The apocalypse, Hollywood assures us, will be long and loud and boring, orchestrated and over-determined. In whatever shape it might take, whether asteroid-wide or virus-microscopic, the end is invariably nigh.

At Manchester’s HOME, Mikhail Karikis’s beguilingly compact new piece, Songs for the Storm to Come, proposes a counter-narrative, reaching for a new grammar of hope on an altogether more human scale. Lent urgency by the climate crisis, Karikis developed the work with Manchester’s SHE Co-operative, a choir of women and non-binary people whose collaborative ethos chimes with his own practice.

Informed by the work of American composer Pauline Oliveros, who herself felt moved to find ways to swim against the currents of despair that threatened to overwhelm her country amid the tsunami of political assassinations that ended the 1960s, Karikis takes heart in particular from her methods for deep listening. Oliveros distinguished the conscious act of listening from its more passive counterpart, hearing, and, in common with more formalised therapeutic approaches, saw in the former a potential for healing. In concert with Oliveros’s influence, Karikis’s approach has also evolved out of the ways of being described by indigenous writers such as the philosopher Ailton Krenak, whose people have been subsumed into Brazil, and the Cameroonian post-colonialist intellectual, Achille Mbembi. One of Karikis’s skills as an artist is to incorporate this weight of theory in a way that feels anything but leaden, conveying its compressed context with a considered lightness, allowing it to take flight.

The piece consists of two complementary elements. Of these, the one that initially draws the eye is a video work foregrounding members of the co-operative, circling like life itself through a series of performances and responses. For all that these have been developed over time, they retain a certain candour, a playful openness in keeping with the work’s intent.

In a century saturated with the moving image, more often conscripted by commerce than art, video works, in the course of working towards a new language, inevitably rub against the corporatisation of progressive dialogue. For instance, a sequence in which monochromatic flags are spun with majorette dexterity brings to mind the glib nuclear seasons of Duran Duran’s absurdly contagious Is There Something I Should Know? Likewise, the part of the performance in which the choir step forward in turn to declare “we are together because…”, each completing the sentence in their own way, sets out in a fashion familiar from adverts for Dove.

The artistry, however, flourishes in the way that the latter sequence in particular is developed. As the declarations accelerate under the pressure to be heard, they become, at first, a babel of white noise, before, as the discord of competition is displaced by the harmony of common perspective, taking on the quality of song. Taken up, the song in turn is underscored by the simplest of percussion, the rhythm of hands together, invoking and evoking the thunderous voice of the atmosphere on which our lives depend.

Further enhancing the effect is Karikis’s attentive sound design, punctuating and italicising the images, most notably bringing the urgency of asthma to the choir’s individual gasps for breath as the narrative is broken up by footage of their apparent displacement.

Stepping back from the main element, in taking a needed breath, it’s possible to discern the corresponding ripples on an array of flat screens, on which the sounds of the larger one are made visible in a range of materials more solid than air, evoking as they do both waves and murmurations, suggesting a commonality to both. More, they link clamour to change, implying how, brought together, the sound of the crowd can move any mountain.

In engaging heart and mind, Songs for the Storms to Come ensures that its resonances will continue to be felt in the viewer long beyond the brevity of its viewing. In inviting the collective imagination to attend to the deluge before us, through a call to collective arms, it replaces the full stop of Hollywood with the three dot ellipsis of ‘to be continued’…

By Desmond Bullen, Chief Arts Correspondent

All photos by Michael Pollard. All photos courtesy of HOME.

 

Songs for the Storm to Come by Mikhail Karikis is at HOME, Manchester until January 5, 2025. For more information, click here.