with anything?
It doesn’t 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’re guessing.
But in the end it kind of doesn’t matter, because 180 presents work to such a high standard, in such an amazing space, that you still almost get blown away. It’s 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’d just called the show “Some stuff we quite like”, you wouldn’t spend all your time trying to figure out what the hell they think a paradigm is – or how any of this shifts it.
