The Oval Window

About

Bringing together six artists, The Oval Window explores fictional, historical and mythical figures, using sculpture, film, painting and print to develop new narratives grounded in embodied, relational experience. 

The Oval Window refers to a membrane that separates the passage between the inner and outer ear, and to a poem by the avant-garde poet JH Prynne, who pieces together a mosaic of voices drawn from diverse sources, from ancient Chinese poetry to the language of computer programming. In the context of the exhibition, the notion of the aural passage and its evocation of interior corporeal space opens questions of memory, inheritance and the politics of the body in relation to the process of devising new narrative forms. 

Each of the artists explore representations of the body- both contemporary and historical- to convey reflections on gender, subjective experience, power and marginalisation. Using storytelling devices, immersive experience and strategies that deconstruct familiar histories, the artists present works that reimagine our relationship with our own physicality and the structures that define our relations with others.