Thin Air, The Beams review ★★★★★

Standing inside a vast misty warehouse, lights flash and the sound roars as if we’re living through an apocalypse. It feels like the roof could come crashing down or some giant mechanical beast will emerge from inside the mist and devour everyone in the space.

This work by the collaborative duo 404.zero is the largest work of seven at The Beams, a new venue in a warehouse in the Docklands in East London, and is part of Thin Air the inaugural exhibition for this gargantuan space. All the works feature light and technology, and make use of the impressive scale of this warehouse space.

While the works are largely visually captivating, there’s a lot more than just Instagrammable content on offer as James Clar projects light at a wavelength of 110Hz, a frequency that’s known to have a calming effect – and it definitely feels tranquil as the waves of coloured light roll towards us as we progress down a corridor.

Similarly calming is the work by the studio SETUP who have created lights that flicker and switch colours above us as we sit back on cushions entranced by the light show above us. Before heading upstairs to see work by Kimchi and Chips where a narrator asks what it would be like to see with one eye or multiple eyes as projections create shapes in front of us.

The upstairs section is a little weaker as the ability to use coding to create different versions of ourselves on screen or use our voice to manipulate objects on screen is fun but very much lacking the wow factor of the works downstairs.

Though the exhibition does finish strong with red laser mesh that visitors can walk through by Matthew Schreiber. It feels disconcerting at first to pass through the beams but it’s an installation that you can relax into over time.

This isn’t just an exhibition of art concepts, but also a realisation of what technology can do when given such a large-scale space to work with – resulting in an impressive debut exhibition for The Beams. The location isn’t an easy one to get to, but Thin Air proves it’s well worth the trip.

Thin Air is showing at: The Beams, Thameside Industrial Estate, Factory Road, London E16 2HB

All photographs by Sandra Ciampone.