Demolition/Escape

Demolition/Escape brings together three artists whose work with video and sound shares a concern with movement, inversion and porosity. 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.

In Keane’s five metre high two-channel video installation attention is organised through its vertical, serial structure. Across eleven pairs of tiered 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 and porosity operate here, and in the practices of Lloyd and Richards in different ways, as a critical method.

Hilary Lloyd and James Richards contribute new works produced in dialogue, both contextualising Escalator, responding to the architecture of Fluentum and creating new resonances. Richards’ sound installation How different different kisses are (2026) operates both on its own terms and as a surrogate soundtrack for the silent Escalator. His series of eight large posters mounted on board, Travellers (2026), suggests underground advertising hoardings—a motif Keane had also drawn on for some iterations of Escalator, where she showed stills from the video on lightboxes alongside the structure. Lloyd’s Come up and see me (2026) stages a series of moments in video alongside subtle alterations to the space, filling it with a libidinous and uninhibited charge.

The title is drawn from Keane’s multimedia installation Demolition/Escape (1983). Composite in origin, it began as Demolition, a soundwork included in Audio Arts’ Live to Air (1982), before Keane added three further elements: a small train on a wide-gauge track; a zigzagging tower of six monitors, alternately inverted and upright, each showing Keane climbing a rope ladder; and a neon sequence counting down from 9 to 1. Arranged as a triangle, lit by the train’s red and yellow running lights, the work has the sensuous sculptural physicality characteristic of Keane’s practice.

Although not included in the exhibition, Demolition/Escape provides the curatorial logic: distinct elements that cohere as a whole while remaining legible as discrete units—a structure the artists and curators apply to the exhibition itself. Drawing on the themes of Keane’s work and reflecting on her legacy while also forging something new, Demolition/Escape seeks to create an environment in which bodies, images and technologies co-produce one another.

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