THE PICTURE ROOM

24 - 29 August, 2026

North Gallery

THE PICTURE ROOM

The Picture Room takes its name from the traditional interior in which images were gathered, framed and arranged for viewing. Here, however, the picture refuses to remain still or contained. It moves across screens, reflective surfaces, sculptural objects and cinematic sequences, shifting between something we look at and something we physically enter. Image, object and space continually exchange roles: a surface becomes a threshold, a reflection alters with the position of the viewer, and the moving image unfolds through sound, duration and changing states of attention.

Across installation and video, the works consider how images mediate our relationship with realities that remain only partially accessible. Landscapes become sites of ritual and transformation; artificial intelligence speculates on forms of communication beyond the human; glass, mirrors and light destabilise the boundary between what is physically present and what only appears to be there. Elsewhere, cinematic narrative returns to the social world, tracing labour, displacement and the quiet reconstruction of value through the intimate gestures of everyday life. In each case, the image does more than represent its subject. It becomes a device through which another condition of seeing, thinking or inhabiting the world can be proposed.

The Picture Room therefore treats the picture not as a fixed object but as an event: something produced between material and perception, technology and imagination, the visible and the unseen.