On December 12, 2023, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (MAC) will be taking over the Fonderie Darling with a major new exhibition: Phase Shifting Index (2020), by Vancouver-born, Berlin-based artist Jeremy Shaw.
This video, sound, and light installation is an exhilarating post-documentary reverie of considerable intellectual and artistic ambition. On seven large screens, it presents depictions of seven autonomous groups of people—or “subcultures”—performing various movement-based exercises, therapies, or dances.
The groups appear to be in archival documentaries dating from the 1960s to the 1990s, captured in their corresponding twentieth-century media formats, from 16 mm film to VHS and Hi-8 videotape. They are, however, presented as being in the future, in a narrative anticipation of social developments to come.
The cathartic and ritualized movements performed on each of the independent but simultaneously playing screens—which can be experienced either individually or more collectively from a raised platform—suggest unique cultures, with belief systems formed around their aspirations of inducing parallel realities through movement.
In interviews with some of the participants, the responses are mostly indecipherable, and we must read the subtitles to gain insight into their possible wishes for transcendence and yearning for community. Meanwhile, an ethnographic voiceover reads out a report from a time beyond theirs, retrospectively commenting on the emergence of the first recorded evidence of these baffling groups who were able to physically alter their realities via movement and belief.
Beautifully combining staged documentary, choreography, evocations of spiritual practices, neuroscientific research, drug-induced psychedelic revelations, club subcultures, visual effects, music, and alternative movement therapies, the intensely immersive installation plunges us into a vortex of frenzied movement and altered mental states. Cognitive dissonance ensues as time and space, imagination and reality are scrambled.
The screens conspire in an intriguing narrative that unfolds skillfully and inexorably, culminating in a strobing “trans-temporal” sync in which all the subjects come together in a collective catharsis. For a time, we experience oneness and rapture, as Shaw subverts our trust in the authority conferred by documentary strategies—or, conversely, underscores our distrust of these same strategies.
The exhibition is presented in partnership with The Polygon Gallery, Vancouver.
Location: MAC at Fonderie Darling, 745 Ottawa Street, Montréal, Québec, Canada.
About the artist
Jeremy Shaw (1977, North Vancouver, Canada) works in a variety of media to explore altered states and the cultural and scientific practices that aspire to map transcendental experience. Often combining and amplifying strategies of verité filmmaking, conceptual art, music video, and scientific research, he creates a post-documentary space in which disparate belief systems and histories are thrown into an interpretive limbo. Shaw has had solo exhibitions at Centre Pompidou, Paris; MoMA PS1, New York; Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin; MOCA, Toronto; and most recently Polygon Gallery, Vancouver. His works have been featured in international surveys such as the 57th Venice Biennale, the 16th Lyon Biennale, and Manifesta 11, Zurich. Works by Shaw are held in public collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate Modern, London; the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; and the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal.
