Lisson Studio

Raheel Khan and Tiffany Wellington ‘A Public Safety Concern’

In collaboration with The Bomb Factory Art Foundation, Lisson Gallery presents an off-site exhibition by two London-based artists, Raheel Khan and Tiffany Wellington from 6 –12 September, 2024. ‘A Public Safety Concern’ marks the first collaborative project between Khan and Wellington, both previous recipients of Lisson Gallery’s bursary for MFA postgraduate studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2022 and 2023 respectively, have brought together site-specific works incorporating film, installation and sound. The exhibition takes as its locus the sculptural gestures inherent in everyday movement and objects, and a foregrounding of the otherwise ordinary.

Presented as a site-specific film, Raheel Khan unveils Monotony of a Waterfall (2024), positioning the windows of the space as screens, each understood as a bridging scene, viewpoint or chapter. Khan embeds moments of contemplation within the sound composition – comprising acoustic synthesised and actual woodwind and string instruments – that are punctuated and complemented by the unknowable sound of the surrounding city. Khan raises questions around who maintains authority over noise and sound in the public arena, both industrial, mechanical, and human-made, particularly in times of protest and resistance.

Tiffany Wellington’s Witching Hour (2024) brings characterisation and personification of objects to the fore through its use of lighting. Centred around the 2024 film After Hours, the installation sees three TV screens present several scenes in which a cast of everyday objects are revealed by car headlights that flood the frame. A misplaced set of keys, a wooden palette awaiting collection – these actors or props are also physically present within the exhibition space, depicted both in person and on video in instances outside of their intended use or function. Coated in a reflective material but identifiable by their shape or perceived texture, they take on a ghostly presence in their filmic realm. 

Here they discuss some of their approaches to the exhibition with documentation from ‘A Public Safety Concern’. Click to unmute their sound works, with credits and acknowledgments for all performers listed below.

Raheel Khan: The segment of the gallery space where I’m presenting naturally lends itself to thinking about the surrounding area. Even when experimenting with composition on initial site visits, my eye was naturally drawn towards the windows, I kept looking towards them and noticing the different paces of movement on the street directly outside. You and I kept talking around this and we then then extended into thinking about public space in general – our relationship to it, the sound, the movement, un-identifiable spaces, things in constant transition etc… This street in Marylebone was the first bypass road built in London, so it’s never standing still and never has done. It’s the artery of the city.

Saying that, I’m not sure I have any business being in Marylebone, I don’t know if you think the same way? I feel very at home in our little corner of Deptford that we both work from. I think we were talking about this and it may have led to a conversation about authority and agency in public space. How do we interact and perform in different environments? Then you started to think about bringing the outside in, there’s a strong motif of what’s visible/invisble in your work. From this we started experimenting with some fabric scans (something I enjoy doing) and when you scanned some high-visibility workwear it really centred our thinking on the authoritarian side of public space. Particularly how policy and local regulation works. Some of the scans ended up as the lead image for the show.

Is high-vis a recurring motif in your work? I’m not sure if I’ve seen you use it before. but I feel like it embedded quite a lot of discussion for us in the exhibition. Would be nice to hear more about your use of it…

Tiffany Wellington: I have never worked with hi-vis as a motif, but I have been very fascinated by its authoritative status. People tend to trust those in high-vis (e.g. the police, paramedics, firefighters, security etc). I wanted to work with this material to give things that are usually in the background an important role. I am also interested in how high vis gives a ghostly effect only triggered by direct light, glitching your eyes to think what is in front of them is totally white. Coating objects here in the reflective spray and looking at them from behind a light made them look ghostly, almost digitally edited. It made me think if I could use that same trickery with a camera and how would the audience interrupt viewing the objects in person and on film. 

What led you to explore the social aspects of ‘noise’ for your sound piece, or maybe you could describe it as a film, once paired with the windows in the space?

Raheel Khan: During the early stage of research I started to think about the history of the local area. Marylebone had such influence, particularly during the era of ‘Great’ Britain that we grew up learning about, it was a highly developed part of town, full of what we would now call ‘influencers’. I had heard the name Charles Babbage from a show at Manchester International Festival in 2019. He was a polymath and inventor, most famously designing what went on to be the first computer. He lived down the road from the gallery in the late 19th century, and although his methodology behind design, maths and innovation was really interesting, it was his report in 1864 that really caught my eye… He wrote 26 pages on the new observations of street nuisance taking over London, and it’s overall effect of robbing the ‘intellectual classes’ of their time…

Sound in public space has changed massively over the past two centuries, since the introduction of industrial machinery then post-industrial hyper-logistics and now technological isolation, but perhaps the perception of what ‘nuisance’ is has remained the same? I mean you don’t have to write 26 pages on it anymore that ends up in the local paper, at this moment if you type ‘report nuisance’ in Google you’ll get pages of policy, law and council regulations. Some regarding land, others relating it to ‘anti-social’ behaviour. We kept digging and a few clicks through we end up on the local Westminster online forum, where you can report complaints around street noise, it gets logged, tracked and some action will take place.

Babbage would have loved this online system – but from a wider perspective it embedded some questions in the work … What does noise represent? How does it exist within the different class systems, especially those associated with the different boroughs of London? Who gets to call it noise and when does it actually become a problem? Then, where does policy and law step in?

Then there it was, sitting as a heading of the council webpage you can click on – describing excessive noise as ‘a public safety concern’ and how to best deal with it.

We spoke a lot about different things in terms of private/public space, what was it you responded to and how has the been developed in some of your presentation of works? 

Tiffany Wellington: I was thinking about the forgotten/discarded/nonchalant, especially looking through the windows in your space. I started to notice small items that had been left on the side of the road and I started creating narratives about those things. Like a puffer jacket left by the front door of the space, or confetti that had flown across the road after a wedding ceremony, stacks of cardboard boxes left for Westminster council and many more things that we simply walk past without giving any thought. We are surrounded by so many things we tend to forget they even exist. Everything has a backstory that can be both complicated and simple yet can be forgotten. I wanted to bring what is public into a private setting...
 

Raheel Khan: Maybe if you feel it’s right, could you touch on the titling of your work too? 

Tiffany Wellington: Well, the title Witching Hour, came about through our conversations. While we were talking about our ideas for this project, I remember saying something on the lines that I will be shooting during the ‘witching hour,’ not really thinking much about it. Later I realised that it’s such a fitting tile as it brings both mysticism and realism into the fold. My film crew of four went to six locations in the early hours shooting various scenes across South East London, where I currently live. We wanted to keep it local because it would be easy for us to get home, especially since we wrapped up at 4am. We actually ended up only shooting in five locations due to the fact that we ushered out by a guy who seemed to be guarding the premises. He literally popped out of nowhere and we were expecting the site to be completely empty but we were wrong. I guess that’s what happens when you don’t ask for permission, but I personally prefer guerrilla filmmaking.

What led you to take a filmic approach for your sound piece and do you see your sound piece as a film in itself or is it only a film once paired with the windows in the space?

Raheel Khan: I’ve always connected to compositions that accompany films, perhaps more than the visual, and I feel that a filmic approach has become quite central to my practice. The attempt of building image through the use of sound is something I consider vastly when writing. I stumbled across this framework when working on Mileage, 2019, a project in Manchester that focused on the daily lives of taxi drivers. I installed microphones internally throughout a number of cars and edited over 40 hours of material down into 15 minutes presented via BBC Radio. On reflection it was the start of many challenging editing and arrangement journeys, but it birthed this interesting notion of creating image and story through sound. I think there’s a question to reflect on what makes a film a film. If we took away the script, lens and actors, we’re left with unrehearsed reality without the the bias that’s so heavily attached with image and a camera. Maybe that’s why my concerns ultimately lie within sound, it has the potential to remove internalised structures and dismantle the hierarchy between the use of the eye and ears. What would everything look like if we listened more? The Monotony of a Waterfall anchors itself on this notion, the only dialogue you get is the constant stream of cars and movement directly outside, a static white noise (or silence if we get Cagean about it), which the composition builds itself around, as well as the local historical context of what street nuisance represents who gets to call it that. I’d like to think you could take the sound composition anywhere with you and still have a similar feeling. 

Tiffany Wellington: Why did you decide to use speakers that were manufactured in Britain? Did you consider that as a factor in choosing them, especially since they have such a strong aesthetic to them?

Raheel Khan: Shivas from Friendly Pressure helped to deliver on the technical and audio design. We spoke at length about the composition and how I wanted the mix of the clarinets and violins to be really dry and intimate, almost so you can hear the musician taking a breath between playing notes. We thought about directionality, texture, staging and range, as well physical space and the reflectivity of the concrete and exposed bricks. The Quads sat at the top of the list. The year and country of manufacture did play a part in sourcing them, but it wasn’t the key parameter that was make or break. Once we got a pair and listened to some drafts of the compositions in his studio, we knew they were the ones. After that I’d get a barrage of links from Shivas, second-hand speakers that were for sale across the country. I think the furthest I went to was Rochdale to pick up a pair!

On the topic of speakers, you went the truly DIY method of placing audio exciters on insulation boards! Was this always the intention or did it come through once you started placing objects in the space?

Tiffany Wellington: I always intended to use the insulation boards as speakers, especially having seen the space in person. It did not make any sense to use conventional speakers to carry the sound. I wanted to play around with what was originally in the space and what I have intentionally put in the space. Putting insulation boards just made sense as something that blended in the environment that also mirrored the TVs.

Raheel Khan: There's an interesting use of lighting in the way you've filmed on location, it would be interesting to hear more, did you look at any references across theatre / film ?  

Tiffany Wellington: The film itself has quite a nostalgic feel due to the fact it was shot through an old 1940s Bolex lens that would have previously been used to shoot 16mm films back in the day. For me it worked with the idea of each shot having a ghostly presence, a key example is the red telephone box that holds so much history, now surrounded by shrubbery, it still has some life through its the active blue light that illuminates the graffiti on glass. I wanted to give a nod of recognition to places that have been forgotten. In terms of the lighting, working closely with Alex who is a gaffer/chief lighting technician professionally, we discussed how we could control the lighting in each shot that worked with the street lights already there. There were so many lighting variations on the different locations it was quite hard to get a film noir look on camera without controlling the lights which we did end up doing with use of the right camera angles and extra external lighting along with the two theatre spotlights to wash over the objects in the shot to activate the reflective properties on camera. Taking inspiration from lighting used in The Third Man by Carol Reed, and 'it-narratives' where a story is told from the perspective of inanimate objects; the film gives you subtle glances to the soul of each object being highlighted by spotlights.

Raheel Khan: I definitely see the ghostly elements in your work, the sound you've created contrasts in a really interesting way. What was the process behind that?

Tiffany Wellington: Working with a tune that is both stripped back and recognisable, that also compliments your film score, it led me to think about earworms. I wanted something that would draw the viewer in from behind the curtains, that also has an eerie feel. The song Fly me to the moon has been covered so many times. Originally written in 1954 by Bart Howard, it was known as In Other Words, a cabaret ballad that was dedicated to Howard's partner, a secret queer love song which then later became synonymous with the American moon landing after Frank Sinatra's cover. This interesting history of the song made me think about stripping it back, whistling instead of singing with a soft backing track. I think it works with the ghostly elements with my work and can be considered ghostly itself. The song style also fits the style in the film as another nod to nostalgia and the forgotten.

 

Credits and acknowledgments

Raheel Khan has a forthcoming commission for Nottingham Contemporary as part of an ambitious group exhibition, ‘Your Ears later Will Know to Listen’ (2025), which explores sound’s ability to map, travel and transition across cultures, times and experience.

Monotony of a Waterfall, 2024
Installation with three sound compositions
Duration: 8 minutes

Composition 1: ‘Pipe for Marylebone Stream’
Written by Raheel Khan 
Clarinet, Alex McKenzie

Composition 2: ‘String for Marylebone Stream’ 
Written by Raheel Khan and Camila Corvalán 
Violin, Camila Corvalán

Composition 3: ‘Hana’
Original composition by Asa-Chang & Junray, reinterpreted by Raheel Khan, 
Michelle Hromin, Camila Corvalán and HforSpirit
Clarinet, Michelle Hromin
Violin, Camila Corvalán
Cello, HforSpirit

Audio Technician, Shivas Howard Brown / Friendly Pressure

Tiffany Wellington has previously exhibited at Public Gallery, San Mei Gallery and Cubitt Gallery, London.

Witching Hour, 2024
Installation comprising three channel HD colour video and sound

Installation: Five spotlights, dimmer box, two amps, three audio exciters, wires, pallet, cans, crisp packet, Polaroid picture, glass bottles, plastic shopping bag, gas canister, three car scissor jacks, dominos, dominos box, tape measure, lock, light stands, chair arms, football, safety boots, keys, car fenders, bonnet and bumper
Dimensions variable

Triptych: After Hours, 2024
Three channel HD colour video
Each screen: 130 x 75 x 12cm
Continuous loop, 2:20 minute duration

Sound: Wellington's whistle cover of ‘Fly Me to the Moon’, 2024
Duration: 1:56 minutes

Dan Simpkins - Cinematographer 
Christian Kingo - Colour Grader
Fred Thomson - Metal Fabricator
Orla Carolin - Technician 
William Butterick - Spark

And, a special thanks to Alex Styles who helped with the development and execution of the film and installation.

Portrait photography: Sean Dower

Install photography: George Darrell

 

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