Many of Steve M^cQueen’s works substantially impact the movement, direction and position of the viewer in space. They exert an inescapable pull, drawing us into their dynamic, as in the radial force generated in Static, the first work encountered on entering the exhibition. On a screen suspended in space, we watch the images made by a camera circling around the Statue of Liberty and find the torque affecting our own steps. The sculptural quality of this piece is reinforced by having to walk around it in order to enter the darkened body of the exhibition. M^cQueen’s handling of movement, its almost intrusive immediacy, already informs the early films Bear, Five Easy Pieces and Just Above My Head. For the first time, instead of being presented separately in self-contained spaces, the three films are screened simultaneously on the central square of the City of Cinemas created for this exhibition. Their three-dimensionality is reinforced by a presentation that allows for multiple viewpoints, so that the sculptural parameters of body, volume and structure complement the cinematic factors of time and motion. In Bear, two men are wrestling in a circular play on proximity and distance, strength and restraint. In contrast, the rigorously composed images of various brief actions in Five Easy Pieces are oriented along vertical and horizontal axes. Just Above My Head, showing the artist’s head cropped at the bottom of the picture, pursues this formalistic aesthetic and provides a transition to Deadpan, a work M^cQueen made immediately afterwards as a tribute to Buster Keaton.

The artist’s body plays a performative role in both works, which are shaped and framed by the conspicuously positioned camera. M^cQueen almost falls out of frame in Just Above My Head, while in Deadpan he is literally framed by a window when the wall of a house collapses on top of him. In Drumroll M^cQueen’s camerawork is even more experimental: he attached three cameras to an oil barrel and rolled it through the streets of New York — an automatic image-finding mechanism. Sound and image reveal the immediacy of the unfiltered production process. The film is literally rolling.

The resulting triptych, revolving in three directions, divorces the viewer entirely from the camera positions. In view of these twirling images, we can no longer establish a fixed viewpoint; the world is shown as only a camera can see it. In the video installation Pursuit, finally, the mirrored walls completely undermine any sense of space, and the projection of reflected light multiplied in them deprives the viewer of all solid ground.

Like images, sound can offer a handhold and open up unexpected dimensions. In Static, the increasing and diminishing noise of a helicopter circling around the Statue of Liberty underscores the back and forth between feelings of remote distance and approaching threat. The noise of the rotor blades is not disturbing as such because it matches the changes in distance between viewer and image. The background noise of the city is overwhelmed by the earsplitting noise of the artist’s experiment. The sound does not accompany the image like a soundtrack; it essentially enables the image. The inseparability of image and sound also applies to Drumroll, in which the oil barrel rolling along the street holds three cameras and generates its own noise. In these two works we do not just witness the distinctive camera work (from a helicopter or a rolling oil drum); we actually hear it.

Many of Steve M^cQueen’s works exploit the power of the sounds generated by his subject matter. Prey shows a running tape recorder producing rhythmical tapping sounds, which is subsequently lifted into the air. In Girls, Tricky, we see and hear the intense rapping of the singer Tricky during a studio recording. The sounds of rustling and breathing in Pursuit communicate the anxiety of an unseen person in a dark park. In Illuminer, we perceive the hotel room only through the presence of the light and sound coming from a TV screen. The light emitted by the TV is enough to activate the camera while the sound of the running broadcast is simultaneously inscribed in the audio track of Illuminer. Significantly, we never see the source of light and sound, the television set itself.

These dynamic and agitated films stand opposed to a more understated combination of sound and image. The personal and vivid story told by the artist’s cousin in 7th Nov., a still projection with a voice from off, can hardly be compared with hours of reading administrative documents out loud in End Credits and even less with the incomprehensible babble (glossolalia or speaking in tongues) in Once Upon a Time, but what all of these works have in common is the way the sound drifts away from the image. The soundtrack takes on an independent character that calls for greater concentration, although, once again, the visual impact of the images is crucial to these installations. The calm and yet compelling appeal of the images is set off against the agitated flow of the language.

Physical contact is central to many of Steve M^cQueen’s works. The senses of touch and sight overlap and intersect. In Charlotte, the camera focuses on an eye that is being approached by a finger. The eye in close-up appears extremely fragile and threatened by the finger’s touch. The sensitivity of this sense organ calls to mind less gentle treatments of the female eye in such films as Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou (1929), in which an eyeball is apparently slit by a razor, or Vito Acconci’s video Pryings (1971), of a performance in which a woman’s eye is violently pried open. In Charlotte, tenderness and violence lie very close together. The film image, suffused in red, implies eroticism and intimacy, yet also harassment and aggression.

The interaction of seeing and touching in Charlotte makes manifest the groping nature of the gaze. Since the seeing eye is simultaneously seen (or touched), it can be read as a symbol of the camera eye, conjuring the idea of seeing in the cinema. The gaze takes different, opposing directions in Illuminer as well: the TV image illuminates the person watching it and enables us to watch him watching television, but the fact that we can see anything at all is, in turn, indebted to the filming camera. The autofocus of the digital camera is foiled by the “dark room” in the hotel, repeatedly plunging the space into diffuse darkness. The shadows are even deeper in Western Deep. The descent into the depths is like intruding into a body; the fleeting impressions that appear in the light of the helmet lamps resemble endoscopic images as if showing fragments of the earth’s intestines, where miners struggle under relentlessly harsh conditions. The radiant promise of triumphant globalization, which goes hand in glove with gold mining, is extinguished in the darkness of the earth’s innards. M^cQueen’s filmed fragments on the belated consequences of colonialism and racism deconstruct the supposedly objective and objectifying language of the documentary film. The artist delineates a disturbing situation that slithers into a zone beyond visibility and representation. A merciless frankness, in contrast, attaches to the point of view in the two feature films Hunger and Shame. In both films, the protagonist (played by Michael Fassbender) suffers a physical martyrdom that is almost unbearable to watch. Hunger presents an inside view of Maze Prison near Belfast, Northern Ireland, where the IRA activist Bobby Sands was incarcerated and died in 1981 during a hunger strike. Here, touch and contact flip over into violence. We are pierced to the core by the immediacy of the unvarnished scenes and the brutality of the conflict between prisoners and guards. Shame, on the other hand, describes the life of a person imprisoned in his own body, whose sexual instincts rob him of willpower and freedom of action.

A narrative structure is hardly detectable in Steve M^cQueen’s earlier videoand film installations, but not so in the later pieces. The two related works Carib’s Leap and Western Deep initiated a phase of relatively long films, played out on the borderline between documentary and subjective experience. These pieces are deeply influenced by the (pre-)history of their respective locations — the colonial period in Carib’s Leap and the inhumane working conditions in South African mines in Western Deep — but do not focus on their specifics. Moods and self-contained, unconnected scenes and actions dominate without explicit reference to the larger context. This approach features in many of M^cQueen’s longer, narratively oriented works.

The only allusion to the historical and political background of Gravesend, for instance, is a scene depicting the sun setting over Gravesend harbour. The harbour of this town on the Thames hosts the opening scene of Joseph Conrad’s famous novel Heart of Darkness (1899), describing a fateful journey into the Congo during the colonial period. The film and title Gravesend subtly suggest an historical parallel between the colonial exploitation of Africa during the Industrial Revolution and the current exploitation of the Congo to gratify the needs of the Digital Revolution. The montage of highly contrasting film images coalesces into a geopolitical statement on global interdependency and inequality.

Steve M^cQueen’s treatment of the NASA Voyager project in Once Upon a Time, while similarly cryptic, makes astute observations. In a slow fade-over, the film shows a series of 116 images sent into space by NASA in 1977 aboard the Voyager I and II spacecraft as information about our planet for possible extraterrestrial life. The biased portrait of life on earth already drew criticism at the time, as it omitted poverty, injustice and war, but the project attests to a faith in such utopian attempts that is almost inconceivable today. The time capsule continues to move farther and farther from the earth both geographically and in terms of contemporary developments: in 2012, the probes entered the heliosheath, billions of kilometres from the earth, while the recorded images they contain are frozen in the late 1970s. By combining the selection of visual material made by scientists with audio recordings of unintelligible babble produced by the subconscious (known as glossolalia), McQueen questions the very possibility of mutual understanding.