Demolition/Escape

Demolition/Escape brings together three artists whose work with video and sound shares a concern with movement, risk and inversion. The exhibition features Tina Keane’s Escalator (1988), fully restored and exhibited for the first time in over thirty years, alongside newly commissioned works by Hilary Lloyd and James Richards.

First presented in the 1980s, Escalator organizes attention through verticality and serial arrangement. Across eleven pairs of stacked monitors, the left screens show suited city workers ascending into a world of glass and steel, while the right show the city’s homeless occupying underground stations. Its looping ascent and descent do not resolve into arrival but return the viewer to the same point, producing a suspended, repetitive temporality. Reversal and replay estrange familiar gestures from habitual meaning and lend everyday movement new symbolic weight. Inversion operates here, and in the practices of Lloyd and Richards in different ways, as a critical method.

Across her multi-monitor installations, Hilary Lloyd isolates fleeting moments from everyday life: an action, a social interaction or the play of light across an object. Meaning emerges through architectural framing, both within the work and through the viewer’s bodily negotiation of the display. For the exhibition, Lloyd will create a new body of work that establishes connections between her practice, the other two artists and the building, continuing her project of capturing the intangible and giving it form.

In his work, James Richards layers disparate visual and sonic material into affective, non-linear sequences in which editing and spatial arrangement unsettle narrative progression. For Demolition/Escape, he will present a series of new collages positioned across the space, alongside a sound work that plays intermittently throughout the gallery, responding to the building’s acoustics and indirectly to Keane’s practice.

The title is drawn from Keane’s 1983 installation Demolition/Escape. Although not included in the exhibition at Fluentum, this earlier work offers a framework for understanding its logic. Combining video, performance, sound and sculptural elements, the installation brings together filmed action across stacked monitors with mechanical and sonic structures. Its distinct elements cohere as one work while remaining legible as discrete units of display, though not always as autonomous artworks. The artists and curators apply a similar logic to the exhibition. Demolition may enable escape by removing an obstruction, yet it can also produce continuous motion rather than release. Together, the works in the exhibition construct an environment in which bodies, images and technologies co-produce one another, sustaining the tension between demolition and escape.

The exhibition opens on Tuesday, April 28, 2026, ahead of the 22nd edition of Gallery Weekend Berlin and will be accompanied by an opening reception in Fluentum’s front yard from 6 to 10 pm.