Karimah Ashadu 

Kobby Adi

Cory Arcangel

Martha Atienza

Ed Atkins

Charles Atlas

Darren Bader

Martin Beck

Dara Birnbaum

Zheng Bo

Nate Boyce

Sonia Boyce

Candice Breitz

Maeve Brennan

Duncan Campbell

Jonathan Lyndon Chase

Kwan Sheung Chi

Adam Chodzko

Tony Cokes

Stephanie Comilang

Alex Da Corte

Jeremy Deller

Shannon Ebner

Angus Fairhurst

Jes Fan

Nikita Gale

Theaster Gates

Lawrence Abu Hamdan

Rei Hayama

James T. Hong

Jonathan Horowitz

Tishan Hsu

Andrew Thomas Huang

Tao Hui

Yee I-Lann

AKI INOMATA

Evan Ifekoya

Takahiro Inamori

Derek Jarman

Yu Ji

Eisa Jocson

Joan Jonas

Mike Kelley

Sin Wai Kin

Lee Kit

Vvzela Kook

Friedrich Kunath

Alan Kwan

Tang Kwok-Hin

Christopher Landoni

Carolyn Lazard

Mark Leckey

Kang Seung Lee

Florence Yuk-ki Lee

Lawrence Lek

Shuang Li

Klara Liden

Enzo Camacho & Amy Lien

Quỳnh Lâm

Jill Magid

Diego Marcon

Helen Marten

Jennifer and Kevin McCoy

Shala Miller

Takeshi Murata

Shirin Neshat

Tuan Andrew Nguyen

Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi

Ho Tzu Nyen

Lydia Ourahmane

Tony Oursler

Xiaofei Mo & POND

Gary-Ross Pastrana

Yuri Pattison

Ellen Pau

Imran Perretta

Sondra Perry

Paul Pfeiffer

Thao Nguyen Phan

Wong Ping

Calla Henkel & Max Pitegoff

Ingrid Pollard

Kobby Adi & Nina Porter

Walid Raad

Oliver Payne & Nick Relph

James Richards

Robert Sandler

Aki Sasamoto

Jacolby Satterwhite

Shimabuku

Tiffany Sia

Julian Simmons

P. Staff

Angela Su

Martine Syms

Kenneth Tam

Maria Taniguchi

Luke Willis Thompson

Rirkrit Tiravanija

Juria Toramae

Carriers and Manifestations

currently live and work between London and Frankfurt.

WangShui

If the camera is the body and the lens the skin, it becomes almost entirely undetectable, as it mirrors its surroundings while recording.

From Its Mouth Came a River of High- End Residential Appliances

(2023), the epic showdown between Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao finds Mayweather erased from the footage, a ghost the mind wraps around. Pacquiao ducks and sways before an etched collective memory. His gloves cover his head. He quivers with hits from a figure we might easily fill in, or have to find a reminder of. I try to watch as many times as possible, holding off from watching the original fight. As I do so, I pay more attention instead to where my eyes tend to focus when the central drama is cut and drained from the scene. I look at the eyes of the crowd, which move together, tracking the two’s dance, narrowing at each hit. The viewer shapes her mind around a void, strays to the MOTOLITE on Pacquiao’s waistband, the blue of the MGM GRAND across the mat.

Fights of the century like this are cited as media tipping points, offering a rare convergence: dense layers of sensory, political and quasi-spiritual spectacle. This fight was wildly anticipated for years, hotly covered, watched by many millions and then debated for the decade after. Many felt the fight was five years too late past each boxer’s prime, and that Pacquiao’s technical proficiency and number of blows should have secured the win. Pacquiao – the people’s hero – sustained a shoulder injury. Any clean opposition became less clear. This was one of the few fights in which Mayweather was forced to move, duck, and run around the ring. It was unusual to see Pacquaio in as many defensive postures as offensive, ducking, stepping back, pushed, even thrown against the ropes, which the artist’s edit highlights. In this edit, 

 gets as much credit for his defensive skill, taking serious hits in the face and head that would send most to the ground. Finished. We can admire Mayweather’s ghost’s technical precision. He was strategic and bided his time, even if he was less of a showman.

The sheer weight of expectation bearing down on this fight heightens the drama of what’s unseen, namely, all the puppeteering hands pulling on lines of tension, orchestrating the scene. The dance of the two was on a set before an audience both real and imagined, against a backdrop diamond-sharp in its symbolism. Pfeiffer’s choreographed edit nudges us to hold all that is off-screen as we watch. The interruption between the image and what is expected turns us to what is not there, what is outside the frame. We orient towards what might be working beyond view. A body in motion, seen through the filter of absence, through the language of speculation, betting, through the crowd’s gaze, through our imagining and our memory of his opponent in this lucrative spectacle. We watch Pacquiao’s squints, mouthed deep breaths, his expressions of grim determination. Muscles move in waves across his back and arms with each heavier punch. The camera flips views, second to second. We drift to the crowd, to the god’s-eye view, the isometric view, to the ring mat, to the back, to the shoulders of Pacquiao. 

The whole place is silent, allowing us to concentrate. We can note the improvisational, emergent aspects of the fight; there are brief smiles, moments of acknowledgement, hugs right before the final round. There is begrudging and mutual respect, if totally different styles. And there is a deep understanding on the part of each athlete that their image, and their performance in the game, is all. Pfeiffer notes in a recent interview that he was riveted to find Mayweather owns the rights to the fight, and so likely has the highest-resolution footage.

 A direct feed into the minds of the watching.

Watching Pacquiao dodge before the ghost memory figure of Mayweather, caught from every camera angle, I am reminded of Jena Osman’s challenging book 

(2019). Osman looks so closely at the details of how cameras evolved across human history that we feel her prose start to move with the cameras. As the power of visual capture accelerates, becomes more wily and tied to technological systems that are themselves more difficult to see (beyond the interface, at work through computation, or quite literally concealed), Osman argues that we must think as fluidly, deftly, with as much skilful movement. Motion technologies have their poetry, and our best possible role given their increasing speed, scale and power is to develop a critique of the moving image that lyrically moves with cameras, asking and answering the questions their movement makes possible.

, along with other videos in the long-running 

 suite, Pfeiffer uses spatially responsive and deft, fluid editing techniques to ask for a thinking and thought that meets them in flux, cutting and moving with the eye. These works blend jump cuts, speculation and documentary not just to ‘speak to’ how oversaturation, surveillance, and economic and cultural power are managed and mediated through these spectacles. The works, through what’s in absentia, ask the viewer to turn their eye and mind beyond the frame, to poke into what is unseen and what sits right beyond. Why did we see what we saw, in this way, framed in these terms?

Collective cultural memories, like the endlessly proliferated media of a great fight, are continually reworked much like individual memories. New theories, more critical analyses of digital media and sophisticated technical systems, more savvy media literacy attuned to algorithmic orchestration attune us more to what is not seen. There’s an understanding that we need to be as much critical visual readers as readers of what is beyond the frame, as power now primarily unfolds and operates beneath or beyond the visual realm, even as visual evidence provides many sigils and clues. Our collective memories are partial, contingent and far more malleable than our externalized prostheses of artificial memory, our media storehouses, might suggest. Despite computational logic’s insistence, memories are not like files stored on hard drives, retrieved simply at will through a database, sorted in a table of contents. They necessitate retrieval, prompted by association or a trigger (a madeleine, a scent), and story and context to activate them, and active retelling. ‘We’ are collectively prone to embellishment and error in remembering, to selectively forgetting, to blocking.

As we consider the diverse dislocating formal techniques Pfeiffer deploys, I turn to the artist WangShui’s 

From Its Mouth Came a River of High- End Residential Appliances 

(2019). In this 13-minute film, we coast in a continual motion, as though on the nose or head of a dragon, through the Dragon Gate, a famous type of square-and-curved void in massive, absolutely overwhelming high-rises in Hong Kong that dizzy the mind with their density and spectacle. Such Dragon Gates are built so ‘spirit dragons’, carrying good 

, positive, auspicious, fortunate energy, can flow easily from the tops of the hills to the sea, to drink from the sea, and return in the evening. The dragons are mythological, spiritually significant, and ‘real’ in the sense that many demigods and mythical beings are ‘alive’ in the collective imagination.

Each building’s gate implies a connection of the man-made to the sky, sea and mountains around. We listen to the artist describe themselves and collaborator Hercules, aiming their drone towards Bel-Air, a complex on the sea. We look at three dragon gates and hear the narrator: ‘Hercules launches the drone, and we watch it fly towards the first hole.’ The architectural respect for this type of urban feng shui is evident in skyscrapers across the city. Further, as we learn in the film’s story, many practitioners of feng shui – banned in the PRC in 1949 – fled to Taiwan and Hong Kong in the late 1960s to escape persecution. Tied to geomancy techniques, we learn, the buildings embed an ecological understanding that may not be immediately apparent but is essential to consider. A building will respond to wind, to movement in the ground, and can hardly be built well without consideration of the natural and artificial systems in motion all around.

In the film, we move along a smooth, rigorously focused motion right through the centre of one dragon gate. These gate-voids, WangShui describes, refuse monumentalism and resist ideology. We are ourselves as viewers possibly coasting on the unseen energy that would lead dragons from the mountains out into the sea. As we edge closer to the first dragon gate, we see the sea, the pink and purple and blue soft sky above it, framed by the garden walkway of the gate, which residents ostensibly can step out onto. We see tankers and huge ships on the sea. We are told the drones will likely lose reception as they pass through, so we are refused the passing through; the scene changes to a new drone shot, approaching another dragon gate. Because we never quite know if the drone, the dragon, ever passes through, a void forms further in the narrative and the imagined flow of an ancient or future dragon we might be simulating.

As we course on towards the second gate, our sense of our ‘eye’ and view, and what vantage we are looking from, and what we are, destabilizes narratively and, perhaps, mentally. WangShui describes the dragon they ‘have in mind’, which takes on their name, has no body, and is perhaps a kind of camera-like eye, shuttering, shifting between endless vantage points, generating ‘an infinite live image’ of the artist. A tired voice on the final, third drone journey expresses a mournful desire to escape the tyranny of positive images, to find an escape from fixed identity. We hear: ‘If the camera is the body and the lens the skin, it becomes almost entirely undetectable, as it mirrors its surroundings while recording.’ And indeed, this ghostly camera, impossible to see, implied and hidden away, is mythic, mythologized, the roving, hidden eye of our time. WangShui’s intentional edits turn our gaze towards what is out of frame.

As Margot Norton argues, we find that ‘the unseen, the “void,” the shifting, formless, inexplicable, and otherworldly [are] often exalted in WangShui’s work – the immaterial as primary material’.

 By speaking of the immaterial as we move towards a void, we think on myth, history, persecution, urban architecture, yes: all lenses we can read the work through. But just as important as the legible and clear ‘reasons’ for the void, WangShui argues for our consideration of system mechanics and movements beyond sight. In fact, they insist on the otherworldly, the void, that is at the centre of our own knowing, at the centre of any frantic neoliberal search to pin down identity, narrative, as a fixed set of factors. No, the artist and this work seem to say: the void and the abyss are the point, turning our thinking outward, towards the edge, towards what needs consideration.

The void, in both these works, allows us to consider other tellings, and consider the illegible, hard to narrate aspects of spectacles of power, the non-visual aspects, found around the edges of the void, in the approach 

the void. Both works refuse an omniscient and single camera gaze, moving us as viewers towards the collective nature of watching, while refusing any single, seductive ritualized viewing. In looking at each artist’s formal strategies of dislocation, roving and destabilization, we can respect their respective approaches to showing what’s just beyond the frame – politically, socially, culturally – and all we learn in absentia.

Focusing on the void, we find the disembodied, watching power right at the edge of its frame. At the edge of the void is collection, management, organized stories, coherent narratives, clear power binaries. The state, the corporation, the algorithmic media life world, the surveillant, the entire topography of power shifts in the present, a many-eyed dragon impossible to see, above the ring, coursing above the crowd. In erasing the fighter, refusing the pleasure of passing through, repeated, each time, we learn how to recognize how power – its ideology – roots in the mind. Who won, and why. The void refuses the closed story, opening up dynamic paths beyond the frame and showing the cost of ignoring what is there, waiting to be read. 

Notes

Biographies 

Vs. (Fight of the Century)

Extract from From Its Mouth Came a River of High- End Residential Appliances, 2019

In Absentia

screening

(2023) considers Black Queer interiority and erotics through an astral exploration of the mouth as portal. Extending their multidisciplinary practice to moving image, this surreal, cinematic portrait by Jonathan Lyndon Chase suggests the overlapping and simultaneous narratives active within psychic space, and the tensions between these potential storylines. Across scenes that layer imagery of domestic intimacies and public spaces in their hometown of Philadelphia – a playground, a pool hall, the supermarket, church – the artist remembers and reconstructs, opening windows on to the erotic and pleasurable counternarratives at play within constrained, anxious or straight-presenting settings. Musing on infinity plays and memory as a fallible loop structure, 

expands Black Queer storytelling and teases what time can do to disentangle us from our own cycles. 



I’m a huge fan of your work, so it’s amazing to have this conversation.



I’m excited. It’s been busy. We just moved our studio to a bigger space.



It’s rare to see the studio looking a certain way for longer than two months. There’s a balance of intuition, chaos and order. I’m very much into interior design and thinking of the space as being alive, a living document.



(2023) again, together. What’s the story behind it?



My first jump into video work was around grad school, and I made my first public video in 2018. I’m always thinking of different ways to communicate symbols in my work, like poetry. My work in film started with animating my drawings, but that didn’t quite work for me, and I wanted to use more of my archival material. For the show where 

, Sadie Coles HQ, London, 2023), I wanted the film to be a focal point containing different symbols that show up in my larger body of work. 

is an attempt to figure out a way to make these symbols work in motion or moving image format. Making the archive of my practice accessible in different ways is important to me.

I don’t have lots of formal training with film – I’ve taken maybe one film theory class and a moving pictures class – but I love movies so very much. Also, as my work is expanding and growing, I always have the thing I’m very sure of, the thing I’m less sure of, and the thing that’s more experimental, working through the different mediums of drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, sound. Making 

was also a great learning experience and helped me to understand how all my artworks inform each other.



, but also generally, I go out in Philly (where I’m from), or wherever I am, and I take pictures of things that I find. I always have my digital camera and phone with me. Sourcing images from this found archive, I try to collage them together in a way that has a narrative but is also very open-ended, dreamlike or poetic.

is narrative-driven in that you’re seeing these everyday environments or public spaces, and then there’s another lens or framing with a person’s mouth, which is both erotic and, for some people, maybe even humorous. But I mostly equate that humour to discomfort. I’ve been reading Marlon Riggs. I also studied his film work in grad school, along with other Black Queer theorists and writers on Black interiority like Isaac Julien and Barbara Hammer, a filmmaker and photographer who made these amazing videos of queer life. While her spaces are kind of non-specific, her frame is very much focused on the body. I’m really interested in the mundaneness of what the frame can capture and also in being unapologetic.

For me, there’s an erotic component to 

 that I think is very necessary in terms of us seeing that in the world. I make my work for Black Queer people; that’s my audience and my main concern. 

is really about the interiority of the body; the corporeal, spiritual, mental and also political, these multiple functions of what a mouth can represent and can do. It gets weird in a fantastical or dreamlike way because I’m trying to channel nuanced poetics. These objects, these items come out of the body – the world that’s inside the body – and function maybe as a gag.

. I probably have 100,000 images on my phone and PC, and generally I make binders where I’ll classify things: as footballs or shoes or blue T-shirts, or people at nighttime, people in daytime, that sort of thing. Then I use all these weird and interesting apps on my phone to manipulate them and move parts around. I’m really interested in using what I would consider low or humble tech. Then I use Photoshop to layer and blend things together. In my paintings, there’s also a fair amount of layering.



I’m curious about the phone-like frame. We have many windows open at all times; these collaged compositions that we exist within are so interesting. Something super intimate can be happening on your phone while you’re in public.



I think the framing had a lot to do with knowing that I was going to show this work inside a bedroom-style installation – a very intimate, private space. 

was also shown on a television screen because I think a lot about the different ways queer people have found ways to communicate with each other over time: letters, secret meeting places, the telephone. I also remember Myspace, Xanga and other web clubs and chat rooms. I wanted the installation to have a digital but painterly feel.

The horizontal-vertical compositions allow this – like you’re holding your phone or sitting at a monitor. For lots of us, that’s how we’re able to access so much about the world and other people. We spend so much time seeing the world in this manner. It felt like the right way to depict these elements. I’m also very interested in what rectangles and squares, also in a gender-binary way, tell us information-wise, paying attention especially to the softness of the flesh versus the harder angles. Part of the fun and challenge for me is to play with formal qualities. But I also consider these compositions closely tied to my poetry and writing practice in the way that I always say: I don’t consider myself a poet; I’m a painter that makes poetry.



I’m more interested in working across mediums. It’s a love for the uncertain and experimental. I think of my videos as collage. I try to maintain an aesthetic familiar to my work, but it’s very different at the same time.



I actually do have a poem about a mouth that acted as source inspiration. I might have it … I’ll be right back.

Locked. Salt.

This poem really helped me think about how to compose the visuals for the video. It was something that I’d been sitting on for a really long time, because this stuff incubates, and I like for things to kind of spill out of the frame.



, the video, gave another form to these thoughts?



The mouth is a pleasure point and a power zone. We use our voices for great change, and it’s one of the ways we affect the world haptically. I think of people and political activists like James Baldwin or Marlon Riggs, this idea of song or chant, and these items we see in the film like eggs and carrots – things from the safe place of the domestic, where we can be vulnerable, just ourselves, and unguarded in a very tender way. These items are coming through this portal that’s within the body, that’s a pleasure point. For 

, I decided to focus on the mouth as a zone of possibility.



And yet it feels like an unexplored or lesser-appreciated zone, culturally speaking.



I agree. People get uncomfortable. That response isn’t new to me. Actually, I kind of like it because it asks the viewer to question their discomfort.

The people in the film are friends of mine, and they told me that filming it felt cathartic, relaxing and a little adventurous for them. It felt like something they should and shouldn’t be doing at the same time. There’s tension.

I think the key is to be unapologetic in showing these sorts of visuals. But of course, that’s what makes people uncomfortable. Partly I think we’re simply not used to seeing imagery like this, made by a Queer Black person. It catches people off guard. For me, making this work is also about a need and desire to have a rich and complex visual canon and the possibility of what else might be birthed from that. This idea of birth, too, is like an opening orifice. I often talk about how the skin of our lips is the same kind as our anus, and I think we also must remind ourselves that our bodies are flesh. What does that mean for how we look at reality?



Let’s look at some of the scenes in more detail.



Together, the compositions in the film exhibit a pattern or revisiting of tensions that I’m trying to push up against each other, to make something of a simultaneity where more than one thing is happening.


In the carrot scene, the drilling noise is the engine sound of motorbikes. There’s an element of freedom, danger and romance in being on a motorbike, and then that’s paired with these very sharp or phallic things being packed into the mouth. This is something that might happen where these people are going, maybe a sex party. Again, this mix of something that’s uncomfortable and pleasurable at the same time.
The candle scene talks about religion specifically. I was raised in a Baptist household, and though I haven’t been to church in years, it still sticks with me in my memory. I wanted this composition to be more vertical, echoing this idea of heaven and hell, up and down. This scene is part erotic, with the candles in the mouth, but it also relates to experiences of being silenced because of who I am as a person. This is one of my favourite scenes because it touched me in coming to terms with what spirituality meant for me at the time, and what it looks like for me now.



There’s significant labour in constructing each composition, too: going to get the eggs, sourcing the stained glass, putting things in the mouth.



Thank you for mentioning that, because increasingly through my works I’m shaping my practice as a form of ritual. It’s a process. I also consult with the performers about how the objects feel and fit in their mouth. I’ll give the object to them to get to know it. That’s part of it; the objects that are in play, and then the space that’s being charged with memory.

The basketball court scene is set in a playground in North Philly, and there’s a small, rubber American football inside the mouth. It’s a kind of surreal play on balls and masculine sport. I’m interested in archetypes and roles that are considered very macho or masculine, and the historical erasure and policing of these spaces. Especially with athletes and what’s going on in current events with trans athletes, queer athletes. There’s also this homoeroticism that comes into play with sports that I wanted to challenge. You have all these macho men playing with balls, and this is supposed to be a safe space for everyone, but unfortunately, sporting culture really promotes homophobia. There are so many people who are lovers of sports but who are alienated. Again, there’s a level of silencing regarding what sports culture could be doing to someone.

I’m also thinking about cultural conditioning or brainwashing. It starts very early, the way you’re expected to function, look and navigate through space, what’s ‘culturally appropriate’. This reflection on childhood is also why I used a toy football in this composition. I collect lots of miniatures and kids’ toys.

Also, identity and intersectionality. For many young Black people, sport is a site of power, pride and respect that goes hand in hand with ideas of masculinity. I remember growing up – and even still now – with some of my friends, the pressure or policing of certain aspects of their personality. It’s strange and violent.



We’re talking about truth and fiction, in a way – the scripts and performances that we repeat in our everyday lives versus what our interior reality or story might be at any moment. One of the defining characteristics of 

I like loops, especially because I think of memory that way. Not necessarily related to trauma, but also to happy or pleasurable thoughts that stick in your mind. That’s the mental, emotional landscape I’m talking about. Making 

, I was thinking a lot about the memory of sound, how it stays with you, which goes back to the loop. I wanted a set number of sequences and then for it to just sort of repeat. How does sound take up a space in our mind along with how something looks? I like to call it ‘being sticky’ – you hear a few quick seconds of something and then it just keeps going in your mind.



But the second repeat is slightly different. Does 

propose an undoing? In the sense that the more you repeat a pattern, the more you can register, understand and perhaps halt it. 



I really love our talk right now. When my work leaves me, or the studio, it takes on its own life and I start figuring out and learning other things about it. There’s always this question of ‘the intent’: what’s going to come across, and how much you want to direct or inform the viewer. But it mostly brings me back to the idea of bringing new possibilities to the canon of Black Queer storytelling and image-making.



 the most. I’m a huge nerd. A lot of people don’t know that about me, but comic books gave me my introduction to fantasy, science fiction and horror stories. I love how they give you so much information through panels and windows.

I think about thresholds, windows; liminal moments when you’re going from point A to point B; the transition. With the idea of the threshold, I’m very much thinking about the lens and perspective of a person or people: whose window we’re looking through and how that matters. It’s kind of my way of going inside what we’re holding internally. The mouth itself is definitely a door or a window in that sense, like what we might be seeing inside this person. When you’re being as vulnerable as I try to be, and there’s vulnerability in seeing how a person thinks, there’s also a need for protection that I’m very conscious of and am always trying to think about. Although I make work for our community, there are other people interacting with and looking at it as well.



What do you think about the relationship between interiority and technology, our increased ability to record, reflect and share our interior worlds?



We look to platforms like Instagram and TikTok to enrich our lives and help us connect with one another. They’re great tools, but they’re also doing something very weird. I’ve been reading about how our physical third spaces are shrinking (home, work, and then social space, or ‘third space’) because people are more interested or more comfortable spending time interacting via the screen. I’m wary of what it could be doing to our psyche, especially with people who might struggle with insecurity or anxiety; how it interferes with how we perceive ourselves.

I’m interested in archiving and preserving certain memories, and then, because I’m more of an introvert and pretty private, being able to use that archive as a tool to reach out to people. People also have a very short attention span now; music isn’t as long, we have clips, memes, shorts. You’re dealing with the element of time in a different way. For me, it made sense to edit the film to the most important parts, and then use loops with slight variations. But I’m very excited to explore this medium of time. Really, I think that’s the major player in investigating this work.



The ouroboros has been on my mind these past months. The snake that eats its own tail …



This is amazing. I'm very interested in the infinity symbol. The bodies in the Sadie Coles HQ exhibition where I exhibited 

I called ‘number eight bodies’, or the snake eating itself. For me, the idea of this collapsed body, or I just call it a number eight body, is really in relationship to 

. When I’m thinking about an abstract body, and focusing on these pleasure points like the mouth, which are thresholds and entrances, it’s also about entering another world or liminal space.

I’m just homing in on one entrance to this timeless zone. I think a lot about liminality, and then it starts getting more spiritual or astral because you’re going inside the interior. I have one of these bodies tattooed on me. I think it has a lot to do with our bodies only being here for a certain amount of time, and thinking of how our bodies interact with space. They’re changing rapidly, but we’re slow at the same time.

Someone I really admire is the artist Wangechi Mutu. I’ve been thinking more lately about timelessness, and science fiction. I’ve also been really interested in learning more about African folklore, but I won’t give too much away …



Thank you so much. It’s been amazing to spend this time with you.



Thank you so much, this has been amazing.

Biographies

1 min clip from Mouth 1

Mouth 1

(1999) in my friend’s Hackney Wick apartment. It might have been the afternoon after a party. The atmosphere was dazed, blinds were drawn, beers circulated, the beam of the projector picked out interweaving curlicues of smoke. Watching it now, 

conjures the only vivid memories to survive from that period of my life: not of working bad jobs and struggling to meet shared rents but of sitting by the canal as the sun rose, talking shit in mysterious apartments, night buses, tempting fate, seeking out love and revelation in spaces like those in which the film’s unwitting protagonists gather to dance. 

And these fragmentary memories are woven into the broader nostalgia that it inspired for the world into which I was born, at more or less the midpoint of this potted history of rave culture (seven-and-a-half minutes into the film, it pauses on a VHS still with the time stamp 19:84). And it seems to me self-evident – though this might be egotism – that these scenes were shot in the North, that geographically indeterminate region of England defined by a popular culture with which I identified. If you’re English, you know a northerner from a southerner in the same ways that a classmate learns to distinguish identical twins: not only through accent but by an accumulation of characteristics – the way that they hold themselves when standing, small mannerisms of dress – of which you are individually unconscious and could never articulate.

In much the same way, I can present no real evidence that this is also a history of the North. Earlier scenes take place in working men’s clubs, a predominantly if not exclusively northern cultural phenomenon, but the locations are mostly the dark, undistinguished rooms in which music is played late at night. There are Brutalist estates that call to my mind the suburbs of Leeds or Manchester but which could equally be London. Perhaps it is the sensibility of the artist that infuses the work with this feeling, as if the edit communicates the aggression and spark that I associate with the North. But it seems more likely that it is my desire to identify with the film’s narrative that means I have always thought of it this way, because the film is profoundly nostalgic and I am nostalgic for the place to which I once claimed to belong but long ago left. A place that I betrayed, as you betray a class.

, whatever it is that identifies its characters is passed through the generations by inherited gestures, so when one dancer drops a shoulder, another – through Leckey’s jump cuts ­– completes it. That ‘something’ (a wary abandonment, an aggressive insouciance?) is intrinsic to what I learned in my childhood to identify as 

, meaning something to be admired and copied. The first half of this film reminds me of case studies in an aesthetic self-education, like the photographs of Ian Curtis or Jarvis Cocker that I would cut out of the 

Akeroyd Collection

Artists

Kobby Adi & Nina Porter

Exhibitions