JEPPE HEIN
SPACE SHIFTERS

HAYWARD GALLERY, LONDON, UK
26 SEPTEMBER 2018 – 6 JANUARY 2019

In Autumn 2018, Hayward Gallery presents Shifting Spaces, a major new thematic exhibition that includes site-specific installations and new commissions in the tradition of Light Show and Psycho-Buildings. The exhibition features over twenty leading international artists who work at the intersection of perception, sculptural space, and architecture. Beginning with the pioneering use of radical sculptural materials in the 1960s – often minimal in nature or concerned with transparency and reflection – the exhibition explores the ways in which the viewer’s perception of space is actively engaged. The development of this formal precision and interest in spatial experience is then traced through artworks to the present day, and includes installation art and architectural interventions.

Like the aesthetic equivalent of sensory experiments, the artworks use both sight and sound to re-orient the viewers’ perception of their surroundings, often eliciting surprising physiological and psychological responses. Shifting Spaces will explore the ‘event of viewing’ – the way that our seeing continuously unfolds in relation to the changing world around us and transforms over time. Additionally, many of the installations and new commissions will respond directly to the Hayward Gallery’s distinctive brutalist architecture. As a series of responses to the sculptural nature of the building, Shifting Spaces will be a dramatic and fitting conclusion to the Hayward’s re-opening and 50th Anniversary year.