Bui Cong Khanh, Chicken Rice in the Border (working title), 2014
Collection of the Artist, Image Courtesy of the Artist

Sensorium 360° is an exhibition that calls upon the full range of human senses and explores how sensory experiences locate us in understanding the world and knowing the self.

In the realm of visual art and daily life, vision and sight tend to dominate yet other senses are equally indispensable in enabling us to apprehend the world within and without – taking in its pleasures and pains, even as we absorb data/information. These physiological capacities are also sources for creativity, such as in the fields of music, gastronomy or even perfumery, and contemporary artists, in crossing disciplines, have often drawn upon the sensorial spectrum.

Lavender Cheng, Consciousness: Unconsciousness, 2012, Collection of the Artist, Image Courtesy of the Artist

While the five senses of sight (ophthalmoception), sound/hearing (audioception), taste (gustaoception), touch (tactioception) and smell (olfacoception) are the most commonly known, other identified other senses include the ability to detect temperature (themoception), kinesthetic sense (proprioception), pain (nociception), balance (equilibrioception) and time (chronoception). Less easily explained but no less compelling is the ‘extrasensory’ perception of the ‘sixth sense’ – intuition or premonition.

The exhibition presents several newly commissioned works and loans by artists from Singapore, Southeast Asia and beyond, with each work and gallery dedicated to one specific sensory experience. In unfolding the varied phenomenological dimensions of senses and their sensibilities, Sensorium 360° also seeks to highlight three facets of the sensorial experience: its relationship to health, therapy and healing (notably touch); synesthesia (how one sense translates into another, e.g. sight into sound), and how one sense often triggers other aspects of human cognition (e.g. memory or danger).

Spanning the fields of art, neuroscience, cognitive psychology, phenomenology and philosophy, Sensorium 360° is a visual art exhibition that moves beyond vision to ‘see’ the world through the other senses, and experience it in the round.

Exhibition:     Sensorium 360°
Dates:     31 July – 22 October 2014
Venue:     Singapore Art Museum, 71 Bras Basah Rd, Singapore 189555
Hours:    Mon to Sun 10am – 7pm (Last admission at 6:15pm), Fri 10am – 9pm
Info:     www.singaporeartmuseum.sg, www.facebook.com/singaporeartmuseum