Everything changes, nothing stays the same: Martine Rose and Sharna Osborne

Sadie Coles HQ on Davies St sits right next door to a shop I have walked past many times. Hedonism Wines always catches my attention with its extravagant 3D window displays that spill out onto the pavement. Valentine’s Day, Christmas, Easter – they always demand attention, and each time I walk past I love to cynically sneer at tourists taking pictures in front of the displays. As I turn my nose up at their capitalism-induced joy (whilst being simultaneously fascinated by what outlandish display they might reveal next) I think to myself “I guess Hedonism Wines window display is its own form of ‘art’”. It seems comically incongruous that the display is just a few feet away from Martine Rose and Sharna Osborne’s film EVERYTHING MUST CHANGE, screened inside Sadie Coles HQ. 

Anyone who’s seen a Martine Rose show will know that her work transcends that of the typical fashion designer, spanning film, music and performance. For her most recent collaboration with photographer and filmmaker Sharna Osborne, Rose presents a dreamscape vignette that leaves my head spinning and immediately I forget the Hedonism Wines display next door. As I walk into the gallery, Jimmy Somerville’s haunting rendition of the eponymous song floats through the gallery. 

The sparse layers of foreboding instrumental paired with Somerville’s stripped back vocals are permeated with a hauntological ambience that feels eerily disjointed. Every movement is slowed down, in time with the creeping vocals of Somerville – a cover of the song Everything Must Change, originally composed by Quincy Jones. 

Admittedly, I hadn’t heard the Quincy Jones original – and even if I had I’m not sure if I would have recognised it because it has been totally transformed (duh, just discovered what the purpose of a cover is). Somerville’s striking falsetto fuses with the song’s sedated pace, laying bare an uncanny tune and punctuating the raw and inescapable lyrical message:

“Everything must change

Nothing stays the same

Everyone will change

No one stays the same

The young become the old

And mysteries do unfold

‘Cause that’s the way of time

Nothing and no one goes unchanged…”

The tapestry of VHS footage is split across three screens, imbued with hazy, dreamlike frames – grainy fragments of light leak and fuzzy shots of out of focus jewels on Jimmy Somerville’s diamonté gimp suit. Somerville was a band member of Bronski Beat, most famed for the 1980s hit Smalltown Boy. 

I’ve sometimes found the term ‘hauntology’ difficult to get my head around – perhaps because of unnecessary jargon or maybe because it’s difficult to understand something so intangible. The late Mark Fisher, who used the term ‘hauntology’ to describe the idea that the present is haunted by the ghosts of lost futures, wrote about musicians such as Burial and The Caretaker, or the sort of tracks on the Twin Peaks soundtrack, in relation to the theory. It’s not a genre as such, but more of a ‘vibe’ where there’s a sense of decaying and a melancholic nostalgia. In this sense, it feels fitting that it is Jimmy Sommerville, singer of Smalltown Boy, (a song from the 1980s about a young gay man fleeing his disapproving hometown) who sings this recontextualised and now haunting rendition of the song.

Let’s not forget this is a fashion film, too. Each shot is celestial, emphasising a dreamlike ephemerality. Martine and Sharna leave breadcrumbs of symbolism across the three channels. At one point, a flock of starlings crosses the screen and it reminds me of a shot in Mark Leckey’s Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore. In fact, the whole film does. Leckey’s video, or rather, the 15-minute piece of ‘sound-art’, has been hugely influential, particularly when I realised that it was sampled in Jamie XX’s All under one roof raving. Leckey knits and slices fragments of archival footage of clubbers together, and there’s an impermanence that somehow feels transcendent. There is a particular moment where a bird appears out of one of the subject’s hands and animatedly flies into the next frame, settling as a tattoo on a man’s arm that always sticks in my head. Seeing the starlings on the screen at Sadie Coles HQ immediately takes me there. Both Fiorucci made me hardcore, and EVERYTHING MUST CHANGE ostensibly fit the hauntological ‘vibe’, and confronted me with something that feels totally stirring and almost unexplainable (trying my best here). Each film feels a bit like I’ve walked into someone’s lucid dream – one where I know that I should leave, but I just can’t bring myself to look away.

I’m not just saying this for dramatic effect, but as I walked out of the door I shivered, like when people say someone has just walked over their grave. The film, and the music are both totally disconcerting and alluring at once, and watching it feels like a gentle but no-less poignant reminder of mortality. I open the door of Sadie Coles to leave. I pass Hedonism Wines and admire the display. This time I hum the words ‘everything must change, nothing stays the same.’ I wonder what display they’ll do next.