Paradigm Shift Review – Loud, immersive video art to make your mind turn off | Video art

DShould exhibitions have meaning? The folks responsible for the vast wonderland of underground video art at 180 The Strand certainly don’t think so. In the past they have been masters at immersive art fairs in London. Their debut, The Infinite Mix, in 2016, set a standard that all video art shows since have tried — and largely failed — to reach. This time, in the bowels of this massive concrete behemoth, they threw a whole bunch of video artwork onto the walls, and hoped some of it would stick. But not many do.

The film opens with Mark Leckey’s Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, Pipilotti Rest’s Ever Is Over All, and Gillian Wearing Dancing in Peckham – three of the most important works of video art of the 1990s. Leckie’s film, a paean to flattery, youth culture and discomfort, still has an impact almost 30 years later. Putting on a silent and endearing solo dance number at Peckham Shopping Center is one of the defining acts of its time. And if you’re looking for a contemporary influence, Rist’s video, which follows a smiling woman down the street as she smashes car windows with a flower, was spoofed by Beyoncé in her video for Hold Up in 2016.

Okay, I get it, it’s going to be an entire exhibition about the ’90s and how the sudden proliferation of cheap cameras and editing equipment led to an explosion of creativity. right?

mistake. Next comes Ryan Trecarten, with a delightfully long, barely watchable comedy series about weird people in the mid-2000s doing weird things in the mid-2000s. Then, as fashion designer Telfar Clemens captures the exciting, awe-inspiring, and awe-inspiring audition of new supermodels in the year 2025, while pioneering photographer and activist Nan Goldin stitches together footage of Donyiel Luna, the first black supermodel, and then your mind begins to close in on itself.

By the time you get to Dara Birnbaum’s wild, late-’70s experiment in turning Wonder Woman into a disco star, or Josèfa Ntjam’s CGI video of squirming sea creatures being deemed a “weird twist,” you’ve been slapped with so many incongruous themes and ideas that you can’t discern art from your elbow. You walk from room to room and all you think is, “Huh?” It doesn’t mean the work is bad (although some of it is). There’s no reason for any of it to be in the same show as any other segment.

there some Narrative themes here. Cao Fei and Arthur Jafa play brilliantly with the music video as an art form. Java and Martin Sims explore incredibly poignant themes of blackness; There is eccentricity and fashion in Telfar’s auditions and Andy Warhol’s “Fashion Television”; Social media appears in Trecartin’s video and Meriem Bennani’s film about lizards in the pandemic. But none of these separate threads are woven into a cohesive exhibition. And what does Derek Jarman’s Super 8 experience have to do with anything?

This doesn’t make any sense, in any way. By trying to integrate a collection of disparate new video works into a continuous, half-finished historical series, the curators seem to be guessing.

But in the end, it kind of doesn’t matter, because 180 Gifts operates to such a high standard, in such an incredible space, that you’re almost left in awe. All loud and immersive in your face. The Sims’ action is unrealistic, the Java segment is hallucinatory and uncomfortable, and those ’90s movies are great. If they had called the show “Some Things We Just Like,” you wouldn’t be spending all your time trying to figure out what the hell they think the model is — or how any of this changes it.