Installation view of 4th Floor to Mildness by Pipilotti Rist. Image courtesy of The Store Studios

What The New Museum is bringing to London next month

Expect screens, beds, reflections on the past and predictions for the future at Strange Days

Next month, Manhattan’s New Museum crosses the Atlantic to host an immersive, off-site exhibition inside a big, brutalist office block, renamed The Store Studios, at 180 The Strand, London. The show, the museum's first in the British capital, follows on from other successful visiting shows at The Store including Hayward Gallery’s hit 2016 exhibition, The Infinite Mix, and the Lisson Gallery’s similarly successful 2017 show, Everything at Once, held during Frieze Week.

The New Museum’s exhibition, Strange Days: Memories of the Future, will be curated by the New Museum’s director, Massimiliano Gioni, and will present work by 21 artists and filmmakers who have shown video works at the New Museum over the past decade.

Yet, as the name suggests, Strange Days: Memories of the Future won’t simply serve as a retrospective. Instead, the exhibition will “consider how images shape memories while anticipating visions of what the future may hold. Weaving together reportage and lyricism, the works on view blend images and sound into polyphonic, dreamlike compositions.”

 

Installation view of The Vertigo Sea (2015) by  John Akomfrah, courtesy of The New Museum
Installation view of The Vertigo Sea (2015) by John Akomfrah, courtesy of The New Museum

The pieces on show will include 4th Floor to Mildness by Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist, a fairly chilled-out installation of beds and ceiling projections last seen at her New Museum show Pixel Forest, back in 2016.

The exhibition will also include the work of British video artist John Akomfrah. Look out for Akomfrah’s Vertigo Sea, his multi-screen meditation on the ocean as an environmental, cultural, and historical force, that was a hit at the 2015 Venice Biennale, before it was shown at the New Museum earlier this year.

 

Still from Kahlil Joseph’s Fly Paper (2015)
Still from Kahlil Joseph’s Fly Paper (2015)

Strange Days will also feature Kahlil Joseph’s Fly Paper a personal portrait of black cultural life in Harlem, which premiered at the New Museum in the fall of 2017; and French artist Camille Henrot crunched down movie of the universe’s creation, Grosse Fatigue.

The prognostic nature of the show might sound a little murky, but you don’t have to be an artworld shaman to predict that The Store Studios has another hit on its hands. 

 

Pipilotti Rist: Pixel Forest
Pipilotti Rist: Pixel Forest

For more on Pipilotti Rist, order a copy of our book Pipilotti Rist: Pixel Forest, which served as a catalogue for the New Museum show of the same name and features an interview between her and Gioni. You can buy your copy here.