As night falls on Manchester, Valentin Noujaïm and Space Afrika audio-visual hellscape The Dark Wood comes to life, confronting social and political collapse to fight for a brighter daybreak.
For an installation concerned with architectural ruin, The Dark Wood presents its case with a deft symmetry. In the ICA’s Upper Gallery, each contribution by Noujaïm and Space Afrika has a side, while passages of Dante’s Inferno play through headphones in the central vestibule. Cohesive and concise, the on-the-hour slots that the gallery urges visitors to stick to give them 15 minutes to engage with The Dark Wood, Space Afrika’s audio installation, before Noujaïm’s Opera Omnia begins across the way. What initially feels somewhat restrictive becomes imperative to unlocking the meaning behind the show, which poetically unites the artists on multiple levels.
The Dark Wood, the Space Afrika installation from which the show gets its name, moves through the noises of an urban environment, the sounds of cars and chatter creating a white noise that city dwellers are all too familiar with, before slowly moving into a smoother electronic soundscape. The windows of the room are deep blue to match the warm, nocturnal atmosphere that the sounds create. The handout situates this “somewhere between night and early morning twilight,” but with the exhibition’s directionality, it feels more like dusk, as the bustle of the city dies down to a dead silence.
Nocturnal darkness is the hinge that holds the two installations together; indeed, the readings from Dante’s Inferno that sit between solidify the feeling. We are led, as Dante would have us believe, to “the other shore, into eternal darkness.” Dante finds hell through a “dark wood where the straight way was lost”; the dark wood that Space Afrika envision is no more perplexing, free of the safe, logical light of day.
If Space Afrika could choose any contemporary video artist working today to bring this untethered vision of a modern underworld to life, it isn’t surprising that they chose Valentin Noujaïm. Opera Omnia comes after the success of Demons to Diamonds (2025), the final film in his Défense trilogy, Noujaïm’s has—if you’ll pardon the pun—cemented his style. Mixing CGI with surveillance footage, enigmatic characters living in a nocturnal sci-fi future tethered only by lonesome musical motifs, Noujaïm reignites a Lynchian aesthetic to explore how the decay of urban architecture symbolises socio-political collapse. For Noujaïm’s interpretation of Inferno, two boys take the place of Dante and Virgil, who move through nighttime Manchester, where darkness invites the damned, where an opera singer and a contortionist attract suited cult followers.
But as the dulcet tones of the opera singer (played by revered French soprano Axelle Fanyo) fill the dark and empty concrete halls, they begin to feel trapped. Their groundless, ethereal nature has a visual manifestation in low-quality CCTV footage, a swamp of pixels that loosens the concrete walls from their foundations—another Noujaïm signature, but also a hark back to the video J-horrors of the early noughties, like Pulse (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2001). These structures may seem loose and porous, yet they remain; the opera singer and the contortionist may have freedom to perform, but only while encircled by inquiring eyes (real and digital), suits and concrete. Their elided agency is hidden under layers of hegemony, shrouded by the darkness of night.
Whether the infernal inhabitants of this nocturnal city are the enemy or the victim of daylight is left unresolved. For visitors, the movement from city noise to dark silence that Space Afrika provide is a familiar one; for those who see it as a sign to seek shelter, Noujaïm encourages us to ask why. Why does that night hold danger? Who inhabits the darkness, and why are they pushed there? While Opera Omnia may be set in Manchester, the structural issues it signals apply to every major city.
As immersive exhibitions in London go, The Dark Wood achieves what is all too often lacking: the attraction of taking visitors to a new and exciting place, while keeping critique at the forefront—a breath of fresh air in a time where immersive installations often seem to just wobble the concrete walls for effect.
The Dark Wood is on show at ICA until 14th June. To find out more, visit their website.
Image: OPERA OMNIA (2025), Dir. Valentin Noujaïm, in collaboration with Space Afrika, colour, sound, 12 min (film still).
