The Sun Has No Shadow is an exhibition project by video artist and filmmaker Rebecca Salvadori. The exhibition revolves around two chapters of her ongoing long-term cinematic project which explores the underground music scene in London and her relation with this city: the film The Sun Has No Shadow (2022), presented as a video installation, and Messengers (2023), screened in combination with live performances by Kenichi Iwasa, Olivia Salvadori & Coby Sey, Sandro Mussida, and Charlie Hope.

Experimenting with different modalities to connect filmmaking with sound and performative practices, for over 10 years, Rebecca Salvadori has been exploring the multilayered ecology of relations that inform London’s underground music culture. Documentations of raves and performances, portraits of musicians and artists have formed a vast video archive, a part of which has been deployed to compose the two films featuring this exhibition project. Furthermore, the live performances by the guest artists collaborating with Salvadori emphasise her focus on individual relations as well as further expanding the reflections on moving image and sound performances, central to her practice.

Presented as an immersive video installation, the film The Sun Has No Shadow is a visual journey across a series of raves, techno parties, and sound performances. A journey that develops as a spiral, starting in the periphery of London by the A14 motorway and reaching its very dense core at the club FOLD during the day raves UNFOLD. By placing the performer in the middle of the dance floor, UNFOLD generates an unusual form of spatiality which creates alternative approaches to togetherness, physical connections and community-making. In this visual narrative, images become sites of experimentation, whose alteration and combination in the post-production phase generates new patterns of meaning. While immersing the viewer in this cinematic continuum, the film also expands on a second level, a meta-dimension which creates a space for reflections on universal questions such as human existence and visions of life.

Messengers, instead, focuses on intimate conversations among artists and musicians on the nature of friendship and music. The film takes place at PAF Festival in Olomouc, Czech Republic where Rebecca Salvadori built a temporary set and filmed a series of mise-en-scènes, exchanges, and live performances together with musicians Kenichi Iwasa and Maxwell Sterling, light artist Charlie Hope, writer, editor and curator Elaine Tam and photographer Henerico Rossi. The deconstructed film set where the mise-en-scènes took place was also open to the public audience, which became part of the film as well. Messengers is presented as part of a hybrid event in which the screening of the film is combined with sound performance by Kenichi Iwasa, Sandro Mussida, Olivia Salvadori and Coby Sey. The lighting of the event is designed by Charlie Hope.

The Sun has no Shadow is therefore an exhibition project informed by a dynamic balance of unresolvable tensions, such as, individual knowledge-collective rituals, systems of representation-immediate experience, moving image-sound performances. Embedding these dichotomies, The Sun has no Shadow aims to open up new perspectives on these issues, generating a wider space for thoughts that overcome the specific scenarios represented.