A Gallery With No Walls, Only Light
By Priya Nakamura
There is nothing hanging. The room is the work, and it is different depending on where you stand in it.
Shows like this one tend to be remembered for a single room, and the argument about whether the rest earned it starts on the second weekend.
Priya Nakamura, who went twice, once alone and once at capacity, has been close to it from the start.
What changed
Projection, shadow and negative space, and a floor plan that deliberately gives no two visitors the same sightline.
Two of the people who started the project had left by the time it finished, and the handover notes are now part of the studio's standard kit.
Go alone and it is an architecture piece. Go at capacity and it is a portrait of the crowd.
The visitors are the only opaque objects in the room. That is the material.
the artist
How it works
The gallery caps entry at eleven people, because at twelve the shadows start to read as bodies rather than as the piece.
The measure will be whether anything changes afterwards, in the collection or the programme, rather than in the press release.
Peers have been generous in public and more pointed in private, mostly about cost.
They are careful about what they claim. Two of the decisions that look deliberate now were, by their own account, the only option left by the time anyone noticed.
What happens next
Timed entry, eleven at a time, until the end of the season.
