Behold

BEHOLD is an innovative exhibition that draws attention to touch – providing unusual and playful ways of experiencing artworks and reaching beyond the visual to activate our other senses. We wonder if you share our feeling that exhibitions are sometimes a bit distant from your body, closed off, as though in a musty cupboard… BEHOLD counters all that by seeking to address the pleasures and problems of our physical interaction with others and the world. The exhibition is an attempt to engage with the raw actuality of things. Artworks have been chosen and presented with a focus on the sensorial and haptic, on presence and experience. A series of touch-sensitive workshops will run as part of the show. Visitors are invited to become participants in the show, encouraged to behold artworks through a collaborative multi-sensory tour designed by artists, writers and academics, who are either blind, visually impaired or sighted. BEHOLD seeks to help reframe access to art by disrupting the hierarchies of perception and art education, by providing unusual and playful ways of experiencing artworks – beyond the visual and with the effect of heightening our other senses.

“How many artworks have held your attention, spoken to you or touched you?”

“How many dust particles are still attached to the sole of your shoes that weren’t there when you entered the space?”

“Do you feel slightly too warm in the clothes that you’re wearing?”

“What are you going to hear once you’ve stepped back onto the pavement?”

BEHOLD seeks to reach anyone who has felt excluded from the arts, existing as an evolving and live inquiry into how we can experience art. A show that will listen and respond to you over the course of the exhibition.

*The origin of the word ‘exhibition’ actually means ‘to hold’ rather than to show.

Curated by Sasha Galitzine with Graham Little with multi-sensory mediation in collaboration with Harshadha Balasubramanian, Joe Rizzo Naudi, Genevieve Reeves, Ben Street & Kyle Berlin.

The exhibition is made possible by Hypha Studios and kind support from Regents Street W1 and The Crown Estate. Supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England. With thanks to the generous support of Charles Asprey, the Alexander Pigott Wernher Memorial Trust and Lockton Companies LLP, Fine Art Insurance brokers and thanks to Dima’s Vodka, a Ukrainian vodka producer.

Selected by

Eliza Bonham Carter (pictured), Curator and Director of the RA Schools, and Mark Davy, CEO of Futurecity

Eliza Bonham Carter has been a noteworthy contributor to arts education for over twenty years. From her early days as a senior lecturer in Fine Art at DeMontfort University in 1993 and Head of Fine Art at the University of Reading in 2003, to her current position as Curator and Director of the Royal Academy Schools, since 2006. Graduating in Fine Art from the Royal College of Art, Eliza exhibited widely and has work in both private and public collections. Eliza is Vice Chair of Camden Art Centre and recently stepped down from the Council of the British School at Rome where she was also previously a member of the Faculty of Fine Art.

Mark Davy is a former fine artist who studied at Canterbury College of Art and the Architectural Association. His last exhibition at the RIBA London in 2000 gave its name to Futurecity, set up in 2007 to reflect the growing interest in placemaking and regeneration. He has used the agency to provide a platform that promotes the use of arts and culture, community and wellbeing as a guiding narrative for the development and regeneration of our towns, cities, and urban centres. His work has led to major new funding for the arts in the UK and abroad, and Futurecity has been involved in over 250 cultural projects globally, placing artists in partnership with other disciplines including engineers, landscape architects, developers, and architects.