A SPATIAL EXPERIMENT

A Spatial Experiment is a curatorial project by the artist and performer Henry Tan. Engaging with recent trends and critical debate in participatory art and social practice, Tan has invited a variety of designers, writers, musicians and other practitioners to create works in the elegant but demanding environment of H Project Space.

A Spatial Experiment faces questions of the universal significance of artistic practices. Tan is interested in the erosion of individual beliefs and understandings as a consequence of contemporary technologies of transnational communication. How can or do individuals make specific sense of artistic practices in an era of endlessly circulated memes and ever-shifting boundaries and cultural contexts?

Every generation of artists provokes new ways of thinking about the most popular question asked of art: what’s this got to do with me? A Spatial Experiment explores how ‘life’ and ‘aesthetics’ are not separate domains of experience, inquiring into where an artists’ vision ends and audience engagement begins. The installation is immersive and multi-faceted with no easily determined outcomes.

Simultaneously a director and facilitator, Tan highlights tensions between the directed or controlled and the happenstance and revelatory. And perhaps most notably A Spatial Experiment stages such tensions physically rather than the virtually, retrieving the authenticity of experience from more pervasive and conventional forms of interface.