With most of us fixated on a palm-sized screen, it’s hard to recall the power of a large-format moving image to mesmerise. Video art, from its nascent stages, held us in a moment, whether lost in beauty, repulsed by the unpleasant or expectant of the unexpected. A new exhibition at 180 Studios, curated by Jefferson Hack of Dazed Media with 180’s Mark Wadhwa, restores some of that wonder.
On until 21 December in a warren of subterranean spaces beneath 180 Quarter, ‘Paradigm Shift’ takes us back to the 1970s, a time before video virality, when Dara Birnbaum pushed against ‘feminist’ icons like Wonder Woman and Andy Warhol lay the foundations for the celebrity web series. And it charts the course of the art form to the present day, as artists explore its potential to disturb, lampoon and alter perceptions. Snippets of Super 8 and VHS from avant-garde cinema, conceptual music videos and guerrilla art appear in unlit, unapologetically raw spaces that draw visitors through sound and instinct. Some are spontaneously shot, some meticulously choreographed — or perhaps it’s the opposite. The answer is what we want it to be.
‘Video art and moving image have always operated at a crossroads — high and low, visceral and conceptual, personal and political,’ Hack said ahead of the opening. ‘In Paradigm Shift, we see how great artists inspire us to engage with storytelling through screens differently, for us to feel more, imagine more and recover our senses.’
Without much intervention, women take a firm grip on the proceedings, behind the camera and in front. Nobody can resist the dancing girls in Cao Fei’s ‘Hip Hop: Shanghai’ or the mad energy of ‘Ever Is Over All’ from 1997, in which the Swiss innovator Pipilotti Rist smashes car windows and unwittingly spearheads an iconic video from Beyoncé’s ‘Lemonade’. Nobody can move past the loop of Martine Syms in silent protest, covered head to breast in a dripping milky film. Throughout a carefree, music-less dance by Gillian Wearing, we find ourselves speculating what’s going on behind the tripod and out of the shot.
The exhibition’s title is literal. Shuffling along the uneven flooring at 180, we sense the paradigm being shifted by artists innovating with form and format. But as technology and quality improve with time, new techniques are employed to toy with us.
