
Exhibition preview·London
Majid and Newby's 'Bizarre Life' finds icon power in unstable images, ArtReview says
Alexander Harding reviews Laila Majid and Louis Blue Newby's 'Bizarre Life' at Niru Ratnam, London, arguing that their drawings, Spread works and vertically hung video pieces show an image can shed its photographic identity while keeping its iconographic charge.
ArtReview has published a review of Bizarre Life, the exhibition by Laila Majid and Louis Blue Newby at Niru Ratnam in London, which ran from 2 September to 3 October. Writing for the magazine, Alexander Harding examines how the duo's drawings, large-scale Spread works and video installations manipulate photographic instability. Decontextualisation emerges as a governing logic across the show, the review argues, though it lands differently depending on the medium. In the singular drawings, estrangement grows out of the image itself; in the Spread works, the display nearly overstates the point, pushing the logic of displacement to the foreground. The vertically presented video works, Inner Heat (Strobe) and Inner Heat (Taylor's Version), push photographic instability into motion. The former shows a reversed, low-resolution film of fireworks folding back in on themselves, climaxing and retreating in pixelated splendour. The latter captures a stranger moment: slowed footage from a Taylor Swift concert renders the singer a glowing entity, her body abstracted by stage lighting, costume glitter and a struggling camera sensor wrestling with the variables of image processing. Between the subtle distortions of the drawings and Swift's low-resolution splendour, the review finds a shared feeling, where images with little in common on the surface can still fluctuate in meaning. These dissonant moments, Harding concludes, assert that an image can surrender its photographic identity while retaining its iconographic power. The exhibition never quite decides whether that force is connective or unsettling, and the review suggests it may be both at once.

