Whitechapel Gallery, London
Jenn Nkiru’s standout film of Detroit’s techno history evokes the rhythm of fractured black lives in a show with no winner but plenty to mull over
A tsunami of black, computer-generated goo rushes along ancient streets, floods a courtyard and inundates a chapel. Fires break out, smoke and flame billowing around minarets and churches. The opening scenes of Larissa Sansour’s 2019 film In Vitro are gripping enough, before you realise that the city in question is an apocalyptic Bethlehem, where time runs in several directions at once, and there’s a big, black, sci-fi sphere haunting the basement of a brutalist sanctuary. All this must be a metaphor for something or other. “Bethlehem,” one of the protagonists says, “was always a ghost town, the present upstaged by the past.”
Related: Anatomy of an Artwork: Larissa Sansour’s In Vitro, 2019