PART 2:
TACTILE
VISIONS

THE
HAPTIC
EYE

30 OCT - 30 JAN

The Haptic Eye: Part 2 “Tactile Visions” focuses on the nature of optical stimulation, which is to say how color and the sensate qualities of various materials can generate a retinal charge, and have the capacity to enervate extended sensory experiences.

Whereas The Haptic Eye: Part 1 “Eyes of the Skin” focused on materials and objects that might relate in some way to the body, “Tactile Visions” chooses to express wider sensory experiences of eye and mind, ocular capacities that are broadened through extended sensory perception, where visual experience as the effect can often lead to and provoke an intuitive sense of immanent affect. As with “Eyes of the Skin” in “Tactile Visions” the emphasis continues to stress haptic qualities such as malleable and pliable presence, but at the same time they are inflected towards ocular-feelings of touch as a sensory abstraction—experiences that might well be called an expansion of the empathetic gaze

An emphasis is placed on the variability of image and viewing subjectivity of contents, bringing together image materials and cultural sources and histories that might not otherwise commonly be brought into immediate juxtaposition. The interaction between the ethnic variables is made to increase awareness of each works’ capacities to create a different haptic sense in the viewer. The pictorial causality of effect may vary from the purely coloristic to specific details that suggest other intellectual invocations.

“…Imagination is always seen to be the faculty of forming images. But it is rather the faculty of deforming the images offered by perception, of freeing ourselves from the immediate images: it is especially the faculty of changing images. If there is not a changing of images, an unexpected union of images, there is no imagination, no imaginative action.”

Gaston Bachelard
Air and Dreams: An Essay on Imagination and Movement, 2002

Artists:

Zofia Butrymowicz

Natasha Yudina

Susan Hefuna

Margret Eicher

Emo de Medeiros

Jolanta Owidzka

Lizette Chirrime

Magda Skupinska

Charles Chamot

Curated by

Mark Gisbourne

ZOFIA BUTRYMOWICZ

EUR 30,000 + VAT

EUR 19,000 + VAT

EUR 6,000 + VAT

EUR 13,000 + VAT

EUR 18,000 + VAT

SUSAN HEFUNA

EUR 18,000 + VAT

EUR 18,000 + VAT

EUR 30,000 + VAT

EUR 30,000 + VAT

EUR 25,000 + VAT

EUR 7,000 + VAT

EUR 20,000 + VAT

EUR 7,500 + VAT

EUR 10,100 + VAT

EUR 7,200 + VAT

EUR 12,000 + VAT

PART 1: THE EYES
OF THE SKIN

THE
HAPTIC
EYE

18 SEP - 30 DEC

The Haptic Eye is conceived as a series of online exhibitions of soft sculpture, objects, and variable materials that focus upon visual assimilations in the context of a multisensory and expanded field of artistic production. In the current post-quarantine context of social distancing and physical separation, it seems imperative to focus anew on those sensory experiences that have been diminished in the immediate pandemic situation. While the exhibition is online and optically directed, attempts have been made to generate, what Gaston Bachelard referred to “polyphony of the senses,” to acknowledge that visual aesthetic experiences come from the fact that the eye collaborates with the body and the other senses in a state of continuous interaction.

The Haptic Eye exhibitions take on a particular orientation shaped by visual sensory experiences, subtlety shifting the emphasis encompassed by the metaphor of haptic vision. Hence they will focus on immediate sensory qualities that are common to the various works presented. Each presentation will shift the emphasis around ideas of malleability, soft materials configured, or uniquely manipulated into given shapes without the effects of rupture breaking or cracking. Also pliability, the use of materials that are flexible, easily bent, elastic, and often open to a variable presentation. The works may be foldable, stackable, or accumulative in presentation, have transportability, and they are easily conveyed from location to installation.

THE HAPTIC EYE PART 1: “The Eyes of the Skin”

The first exhibition puts the emphasis on touch and the body, soft sculpture works, or objects that have a sense of palpable tactility. Unlike soft sculpture in the expanded field as determined by late modernism in the seventies and eighties, in this instance the focus is placed on the phenomenal qualities of the works, evoking body-based ideas of the pelt, mantle, habitat, and in consequence, the increased capacities of sensory awareness are brought about by the innovative materials used by the artist.

Artists:

Shaarbek Amankul

Birgit Dieker

Sheila Hicks

Ritzi & Peter Jacobi

Marie Claire Messouma Manlanbien

Aiko Tezuka

Günter Weseler

Magda (Vitalyos) Ziman