Harlem Nocturne

Nick Browne

  • 28 Mar - 15 Apr, 2005

Harlem Nocturne looks something like a haphazard black-and-white film set, and it tells some damn good stories amongst the array. Browne doesn’t prescribe endings and meanings to these stories, nor cede beginnings or middles. He just opens it all up – and makes sure there’s plenty of quirk and charisma in the detail.

A multi-media and multi narrative installation, the works in Harlem Nocturne entice visitors to piece together an overlapping array of tall tales concerning pygmies, worms, gods, sparrows, wayward monks and one quoits-playing drunk. As on set, any cohesion to the installation’s narrative fragments can be found only by roaming around camera-like, inhabiting first one perspective and then another.