Putting on exhibitions about artists who use dance is tricky. Either you hire dancers to perform the works throughout the run of the exhibition, which is crazy expensive, or you show choreographed films by those artists, which is infinitely less exciting.
The Whitechapel Gallery has obviously gone for the second option, and the results aren’t great. The eight films here, by eight different artists, explore how the body can be used to tell stories of violence, nature and healing, all through the medium of dance.
There are lots of moving moments among all this movement. Alberta Whittle’s film about healing in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement is tender and elegiac, Alia Farid’s film of dancers celebrating Persian new year is entrancing and hypnotic, Hetain Patel’s work about two young women communicating through martial arts is touching and fun.
Most of the work isn’t really the problem (though some of it is heinous and accidentally hilarious). The issue is that the exhibition is set up so that none of the films overlap, and are instead screened one by one at specific intervals on different screens. And let me tell you, video artists are not known for brevity or having the ability to self-edit, these are long films. So if you come in halfway into Egle Budvytyte’s work, you have to wait an hour to see Alberta Whittle’s. And if you want to take in the whole show? That’s three hours of your life you’ll need to have going spare. Yes, it encourages slow, deliberate, considered viewing. But if you find what you're watching boring, or even bad, tough luck. You’re stuck. Considering the fact that almost none of these films are narrative-based, that’s a pretty tall order.
A really testing, arduous viewing experience
Being this proscriptive about how visitors experience the work assumes that the viewer is too uncultured to know good from bad, that they’re not smart enough to decide for themselves when they’re done with a work of art.
Maybe the argument is that the gallery doesn’t have the ability, technology or budget to show loads of fully isolated films, like 180 The Strand manages to do, but in that case, just don’t do video art shows. Apparently, the reasoning for playing all the films in sequence is to minimise the exhibition build, and the carbon footprint and energy bills of the show in the process. But again, maybe don't do video art shows if you don't want to show the work properly.
But more than anything, this doesn't really work as an exhibition, the films don’t sit well together, they’re barely linked. It feels like a curatorial idea taken too far, like someone said ‘let’s do a whole show of long videos of people dancing about nature’ and no one said ‘are you sure you’re not just jamming loads of unrelated shit together and creating a really testing, arduous viewing experience?’
Who has three hours to spend sitting in an art gallery watching people do interpretive dance in a forest? Me. I do, because it’s my job. And I’d still rather watch ‘Footloose’.