Frith Street Gallery in London has announced Five lines of song-smoke, a new multi-channel video work by Jaki Irvine, as its next exhibition at Golden Square. The show runs from 20 November 2026 to 16 January 2027, with a private view on Thursday 19 November from 6 to 8pm.

Irvine works across video, installation, photography, music composition and writing, exploring how people imagine themselves and the world around them — a process she sees as having both philosophical and political implications. Over recent years she has invited musicians to collaborate with, respond to and improvise around a series of shifting audio-visual elements, using a moving graphic score that she films, records and generates herself.

The new installation starts from small details of ordinary life in the artist's immediate home environment: a stone thrown into an icy pond, string hanging in a neighbour's garden, a heavily plastered ceiling. Those images expand through the musicians' responses into a work that is fixed only for a moment in time. Other elements draw on the 1925 song Show me the Way to Go Home, which Irvine reads as whistling in the dark in the face of imminent crisis — it is memorably sung in Jaws just before the shark attacks — and the musicians were asked to play in its shadow rather than replicate it.

The musicians taking part are Izumi Kimura on piano, Joe O'Farrell on flute, Sarah Grimes on drums, Marco Colonna on bass clarinet, Phil Robson on guitar, Tara Franks on cello and Cath Roberts on saxophone. The resulting images, grounded in sound, are at once precise and hallucinatory, holding together glimmers of hope and despair, intimacy and a sense of being overwhelmed.