Home Exhibitions Sensory Spaces 13 - Anne Hardy

up to and including 27 May 2018

Sensory Spaces 13 - Anne Hardy

Sensory Spaces is a series of commissioned solo projects presented in the Willem van der Vorm Gallery, located in the freely accessible exhibition space in the mu-seum’s entrance hall. Artists are invited to respond to the architectural qualities of the space, emphasizing notions of transformation and surprise.

For the thirteenth edition of the Sensory Spaces series the British artist Anne Hardy will present a new site-specific FIELD work. Anne Hardy makes 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.

Anne Hardy initially gained recognition for her photographs of staged spaces: spaces she built in her studio, photographed and then demolished. The resulting photographs depict complex, imaginary environments that suggest that something has taken place, though exactly what is unclear. Since 2013 she has presented the physical installations themselves under the term ‘FIELD’ works. This shift in presentation stems from her desire to remove the barrier between the work and the viewer that was inherent in the photographs. In the FIELD works, visitors are immersed in the artwork, which speaks to all their senses. This begins 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. For Sensory Spaces 13, Anne Hardy will create a new ‘FIELD’ work.

Take, for example, the installation 'Falling and Walking (phhhhhhhhhhh phossshhhhh crrhhhhzzz mn huaooogh)', which Hardy made for London Art Night 2017. Visitors stepped through a hole in a billboard to arrive in 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 with a circular opening affording a glimpse of the next space.

Hardy refers to her works as ‘sentient places’. They are partly architectural, partly organic and their carefully created audio scores and lighting fluctuate and change over time. ‘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.'

‘The tactile engagement with material, light and process is at the core of my practice, and I want the work to have a sense that it is an active presence that changes around you.'

Anne Hardy.

© Anne Hardy, courtesy Maureen Paley, London, photo: Angus Mill

Hardy finds many of the materials, objects and sounds for her FIELD works on the street: things that have been discarded and have lost their original function. Hardy believes they are therefore in some way free of language and order and suitable for new uses and meanings. 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 and has an inventory of places that also have this feeling: street corners, or a piece of land between two roads, or an empty corridor. They are places that are 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’.

Hannah Duguid wrote about Anne Hardy's work in The Independent: "Hardy achieves a degree of magic with her installation, which is very difficult to do. Plenty of solipsistic installation artists out there tediously fling objects together with results that never quite work. Hardy’s installations possess a complexity and pleasure that put her in a class of her own."

Biography Anne Hardy

Anne Hardy (1970, England) lives and works in London, where she studied at the Royal College of Art. Her work has been exhibited internationally, with recent solo exhibitions at The Common Guild, Glasgow (2015), fig-2 at ICA Studio, London (2015), Kunstverein Freiburg (2014), Maureen Paley (2013), Secession Vienna (2012) and group exhibitions at the Hayward Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum and Barbican Art Gallery in London.

In 2014 she created a new performance during a residency as part of Modern Art Oxford’s Live in the Studio series, and in 2011 she was artist in residence at Camden Arts Centre in London. Anne Hardy is represented by Maureen Paley, London.

Guest curator: Nina Folkersma

Essay Sensory Spaces 13 - Anne Hardy

Each exhibition will be accompanied by a bilingual booklet with an essay by the curator:

Essay Sensory Spaces 13 Download pdf

Sensory Spaces Series

Sensory Spaces is a series of commissioned solo projects presented in the Willem van der Vorm Gallery, located in the freely accessible exhibition space in the museum’s entrance hall. Artists are invited to respond to the architectural qualities of the space, emphasizing notions of transformation and surprise.

Sensory Spaces 1 - Oscar Tuazon

American artist Oscar Tuzaon has kicked off this new series. In this open space Tuazon has arranged several sculptural constructions. The artist fuses architectural and...

Sensory Spaces 2 - Sabine Hornig

Sabine Hornig (Germany, lives in Berlin) is known for making photographs, sculptures and installations that distort or intensify our experience of space and time. At first glance, her work can appear deceptively simple, but...

Sensory Spaces 3 - Elad Lassry

Elad Lassry focuses on the workings of the photographic image, both on a two-dimensional plane and in three-dimensional space. ‘Pictures,’ says Lassry, ‘are so very like what we see, and so very unlike what we see.’ He strips...

Sensory Spaces 4 - Liu Wei

Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen asked Liu Wei (Beijing, 1972) to make a site-specific for the forth edition of Sensory Spaces. Liu Wei’s work deals with China’s rapid modernization and urban growth. Literally using the materials a city is made of, he takes...

Sensory Spaces 5 - Siobhán Hapaska

The fifth site-specific installation is made by Siobhán Hapaska. Siobhán Hapaska (Belfast, 1963) makes installations that speak to all the senses. She uses organic and synthetic materials and works on the border between...

Sensory Spaces 6 - Sara VanDerBeek

For the sixth edition of the series Sensory Spaces Sara VanDerBeek (Baltimore 1976) walked around Rotterdam for several days; she photographed what she saw and built an archive of images. From this experience, she has created a modular installation...

Sensory Spaces 7 - Aleksandra Domanović

For the seventh edition Aleksandra Domanović (Novi Sad, Yugoslavia 1981) has made an installation that examines themes such as reproduction and representation and man and machine. In the Willem van der Vorm Gallery a cluster of semi-transparent foils printed with images that include...

Sensory Spaces 8 - Mike Nelson

Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen invited the British artist Mike Nelson (Loughborough 1967) to produce a work for Sensory Spaces 8. Nelson presented ‘Amnesiac Shrine’, an installation made up of a set of successive artworks that combine to form an...

Sensory Spaces 9 - Beni Bischof

Beni Bischof is the ultimate mix and matcher: in all his work he combines and adapts existing images, texts and situations. His work can be read as an ironic commentary on the banality of everyday life. And he doesn’t...

Sensory Spaces 10 - Olaf Nicolai

For the tenth edition of the ongoing series Sensory Spaces, Nicolai presented a site-specific adaptation of the works ‘Probestück 1, 2 and 3’. Following the Greek composer Iannis Xenakis’ (1922-2001) definition of architecture as ‘petrified music’, it investigates...

Sensory Spaces 11 - Raphael Hefti

Hefti's work is experimental, it untilizes chemical and technical processes with industrial equipment in order to discover new things. His work includes many aspects; nature and industry, abstraction and figuration. Hefti often works with engineers, scientists and even...

Sensory Spaces 12 - Abraham Cruzvillegas

Cruzvillegas builds his sculptures from found materials, a principle he calls ‘autoconstrucción’. His work is an expression of human reality...