I’d rather people feel a film before understanding it. I’d rather feelings arise before intellect.

-Robert Bresson

There’s a frosted stillness that can settle over exhibitions when we treat them like essays with walls – a linear argument, a clean statement, a tidy takeaway. It’s not that thinking is the enemy; it’s that thought can become a defence mechanism. In her much-cited 1964 essay Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag asks for something more destabilising, and more intimate: “What is important now is to recover our senses….We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more.” And crucially, she warns against a critic’s hunger to extract maximum “content,” suggesting instead that we “cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.”

That “cutting back” could be mistaken for minimalism. But in the most compelling exhibitions today, it can look like the opposite: not less experience, but less over-determination. The withdrawal is conceptual, not sensorial. The work stops arriving pre-captioned and returns as an encounter – something you meet with your body before you meet it with your vocabulary.

Dreams are a useful analogy here, because their force doesn’t come from explanation, it comes from contact.

A dream doesn’t ask you to interpret it in real time – it happens to you as atmosphere, rhythm, pressure, dread, and tenderness. And while we tend to talk about dreams as “images,” research on dream reports suggests they’re often multi-sensory: vision is most common, but sound and touch recur too, while smell and taste are comparatively rare. In other words, the dream’s power isn’t that vision disappears – it’s that vision is no longer the sovereign sense. It’s folded into a fuller, embodied logic.

This is where the author and activist bell hooks becomes essential, because she takes participation seriously – not as interactivity for its own sake, but as meaning emerging through shared, embodied contact. Writing in 1994 on Félix González-Torres, hooks calls his practice an “aesthetics of loss”: intimacy inseparable from encounter, the work living publicly yet felt privately, asking something of the viewer that isn’t purely interpretive. 

González-Torres’s works make “sense” in both meanings of the word: sensory contact becomes sense-making – the way grief, desire, love, depletion become legible without being translated into one single explanation. Think of the candy spills, especially Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) (1991): an ideal weight of 175 pounds of individually wrapped sweets, offered to viewers to take. 

The work’s body diminishes through touch, generosity, appetite; and when replenished, it returns – not as a fixed object, but as a social contract, a living agreement.

"Untitled" (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) by Félix González-Torres 

Long before “immersive” became a marketing language, contemporary artist Rirkrit Tiravanija was already dissolving the boundary between artwork and social space – using food, hosting, and gathering to make the exhibition a situation rather than an image. In Untitled 1990 (pad thai), he cooked and served pad thai at the opening of his solo exhibition at Paula Allen Gallery in New York. Taste and smell don’t “illustrate” the work – they are how the work happens: medium as hospitality, and hospitality as a decision.

Rirkrit Tiravanija. untitled 1990 (pad thai). 1990. Opening event at Paula Allen Gallery, New York, 1990.

Image courtesy MoMA PS1. Photo- Marissa Alper

What is also interesting is how institutions have tried to re-stage that liveness. At Berlin’s leading art institution Gropius Bau in 2024, for instance, his programming has explicitly brought cooking sessions into the museum’s atrium – an attempt to keep the social, sensorial engine of the work from becoming mere documentation. But the question lingers: does this kind of work land differently in intimate settings, where you’re not absorbing it as an institutionally managed experience, but as an encounter that can genuinely surprise you?

And then there’s conceptual artist Anicka Yi, who makes the sensory turn feel not convivial but uncanny – less dinner table, more atmosphere as intelligence. For her Hyundai Commission at Tate Modern, she created changing “scentscapes” alongside airborne, heat-responsive “aerobes,” folding smell, motion and ambient unease into the architecture itself. 

Maybe the most radical thing an exhibition can do right now is slow the viewer down without telling them to. To make looking feel like an event again – not a screenshot. To let a work arrive through breath, through sound, through the small theatre of being in a room with others. If Sontag wanted an “erotics of art” then the return of the senses isn’t a trend – it’s an ethic: a way of refusing to reduce art to what it means, so we can remember what it does.

A recent London example that insists on this kind of embodied negotiation is multidisciplinary artist Laura Lima’s The Drawing Drawing at the ICA – her first London solo exhibition – which centres participation and the live, shifting relationship between artist, viewer, and institutional frame.

Laura Lima, The Drawing Drawing, 2026. Photograph: Anne Tetzlaff. Life model: Olia Poliakova.

Co-founded by Selin Kir and Yang Rung Chen, Obtuse Archive is a curatorial platform of reverberation where artistic, spatial, and intellectual practices, material experimentation, and alternative narratives converge. Their first IRL exhibition, OBTUSE (°), brought together thirteen artists and three performers in a two-day programme privileging sensation, atmosphere, and duration across painting, sculpture, sound, performance, and food.

Last summer, The Hepworth Wakefield saw a major retrospective of Helen Chadwick’s diverse oeuvre, opening with Cacao, an enormous gurgling font of melted chocolate. The initially enticing sweet scent becomes cloying, and mingles with the reek of Carcass, Chadwick’s ode to earthly slime in the form of a perspex monolith filled with rotting matter. The exhibition is a miasmic blend of disgust and desire, life and death.

In 1976, performance artist Bobby Baker held a cannibalistic tea party in her post-war pre-fab home. Re-created at the Tate Britain in 2023 and The Whitworth in 2025, the exhibition, wallpapered with ‘70s newspapers and icing, welcomed guests in for a profane communion of the nuclear family. A father, son, daughter, and baby constructed of cake are consumed alongside tea provided from the mother, a mannequin with a teapot for a head.

all images © Tate, An Edible Family in a Mobile Home, Bobby Baker, 2023, image by Madeline Buddo

Commissioned by Somerset House, Play Nice by Aziza Khadryi is an interactive exhibition that explores how identity can be shapeshifting. In partnership with UAL Creative Computing Institute, Khadryi turns heritage into digital play, bringing the senses to life with sound, textiles, and digital programming. Through this landscape, echoes of cultural survival and fragmented memory bloom into a vibrant world, building from personas to cultural textiles that showcase the shapeshifting narrative that Aziza Khadryi absorbed growing up between Russia, China, and Uzbekistan. This exhibition is playful, immersive, and full of life.

Aziza Kadyri - Play Nice (credit Tim Bowditch)

Unknown Lands gathers four Welsh artists whose photographic practices move through landscape as lived experience, as an emotional terrain where heritage, memory, and belonging blur at the edges. Place emerges here as atmosphere and trace, shifting and often unknowable. The exhibition invites a slower kind of looking, where identity is felt in texture and distance, and the land suggests an identity that cannot be explicitly named.

from

https://www.inaland.uk/exhibitions/unknownlands

 © perediza 2026