In the foreground, the crown of the head of a man lying on a table, apparently motionless. A long scar runs along his scalp, looking like a crooked smile. The colour slide projection, accompanied by 23-minute-long monologue, is projected in a small dark room furnished with just a square bench. It is the first-person account of a man telling the heartbreaking story of how he inadvertently shot and killed his brother; how the ambulance arrived late and the police almost immediately; and his mother, who died while he was in jail, probably from the pain of losing two children with a single gunshot. The still shot of the man's head represents the past, present and future of the story of an event that has changed at least three lives in a few moments. The narrating voice of the murderer is that of Marcus, cousin of the British artist and director Steve McQueen. 7th Nov. represents the most linear narrative work of the current exhibition at Tate Modern, which brings together practically all of McQueen's most recent and relevant video works. 7th Nov. dates back to 2001; in 2020, it sounds a bit like a podcast.

It's hard not to notice that Western Deep, the 2002 film originally commissioned by Okwui Enwezor for documenta 11, almost looks like a long series of artistic Instagram Stories. This work follows the miners as they descend into the TauTona mines, the deepest gold mines in the world, just a few kilometers from Johannesburg. It is a subjective journey with a claustrophobic and syncopated succession of images which alternate with parts of the film when everything collapses into darkness and grain, blur and amorphousness. Steve McQueen chose Sean Bobbit’s Super 8 cinematography because “I wanted to shoot on something that had grain. I wanted to stick to the viewer. For this project I wanted something that the viewer could hold onto, that had texture, the texture of the rock, the drilling and mining. I wanted the audience to actually feel the molecules of dust.

In 1649, Jacques Dyel Du Parquet, a French soldier who went down in history as one of the first governors of Martinique, set up an outpost of 203 men on the island of Grenada. The treaty agreed between du Parquet and the indigenous Chief Kairouane to peacefully partition the island didn't last long; two years later, the last Caribs chose to jump off a 43-meter-tall cliff to their deaths rather than submit to the Europeans. Steve McQueen's father was originally from that island, which is located about 160 kilometers north of Venezuela, and Caribs' Leap is the title of the director's film explicitly inspired by that voluntary holocaust, during which light and darkness alternate, showing children swimming in the water, a funeral parlour, some boats on fire. The everyday life images shot by McQueen are both a witness of resistance and a celebration of the cycle of life. The project consists of two videos - one is projected outdoors, on a seven-meter screen on the wall of the Tate Modern.

Caribs' Leaps was presented at documenta 11 along with Western Deep. McQueen seems to love working on two projects at the same time, and this was made very clear also during this exhibition. The entrance to the exhibition, which leads you through a dark tunnel to a huge and equally dark room, reveals a portrait of the Statue of Liberty shot from a helicopter a few days before September 11 (Static): “You can see the unruly seagulls nesting in an armpit, her blank eyes, and how the livery is ruined and discolored,” McQueen told the American art curator Hamza Walker. On the other side of the room there's Once upon a time, which presents the hundred and more photographs sent into space by Nasa in the 1970s on the Voyager space probes. Veiled in blood-red light, Charlotte is the extreme close-up of actress Charlotte Rampling’s eye (at one point, McQueen briefly touches her eyeball, getting “an electric shock”), and a few meters away McQueen's nipple is the protagonist of Cold Breath, a 16 mm black and white film projection from 1999. These projects are representative of his basic approach, made of camera movements and dilated timing. These characteristics can be seen both in videos (for example in Girls, Tricky, where the camera follows the hypnotic movements of trip-hop musician and producer Tricky), and in cinema (like the long, nerve-wracking hanging scene of 12 Years A Slave, the movie that made McQueen's famous to the general public). Clara Kim (The Daskalopoulos Senior Curator, International Art at Tate Modern) writes in the long essay at the beginning of the exhibition catalogue, that at the very core of McQueen's art we find the ability for the image to reach some form of truth, and quotes McQueen himself, interviewed by the BBC: “I’m interested in a truth, and the most horrific things can happen in the most beautiful places. I cannot put a filter on life. It’s about not blinking”. Winner of a Turner Prize, he's probably the only artist that feels equally confident on the Oscar stage as well as in a contemporary art museum, creating an installation or project for schools or an action movie with Liam Neeson.

In 2019, 300 hours of video were uploaded to YouTube every minute. On the subway, it is difficult to find someone who is not immersed into Instagram. Videos are everywhere - be it a clip, a fragment, some moving pictures. We are constantly exposed to videos and constantly produce and share them. It's a fact that cannot be ignored when it comes to Steve McQueen. Artist and film director, his approach to video is all-encompassing. He is one of the greatest contemporary video art masters. If we are drowning in videos, his vision tries to keep reality afloat. And he does so by crossing narration and camera movements, shots and shooting times. With a focus that goes from the current to the intimate without interruption, as in Illuminer: Steve McQueen, in a hotel in Paris, watches a program about the training of American special forces for a mission in Afghanistan; he is lying in his bed, and the camera, placed on the television is the only source of light in an otherwise completely dark room. And it is filming him. His body, in the reflection coming from the world, is the protagonist.

12 Years A Slave came out in 2013, and it's the first film directed by McQueen that he did not write. It is certainly the most popular, in every sense, among his films. It won every kind of awards: Oscar, Bafta, Golden Globe... and is widely acclaimed as one of the best films (or maybe the best?) ever made about slavery. It is the story of a man experiencing the hell of slavery in America: Salomon Northup was a free man, in the film he's a talented violinist from the state of New York, who is kidnapped and ends up in chains for twelve years, a sort of African-American Gulliver who travels in a parallel world where men are no longer small or tall, but free depending on the color of their skin. A beautiful and at the same time brutal movie, which also raised more than one criticism: someone accused him of being too moderated, someone of being excessive. 12 Years A Slave is the film of an America in turmoil: the following year was marked by the explosion of the Black Lives Matter movement, the death of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, the beginning of a long period of demonstrations and protests. 12 Years A Slave is also an all-American story directed by a boy from London, son of Caribbean emigrants, who grew up in Ealing, the "Queen of the Suburbs" at the beginning of the last century. He attended a multicultural school, and being very good at playing soccer helped him to fit in, as he said. But dyslexia and skin colour are a barrier. Steven Rodney McQueen, who was recently awarded a knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II, has experienced racism, disparity, bullying – all themes which remain inextricably linked to all of his art, and drive it even beyond its enormous formal values. Year 3 is a collection of photos that was started in schools 20 years ago, starting from McQueen's school experience, his dyslexia and marginalization: “there were many situations in which black kids were excluded”, he says. On show at Tate Britain, the project was an attempt to capture something in every school in London. And again London, the city where he grew up and left at some point, to study in America and later to live in Amsterdam, is the protagonist of Grenfell, the video about the 24-storey Grenfell Tower fire, in which 72 people died. The building was less than a mile from White City, where McQueen grew up. “Some people die because they're marginalized. That's Grenfell for me”.

That of Ashes is a story of death and marginality as well, which is the ideal conclusion of Caribs' Leaps, bringing attention back from the community to the individual. The title Ashes refers to a man from Grenada who Steve McQueen met while he was on the island to shoot the film for documenta 11; struck by his charisma, he decided to capture it as well: "it seemed that there were no limits on who he wanted to be and what he could look like". So McQueen and Robby Muller (the cinematographer who was with him and who passed away in 2018) got on a boat and filmed Ashes: from behind, paddling, his vitality nestled between the saturated colours of the Caribbean sky and the lapping of the sea as he ploughed through it.

McQueen discovered that the man died shortly after that encounter only many years later, when he returned to Grenada. So, that boat ride with Ashes becomes Ashes. A double and two-faced video work, whose installation at Tate Modern includes a screen that cuts a small room in half, accessible from the two different corridors. On the one hand Ashes in all his vitality, on the other his life after death, with the tomb that McQueen himself had built for him, after discovering that he had been buried in a cemetery for the poor. The narrating voice is that of a friend, who narrates the death of the Grenadine, killed because he had stolen a batch of drugs.

The story of Ashes, which can be seen as a crime story and at the same time as an exemplary representation of how difficult it is to survive, literally, in an economy where poverty is everywhere, is also a parabolic tale of that trigger procedure that McQueen himself puts at the base of his reasoning on image and knowledge. "the things that you recognize are the things that you recognise," he explains. "But then again, you can recognise something, but is it really that or will it lead to somewhere else? It's a trigger. And it's intangible."