Light, sound, and the subterranean exhibition hall are the only protagonists of Steve McQueen’s newly commissioned, site-specific installation for Dia Beacon. The converted shipping space becomes the scene for a mediation on the African diaspora, which reverberates in a score of its sonic expression in different forms of bass music. The vacancy of the image created by McQueen is contrasted with three works concurrently on view at Dia Chelsea. Here, film-historical, symbolic, and personal references to the experience of migration and uprootedness collide in film and photography. In his review, Fionn Meade expands on questions of visibility and representation in the artist’s dual shows.

Central to Steve McQueen’s films is a passing in and out of legibility and visibility through encounters with raw physicality, coercion, and systemic brutality in which status is lost, contested, and ultimately transformed and reassembled rather than regained. Whether framing the illicit undertow of theft and addiction, or pulling lifelines from the wreckage and overwhelm of the Troubles, or from slavery and its conditions within the United States in the 1840s, or from the London Blitz, McQueen’s narratives of moral tremor produce a kind of spectral sublime that haunts; perceived and real danger insinuates and asserts itself everywhere in his cinema, and history is acutely engaged as, to quote the artist himself, “dancing with ghosts,” an apt description of the bruising and ethereal path the work takes.[1]

More permissive and fractured but no less haunted, McQueen’s dual exhibitions at Dia Chelsea and Dia Beacon both take experimental turns that push into a newly open-ended register. The first room at Dia Chelsea is disarmingly at odds with the architectural-scale expectation of many past film installations: a lone cube monitor shows a one-minute Super 8 color film, Exodus (1992–97), conspicuously propped on a pedestal along an extensive white wall and enveloped on three brick walls by Bounty (2024), a framed set of 47 photos of red-hued tropical flowers in close-up. Shot in shallow depth against lush green foliage on the Caribbean island of Grenada – where the artist’s father grew up before migrating to London – the garland-like photo series embraces a too-muchness that references but also skewers taxonomic treatment and renderings of exotic flora. The set of flowers appears to lean in on the viewer, quotidian flourish but also witness to an un-pictured plunder. The blooms have a nearly kitsch effect of estrangement in their edge-of-rot, like outtakes and cutaways from an absent revelation or a dead-end foreshadowing. In this, they eerily recall opening lines from Aimé Césaire’s epic poem “Notebook of a Return to the Native Land” (1939), set on the island of Martinique, where all self-fashioning to follow opens resolutely before the darkening of “the flowers of blood that fade and scatter in / the empty wind like the screeches of babbling parrots.”[2] Far from signal- ing the enchantment of homecoming, McQueen’s flowers upend cliché readings, forming instead a preamble of uprootedness and seeking alongside his earliest film work.

Shot with incidental vérité style and keen brevity, Exodus shows two men from the West Indies, each carrying a potted palm tree through the sidewalk push of a busy London street. Passing before the camera for an instant, with sidelong glances, the two are followed by the viewfinder. Smartly dressed in long coats and brimmed hats, the middle-aged duo maneuver through the crowd, cross the street, and board a double-decker bus, only turning to smile and wave as the bus moves off. It is the extraordinary in the ordinary, a double take happened upon, an untethered scene that accretes more possible readings than it emits, as the roles and destination of the men are left open and guessed at – lovers, coworkers, observers of a ritual – narrative inklings and gestural immediacy in equal tension put on unresolved repeat. Exodus provides an aperture into McQueen’s way of seeing that marks all his subsequent film work, allowing for style and flare within a register of loss and confrontation, an aesthetic of recuperation in being seen and returning the gaze, even in the wake and aftermath of calamity. Not only a metaphor of Afro-diasporic perspective, Exodus is also a radical encounter of “if so” likeness and affinity, a being-beside-oneself moment that finds McQueen attentive, up and running, that literally turns his camera on to the intense proximity of collapsed distances and diasporic presence brought close.

A turn to Sunshine State (2022), in the main gallery at Dia Chelsea, amplifies the intensity of distances collapsed as two suns glower and twist, large front-and-back dual projections suspended in a cavernous space, all fiery torsion and mesmeric force accompanied by the slow rise of a hoarse otherworldly incantation in voice-over: “Shine on me, Sunshine State,” a first use by McQueen of his own voice in a piece. The footage of the doubled sun – sourced from NASA and highly manipulated – is intercut with and eventually gives way to a much longer sequence of excerpted, edited, and altered footage from the notorious film The Jazz Singer (1927), well known as the first talkie film to have synch sound, and equally infamous for its minstrelsy scenes of Al Jolson performing in blackface.

Focused on excerpts from a penultimate backstage scene where the main character Jakie Rabinowitz morphs into Jack Robin by applying blackface, McQueen manipulates proceedings in his version so that Robin’s face disappears, an erasure further iterated as the footage is shown in positive but playing backward on one channel, meanwhile its negative moves forward on the other. Never quite aligning, the mis-registration multiplies already schismatic readings of a tale of a singer who has forsaken his Jewish roots for success as a white entertainer in show business expressly by performing in blackface, an assimilation through denigration that W. E. B. Du Bois termed the “public and psychological wage” of performing whiteness.[3] McQueen’s layered use of the footage posits a reimagining of the film’s apotheosis moment, the proximate violence of blackface now rendered as enacting a nothingness upon Rabinowitz. In kind, the sensational talkie of it all is gone, as the archaic over-the-top sound of the original is removed and replaced with McQueen’s highly personal voice-over telling a different but not unrelated version of the wages of whiteness.

McQueen relates a harrowing story his father shared on his deathbed of having been a migrant worker in the United States in the 1950s picking oranges in Florida, together with young men gathered from “all over the West Indies.” After sharing the bare intimacy of his father’s experience, a gaping scene of brutality and racism barely-survived that left two of his friends dead at the hands of a white mob, Sunshine State ends with the halting revelation that while McQueen often thought his father was cautious and holding him back, he “didn’t realize it until then, when he told me that story, he was holding me tight… He was holding me tight.”

As the story repeats, its syntax falls away, marred phrases abruptly keeping time with gaps of silence in between, a redaction made audible over the building intensity of the backstage footage, which is likewise increasingly torn asunder. Reduced to a nightmare silhouette and profile, the punctured outline of his father’s ordeal nevertheless ends each time with McQueen’s scumbled phrase and echoing counterpoint to the layered violence: “He was holding me tight.” By contrast, Bass (2024) feels as loose as anything McQueen has done since Drumroll (1998), transforming Dia Beacon’s upstate basement 158 REVIEWS space into a light-and-sound show, a liminal space that embraces the structural components of film but also escapes into a meditative nocturne of displacement, reverberation, and kinship found in the language of music. Sixty ceiling-mounted LED light boxes shift slowly from purple to blue to green to yellow to orange into red into magenta, and back, capturing from shortest to longest color wavelengths, transposed into an artificial grid of unnatural, shadowless light. No moving image but rather awareness of the cement pillars of a postindustrial space once meant for breaking up, parceling, and shipping goods; cracks bolting across the floors, tracing the weight of past cargo, the heft and units of a factory’s afterlife.

Having recorded in the space with bassist and arranger Marcus Miller, one of Miles Davis’s longtime collaborators, and four other highly accomplished musicians – Aston Barrett Jr., Mamadou Kouyaté, Laura-Simone Martin, and Meshell Ndegeocello play a range of electric and acoustic basses as well as Malian ngoni bass – McQueen produced an improvised score unspool- ing for more than four hours, inhabiting and feeling out the space at a human scale. Exhibition notes mention the Middle Passage and musical idioms that arose from the transatlantic slave trade as orientation points, and, as an experience, Bass builds slowly into half melodies, call-and- response exchanges, long tone sequences, and percussive huddles, only to disperse and quiet, and then isolate and approach again – a subterranean exchange and comparison of different modes of composition.

The resulting conversation across a set of instruments is one of polyphonic relation rather than cacophony or orchestral swell. Indeed, Bass is a scatter piece of pulse and gather, its acoustic vibrations rebounding in an open but restrained volley that brings the negotiated liveness of the piece to bear, a kind of experiment where phrases and riffs appear and then are broken down in variation and reverberation. At times, it recalls the laconic directness and waiting of Bruce Nauman’s 2001 video installation Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage), also shown in Dia Beacon’s basement space and clearly a touchstone for McQueen, but Bass also dialogues succinctly with the vertical push of Senga Nengudi’s gestural installation Wet Night–Early Dawn–Scat Chant–Pilgrim’s Song (1996) – on view concurrently – and even with memories of attending Yvonne Rainer’s concentric perfor- mance variations, indelibly undertaken at Dia Beacon in 2012. The presence of Bass is responsive to the space and invitation without being beholden to the context. Baleful and even keening at times, the acoustic double bass is frequently bowed, sustained notes becoming a nearly vocal presence while the ngoni’s inherent brightness and rhythmic trill summons a seeming horizon line. Both instruments create a space of anecdote, while the electric basses veer toward ricochet, slide, and interjected statements in between, ghostly refractions startling us back into the hulking immediacy and breath of the immediate confines.