The Showroom presents a major new commission by Wendelien van Oldenborgh and her first solo exhibition in London.

From Left to Night is an experimental film production through which a number of seemingly unconnected players, places, events, subjects and histories, drawn from The Showroom’s neighbourhood, meet. It involves five people, three locations, and the different subjects and forms of knowledge that they bring with them. These range from urban tensions – such as unresolved histories of the 2011 London riots – to music and the personal ways in which each of the protagonists relate to ideas of the political. Material gathered in a concentrated two-day shoot has been brought together in a film installation specially conceived for The Showroom.

The project developed out of the artist’s year-long engagement with The Showroom’s local area. In particular, a music video project initiated by van Oldenborgh and local hip-hop artist Reveal, performed by Owls, became an important step towards cementing relationships with some of the players in this film. Through carefully orchestrated scenarios van Oldenborgh creates situations where these elements collide and trigger new articulations and sparks of logic; generating the ‘script’ with the full involvement of the players, as filming unfolds. As with the artist’s previous works, the film explores social dynamics and behaviours, the governing systems and architectures which provoke and reinforce these, and the voice and language of the individual amidst them. In so doing van Oldenborgh reveals a reality often hidden from view in the public realm, in an attempt to understand familiar stories in a new way.