Grenfell, Steve McQueen, Serpentine Gallery review: a haunting monument to tragedy, hypnotising in its horror
The IndependentFor free real time breaking news alerts sent straight to your inbox sign up to our breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails Sign up to our free breaking news emails SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. This is Grenfell – one unedited shot, 24 minutes and 2 seconds long – filmed by the artist Steve McQueen and showing at London’s Serpentine South Gallery in Kensington Gardens, just outside the boundary line of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, where Grenfell Tower’s fire-ravaged reproach still stands to this day. “I feared once the tower was covered up it would only be a matter of time before it faded from the public’s memory,” McQueen writes of his decision to film the tower, six months after the devastating fire that claimed the lives of 72 Grenfell residents, leaving hundreds more injured and bereaved. open image in gallery Director Steve McQueen in a still from ‘Grenfell’ “Who can be killed without any consequences?” Gilroy writes. How can these acts of gratuitous killing be marked and remembered?” How can art respond to such a tragedy – one that could and should never have happened if warnings were heeded; one that stole lives needlessly, in the reckless and selfish enterprise of greed – and how can the community grieve when Grenfell’s slow violence still seeps out, and when justice is kept deliberately out of reach?
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