Graham Fagen’s work is all about ‘in-between’ spaces – hidden, overlooked places, or the gaps that lie between established categories. So, the dozens of weird, washy watercolours, like psychedelic splodges with leering grimaces attached, on display here? They’re actually representations of the inside of Fagen’s mouth – a space that’s bounded, portcullis-like, by the sharp solidity of his teeth, while the deeper recesses can only be depicted as an indistinct, imagined, proprioceptive zone. And those branching, candelabra-like sculptures? Some of the branches end in metal casts of, again, teeth; but the other forms, more abstract and squishy-looking, are casts of the space made by Fagen squeezing his hand into a fist.
The biggest work in this show across two venues in Southwark Park takes things in a more social and historical direction. ‘The Slave’s Lament’ is a four-screen video installation in which the titular, eighteenth-century poem by Robert Burns is set to a specially composed musical score. And much of the music, a sort of wistful, string-led ballad, sounds appropriately Scottish – indeed, the piece was part of Fagen’s exhibition as Scotland’s representative at last year’s Venice Biennale. But other elements also contribute to the mix: echoey trip-hop beats, courtesy of the track’s producer, dub legend Adrian Sherwood; and the striking figure of the singer, reggae vocalist Ghetto Priest, with his dreadlocked hair, gold-capped teeth, and Afrocentric regalia.
The work, then, is about hybridity and migration. Just as Burns’s original poem describes a relocation – albeit unwilling – from Africa to America, so the musical form contains a mish-mash of folk styles from both the Old World and the New: a sonic space that exists between different cultures, rather than belonging solely to one. It sounds like a simple idea for a work – but, exhibited in Dilston Grove, a cavernous former church, it’s hauntingly powerful.