Jaki Irvine’s “Five lines of song-smoke” at Frith Street Gallery, London: Whistling in the Dark, in Five Channels

There is an old habit of whistling in the dark when you sense trouble coming. Jaki Irvine’s “Five lines of song-smoke” at Frith Street Gallery in London turns that habit into a 28-minute, five-channel sound and video installation. The Dublin-based artist’s new work is the only piece in the exhibition, which opens on Thursday 19 November 2026 and runs at the gallery’s Golden Square space from 20 November 2026 to 16 January 2027. It is a show to sit with, not walk past.

A song you will not quite hear

The tune behind the work is “Show Me the Way to Go Home”, a 1925 drinking song most people half-know. Film fans know it from Jaws, where three men sing it on a boat at night shortly before the shark returns. Irvine connects the song to that feeling of singing to keep your nerve as a crisis approaches. But the musicians she worked with were not asked to perform it. According to the gallery’s press release, they were told to “play in its shadow” — to let the song shape what they did without ever quite stating it.

That instruction is the key to the whole work. What you hear and see is improvisation around an absence: a familiar melody that hovers just out of reach, like a word on the tip of the tongue.

How the work was made

Irvine built the piece from collaboration and improvisation. Seven musicians — Izumi Kimura on piano, Joe O’Farrell on flute, Sarah Grimes on drums, Marco Colonna on bass clarinet, Phil Robson on guitar, Tara Franks on cello and Cath Roberts on saxophone — responded to shifting sounds and images guided by a moving graphic score that the artist filmed, recorded and generated herself. A graphic score replaces conventional notation with images and marks that players interpret; here, the score itself is in motion.

The images feeding that score are strikingly modest: small details from everyday life near Irvine’s home, such as a stone thrown into an icy pond, string hanging in a neighbour’s garden and a heavily plastered ceiling. The work also draws on her earlier performances and rehearsal sessions. The result, as the gallery describes it, is imagery both precise and hallucinatory, swinging between holding on and letting go, hope and despair, intimacy and being overwhelmed.

Spread across five screens and speakers, the piece makes the viewer something like the conductor: where you stand and which screen you face changes what you hear and how the musicians seem to answer one another.

Who is Jaki Irvine?

Born in Dublin in 1966, where she still lives and works, Jaki Irvine moves between video, installation, photography, musical composition and writing. Her recurring subject, according to Frith Street Gallery, is how we imagine ourselves and the world — and what that means philosophically and politically.

She has a long exhibition record in Ireland and the UK. Ssh Ow at the De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill-on-Sea (2025) was described by the gallery as her first major solo exhibition in a UK public gallery. Earlier, the Irish Museum of Modern Art showed If the Ground Should Open… (2016–17) and The Silver Bridge (2005, later at SMART, Amsterdam). Other projects include City of Women at The LAB, Dublin (2010), Seven Folds in Time at Temple Bar Gallery (2009), In a World Like This at The Model, Sligo and Chisenhale Gallery, London (2006–07), and Re_sett_ing_s with Locky Morris at Void, Derry and The Complex, Dublin. This is her sixth solo exhibition at Frith Street, after shows in 2000, 2005, 2010, 2017 and 2021.

Frith Street Gallery and the moving image

Jane Hamlyn founded Frith Street Gallery in 1989 in a Georgian townhouse on Frith Street in Soho, and in 2007 moved its main space to purpose-built premises on Golden Square. Over more than three decades it has shown painting and sculpture alongside film, video, installation and performance, and it has been one of the London galleries most committed to artists’ moving image. A long-term relationship like Irvine’s — more than 25 years — is exactly what that commitment looks like in practice.

Why it matters

Video installations can seem hard to collect, but they are usually produced in small editions; anyone interested should ask the gallery about availability. For artists — painters included — the work is an object lesson in how a score, a rule or an instruction can free improvisation rather than restrict it. And for winter visitors to the West End, it offers half an hour of concentrated listening in the middle of the Christmas crowds.

Our advice: go when it is quiet, give the loop its full 28 minutes, and move around the room at least once.

Visiting information

Frith Street Gallery, 17–18 Golden Square, London W1F 9JJ. 20 November 2026 – 16 January 2027. Opening: Thursday 19 November, 18:00–20:00. Open Tuesday–Friday 11:00–18:00 and Saturday 11:00–17:00; closed Sunday and Monday (check holiday closures with the gallery). Phone: +44 (0)20 7494 1550. Email: [email protected].

See the official exhibition page, our exhibition listing, and more London openings on Upcoming Art Exhibitions in Leading Galleries.