Double Indemnity @ Cornerhouse, Manchester, 14 Sep-5 Jan

When Phyllis (Barbara Stanwyck) comes into your life, everything changes. Don’t believe us? Then see for yourself at Cornerhouse’s autumn exhibition, Double Indemnity, named after that little ol’ Billy Wilder noir of the same name. You might walk into that Oxford Road arts joint as plain old you, but you’ll walk out with dollar signs in your eyes and that dame’s scent dancing in your nostrils. That’s what happened to Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray), the sap who goes gaga for Phyllis and her anklet in Wilder’s film.

“Desire is a central question in this exhibition,” says Michael Connor, the fella responsible for curating Cornerhouse's film noirarama, speaking to us from the Big Apple. “It’s a really complicated thing to think about” – no kidding, Connor, we’ve seen Phyllis’s anklet – “but that’s really what a lot of the work in the show is examining.”

Connor called in some favours: the exhibition features work from high-profile artists including Sophie Calle, Jenny Holzer, and Frances Stark. He’s also roped Ming Wong and Anicka Yi into his scheme, and commissioned them to create new works.

“What’s great about [Ming Wong] is that he’s such an amazing film nerd,” Connor says. “He knows everything.” Wong is particularly interested in Stanwyck. He argues she’s a dame who just won’t quit, an archetype who persists through time, cropping up in the 70s in Chinatown and in the 90s in Chungking Express. Wong has responded to Connor’s brief by cooking up After Chinatown, a twisty video installation where he himself gets decked out in Stanwyck’s femme fatale get-up. You know the look: trenchcoat, platinum locks and sunglasses as black as her heart.

“That wig and sunglasses look for Stanwyck is a kind of symbol of her bad taste,” says Connor, “and so he was interested in that direction, of her as an object of desire while at the same time quite crass.” Wong transports this character across the globe, into different settings, specifically bringing in questions of race in film noir: “Chinatown has a higher racial dimension [than Double Indemnity] and then Chungking Express transposes the noir to an Asian context, so there’s a cultural translation going on and [Wong is] interested in making that visible.”

And what about this Anicka Yi dame? What’s her angle? “I wanted her to make a perfume for Stanwyck,” Connor explains. “There’s something in the film that I wanted to be in the exhibition, which is about the consumer world in which Double Indemnity operates.” 

Which begs the question: what does Barbara Stanwyck smell like?

“She’s cold and metallic,” says Yi, “very menthol. I wanted the sent to be alienating – not warming. But I also wanted it to smell desirable. There are elements of sperm, a little bit of bourbon, and, of course, something that would smell like car headlights in the dark.”