House of Kong
Gorillaz’s 25-Year World Comes to Brooklyn
House of Kong entrance at the Agger Fish Building in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Photo: Pablo Herrera / TMN
Now open at the Agger Fish Building in the Brooklyn Navy Yard through September 28, House of Kong brings Gorillaz’s fictional universe into physical space. The immersive exhibition traces 25 years of music, animation, comics and strange characters created by Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett.
BROOKLYN | By Pablo Herrera
Gorillaz began in the late 1990s, when Damon Albarn, still closely associated with Blur, was sharing a flat in West London with comic artist Jamie Hewlett. Their fictional band arrived in 2000 with “Tomorrow Comes Today,” followed by the self-titled debut album in 2001. Early videos established 2D, Murdoc, Noodle and Russel as a band with its own personalities, history and internal chaos.
House of Kong brings that world into physical space through a series of carefully constructed environments filled with drawings, instruments, handwritten fragments and the accumulated objects that have long shaped Gorillaz’s visual language. The atmosphere moves between a comic-book studio, a rehearsal room and a warehouse of collected memories.
A sequence of voices guides each visitor through the route, creating the feeling that the story has its own logic and that you are temporarily caught inside it. Light, sound and scent are all part of the experience, sharpening the mood in ways that are sometimes subtle and sometimes impossible to ignore.
It is a playful system, though one that asks people to surrender to the experience and follow its cues. Visitors who dislike interaction or being guided through a narrative may find the format slightly demanding. Still, that personal reservation does not take away from the quality of the work. The production is remarkably well resolved.
The exhibition builds its atmosphere through set design, analogue textures, sound and the strange accumulation of objects that have always made Gorillaz feel like more than a music project.
The result makes the band’s long-running creative method easy to understand. Gorillaz has often sounded like a “pastiche” of genres, collaborators and references: dub, hip-hop, pop, electronic music, guest vocalists and visual cultures moving together. That abundance can feel overwhelming in the music itself. Inside House of Kong, it becomes coherent. The exhibition gives shape to the mess.
The Brooklyn Navy Yard is a fitting location. Its industrial scale and riverside setting give the project an extra layer of atmosphere, especially inside the Agger Fish Building, which has also hosted major music-related exhibitions, including the Radiohead Motion Picture House.
House of Kong was developed by artist and creative director Stephen Gallagher and his studio, SWEAR, in collaboration with Albarn, Hewlett and Eleven Management. Gallagher, who has served as creative director for Gorillaz live shows since 2018, understands that the band’s visual world needs to feel handmade, unstable and slightly unhinged.
House of Kong is open at the Agger Fish Building in the Brooklyn Navy Yard through September 28. Tickets and visit information are available through the official House of Kong website.
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