Imran Perretta’s A Riot in Three Acts is a multidisciplinary installation consisting of a film set, cinematic score and archival objects. The work considers riots and civil uprisings that have occurred in response to systemic injustice experienced by marginalised communities. Evolving initially from Perretta’s experience as a young person during the UK riots in 2011, A Riot in Three Acts provides a stage for the complex narratives that accompany such collective actions directed against the state, often spurred by racist policing, social deprivation, youth disenfranchisement and anti-war sentiment. Researched and developed at Somerset House Studios over the course of two years, Perretta’s moving and immersive work is on view in HOME’s main gallery until 8 June 2025 with accompanying live performances of the score by Manchester Camerata on 28 February and 9 April. State violence, repression of racialised communities and contested public spaces are all themes at play here. Perretta is a writer, director, visual artist and composer of Bangladeshi heritage from London. When I meet with him, he describes A Riot in Three Acts as a ‘space for memorialisation and ritual’.
Mark Duggan, a twenty-nine-year-old black man local to Tottenham Hale, was shot and killed by police whilst pinned to the ground on 4 August 2011. The resulting local riots sparked similar actions across the UK in a week of fire and legitimate fury that caused five more deaths and remains emblazoned on our collective memory. A Riot in Three Acts is Perretta’s way of making sense of those times whilst placing his audience in the hyper-local liminal space of Reeves Corner in Croydon, set aflame during the 2011 Tottenham riots and also nearby to where the artist lived. A video of the Reeves Corner Fire plays on loop from Perretta’s Blackberry handset which was used to receive updates during the chaos. Pixelated and flickering, it is a self-contained capsule of the rage of those days echoing the imagery seen on the front of newspapers and rolling news coverage on television. The classist and derogatory accompanying headlines such as ‘Anarchy in the UK’, ‘Yob Rule’ and ‘Rule of the Mob’ (Daily Star, Daily Mirror and The Daily Telegraph respectively) also stick in my mind from this time. The Blackberry video shows in real time the destruction of the House of Reeves, one of the oldest independent furniture shops in London, which was burned down and demolished after a laptop was stolen and a sofa set on fire inside. Fifty thousand businesses in more than forty English town centres were affected, some multi-nationals, others small and family-run like this one. During a riot, discrimination between harmful or victimless crime tends not to be considered. This scenic painted set feels like an acknowledgement of the precarious situation of small businesses owners who can lose everything in an instant.
Perretta saw Manchester as an important place to host this work. Not only does he have a personal connection to the city through time spent with friends at the University of Manchester, he also spoke to me of the spread of rioting having a profound effect on people here too. He says of the set, ‘in a way it is a part of Croydon but in another way it’s this disused piece of scrubland that has seen some stuff in its time but could be in any one of the places that things kicked off.’ The media called this spreading of the riots ‘copycat violence’; I personally see these events as communities having enough of being crushed under the boot of heavy-handed policing methods.
Questions of right or wrong behaviour during times of protest have never been far from my mind. Just last year in my hometown we saw widespread rioting after the murders of three little girls by a lone knifeman attacking a children’s dance party in Southport. The anger that spilled out afterwards was both a justified and righteous response to the increasing male violence enacted in spaces where women and girls should be safe. This quickly turned from a demand for an end to VAWG (Violence Against Women and Girls, so widespread it has its own acronym) into a sickening display of frothing bigotry devoid of care for the families or local community, fuelled by right-wing social media personalities, politicians and hate groups stoking Islamophobia and division online. The senseless destruction of property and mindless targeting of people of colour was caused by intentionally incorrect information provided through ‘Terrorgram’ networks and group chats about the murderer’s background, leading to a racist mob attacking Southport Mosque. Imam Ibrahim Hussein, who was barricaded in the space, says he still sees the rioters in his dreams. Islam, its figureheads and followers are perfect targets for blind retaliation in a society that won’t face violence perpetrated by men as a gender issue rather than one of race or religion. I too think often about how quickly the rational need to protest injustice can quickly turn irrational and anybody deemed ‘other’ can become a target for the barely restrained violence bubbling under the surface of British life.
Although rioting for different reasons, the destruction of property enacted in Tottenham and elsewhere in 2011 has had a lasting effect on the local community and, for some, resulted in them losing homes and businesses despite bearing no responsibility for that which caused the uprising. They were collateral damage with no warning and no defences. The set of ‘Reeves Corner’ (2024) then poses the question, ‘What do we do with spaces that are ruined by acts of physical violence?’ Do we stay in the same place and rebuild as Southport Mosque has done? Or do we demolish and start again on a new site as the House of Reeves did, leaving a contested space where the original structure stood?
Stepping into HOME’s main gallery is to be immediately confronted by a sweeping cascade of sound. ‘A Requiem for the Dispossessed’ (2024) scores this installation and is arguably its main character. Performed by musicians from local chamber orchestra Manchester Camerata, the nine movements of Perretta’s forty-minute score play on a loop. Following the semi-typical structure of a requiem, a piece of music created to mark death and mourning, each movement bears traditional titles such as ‘Dies Irae’ (Day of Wrath), ‘Hostias’ (Offering – Bread & Wine) and ‘In Paradisum’ (Into Paradise). Silences left intentionally between the pieces encourage quiet contemplation, a breath pausing the emotions elicited by each section. Written over the course of twelve months by Perretta, who shockingly has not been classically trained, it is also a testament to self-education. During our conversation he was keen to clarify the difference between writing music for film and the process of a stand-alone piece like this one: ‘I’ve always written the soundtracks to my films but where they are there to supplement a moving image it doesn’t have to do as much heavy lifting. When you’re writing in this way the music is much more detailed, there’s much more going on.’
Seen side on from the rear left, ‘Reeves Corner’ is angled in such a way as to create a sense of anticipation whilst walking around the rest of the space. Unable to see the front of the set, one can imagine standing in the wings, waiting to start work on a production, the hard work of set designers yet to be seen. A painted, flat facade of the House of Reeves furniture store is the central piece with wooden frames visible at the back, so we can see it is a piece of stage set. Alongside the run-downness of Reeves Corner are reminders of middle-class civility – a white picket fence, uneven in places, guards the front of the furniture shop with an air of idealisation, a throwback to fashions 157 years prior when this business opened. Moving around the space, concrete structures come in and out of view, evoking juxtapositions in my mind: urban postmodernism versus quaint suburbia. Two differing material realities existing together and giving a realistic look at architecture in our towns and cities. It is as though Perretta invites the viewer into his world, one not often visible to those outside of creative industry.
While Perretta’s preferred medium is film, he says A Riot in Three Acts is a way for him to expand his practice and ‘take all parts of making a film, hanging them together to make a constituent whole’. The installation does feel like a look behind the curtain, a production without the players, an invisible cast and crew evident by their work but not their actual presence. This work also encouraged me to imagine the process behind the creation of moving pictures, filling in the blanks around the skeleton of the installation. I am so used to hearing a score alongside a film, to seeing a set alongside a performance that stripping these elements right back allowed space for my own interpretations where this would usually be done for me.
The setting is ambiguously left open with no obvious marker to prevent somebody from walking right through the set like a background extra. Perretta even suggests in conversation that visitors can bring their own detritus and leave it on display amongst the other scattered remains, such as crisp packets, a scrunchie and small boxes, leaving footprints in the gravel as a reminder of their presence. This makes the installation not only immersive but interactive, an exchange between artist and viewer. Their discarded remnants like offerings for him to see at the end. Anonymous placeholders, blank cards, a rubbish bunch of flowers. To me, as a site of memorial, it felt wrong to walk across the gravel, touch the fence, even to investigate the plant boxes and the accumulated waste. When talking to Perretta about being reluctant to interact with the scene myself, out of what I thought was politeness, he was keen to encourage participation and use the space as it has been in the past – derelict, forgotten and uncared for.
The moving nature of the music is carried throughout, no matter what point you enter or move around the space. Played on a loop over speakers, the artist is clear that he wants interpretation to be open and informal no matter where the viewer encounters the piece. The various archive materials in the vitrines, including the written sheet music and devices involved in the process, gave weight to the time and effort it takes to create musical work like this in much the same way as the painstaking painting and dressing of the set does for spotlighting the work of film and theatre crew. Perretta is keen to lift the lid on the machinations of his creative process. When I asked him about any catharsis he felt when writing the piece, he said, ‘There’s lots of personal stuff in there for me. It is also around the time my Mum died, so there’s movements on the requiem that relate to her. That was a very significant time in my life, not just due to the riots but also because of things that were happening for me on a personal level, so this music is about passing into the afterlife, the death of a dream but also the death of a parent. On a personal level the catharsis came when I was thinking about who I was at that time and all the things that were going on. Hearing all that emotion and that narrative and that history played back to me at the end was just like “holy shit”, it was so overwhelming. One is inseparable from the work you are making. I think sometimes the way to make things universal is to be hyper-specific, working on something only you know opens ideas up for other people too. That’s the hope.’
Those who are not university educated or even self-taught in classical music or the tropes of creating cinema, for example, may find it difficult to find a way into the narrative space which at times feels slightly alienating (perhaps Perretta’s aim?). Further reading in the form of four film theory texts is suggested at the start of the exhibition, but I was acutely aware that this is not accessible to all. Reading Steve Goodman’s Sonic Warfare – Sound, Affect, and the Ecology of Fear or Paul Virilio’s War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception in a dimmed space is not ideal. With no direction, I was left wondering if they were from the HOME library or Perretta’s personal one.
Whether the vehicle of a nine-part requiem set in a cinematic framework is successful in calling HOME’s audience to action on matters of social deprivation and youth disenfranchisement is another question entirely. Having said this, I feel Perretta successfully sets a stage for memorialising the events of those days in 2011 which have clearly affected him and so many others deeply, including myself. A starting point for conversation which could then inspire activity. In creating the space in the way he has, he leaves room and time for the viewer to reflect rather than act, to think rather than do, and I feel that is just as deserving of plaudits. Not all art is a call to action; we need work we can contemplate and sit with. A quietly insular space to remember, repair and repeat to yourself, ‘No justice, no peace, no racist police’.
Wednesday 9 April is a final chance for audiences to see a live performance of the score,‘A Requiem for the Dispossessed’. Written by Perretta and performed by Manchester Camerata, this will take place within the installation itself. This composition for string quartet acts as a cinematic score to his physical work allowing viewers a chance for audiences to hear the work performed live. Tickets for each of the two performances are available here.
Imran Perretta: A Riot in Three Acts, HOME, Manchester 22 February – 8 June 2025.
Kirsty Jukes is an art historian and writer from Lancashire.
This review is supported by HOME.
Published 13.03.2025 by Jazmine Linklater in Reviews
2,374 words
