OPINIONATED with Javier Gonzales Garcia
This is a series coordinated by Saman Mimohammadi Tehrani of insightful exhibition reviews from Sotheby’s Institute's MA Contemporary Art. The series, OPINIONATED, engages with contemporary art debates and practices. Saman is a former event planner and part of the creative team for MADE IN BED. He currently resides in London, England.
The exhibition review below was written by Javier Gonzales Garcia.
Imran Perretta, the destructors (2019). Installation view, Chisenhale Gallery, 2020. The destructors is produced by Chisenhale Gallery and Spike Island, Bristol, and commissioned by Chisenhale Gallery; Spike Island; the Whitworth, The University of Manchester; and BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Andy Keate.
The first thing one can breathe in when they step into the Chisenhale Gallery is a profound sense of solemnity preceding Imran Perretta’s video installation the destructors (2019). The screening room waits at the end of a sloped corridor, which the audience traverses as if they descended into the artist’s psyche. Once the door unlocks, a pitch dark room contrasts with the white walls of the hallway and the visitor ventures into the penumbra matching their steps with the rhythm of the body percussion the film opens with. A split screen flashes images of bronze-skinned hands clapping sets a claustrophobic mood, alternated with a man without his shoes on that struggles to follow a set of dance steps in a floor where random objects form a geometrical pattern. The pace accelerates until it stops out of a sudden; the screen goes black and the viewers are left stranded in a gloomy room, alone with their clawing heartbeats.
The film bursts back into life with eerie shots of an empty school that reminisce The Shining in the way the slow camera moves and the intensifying soundtrack puts the viewer on edge. The first character, a young dark-skinned man, is introduced alone in a classroom, sitting barefoot in a circle of chairs. His face is not shown while he narrates an encounter with an immigration officer that upset him. I forgive you becomes his pet phrase, the same that he was told by the aforementioned officer. The Muslim youth delivers a soulful monologue on fear of the prejudices the post-911 World of Terror has shrouded his community in, but in special of those he is beginning to belief. He begins to see himself as a potential instrument of fanatic destruction, and as the thought corrodes him, the camera jumps back and forth between his shaky hands and the rising water and smoke that menace with flooding the school. I forgive you. The condescendence of that statement chokes the air out of him. The water rises; the camera’s lens is almost opaque because of the smoke.
The second character sits atop a table in a separate classroom, his feet dangling over the carpeted floor just low enough for the water to touch them should it pour into the room. His monologue reflects on a different issue related to racial and religious segregation. For him, Islamophobia is dispersed like seeds by the Western media, but it is in the common people he shares the classroom with that it blooms and roots. He is able to acknowledge how classmates and professors behave towards him in a different manner towards him, scorning but also cautions, as if they tiptoed so to not wake a wild animal. As he pours his soul on the viewer, the smoke thickens and the water reaches a staircase through which it cascades to the floor below. Back in the gym where the percussionist boys clapped at the beginning of the film, the three characters form a circle to dance together.
The third character crouches near a window in an even more defeated posture than the others. At times he looks down and hides his face behind his braced knees, as if too shy to show he is crying. Unlike the others, who deliberate about how the external world demonises their community, this one chooses a different approach. He speaks about the most vulnerable aspects of his life, what makes him fragile and thus human, a dying mother he must go home to when the situation at the flooding school gets sorted out. He poetically uses the concept of transmutation to describe the way in which he experiences his body growing strong as his mother’s weakens. Guilt permeates through his broken voice, as if he was stealing her life and felt utterly powerless about it. The three dancers stand back to back with interlocked arms. The percussion ceases. The image in the screen fades to black.
What Imran Perretta achieves with the destructors is a perfect blend between the conflicts faced by the community of Muslim youths that grew up in a post-911 Western world (the UK, in his case) and those he encountered in his own journey through adolescence. Perretta’s is always a political art, and themes of displacement, social injustice, segregation, conflict and alienation are commonly tackled throughout his production, if always with a poetic approach. The artist usually makes use of metaphors and resources alike in order to convey a more impactful message. In the case of works such as 15 Days (2018), for instance, he added a touch of surrealism by embodying said metaphors in CGI images that float around the characters of the film and become the projections of their speeches. In the destructors, however, he favours a more subtle and practical path to achieve his aesthetic goals.
The three protagonists are concerned with different predicaments that have a common source: they have become the scapegoats of an angry and saddened society far more inclined to hate and punish than to understand and heal. The resulting product is a scar in their feelings in the form of stigmatic anxiety. Their everyday exposure to situations where they are derided, hated or patronised makes them suffer from an asphyxiating anxiety. In order to portray this oppressive sensation, Perretta cleverly chooses to shoot the film in an equally stifling setting. That is the reason behind the flood that will not stop rising until the water spills over the windows and the smoke that slowly thickens into a blinding curtain. Much like the three students that are too petrified by their inner turmoil to escape the imminent catastrophe, their environment runs little by little, drop by drop, out of oxygen until it eventually chokes.
In summary, Imran Perretta’s the destructors is a masterfully crafted ode to the victims of one of the greatest injustices of the modern world: the way in which being portrayed as monsters by society can turn common people into believing they might actually be so.
Thank you Javier.
Javier Gonzales Garcia,
Contributor, MADE IN BED