Artists Jeremy Deller and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster will unveil two new moving-image works this autumn in an exhibition co-organised by the Hayward Gallery in London. The show, entitled The Infinite Mix: Sound and Image in Contemporary Video (9 September-4 December), is the Hayward’s only major off-site exhibition while the Southbank-based gallery undergoes a two-year refurbishment.
The exhibition will open at The Store at 180 The Strand, a 1970s building located in central London near Somerset House. The venue is run by the Vinyl Factory, a London-based enterprise which produces vinyl editions, prints and exhibitions. Sean Bidder, the company’s creative director, says that the “Brutalist architecture provides the basis for a unique experience that is truly immersive and radically different from a traditional gallery environment”.
Gonzalez-Foerster’s hologram-like projection, Maria Callas (2016), “recreates a performance by the opera legend of the tragic song Suicidio taken from Amilcare Ponchielli’s 1876 opera La Gioconda”, the organisers say. Deller has collaborated with the Argentine choreographer Cecilia Bengolea on the film Bom Bom’s Dream (2016), which focuses on the annual Dancehall dance competition in Kingston, Jamaica.
Ralph Rugoff, the director of the Hayward Gallery, says in a statement that many of the works draw on the conventions of documentary film-making, adding: "These major works ultimately present new possibilities for how the medium can engage us in exploring cultural histories, including the poetics as well as the politics of music and performance.”
Other participating artists include Rachel Rose, Ugo Rondinone, Elizabeth Price and Stan Douglas. In French artist Cyprien Gaillard’s 3D film Nightlife (2015), the camera moves in on a German oak at a Cleveland high school (the tree sprang from a sapling given by the Olympic committee to Jesse Owens, the gold-winning, black athlete at the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games).
The Hayward Gallery, which closed last September, is due to reopen early 2018. A new set of pyramid roof lights will be installed in the space as part of the Let the Light In refurbishment project. Other Southbank venues such as the Queen Elizabeth Hall will be renovated during the £25m overhaul.