Space Shifters Exhibition at the Hayward Gallery
I have an Art Fund card which allows me to get discounts on certain exhibitions and galleries, on Friday the 16thof November I decided to visit an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery at the Southbank Centre in London.
It is called Spacer Shifters and it brought together installations and sculptures from 20 artists spanning a 50-year period that explore perception and space.
I’ve always been interested in optical illusions and things that skew how you perceive the world around you, so I thought that I would be a really cool exhibition to go too, I was not disappointed.
As you enter the exhibition you are greeted with artist Anish Kapoor’s “non-objects” during the early 1990’s Kapoor became interested in the idea of the invisible, the reflective surfaces of the ‘non – object’(2009) wrap and distort the space around it.
On the wall next to ‘ non-objects’ was Jeppe Hein’s 360 Illusion V, in which Hein places two mirrored panels at right angles to each other; the angles mean that not only does each mirror the surrounding environment, they also reflect the mirrors twin.
There are three bean bags in front that you can sit on and watch as it slowly rotates 360, whether you’re sitting or standing, you see yourselves and the other visitors being suspended in a curious double reflection.
As you walk up the ramp you are invited to go through the work of Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, who had started to include chain link curtains within his own exhibitions in 2013; he does this as a way to influence the way that the viewer moves through the space.
Curtains are often found in domestic settings, we all have them in our home; but particularly in hotter climates they are used to create a semi permeable barrier between indoors and outdoors, between public and private space.
By doing this he invites us to move through the work and be temporally apart of the work, rather than just regard it.
I noticed that this work was very popular, not only because you were forced through the work to get to the next section but I noticed people running their hands along the metal and playing with it. Adults playing with the texture against their skin just like a child does as a baby with touchy feely books and toys.
The next piece of work that you reach after going through the curtain is a large scale installation named ‘ Welten Linie’ (2017) or ‘world line’ – a phrase from theoretical physics that refers to the path an object makes through both space and time.
The artist behind the structure is Alicja Kwade, and her sculptural installations illustrate or attempt to give material form to abstract philosophical questions, addressing the relationship between reality and illusion.
‘Welten Linie’ is a large scale installation that uses double sided mirrors and careful placement of objects, Kwade create the illusion of sudden and surprising material transformations, as we move around and through this steel framed structure, the way we interpret and read the objects within shifts dramatically, depending on our perspective.
‘Welten Linie’ is a large scale installation that uses double sided mirrors and careful placement of objects, Kwade create the illusion of sudden and surprising material transformations, as we move around and through this steel framed structure, the way we interpret and read the objects within shifts dramatically, depending on our perspective.
This piece as I moved through it made you feel like you were in a house of mirrors as you weren’t sure what was a mirror and what wasn’t, you could see every single person attentively walking through, gently stepping through the frames unsure what was there.
My absolute favourite installation of the whole exhibition was Yayoi Kusama’s ‘Narcissus Garden’ (1966-2018) which consists of hundreds of stainless steel reflective orbs.
She first staged this installation as a large scale at the 1966 Venice Biennale, she used to sell the mirrored balls (which used to be plastic) with a sign that read ‘Your Narcissism for Sale’.
As they are all mirrored and close together they create this sea of silver and almost glittery with the lights of the exhibition space, it also made for a great photography opportunity.
Aesthetically it is extremely pleasing and I could have spent hours in it, I wanted to play around with the balls and some lights to see what effects I could create.
I really enjoyed this exhibition would definitely go back and highly recommend it to anyone.
