The exhibition begins at the end of the time period in question with a stark row of monitors facing the street from the front ground floor gallery. Videos by Angus Fairhurst, Gary Hume, Sam Taylor-Johnson, and Damien Hirst and Angus Fairhurst collaboratively are watched over by a teenage Sarah Lucas reading the New Musical Express. In A Cheap and Ill-Fitting Gorilla Suit, Fairhurst lurches around in exactly that, the costume slowly falling apart to reveal him naked underneath, walking out of shot and away from the hairy skin he has shed in the drab, shabby room.
The dawn of the punk era and the societal changes it heralded roughly twenty years prior to the YBAs are presented in Karen Knorr and Olivier Richon’s photographs of punks in the anarchic clubs of London’s West End in 1976 and ‘77. They self-consciously pose rather than being the subject of a simple fly-on-the-wall documentary style, the subjects, notably mostly women, thereby appearing both candid and confrontational, sharply lit by the flashgun.