Selected by our guest curator Riz Ahmed, Imran Perretta is an artist, composer and filmmaker exploring power and the process of identity-forming for young Muslim men. His work is like a mirror to what society often tries to erase, breathing life into silence and reckoning with loss and memory. He tells Alix-Rose Cowie about his biggest influences, and why it’s so necessary for him to create in order to find relief.
“I want to be a healthy, happy person,” Imran Perretta says. “There’s a lot in the world that can make us angry, disaffected, alienated, lonely. I don’t want to carry that with me, so I have to make work about it.” His process of allowing his incipient ideas to guide his medium means his art has made him a composer, visual artist, poet, screenwriter and filmmaker, so far. “I think my practice has become so varied because ultimately the thing that I’m focused on is the outlet valve, releasing that pressure. I’m not precious about how it comes out. It could be cooking a meal, I’m just not a good enough cook.”
Growing up in his family, music was the thing. Perretta and his sister, along with other nineties kids from their London borough, attended a council-funded music school on weekends which gave out free instruments. He received a classical guitar. As a teenager, music videos were the thing. He’d watch Channel U, a British music television channel airing often homemade, handheld videos from the local grime scene, and then go out and make films with his friends. Art came much later, and just in time.
In 2008, as a 20-year-old architecture student, Perretta stopped in at Serpentine Gallery on a whim, where “Blue” by the late multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman was showing. A static blue screen set to a soundscape in which Jarman speaks his lyrical thoughts aloud; musings and matter-of-facts about his deteriorating condition living with AIDS, and losing his eyesight. “It shook me to my core,” Perretta remembers, feeling especially moved as his mother was critically ill with cancer at the time. He didn’t want to be an architect anymore; “Blue” had completely broken open his definition of a creative practice. He picked up a video camera again, and eventually enrolled to do his MFA at Slade School of Fine Art.
Over the last decade, Perretta has been working primarily within the art world, and increasingly within the worlds of classical music and narrative cinema. In 2020, he was awarded a Turner Prize Bursary for his 2019 moving image work, “the destructors”; a piece so potent and personal it grew into his first feature film, “ISH,” financed by BBC Film and The BFI. “ISH” follows the story of 12-year-old best friends Ish and Maram targeted in a terrifying police stop & search and left to grapple with the fallout. The first utterances of “the destructors” began in workshops Perretta held for British teenage boys from Muslim backgrounds to voice their individual and collective coming-of-age experiences. Rather than afforded the common teenage rite of passage—an awkward, rebellious, unremarkable figuring-out of who they are, their identities had been predetermined from the outside, marked by the state as a threat.
Perretta planned to write his next work from their stories, but recognizing the similarities to his, he felt empowered to write from various stages of his own adolescence and young adulthood, experiencing the turbulent pendulum of hyper-visibility and invisibility. “You suddenly understand how you are seen by the state, and you realize that you’re a suspect,” he says. “That’s a very troubling thing to reckon with within yourself.” In “the destructors,” young actors perform his words inside a community center, a once-safe space that slowly floods with water and is infiltrated by smoke as they speak.
“ISH” is the unofficial final chapter of “the destructors.” Perretta based the screenplay (co-written with his writing hero Enda Walsh) on the traumatic experience of his first police stop & search as a 13-year-old in London around the beginning of the “War On Terror” campaign post-9/11. His story is over two decades old but as relevant as ever. “It never stopped being important to tell,” he says. “The specifics may have changed since 2001, but the broader narrative around western imperialism, institutionalized Islamophobia and the tightening of military policing is global, and is happening all the time. In the UK, the police state is as powerful if not more powerful than it’s ever been.”
Mid-pandemic, while his dad was packing up their family home, Perretta found his old Blackberry mobile phone. On it was an archive of messages from 2011, most notably a viral video of a local furniture shop engulfed in flames, set alight during the London riots over that summer. This forgotten clip crackling through a relic of redundant tech spoke to many issues pertinent to his work: policing, austerity, resistance. Personally, the flashback brought up the disconnect between his ideology (a belief in tearing things down in order to build a better world) and the emotional response he’d felt as a local watching parts of his community going up in smoke as helicopters swarmed overhead. “I’m drawn to these moments that feel both deeply ideological and political while ethically and emotionally complex,” he says.
Today, the site where the store burnt down is dead space, unused by anyone due to a land dispute. Nothing better has been built. Perretta’s “A Riot in Three Acts,” commissioned by Somerset House, HOME Manchester and the Manchester Camerata Orchestra is a large-scale replica of that corner of wasteland that viewers can step into, and a 40-minute surround sound orchestral score titled “A Requiem for the Dispossessed,” composed by Perretta for a string quartet. Expanding the notion of a moving image, the installation is designed to invite viewers inside the “film” to congregate within the set, reflecting on the riots from the perspective of the present.
“What I’m not trying to do is to take something complex and make it simple,” Perretta says of his practice. “The project is to look at complex things in a complex way. The goal then is to make the work complete enough that it can exist on its own—that doesn’t mean resolved, just complete enough that you don’t have to explain it. Then you push the rickety boat off into the water and hope that it stays afloat. And if you’ve honored the complexity of what you’re talking about, 9 out of 10 times it will.”
