The installation A Riot in Three Acts by artist Imran Perretta explored the interconnected narratives around riots, civil uprisings and systemic injustice, originally commissioned by and presentated at Somerset House Studios in 2024. To mark the opening of the exhibition at HOME, Manchester, we invited journalist and broadcaster Kieran Yates to reflect on the impact of a work that proved unexpectedly timely last summer, and the wider cultural conversations that unfolded around it.
Imran Perretta’s ‘A Riot in Three Acts’ exhibition takes us back to the heat of the 2011 riots. The civil unrest, following the murder of young black man Mark Duggan by a police officer, ignited protests, riots, looting and a country communicating discontent. Peretta reminds of these events 13 years on as he takes us back to a country filled with smoke and flames.
Peretta’s exhibition forces us to confront how we respond to the nature of rioting and public uprisings. He asks us to reflect on what has been, what is now and what is coming. The installation is in three stages – the Blackberry, Reeves Corner and a 40 minute piece of original music, ‘Requiem for the Dispossessed’ recorded by the four-piece Manchester Camerata, and presented in spatial sound.
The Blackberry, the first thing you encounter, has been reinterpreted as a historical document, shielded by a glass case. It was a result of finding his phone while packing his room into boxes. “It came about over lockdown packing up our family house” he explains. “I unearthed my old Blackberry from 2011, charged it up, switched it on and it had loads of material on it from that summer”.
Filming on phones was abundant and what people chose to report during the riots was significant. The Mirror’s front cover, (also featured) declares ‘YOB RULE’ on August 11th 2011, a story at odds with Perretta’s.
Walking through the exhibition takes you on a temporal journey and messes with your head. The phone represents just how sad and striking the obsolescence of commercial tech can be, and how much they can inform a time. It also shows how things can be lost to memory, to a place, to the ether. Peretta knows this and makes it his business to ensure we don’t forget.
The second part of the filmic installation is the reproduction of Reeves Corner in Croydon, a 150 year old furniture shop that was set alight and the subsequent blaze is probably what you think of when you think back to then. It was on tabloid front pages as evidence of young people being ‘uneducated wild beats’. Peretta calls it one of the most contested spaces in London.
One way to replicate the enduring image of the riots was by commissioning a film construction company to create something that felt like a place in the real world. “Normally you see these incredible scenic paintings in these big studios in Pinewood or whatever, and then the minute the film's done, they get ripped down and recycled” explains Peretta. “So it was really cool to be able to show the paintings and production design side of things outside of the context in which it normally sits”.
The painting of Reeves Corner reminds us that time is not at a standstill. The beauty and ghostliness of the painting feels like floating, or mourning footprints from the past - until you remember that the work is very much in dialogue with the events in the UK today, unexpectedly perhaps. By the time the ‘A Riot In Three Parts’’ came to life, there had been a year of weekly peaceful protests around Palestine, the most sustained acts of its kind in history. You can’t help marvelling at the fact that even now, people continue to gather to make their voices heard.
“In part, A Riot was questioning who controls the narrative of these acts of destruction, who controls the narrative of why people riot” says Director of Somerset House Studios, Marie McPartlin. “Then of course two weeks after we announced it, the far right riots happened”.
Just before the work opened to the public, far-right racist riots were taking place across Britain. Much of this was started by far-right spokesperson Tommy Robinson whipping up anti-immigrant hate that has long been part of political rhetoric. This context forces us to wrestle with large questions. How and why do people gather, riot or protest?
“2011 felt like change was in the air” says Peretta. “It felt like activism. It felt like something really powerful. The media made lazy, quite binary comparisons between 2011 and what happened in August. To me, there's so many ideological differences, but the main thing in my mind is that the rioters of 2011 destroyed buildings and private property, but this year all those Fascists were trying to kill people. The condition that we found ourselves in, hasn't changed, if anything, it's got worse. For me, it felt like only a matter of time before something else kicked off.”
Peretta allows time to reflect on these events and as a result, the third act is arguably the most moving. Perretta’s haunting, cinematic score - which the quartet performed as part of the installation - is both asphyxiating and mournful. As they play, they invite you to reflect on an assembly of people who have a shared vision of injustice.
“I think working with the players on the Requiem was my favourite thing” Peretta says. I'm so used to writing and making soundtracks on my own. There's something incredible about workshopping stuff that you've written with world class string players. For them, it was unusual to be playing music that's conceptually driven and that accompanies an artwork, as opposed to something that's either in a concert hall or is designed to accompany a moving image. It was amazing”.
One moment of significance was when the Reeves family attended the exhibition. “Me, Marie and Imran had gone down to their shop to speak to them and tell them about the work because the building was so central to it” explains Rahila Haque, the Curator of the artwork. “We had a good chat about that period around the riots and how it was for them. And he came to one of the live performances of the score with his wife, his daughter, and his granddaughter. It was really special.”
Perretta is open about complicated feelings surrounding the work. “It felt like there was a lot of righteous anger and dissent that summer. Alongside the desecration of these local community landmarks and businesses, my fear was that creating a work in which we reflected on something that for me is political and something that for him is deeply personal”. These feelings of complication remind us that the work is alive and the effects are felt over and over again. The love of communities and a desire for them to remain intact, after all, is evergreen. These thoughts marinate as the score trickles in around us, reaching a crescendo of noise, of heartache and confrontation of an aimless generation, a changed city, and a neglected place.
“One of the things about Reeves corner is that it feels as though it's been completely forgotten” says Perretta. “It's just a very anonymous patch of scrubland. But actually, even though it looks like nothing's going on, its lack of redevelopment or usefulness for the community, reminds us that the impact of austerity are still very much present.’
Peretta forces us to assess the dissolve of culture and cityscapes, and to ask how much of our city we recognise. Increasingly, property developers have agency over how our cities look (people under-30 are spending more than 30% of their income on rent, more than any other age group), wages are at a historical stagnation (the lowest since the Napoleonic era, nearly 200 years ago) and a generation feeling the impact of a pandemic economically, socially, and emotionally. How many of us know the country that we live in? It seems that Perretta wants us to really see what’s in front of us. ‘A Riot in Three Acts’ looks at the country in hyper focus, and says what we have always known: there is work ahead of us.
