Group curated exhibition with Seth Price, Matthew Darbyshire, Alexander Heim, Jim Lambie, Elad Lassry, Mark Leckey, Hannah Perry, Damien Roach, Daniel Silver, Jack Strange

In a world full of clutter it is difficult to notice things for more than a moment. A Sense of Things focuses on how objects exert their calling on us. In the context of an exhibition, artworks refuse to be passive recipients of our gaze.

A Sense of Things presents a group of works that display interrelated and converging approaches to this calling. The works of Hannah Perry, Oliver Laric, and Jamie Bracken Lobb react to a world already full of objects by recycling and remixing pre-existing materials to generate new meanings. Conversely, other artists such as Lei Xue, Daniel Silver and David Buckley use traditional materials and means of production to re-examine everyday objects and forms. Some of the artists such as Jim Lambie, Tonico Lemos Auad, Adriano Amaral and Andrea Zucchini also try to develop an intimacy with the materiality of the objects through craftsmanship and renewed attention to their materials.

A Sense of Things exhibited works by Tonico Lemos Auad, Matthew Darbyshire, Sean Edwards, Neil Gall, Alexander Heim, Jim Lambie, Oliver Laric, Elad Lassry, Mark Leckey, Roxy Paine, Hannah Perry, Seth Price, Damian Roach, Daniel Silver, Matthew Smith, Jack Strange, John Summers and Lei Xue from the Zabludowicz Collection, as well as Adriano Amaral, Jamie Bracken Lobb, David Buckley, Rob Chavasse, Frances Malthouse, John Henry Newton, Viktor Timofeev, Leonardo Ulian and Andrea Zucchini who were invited to be a part of the exhibition by a selection of the curators.

As part of the sixth annual Testing Ground for Art and Education season at Zabludowicz Collection, A Sense of Things is a curatorial collaboration between students on the MFA Curating courses at Goldsmiths College, and this year, for the first time, The Cass, London Metropolitan University. A Sense of Things is collectively curated by Amy E. Brown, Rebecca Edwards, Antonio Garcia Acosta, Leana Lovell Gardner, Adrienne Groen, Aaron Juneau, Hanna Laura Kaljo, Miriam La Rosa, Marina Maksimova, Barnie Page, Emma Siemens-Adolphe, Rosie Snaith, Thomas Stokmans.

The exhibition aimed to investigate the way in which we view objects today; how our attention has shifted rendering objects are seemingly lifeless, unable to communicate through our over-consumption and their commodative mass production. An overwhelming abundance of ‘stuff’, whether collected unconsciously or with a knowing effort, infiltrates until discerning from one thing to another becomes an overwhelming lapse of judgement.

The artists in A Sense of Things have, in one way or another, reacted to the way in which objects have become passive rather than active participants of our gaze. This takes the form in three strands of methodology; artists such as Lei Xue, Daniel Silver and David Buckley intertwined traditional modes of making with current objects in order to re-examine the forms of everyday objects; Tonico Lemos Auad, Adriano Amaral and Jim Lambie took the approach of developing a certain intimacy with their medium through a renewed attention to detail and material, reappropriating the recognisable into the unknown; conversely, Hannah Perry, Sean Edwards and Jamie Bracken Lobb responded to the overpopulation of objects by means of recycling and manipulating already existing objects.

In conjunction with A Sense of Things, a series events was designed to reactivate the works and generate a wider context of meaning relating to the conceptual elements in the exhibition. These included live performances by Miriam Austin, Anna Vauhkonen and Victor Ivanov and an artist film screening including works by Rosie Carr, Dominic Watson and Alice Gale-Feeny incorporating notions of mass media production, pop culture, re-appropriation, and the fetishisation of consumer objects.