Anne Hardy. Sensory Spaces 13

Sensory Spaces 13 - Anne Hardy
10.02.2018 - 27.05.2018

British artist Anne Hardy will present a new site-specific work at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, as part of the Sensory Spaces series. Hardy is known for her large-scale installations in which objects, light, color and sound seem to take on a life of their own. She invites visitors to enter this "sentient space" and to experience how the work slowly changes around them. Things can appear concrete and familiar but everything feels slightly unreal.

A bright green room, followed by a bright pink room with rotating electric fans, curtains of video tape, flattened beer cans, concrete blocks, balls, twigs and a sloping wall; the staged, imaginary environments Anne Hardy creates, address visitors in a very direct manner. Referred to as "FIELD" works, they are partly architectural, partly organic and their carefully created audio scores and lighting fluctuate and change over time.

Visitors are literally immersed in the artwork, which speaks to all their senses. This begins at the moment visitors enter these "walk-in" works and are asked to remove their shoes. Hardy encourages visitors towards a sensitive experience of the work and hopes that visitors will be receptive to new experiences.

"The tactile engagement with material, light and process is at the core of my practice, and I want the work to have an active presence that changes around you." –Anne Hardy

Many of the materials, objects and sounds for her FIELD works, Hardy finds on the street: things that have been discarded and have lost their original function. They have become essentially "ambiguous" in the sense that they have the possibility of containing two or more ideas simultaneously. Hardy thinks in the same way about space; places can be both strange and familiar, floating between the real and the imaginary. It is precisely this ambiguity that Hardy captures in her "FIELDS." They have something magical—something you have to experience but which is also hard to put into words. In Hardy’s own words: "they make us aware of ‘the slippery nature of our perception of the world.'"

For Sensory Spaces 13, Anne Hardy will create a new "FIELD’" work. Sensory Spaces is a series of commissioned solo projects, presented in the exhibition space in the entrance hall of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. Artists are invited to respond to the architectural qualities of the space, emphasizing notions of transformation and surprise. The new work of Anne Hardy, will be the 13th episode in the Sensory Spaces series.

Anne Hardy is represented by Maureen Paley, London. Guest curator of the exhibition at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen is Nina Folkersma.