Stealing the Senses

Stealing the Senses presents work by sixteen artists whose practices offer sensory and immersive encounters and propose new avenues to our phenomenological experience of the world.

The majority of the works are commissioned site-specific projects and collectively form a passage of immersive environments in various and extended reaches of the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, literally echoing down the emergency escape, piercing the ceiling, consuming the café, spilling out onto the street, through corridors and into the sky at dusk.

The works address thematic concerns and issues spanning from the psychology of incarceration to cosmology, from the sensual usefulness of domestic-scaled functional objects to integrated systems of artificial life. What is shared in the works is a concern for activation or interaction through human sensory perception.
Through stealing our senses for a dedicated time, in a dedicated place and space, the artists focus our attention on ideas about the forces, gestures, stories, textures and sensibilities that inform contemporary living.

Included are Brook Andrew’s room-sized participatory inflatable The Cell; a participatory accumulative project, Passage, by Isabel and Alfredo Aquilizan; Almost Always Everywhere Apparent, a sound environment by Sonia Leber and David Chesworth; a pseudo-domestic environment by jeweller Karl Fritsch, furniture designer Martino Gamper and sculptor Francis Upritchard who have been working collaboratively in Taranaki for three months; a site-specific project, The Golden Grain, by Sara Hughes that consumes all surfaces of the Cafe Govett-Brewster in graphic representations of current economic shifts; eden, a self-generating eco-system by Jon McCormack; architectural interventions from the permanent Govett-Brewster collection by Callum Morton and by Anton Parsons; a Breast Stupa Cookery performance by Pinaree Sanpitak working with bakers from the Parihaka Maori community; Einstein was a Buddhist, a project of participation and devotion by Tiffany Singh; a sculptural disruption by John Ward Knox; and Three more hours, a projected animation on smoke by Jennifer Wen Ma.

Event listed by Kelly Loney

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