Radiohead Brings ‘Motion Picture House KID A MNESIA’ to the Brooklyn Navy Yard
The Brooklyn Navy Yard is not the sort of place that usually invites reverie. Yet Radiohead has turned one of its vast industrial buildings into a dark, immersive environment for Motion Picture House KID A MNESIA, a multimedia installation, exhibition, and screening experience running through May 31. Tickets are priced at $72.
The project gathers artwork tied to Kid A and Amnesiac, the 2000 and 2001 albums that marked a decisive shift in Radiohead’s public identity. Inside the space, visitors move among wall works, a video array built from old TVs and VCRs, and sculptures that emerge from the dimness like props from a private mythology. One of the most striking is a 25-foot-tall version of the band’s recurring Stickman figure.
The installation is deliberately spare in its guidance. There are no wall labels to orient the viewer, only the work itself and a central room where an hour-plus film/video piece unfolds on four large screens after a 30-minute countdown. The film opens with a black-and-white forest rendered with a 3-D effect, set to “Everything in Its Right Place,” and moves through abstract and digitally rendered spaces populated by the minotaur and other creatures from Radiohead’s visual universe.
The result is less a conventional exhibition than a controlled drift through the band’s iconography. The imagery draws on the work of Stanley Donwood and Thom Yorke, and the credits describe the film as “based on art by Stanley Donwood and Thom Yorke.” The atmosphere is at once eerie, playful, and self-consciously theatrical, with a visual language that recalls video-game aesthetics and spectacle-driven cinema.
Motion Picture House KID A MNESIA is scheduled to travel after Brooklyn, with presentations planned in Chicago, Mexico City, and San Francisco. In a city defined by constant reinvention, the project uses the Navy Yard’s rough-edged scale to frame a question that has long animated Radiohead’s work: how sound, image, and mood can be fused into a single, unsettling environment.
