Thresholds

Mat Collishaw

Yapı Kredi Cultural Center hosts the exhibition “Thresholds” of the world famous artist Mat Collishaw from May 16th to July 29th, 2018. This virtual reality exhibition which took place in Somerset House in London in 2017 is now in İstanbul for the first time.

Thresholds is an ongoing touring exhibition that restages the world's first major exhibition of photography. Visitors travel back in time to 1839, when British scientist William Henry Fox Talbot first presented his photographic prints to the public at King Edward's School in Birmingham.

The experience is a fully immersive portal to the past; visitors can walk freely throughout a digitally reconstructed room, and are able to touch the bespoke vitrines, fixtures and mouldings; even the heat and scent of a coal fire is recreated. Infrared sensors track visitors’ movements, creating ghostly avatars that indicate their position and enhance the feeling of travelling through time. Collishaw has also created a soundscape to accompany the exhibition: the demonstrations of the Chartist protesters who rioted in 1839 on the streets of Birmingham, and who can be glimpsed through the digital windows.

Mat Collishaw is a key figure in the important generation of British artists who emerged from Goldsmith's College in the late 1980s. He participated in Freeze (1988) and since his first solo exhibition in 1990 has exhibited widely internationally.