Be Aware of Invisibility

Be Aware of Invisibility considers that which cannot be fully seen or heard yet nonetheless makes itself felt. Moving through a climate of anxiety, observation and quiet menace, the exhibition approaches invisibility as an active and shaping presence - characterising Invisibility as something that lingers, watches, circulates and presses upon perception without ever fully resolving into view.

At Be Aware of Invisibility's core is a sense of dread, not merely as a feeling produced by the uncertainty of what remains indistinct, but a force that operates just beyond the threshold of legibility, generating unease precisely because it cannot be fully located. This 'sense' also draws close to a Kierkegaardian idea of dread in which anxiety jointly emerges from a sense of danger and from the experience of ambiguity, leading to the realms of possibility and personal freedom. Here, dread accumulates around what hovers at the edge of perception, around what acts without declaring itself, and what resists the certainty of direct encounter - making the invisible become a condition of existential and emotional intensity and creative risk.

Be Aware of Invisibility can also be viewed through Vilem Flusser's lens of non-linear concealment and misdirection. Rather than moving from cause to effect, disclosure to understanding, the works suggest dispersed relations, coded systems, interruptions and mediated forms of attention. For us, it's a familiar technological experience of living mediated lives where humans knowingly or unknowingly behave as vectors.

To be visible is no guarantee of clarity, to be invisible is no guarantee of absence. Instead, presence becomes unstable, dispersed and continually negotiated through forces that remain difficult to trace but that can be redolent with potential.

Curated by David Cooper, the exhibition brings together Renata Adela, Simon Bedwell, Paul Benney, Anna Blom, Charlie Boothright, Glenn Brown, Lee Cameron, David Cooper, Aruãn Daneo Lima Santos, Cristiano Di Martino, Amy Marie Gladding, Nicholas Ikin, Bill Jackson, Harry Kincade, Abigail Lane, Lana Locke, Jane Morter, Bhanita Mistry Russell, Jacopo Naccarato, Sian O'Keeffe, Richard Oliver, Emanuele Resce, Philip Robbins, Daniel Ruffles, Rebecca Scott, Estelle Simpson, Sue Skeen, Angus Stewart, Bernado Tirabosco, Mathew Weir, Emma J Withers, Rowe and Williams, and Mark Woods. It is accompanied by the first issue of the art zine PORTAL, on sleep as an active psychological field, published in a limited edition of 25 copies.