Imran Perretta has created a new limited edition artwork: young innocents, in connection with his Spike Island film commission, the destructors (2019).

the destructors draws on Perretta’s experience as a young man of Bangladeshi heritage and explores personal and collective experiences of marginalisation and oppression. It reconsiders the figure of the alienated male youth and explores the complexities of ‘coming of age’ for young men from Muslim backgrounds Muslim living in the UK.

For his limited edition print, young innocents, Perretta excerpts a brief section of the original script for the destructors that he wrote on Microsoft Word in Calibri (one of the programme’s default fonts). The print replicates the poetic script faithfully, formatted as Perretta would have seen it during writing, including the commonplace spelling and grammatical error-indicators (red and green wavy lines respectively). Perretta plays with these suggestions that were generated by a computer algorithm to encourage the viewer to pause, reflect, and at times, imagine a hopefulness or vastness of possibility.

Imran Perretta

Imran Perretta (b. 1988, London) lives and works in London. Encompassing moving-image, sound, performance and poetry, Perretta’s work explores ideas of biopower, marginality and the (de)construction of cultural histories. Perretta is a graduate of the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London (2014) Recent exhibitions include 15 Days, Jerwood Space, London (2018); Mene Mene Tekel Parsin, Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge (2017); it wasn’t a crash, in the usual sense, Arcadia Missa, London (2016); 5 percent, Copenhagen Art Week, Denmark; and Devotions, MOT International Project Space, London (both 2015). Perretta was selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries, World Museum, Liverpool and ICA, London (2014–15). In 2016, Perretta presented Pale News, a performance devised in collaboration with artist Milo van der Maaden and members from the PoC and LGBTQ communities in East London, as part of Chisenhale Gallery’s 21st Century programme of performances and events.