A row of noticeboards outside welcome us to the newly modernised Shoreditch Town Hall Hotel. This is, however, just the start of dreamthinkspeak’s latest site-responsive piece. The venue has allowed the company to turn the ground floor and basement into a succession of public and private hotel spaces, past and present, for a kind of collage portrait both of a long-term guest (very loosely inspired by Margaret, Duchess of Argyll) and the changing worlds within and beyond its walls. We check in, wait in a lobby and browse facsimile copies of the Evening Standard containing material about Margaret d’Beaumont and the conglomerate that now owns the hotel. A handful at a time, we are led into the basement, watch through a one-way mirror as Margaret packs and then wander at our leisure through the labyrinthine installation.

Dreamthinkspeak’s approach to construction, of material and meaning alike, is now familiar. Spaces and physical configurations are echoed and re-echoed in various ways. The hotel is a perfect setting for such a style. We see on a video screen a plush room in its former prime, on another screen the same room fallen into dereliction, then turn a corner and find ourselves in the ruined room itself. The first, blandly modern, room we had entered is later recapitulated in miniature hives, from differing perspectives but all with the same shimmering vid-screens showing Margaret in her pomp. It begins to feel like Alain Resnais’ allusive film masterpiece Last Year At Marienbad: a succession of “Empty salons. Corridors. Salons. Doors. Doors. Salons.” At other points in our progress, the piece’s creator Tristan Sharps cheekily engineers both through-the-looking-glass and Narnia-style moments for us. I burst out laughing, too, on entering a nondescript storeroom and seeing stacks of stacks of Impressionist masterpiece prints supposedly ready to be hung in the rooms and corridors.

In several cases, too, the unused space simply stands for unused space, encouraging us to let our own inferences run free. There is no linear story as such, scarcely any of any kind, and apart from that initial packing scene the performances are all on video rather than in the flesh (apart from the liveried hotel staff discreetly keeping an eye on us). Nevertheless, it is a beautiful work in terms both of what it puts together and how, and of what it leaves for us to fill ourselves.
 
Written for the Financial Times.