Nine Nights: Channel B at ICA, London

Art Monthly, December 2021

The system is broken. This phrase permeates ‘Channel B’ by Black-owned art, music and creative initiative Nine Nights. Spanning the ICA’s two floors, the exhibition comprises audio-visual installations by artists Gaika Tavares, GLOR1A and Shannen SP exploring Black futurism. The complexity of the exhibition’s installation is key; the space is organised in such a way as to create seamless links between the artworks, allowing the viewer to navigate an alternative future. 

A screen, suspended above the lower gallery, has ‘No Entry’ projected across it in red block capitals. This forms part of Gaika’s War Island, a sculptural installation exploring the spatial politics of gentrification. Mirrored columns lit from within, akin to server racks, frame rectangular video screens on which tower and office blocks, filmed from a low vantage point, play on loop, while sound pieces play through headphones. When viewed alone, the work has a ghostly quality, reminiscent of the eerie feeling of empty streets that became all too familiar during lockdown. 

The question ‘Drained by being forced to engage with trauma while viewing art?’ is inscribed on the wall outside Shannen SP’s installation Zen Projects Ltd. A marked change in tone from War Island, the installation provides a framework for screening a number of other artists’ videos, with the text going on to suggest that the project offers ‘guilt free, reinforced and fully automated S.ELF CARE (TM) systems and packages’ through ‘audio-visual pieces which promote healing, restoration and alignment’. Viewers are invited to remove their shoes before entering a dark room, the focus of which is a screen displaying works by Devi Mambouka, Kumbirai Makumbe, Scratcha DVA, Man Wigs, CUSS GROUP and Black Obsidian Soundsystem (B.O.S.S.), the numerous videos and animations offering dystopian takes on subjects such as guided meditation. After being asked whether we are pregnant or have a pacemaker, the viewer is invited to wear a SubPac (a backpack device that vibrates according to the frequency of the works’ sound) and sit in a massage chair, face peering through a leather hole directed towards the screen. This amplifies the installation’s effect; we feel it bodily, vibrating through our muscles and before our eyes. By satirising the culture of wellness, Shannen SP invites us not only to interrogate the capitalist underbelly of the wellness movement but also to think critically about the institutions where Black trauma is co-opted under the guise of allyship. 

Running in conjunction with the exhibition is New Syntax, a programme of ‘live activations’ which includes spoken word, live music and performance. Curated to accommodate these activations, the works certainly feel most alive when the space is occupied. On the second of the New Syntax nights, the lower gallery and its War Island installation was transformed into a pulsing, energetic space by MikeQ (a leading figure in the vogue-house scene), and Bambi Revlon & Amani Revlon. The installation takes on new meaning when occupied in this way, resisting hostile gentrification by the joyous transformation of dancing bodies. ‘Channel B’ is most successful when activated by people, discourse and participation. This is particularly evident in SWARM, a performance space and multiplayer video game by artist GLOR1A. The work feels incomplete outside of New Syntax precisely because of its purpose; it needs to be enlivened by performance and bodies for the work to come into its own. 

Conversely, GLOR1A’s work Dark Matter Inc., in the adjacent room to SWARM, is one of the exhibition’s standout works, its impact unhindered by its viewing context. The work, centring on the monetisation of data, imagines a global nation-state for Black people who own and profit from their own data. In the sci-fi video essay performed as GLOR1A 2.0, a fictive futuristic robot, the artist declares: ‘Black is money, capital and power. Subscribe to Black. [...] For the first time there is hope, collective unity and vision.’ Through its illustration of an alternative system, the work leads us to consider the ways in which the current system is ‘broken’, and how cycles of oppression are perpetuated through new technologies. The subject matter of the exhibition is undoubtedly essential and sobering, but its execution is hopeful and celebratory. Ultimately, it reimagines the future to create an archive of art, performances and Black counterculture, while simultaneously animating this futurism into our present, proposing an alternative world of concrete possibilities.