From Seeing to Acting

september 15 - October 3, 2021
Looiersgracht 60, Amsterdam

The exhibition invites us to (re)consider the mutual relationships between seeing and acting. How are the seer, the seen and the act of seeing entangled? How can art contribute to perceiving the world in a reciprocal way, recognizing the agency of the more-than-human? In what way can art cultivate an attitude of receptivity and being-with the world?

From Seeing to Acting presents thirteen artists working with photography, video, sculpture, installation, drawing, and smell. The selected artworks generate various modes of ‘participatory perception’ and stimulate us to experience seeing as animation: a movement enacted by the perceiving body and the brain in concert with the environment (which perceives us too). The exhibition heightens awareness about the ambiguous relationships
between the distance of seeing and the intimacy of touching, smelling and hearing. Seeing and acting are reciprocal, happen simultaneously and evolve in multiple dimensions, involving all the senses in acts of synesthesia.

From Seeing to Acting is a sequel to Radical Reversibility’s previous exhibition at Looiersgracht 60, called Seeing Without a Seer (2018), where the emphasis lay on alternatives to the linear perspective inherent in mainstream visual culture.

Participating artists:
Terike Haapoja (FI), Mustapha Azeroual (FR/MA), Yoichi Kamimura (JP), Sema Bekirovic (NL), Spiros Hadjidjanos (GR), Nicolas Sassoon & Rick Silva (FR/CA/US), Gwenneth Boelens (NL), Peter Bogers (NL), George Shiras III (re-interpreted by RR), Murat Yıldız (TR), Frank Bloem (NL), and new works made especially for the occasion by RR members Hiryczuk/Van Oevelen (FR/NL) and Martine Stig (NL).