Unease permeates Imran Perretta’s two-screen video installation The Destructors. It’s there in Perretta’s lyrical monologues, spoken by three men who recount their experiences — informed by the artist’s own — as young men from Muslim communities in modern Britain.
It’s expressed in the surround-sound audio: ominous drones, percussive cracks, scratchy violins. And it’s symbolised in insidious forces that enter the Shadwell Centre in Tower Hamlets, where it was filmed: water flooding corridors and stairwells, smoke pouring in through vents and pipes.
Perretta blames austerity and the “weaponisation” of the War on Terror for “the social, cultural and economic marginalisation” of Muslim communities across the UK and explores these ideas through his three protagonists. The first describes the horror of an encounter with a stranger, with his “obscene gaze” who “forgives” him for terrorist bombs. The second tells of being a surveilled body in a stigmatised community: “young innocents, full of infinity” who are “trying to survive this condition we find ourselves in, under-protected and overexposed”. The third recounts caring for his sick mother as he describes wars waged “far away from me” amid declining public services.
Passages of ambiguous choreography punctuate the film, evocative of both interrogation and exercises in trust. The overall mood is one of anxiety, but there is, too, a sense of solidarity and community. A poetic, moving, enveloping and enraging tour de force.
Until Mar 15 (chisenhale.org.uk)
