If all recorded knowledge and culture was wiped out by a great electrical storm, what kind of society might emerge from the post-literate ruins? If it was a world in which reading, writing and memory itself were outlawed, how might you reconstruct fragments of the past in your mind? And, more to the point, how might you combine a dystopian novella based on these questions with the work of 20 different graphic artists to form a coherent exhibition?
This is the challenge attempted by the latest product of the V&A's contemporary programme, which opens in the museum's Porter gallery today. Part novel, part exhibition of contemporary illustration (and part Sky Arts funded experiment), Memory Palace is an ambitious attempt to create a new "experiential reading format for a story".
"How far can you push the format and still call something a book?" ask the curators. The answer is: maybe not as far as they had hoped.
Drifting around the exhibition, between snippets of gnomic wall-text, intricate illustrations and elaborate room-sized props, visitors begin to piece together a post-apocalyptic world, as dreamed up by novelist Hari Kunzru. A master of crafting speculative scenarios that play on our current anxieties – classified, by those who insist on genres, as translit – Kunzru's vision is set several generations after the Magnetization, when all record of culture has been lost and the natural world is reclaiming the ruins of the old city.
Positioned somewhere between Taliban primitivism and George Monbiot's feral utopia, this quasi-medieval society is ruled over by a warrior elite, named the Thing, who believe all civilisation is sinful and are eager to return mankind to a state of unity with nature. The story recounts the disjointed recollections of an imprisoned member of the renegade Memorialists – a tribe trying to revive the ancient "art of memory" – who constructs an imaginary environment of misremembered half-truths on the walls of his cell. It is pieces of this memory palace that form the basis of the exhibition. Confused yet? You will be.
"It's really a story about life after the recession and the financial crisis," says Kunzru, who was commissioned to write a 10,000-word novella, from which the show has been developed. "We are currently thinking a lot about the destruction of the social and economic systems that we've built over the last 50 years, so I wanted to imagine what it might be like to live after a peak of civilisation."
Atmospheric paintings by French illustrator Némo Tral show a ruined London landscape, including the slums of the Limpicks, where cramped shacks are clustered around a rusting Olympic stadium. On the horizon is the shattered carcass of the Shard, now marooned on an island above a sea of drowned towers – the bloated products of the Booming, now submerged. It is particularly satisfying to see the ArcelorMittal Orbit at the centre of a ceremonial bonfire (destroying the "cult of the Red Man") in a quasi-religious diptych by Isabel Greenberg.
Early Christian iconography crops up frequently in the show, reinforcing the cultish nature of Kunzru's tribal society. There is something recalling a delicate Eastern European altarpiece, by graphic novelist Stuart Kolakovic, which depicts the outlawed discoveries of such figures as "Milord Rayleigh, who knew why the sky was blue," and "Lady Ayn Stein, who wrote the laws of relativity." There is also a brilliant reliquary cabinet, made by children's book illustrator Jim Kay, that celebrates The Law of Milord Darwing, featuring forbidden fragments of the Origin of the Species – Darwin amusingly misinterpreted by Kunzru's rulers as a malicious breeder of GM plants and animals.
As the son of a doctor, Kunzru was also keen to highlight the present destruction of the NHS: "Once there were great palaces called hospitals," reads a line of rusted letters on the wall. "The doctors performed great feats of surgery and roamed the cities, looking for the sick. It was a time of great wonder." Illustration collective Le Gun has produced the accompanying prop – a striking black-and-white carriage, built like a giant three-dimensional pen and ink sketch. Ridden by a gurning shaman and drawn by mangy foxes, it contains a wunderkammer of strange medicaments. It is how our protagonist imagines an ambulance might have looked, distorted by Kunzru's narrative of Chinese whispers.
The artists on show, selected by curators Laurie Britton Newell and Ligaya Salazar, have an eclectic range of work, from bold sculptural one-liners to dense storyboards of particular passages from the book. Dutch advertising doyen, Erik Kessels, has piled up a great stack of newspapers and flyers into a temple-like structure in one corner. "In the time before the Withering, there was a religious practice called Recycling," reads the text. "It was a ceremony to celebrate the cycle of life and the turning of the seasons … Men and women would chant: I am not a plastic bag."
Nearby, experimental Israeli typographer Oded Ezer has made eight short films that interpret some other playful definitions in the story. Screens show him eating and setting fire to individual letters, and mistranslating words using Google Translate – a technique Kunzru himself has used in previous work.
Memory Palace is the first graphic arts exhibition at the V&A for more than 10 years, and this has clearly been the anxiety at the forefront of the curators' minds: they have tried to cram in as much as possible, making sure every base of the discipline is covered. The effect is that it all looks a bit like a degree show or trade exhibition, with each artist selling their esoteric wares in individual booths – framed in a series of niches and windows by exhibition designer CJ Lim.
"Graphics and illustration are really hard to exhibit," admits Newell, "but we wanted to make the commissioning an organic process and give the artists free rein."
The result is a vibrant feast of visual techniques, but one that has difficulty hanging together as a coherent experience. But perhaps that is the point: by the end of the show, you're at sea – as bemused and befuddled as the disoriented narrator himself.
• Sky Arts Ignition: Memory Palace runs at the V&A from 18 June to 20 October 2013. Memory Palace by Hari Kunzru is published in June 2013 (V&A Publishing). An accompanying programme featuring the exhibition will be broadcast on Sky Arts 1 HD on 19 June.
