Roberto Cuoghi at the ICA

By Laura McLean-Ferris

Another opening in a public London institution, another apocalyptic scenario. Unlike Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster's imagining of a civilisation in ruin 50 years into the future, however, Roberto Cuoghi asks us to listen to a dying civilisation 14 centuries in the past. If both of these artists ask us 'what will it be like at the end?', then Cuoghi's sound installation at the ICA answers in a din of wailing, crying, spitting and shouting.



When he was twenty-five, Roberto Cuoghi decided to undertake a process of becoming his father, by gaining weight, wearing his father's clothes, dyeing his hair grey and appropriating his mannerisms. His father died shortly after this process, which was not without its consequences for Cuoghi (the strain placed on his body made medical recovery operations necessary.)

Cuoghi has reputedly thrown himself with similar gusto into researching the ancient state of Mesopotamia. A huge statue of the Pazuzu, the Assyrian and Babylonian evil deity of disease and infection, stands on the corner of the ICA's entrance. Pazuzu is so evil that he has the power to ward off other demons and misfortune. (Insert your own joke about the financial crisis and the artworld here).

The installation inside, Šuillakku, is a huge, multi-room sound piece, with a plethora speakers placed at a fairly low height. Though his research of languages, mythologies, music and history, Cuoghi has multiplied into a huge doomsday chorus of voices as he imagines the city burning. This somehow creates the effect that you are listening to shouting that comes from below, hearing an abyss full of writhing, dying, men, women and children. Which is as good an analogy for history as any. Several people around me started nodding their heads and tapping their feet to beats. I suddenly had an awful feeling of being at a world music concert, which darkened my mood more than wailing death sounds ever could.

Upstairs, in one of the last instalments of Nought to Sixty, are works from Gail Pickering and Torsten Lauchmann. Pickering's video Brutalist Premonition (2008) is viewed in a bare sort of stage-set. A spiky film full of visual squares and brutal angles, it was filmed with the residents of the Robin Hood Gardens Estate in East London. The characters act out several intercut domestic chamber pieces with scripts in their hands, bouncing from aesthetic dream to reality. Torsten Lauchmann's two short and beautiful videos deliberately evade our visual capture. Feral (2008) features a white horse caught in a repetitive glitch, similar to Banks Violette's recent piece at Maureen Paley. Dead Man's Switch (2008) features a candle being continually extinguished.

The booming downstairs, along with the foreboding mood of the country (the world?) forces a certain reading onto every work here: everything is crisis, everything is lost hope, broken dreams and extinguished candles. Perhaps this is the real demon that we need Pazuzu's protection from. Fairs, shows and works everywhere will suffer such projection during this doom-laden Frieze Week, and, as in the history of civilisation, only the strongest will survive.