During the break between terms, I visited a private view for the Juliette Sturlèse and Marjan Moghaddam joint exhibition at the Anna Kultys Gallery in Cambridge Heath, East London. I was invited to this last minute, but it became very relevant to what I am studying at the moment as it is a mixed reality exhibition – i.e. part real world, part virtual world.
This was an interesting experiment in terms of gallery design. The actual space itself is quite small, so the gallery has opted to make use of a VR headset to expand the amount of works they can show. There is definitely a stark difference between the physical and digital space, both in terms of what they can show but also the impact they both leave on the viewer. Personally, I still preferred the physical gallery space. The works shown physically were that of Sturlèse – her work is about sense of space, and was mostly made with astroturf among other materials, depicting abstract scenes and making use of lots of greens and blues. Although I found it somewhat difficult to find what specific message Sturlèse was trying to convey with her pieces, they were large, and they certainly gave me a sense of perspective, that I felt was missing from Moghaddam’s virtual works.

Moghaddam’s art was displayed in a giant virtual gallery, full of digital sculptures and art hanging on the ‘walls’ – this was interspersed with old Iranian revolution songs that were linked to each piece. Personally, although the idea may have been a strong one, I found the presentation rather lacklustre. The walls and floor in the virtual space were very plain, and overall it just had a very unfinished feel to it. Maybe if more effort had been put into the presentation of the world around the art, I would have been more convinced by this digital exhibition space, however it felt like this way of showing the art was more of a novelty than it was something that genuinely added to the emotions and ideas behind Moghaddam’s work. I didn’t really get a sense of scale that I had experienced with Sturlèse’s work, and ultimately I felt unimpressed by the digital space, as I have been before when I’ve previously encountered these kinds of spaces (albeit on my laptop, not on a VR headset).
Maybe as technology develops, these sorts of ideas will become more impressive in practice, however at the moment I am still much more in favour of physical exhibition spaces.