In the seventies, the area around Freston Road and Bramley Road in the West London postcode of W10 declared itself a squatted free state.

Poet Heathcote Williams was its ambassador to Great Britain, actor David Rappaport was its foreign minister and the late Nick Albery, its untitled ringleader.

It became home to avant-garde families, artists, musicians and drug-users. Nowadays the Frestonians have moved on or live in the Notting Hill Housing trust-owned properties where their squats once sat.

And in the midst of all this history lies an immense building that used to make body parts for Rolls Royce, Bentley and Daimler, Nowadays, it is a not-for-profit art gallery, keen to attract new blood.

The cavernous Louise T Blouin Institute began its 10 x 10 After Dark summer project 10 weeks ago; every Thursday since July  it opens its doors til late having allowed a guest curator to interpret the space how they want.

It’s a cool idea and great for young artists and curators alike – they’re given carte blanche to fill the huge space – but it seems a shame that so much work goes into less than 12 hours of display.

I saw the ninth show. Called VIBE, it offered three floors of contemporary Russian sound, installation and video pulled together by Victoria Ionina.

The first floor was amazing; a suitably surreal introduction into a six-artist show that aimed to be viewed as a single installation.

With lights low and the floor a pool of water, four screens faced one another showing various Explorer ships slamming through ice, snow and water in Alexander Ponomarev’s ‘Narcissus’ installation.

With each camera lodged at a boat’s bow, they filmed the water’s various reflections, be it the setting sun as in one or recently carved-snow in another.

Temporary wooden planks provided paths through the floor’s water pools, providing a dry sanctuary enabling hypnotic staring sessions of the ships’ relentless journey through an uninhabitable water world.

Up a level and we were back on solid ground, with Elizabeth Berezovskaya’s ‘Light’ shining bright in the artificially smoke-filled space.

Nothing more than a vertical light shaft beamed down from the ceiling, it nevertheless succeeded in casting a Holy, church-like reverence in the large white-walled room.

And despite no ‘do not touch’ warnings, I noticed no one felt confident enough to bask in its unrestricted warmth.

The religious theme was continued in the fantastically-named artist, Hermes Zygott’s ‘Reanimated Icons’ – a series of re-imagined Orthodox icons printed on light boxes.

Simultaneously beautiful and intriguing, the pseudo-ancient icons revealed a mishmash of images, from the traditional halo-ringed angels to murkier images from the sub-conscious that were harder to make out and all the more exciting for it.

The same room was shared by a brash video installation which, showing everything and nothing to an incoherent soundtrack, denoted chaos, but in a far less accessible format than the light-boxes.

The third and final floor welcomes guests with an unintelligible definition of the Patternist art movement.

Reading as if it was mistranslated from a worthy Russian text, it wasn’t the best introduction to Sergei Anufriev’s ‘Pleroma’ paintings.

These Patternist works showed a series of incongruous items appointed in peasant style. We saw a gherkin and a calculator, a boot and a rose, a hammer and sock and a number of other equally listless items.

What was memorable, however, was the music.  
 
Artists Zygott and Anufriev, the founding members of the Orchestra of Unknown Instruments created both haunting and yet totally danceable sounds as hipsters and art collectors perused the varied works of the Russia’s new avant-garde.

All in all, The VIBE artists made a fittingly transient entry into what was once Frestonia.

The tenth and final night takes places on September 11 showing ‘Twilight Suite’, with artists Paula Naughton, Greg Poole and Mark Melvin.