Atrocity Exhibition
Atrocity Exhibition,
2010–2023
20 photographs
“Tonight, we’re going to do a one-hour set called Music from the Death Factory. It’s basically about the post-breakdown of civilisation. You know, you walk down the street and there’s a lot ruined factories and bits of old newspaper with stories about pornography and page three pin-ups, blowing down the street, and you turn a corner past the dead dog and you see old dustbins. And then over the ruined factory there’s a funny noise.”
Genesis P-Orridge, concert of Throbbing Gristle at the ICA, London, 18 October 1976
While the rough and uncomfortable—sometimes aggressive—music of the British band Throbbing Gristle was from the outset described as industrial, it was not simply because, as the band themselves pointed out, it reflected the brutality of their immediate environment: the London district of Hackney they had moved to in 1973, which was then very run-down. It is also, and perhaps more importantly because, as the band’s singer and lyricist enigmatically put it at the opening of TG’s first official gig at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA, London), their music is first and foremost about the “post-breakdown of civilisation”. This series of 20 photographs, taken in Hackney some thirty years apart, invites us to elucidate this formula.
This set of photographs was the subject of Benoît Grimbert’s Ph.D in Sciences and Technologies of the Arts – Visual Arts and Photography specialization: Atrocity Exhibition. Throbbing Gristle in Hackney (London, 1975-1981). A photographic investigation (2023)