Exploring Treatment’s work 'Reframe: The Residency Exhibition' at Southbank Centre

The studio Treatment, which is based in London, recently collaborated with Southbank Centre, with the support of Apple and production assistance from Factory International in Manchester and STEAMhouse and Midlands Art Centre of Birmingham, to design Reframe: The Residency Exhibition. The Reframe initiative is artist-led and aims to enable emergent black and black-mixed artists to breach systemic barriers within the creative industry. The exhibition is curated by photographer Misan Harriman who is Chair of the Southbank Centre, and the show brings together works by 77 artists of black and black-mixed heritage from across the United Kingdom, whose displayed works explore climate change and its related issues from the lens of their cultural backgrounds through various mediums such as photography, film and sound art.

Treatment is co-founded by Willie Williams and Sam Pattinson, and has undertaken an extensive list of experiential and space design projects for various events, festivals and live shows. The studio’s work has seen them work extensively with touring bands such as U2, The Rolling Stones, Elton John, Adele and Sigur Rós. Additionally, their design work has also been leveraged within the fashion design and theatre spaces.

Pattinson joins Roula Carroll, who is the Exhibition Producer at Southbank Centre, to discuss the exhibition design strategy for The Residency Exhibition with STIR. To begin with, they shed light on how the organisers of the art exhibition approached the arduous task of exhibiting works by 77 artists simultaneously, and further to that, how they went about managing the sound within the space, so as to prevent pieces with audio tracks from overpowering each other. Pattinson tells STIR, “We wanted to give the artists as big a canvas as possible. Most of them had not worked in a multi-screen environment before, but they responded incredibly well to the challenge. We wanted the artists to think beyond a 16:9 frame, and about how their work could occupy a space instead of a frame, as well as what that could mean for the audience.”

Carroll expands on this, discussing that the sound design for The Residency Exhibition was planned specifically in response to the unique shape of the space it is presented in. In her words, “We felt it best to “lean in” to the idiosyncrasies of the space rather than fight them.” She explains that Southbank is essentially a resonant concrete box, with its own atmospheric ambience from adjacent spaces that contribute to the sound design. The artists on the Reframe initiative’s roster worked through a 7:1 surround system format, in order to respond to the multiscreen installation design. She says that the systems were “aligned to focus speakers at each screen; in this way the sound could be environmental from one channel, to fill the space, and focused and pinpointed sounds from individual channels panned the space and appeared at particular points of the narrative and in specific areas of the installation, helping to envelop the audience and adding to the immersive experience.”

The exhibition’s organisers drew great inspiration from Southbank Centre in general: its lack of symmetry, minimal windows and the fact that it was not used for public exhibitions appealed to them. Pattinson explains that the concrete of the space was not ideal for projection, but added character to the environment, and ultimately, did not hinder the experience, as the space was quite large and works could be experienced at distances enough that the textural interference was minimal. As Carroll tells STIR, the creative brief given to the 77 exhibiting artists was to create a sonic, static, and visual creative response to the climate crisis, from their own cultural perspectives, and in interrogating the curatorial theme, the artists reflected on their familial heritage and their personal experiences.

Beyond The Residency Exhibition, Treatment is finishing a short film project with the youth organisation Mary’s, that supports young folks who have been affected by youth violence. Pattinson discusses the youth programme that the studio undertook and that eventually culminated in this film, and says “One of the aims of our youth programme was to finish with an exterior projection of the film. This would give the young people some experience of projection and physical production typical in the touring industry. So, they would get both filmmaking experience and installation production experience. This proved to be difficult due to funding and the lack of viable partners with appropriate outdoor spaces, so we decided to concentrate on filmmaking only.” Working on The Residency Exhibition has reinvigorated the studio’s appreciation of physical presentation formats, and Pattinson is happy at the degree to which the contributing artists embraced it, along with how much they gained from it.

Reframe: The Residency Exhibition was on view from July 19, 2023 - August 27, 2023.