We are not in the world; we become with the world; we become by contemplating it. Everything is vision, becoming. We become universes. Becoming animal, plant, molecular, becoming zero. This is true of all the arts. [...] Art does not have opinions. Art undoes the triple organisation of perceptions, affections, and opinions in order to substitute a monument composed of percepts, affects, and blocs of sensations that takes the place of language. It is about listening [...] This is precisely the task of all art.
Deleuze and Guattari “Philosophy, Science, Logic and Art” in What is Philosophy?,
(New York: Columbia University Press), pp. 170 / 177
“Continuum_the perception zone” is an exhibition which deals with the perception and development of spatiality, and how the visitor interacts with architectural surroundings. The three-dimensionality of an exhibition hall is the parameter upon which the visitor relies without thinking but this exhibiton centralizes it and reconsiders preconceived notions “Continuum_the perception zone” focuses on the idea of the active production of space, and considers how this is created as well as how one can make use of it. The exhibition explores the possibilities of physicality in art and how art becomes the mediator. It aims to create an architectonic context which allows the viewer to be incorporated into a system comprised of spatial coordinates.
“Continuum_the perception zone” suggests space as a scale.
It is the continuum where space is constituted differently – that is, the spatial perception which typically allows the viewer to experience his surroundings and, as a consequence, control them, is now shifted and the familiar frame of references becomes distorted.
The idea of transformation – while it is central to this exhibition – is neither pre-determined nor one-directional. It is an inhabited process in which the artwork, the viewer and the space are fully involved. Rather than merely occupying its exhibition space, the artwork inhabits its spatial logic; each work engages the space in which it is located and establishes the transition to the next one. Each work tests how physical displacement enables dislocation, and therefore, the production of another space. Once the notion of space is accepted as an active process of spatialization, space itself can then can be utilized in new and radical ways. In the context of this exhibition, the nature of this transformation is not dramatic. It is simply the recognition of oneself within a shared experience, and a discernment that what is being presented is an event.
“Continuum_the perception zone” sees the visitor as the ‘user’ rather than the ‘viewer’ of the artwork. He has the role of subject and co-producer, while the artworks’ purpose is to communicate and to connect. Through this set of experiences, curator Maria Arusoo aims to create a dynamic exhibition that is no longer understood in the binary terms of object-subject relations, but is disseminated in terms of environment. Space becomes not only visible and tactile, but also responsive to human action, It becomes contingent and inseparable from the material substance of the moving bodies that inhabit and generate it.
By altering atmospheric conditions, the immaterial is materialised, the invisible becomes visible, what was absent becomes present. Space itself is rendered, not only visible, but palpable and substantive.