Documentary film by Natanya Mark about CONGEE at BEHOLD
Exhibition Text:
BEHOLD (A Show About Touch)
curated by Sasha Galitzine
Open Daily: 11-6pm
23 February 2023 - 16 March 2023
Hypha Studios, 56-60 Conduit Street
BEHOLD is an innovative exhibition that draws attention to touch – providing unusual and playful ways of experiencing artworks and reaching beyond the visual to activate our other senses. We wonder if you share our feeling that exhibitions are sometimes a bit distant from your body, closed off, as though in a musty cupboard… BEHOLD counters all that by seeking to address the pleasures and problems of our physical interaction with others and the world. The exhibition is an attempt to engage with the raw actuality of things. Artworks have been chosen and presented with a focus on the sensorial and haptic, on presence and experience. A series of touch-sensitive workshops will run as part of the show. Visitors are invited to become participants in the show, encouraged to behold artworks through a collaborative multi-sensory tour designed by artists, writers and academics, who are either blind, visually impaired or sighted. BEHOLD seeks to help reframe access to art by disrupting the hierarchies of perception and art education, by providing unusual and playful ways of experiencing artworks – beyond the visual and with the effect of heightening our other senses.
“How many artworks have held your attention, spoken to you or touched you?”
“How many dust particles are still attached to the sole of your shoes that weren’t there when you entered the space?”
“Do you feel slightly too warm in the clothes that you’re wearing?”
“What are you going to hear once you’ve stepped back onto the pavement?”
BEHOLD seeks to reach anyone who has felt excluded from the arts, existing as an evolving and live inquiry into how we can experience art. A show that will listen and respond to you over the course of the exhibition.
*The origin of the word ‘exhibition’ actually means ‘to hold’ rather than to show.
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS:
Conor Ackhurst, Kai Althoff, Jorella Andrews, Louise Ashcroft, Amelia Barratt, Gareth Cadwallader, Nicole Clif, Mosquito Farm, Keith Farquhar, Allegra Fitzherbert, Kira Freije, Andy Holden, Alastair Kwan, Graham Little, Sara Marinangeli, Rebecca Moss, Paul Noble, Nicholas Pope, Hans Rosenström, Hermione Spriggs, Georgina Starr, Jack Warne, Richard Wentworth.
Curated by Sasha Galitzine with Graham Little with multi-sensory mediation in collaboration with Harshadha Balasubramanian, Joe Rizzo Naudi, Genevieve Reeves, Ben Street & Kyle Berlin.
