Visual art exhibitions and events with a platform for critical writing
Broadmarsh Bus Station, Nottingham
18 October – 3 November
Reviewed by: Terry Doohan
Night bus, by desperate optimists, was a video installation premiered in the waiting room of Nottingham's Broadmarsh bus station. It tells the late night 'micro-narratives' of three young women awaiting buses.
The audience is transported from the boredom of waiting into a world where Alice in Wonderland meets A Clockwork Orange; a world where gangs of Nazis and people wearing oversized afro wigs wander aimlessly into and around the station, where a chicken, a rabbit and a horse appear from nowhere. There is a mass outbreak of blood-letting as our heroines suffer nosebleeds, are sprayed with blood and witness a shooting. Then its back to waiting: close-ups of people staring vacantly into the space around them; people wandering between closed toilets,and chocolate machines; people getting on their buses and continuing their journeys – continuing their lives. A female voiceover describes the events. Nothing is beneath comment – if someone takes change from their pocket we are told they are doing so.
This is OK as far as it goes; there are moments of humour, some striking images and the young local cast of actors are excellent. In the information that accompanies the installation, Night bus is described as an attempt to look for, "the stories that fall by the wayside in the non-places". Bus stations are "portals, lacuna, a non-place, a transition between destinations". And here lies the problem with this piece the dissonance between the stories it wants to tell and the stories it actually tells. The bus stations of the film are exclusively populated (the odd animal apart) with well-dressed, trendy people who all get to go home at the end of the night. The images we see are the product of febrile imaginations at the end of a hard night clubbing and one too many E. This is a shame because the stories it could have told us are stories worth hearing: those that inhabit stations who are not waiting for buses; stations as ports of arrival and departure for our internal asylum seekers, people fleeing abusive relationships and families. These are the real non-people who inhabit the non-places.
Writer detail:
TERRY DOOHAN
Venue detail:
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