The polymorphous, committed visual art of Steve McQueen

United States / Switzerland

The polymorphous, committed visual art of Steve McQueen

Nathalie DASSA

IN ART
March 24, 2025

art, African diaspora, Steve McQueen

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In three exhibitions in New York and Switzerland, the Oscar-winning British artist and director offers us a sensory experience of sound, color and light, coupled with an exploration of the narratives of the African diaspora.

Steve McQueen, Bass (detail), 2024. Steve McQueen. Photo: Don Stahl

Steve McQueen is one of those protean artists. The 56-year-old British filmmaker is best known for his committed, formally inventive and politically pointed feature films, such as Hunger, 12 Years a Slave, Small Axe and, most recently, Blitz.

For over thirty years, this graduate of Chelsea College of Art and Design and Goldsmiths University in London has been experimenting with the potential of film - as well as video, installation and photography - as material, documentary tool and narrative medium. His themes continue to probe questions of identity, the history and impact of slavery, power structures and racial politics.

Today, the artist who lives between Amsterdam and London is exhibiting his new work, divided into two parts, in three cultural institutions. Firstly, in the New York galleries Dia Beacon and Dia Chelsea of the Dia Art Foundation, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary; secondly, it will move into the spaces of the Schaulager museum in Switzerland, which had already presented more than 20 of his cinematographic works in 2013.

Steve McQueen, *Bass*, 2024. Installation view, Dia Beacon, New York, May 12, 2024-April 14, 2025. Steve McQueen. Image: Dan Wolfe

From reflection to emotion

The installation at Dia Beacon, entitled Bass, consists of an environment composed of structural elements between sound and light. The spatial work is composed of 60 ceiling-mounted light boxes, which emit a changing spectrum of colored light, and three stacks of loudspeakers, which broadcast low-pitched sounds. Simultaneously, the light changes color and floods the space, while the sound composition reverberates across all surfaces.

The idea for this work takes as its starting point the history of jazz, structural film and the Middle Passage, the Atlantic crossing undergone by Africans, abducted and taken by force to the Americas to be enslaved.

Steve McQueen collaborated with bassist Marcus Miller, who assembled a group of Afro-diasporic musicians. The recorded score thus responds to the changing light, the resonance of space and the meeting of the two. "Made with acoustic and electric bass instruments, including the Malian n'goni bass, the composition reflects the hybrid musical idioms, resulting from the transatlantic slave trade between West Africa, the Americas and the Caribbean," explains curator Donna De Salvo, curator of the Dia Beacon.

This sensory experience builds on Steve McQueen's ongoing formal research into sound, light and color, while adopting abstraction as a "method of transmitting the unspeakable". " I want to place the audience in a situation where they become extremely sensitive to themselves, their bodies and their breathing," he stresses.

Steve McQueen, installation view, Dia Chelsea, New York, 2024-25. © Steve McQueen. Photo: Don Stahl. Courtesy Dia Art Foundation.

Stories from the African Diaspora

In the Dia Chelsea space, the director this time brings together three works that explore narratives of the African diaspora over two decades of his career. The exhibition centers on Sunshine State (2022), a two-channel, double-sided video projection that calls up a moment in his father's life, examining notions of identity and racial stereotypes.

She also presents Exodus (1992-1997), one of her first films, centered on two West Indians on the streets of London, and Bounty (2024), a photographic series on flowers found in Granada, her parents' hometown.

This exhibition, originally commissioned by the Rotterdam International Film Festival, marks Steve McQueen's East Coast debut, highlighting his connection to Florida.

Together, these two parts, which visitors can discover in June at Schaulager in Switzerland, interweave his reflections on his ancestry and the Middle Passage, his formal studies of sound and light, the personal and the political. A global body of work, shared between different spaces, media and technologies.