Ways of Seeing invites the viewer to investigate the manifold ways by which artists accord forms and concepts that are otherwise familiar with renewed appearances and meanings. Each of the artworks on display beckons us to take a second look, upon which the contours of a new reality begin to emerge. The viewer’s desire to understand an artwork can never be fully divorced from the politics that underpin the traditions in which it was created, and the mechanisms that are used for its display. Ways of Seeing unfolds along a non-linear temporal thread that challenges the rigidity of periods, genres, and so-called “isms.” Several of the artworks provide a critique of the art-historical references that appear within them, highlighting the politicized contexts in which they are often encountered; a sub-theme that this exhibition examines.

Ways of Seeing facilitates a return towards a vision of the artist as a maker of things, a skilled technician, who through their understanding and handling of the physical properties of things can alter our way of seeing. Artists relentlessly remind us that the connection between what we see and what we think we know is never that simple, and that seeing is, at its core, a political act.