Beyond the streets: an underground movement goes overground.
London’s street art exhibition, sponsored by Adidas, has hit the stage and it is so much more than I imagined.
I walk into the Saatchi Gallery and a young lady greets me at the ticket desk. “One student ticket please” I ask. She hands me the ticket and says “You’ll enjoy it. The first floor has something special but I can’t tell you too much”, smirking, as if she is holding the world’s best-kept secret in the palm of her hands.
I hear the exhibition before I see it. Michael Jackson’s “Bad” is echoing throughout the bright, ventilated space, but my eyes are distracted by Roger Perry’s ginormous black and white photograph of a graffiti mural on the side of a railway. Looping around the corners of the room, it reads “SAME THING DAY AFTER DAY- TUBE- WORK- DINNER- WORK- TUBE- ARMCHAIR- T.V.- SLEEP- TUBE- WORK”.
London-based radical art group King Mob painted Same Thing (1968) in West London to remind commuters that they were living to work. This piece set the tone for the rest of the exhibition; an array of railway-inspired models, spray-painted murals, as well as digital videos and photographs of street artists balancing in between trains as they painted. The railway became the ultimate canvas, bringing underground art overground.
Abruptly, as if an MC had taken over a nightclub, Cyndi Lauper’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” catapults me back into the exhibition. In the middle of the room, a record shop, named “Trash”, features posters of Blondie in the window and as I step in, Bart Simpson T-shirts and bright stickers engulf the walls and furniture. Standing there are the culprits: two rebellious teenage girls and a record player. I wondered if this was the “something special” the lady at reception had talked about.
I soon came to realise that this was not just an exhibition on street art; the infamous pop culture moments of Run DMC, Beastie Boys, DJ Cheese, Monie Love, and Madonna has been reimagined into Adidas covered mannequins and fun 1980s photographs. The urban subcultures of the punk, pop, reggae, and hip-hop music scenes in London, New York and L.A. are contrasted against a ghostly tattoo parlour, psychedelic comic-art and a glow-in-the-dark junkyard.
As I walked up the stairs to the third floor, I was faced with “The Light of the Beast” and the intimate, wood-carved portraits by Alexandre Farto. This was probably my favourite room of all. Pablo Allison had photographed and documented migrants on the freight train, nicknamed “The Beast”, revealing the extreme violence and deadly terrain, that those travelling to the Mexico-USA border dared to cross. As I watched the video, I realised that street art was so much more than I imagined: it was political. As we hear refugees and migrants vilified again and again, especially with the UK’s new push for the illegal migration bill, this piece hit home and I could not help but reflect on those risking their lives for a better life, then and now.
On my long commute home, I glared outside the window and got lost in derelict train tracks that enveloped London’s streets together, hoping to catch a hint of spray-painted anarchy.
