Blue was the last colour the eyes of Derek Jarman saw before his death in 1994. A new installation near the heart of London transforms the Fitzrovia Chapel, a beautiful Byzantine-themed chapel built in 1891, into a blue beacon of love, life and joy, remembering the power of one of England’s greatest queer romantic artists.

Middlesex Hospital Blues is an installation by multimedia filmmakers Jane Pollard and Iain Forsyth that combines audio recordings featuring Derek Jarman’s voice into an ethereal symphonic soundscape created by musician Simon Turner Fisher.

Sounds include washing machines, bicycles, indeterminate cries and whispers, and lifelong collaborator Tilda Swinton reciting lines of verse and poetry. Tibetan bells ring and chime from time to time. A sculpture by Jenkin Van Zyl appears and disappears, standing between handrails, transformed into what looks like bed rails with a two-way mirror during the hour-long cycle of evolving blue light and sounds.

Blue, the 1993 film Jarman made before his death, is considered a milestone in the history of abstract cinema and the creator’s final act away from narrative conventions and the commodification of cinema. It was also a lament for the death of everyone from HIV/AIDS who, before the success of medication, wiped out a generation with still so much to offer and give to life.

Blue is also the colour of nurses’ uniforms who attended HIV/AIDS patients on Broderip ward before the Middlesex Hospital was demolished in 2007, save for the protected chapel. Princess Diana also wore a blue dress to the ward when she visited in 1987. It is sublime that Blue is also the light that bathes this beautiful evocation, remembering the life of provocateur Derek Jarman.