Louise Bourgeois and Eva Gold, 'City of Rooms' at Rose Easton and Sadie Coles

Contemporary artist Eva Gold, canonical legend Louise Bourgeois and a dose of Japanese horror in an innovative twin show. Who could resist that?

You never quite arrive at City of Rooms, a tightly meshed pair of exhibitions across two sites in London. They are structured to delay the aesthetic encounter, shifting the focus towards the way each exhibition points to the other, or to another cultural reference. Part One at Rose Easton is not complete without its sibling, which opened a week after at The Shop, Sadie Coles HQ, in the West End. Identically carpeted in an old-fashioned brown, Part Two produces the same temporal disjunction as the first, with a pair of handmade satellite dishes implying an intercommunication between the shows, sealed off from the world outside.

Eva Gold’s satellite dishes and drawings of low-resolution screens contribute to an atmosphere nostalgic for some undefined era, maybe the 90s. Seeming to represent CCTV footage, the two drawings at The Shop are in fact copied from film stills from Kyoshi Kurosawa’s 1997 horror film, Cure. In one of them, a man sits at a table, as if to be interrogated. In the other he is gone. The ominous sense of surveillance carries over into the Rose Easton venue, where a masculine presence, signified by a camping chair and phallic camcorder, keeps watch over a tiny, pink Louise Bourgeois sculpture of a house on a large, carpeted plinth.

This 2010 sculpture adds a further, gendered layer of referentiality to the show, deriving from Bourgeois’ ‘Femme Maison’ series, which combine images of female bodies and houses. The Curved House, made of pink marble, has a central door and windows either side, and bends to create a sense of enclosure at the back, where there is a soft and fleshy-looking opening. The inclusion of the vulnerable-looking Bourgeois implies that the forces of patriarchy that associate women with domesticity are contiguous with the voyeuristic gaze produced by the cinema.

The exhibition texts, written by Hana Noorali and Lynton Talbot in collaboration with Eva Gold, make a similar claim about the cinema, while adding to the show’s network of references. In these texts, the endnotes have endnotes, most of which lead to critic Mark Fisher’s sleevenotes for a 2006 album by experimental musician The Caretaker, Theoretically Pure Retrograde Amnesia. Fisher’s point is that we live in a perpetual mode of nostalgia, which suffocates our ability to produce art that speaks directly to our historical moment. Our culture of referentiality to past media is like a form of amnesia, in which we only retain memories made long ago.

With its uneasy nostalgia and erudite network of references, City of Rooms feels like a practical application of Fisher’s ideas. This is both its limitation and its strength. Being so closely aligned with the theory, the exhibitions resist the incursion of ideas from beyond its parameters. They are tightly bound to an intellectual scaffold. As a result, despite their referentiality, they feel more like a closed circuit than an expansive field of potential, just as suffocating as the reality they attempt to describe. This, of course, is the point – and City of Rooms makes it with chilling accuracy.

City of Rooms (part one) runs from 23 March - 22 April 2023 at Rose Easton, Bethnal Green

City of Rooms (part two) runs from 1 - 22 April 2023 at The Shop, Sadie Coles HQ, Central London