Indices Sequence by Richard Hawkins is a haunting four-minute digital video that unfolds as a multi-screen collage, where still and moving images flicker across shifting windows, their positions and dimensions continuously rearranged. Art historical references—such as the visceral figuration of Francis Bacon, and the existential cuts of Lucio Fontana, collide with fragments from b-horror films, many of which featured the legendary Butoh performer Tatsumi Hijikata. This collision of aesthetic registers destabilizes linear narrative and instead proposes a sequence of visual indices—markers of trauma, identity, and disintegration.

The background colours pulse, fade, or flare into prominence, setting a tense and suspenseful rhythm that pairs with a sonic collage. The audio, like the images, splices together disparate sources: guttural whispers, ambient hums, dissonant tones, and cinematic echoes. The effect is disorienting, drawing viewers into an atmosphere of unease, where no image is stable for long. By juxtaposing the Western modernist canon with horror and Japanese performance traditions, Indices Sequence meditates on the distorted body as a site of cultural, historical, and emotional violence. It invites us to think of their connection, the often-under-represented influence of Eastern traditions on Western Modernism. Hijikata’s Butoh—an anti-dance steeped in memory, decay, and transformation—mirrors the horror genre’s fixation on bodily rupture and psychic fracture. Simultaneously, modernist gestures such as Fontana’s slashes and Bacon’s contortions embody a parallel desire to expose unseen realities and tear through surfaces.

Hawkins's work forges a transhistorical dialogue between Western modernism’s existential angst, Japanese performative aesthetics, and the horror genre’s visceral poetics. It underscores the shared impulse to visualize trauma, confront mortality, and challenge coherent identity. Ironically, the gothic and horror could be read as all that Modernism desired to conceal and hide away, but their impulse was shared, and Modernism, under closer scrutiny perhaps cannot shake off its clandestine influences. What is left in Indices Sequence, is less a narrative than a shifting field of affect—where meaning flickers, disappears, and re-emerges with uncanny intensity.

Read Bradford Nordeen's review of The Garden of Loved Ones’ at Empty Gallery, Hong Kong in 2025 where this artwork was exhibited.