It is unquestionably a visual art show in a gallery with works by Anish Kapoor, Antony Gormley and Nadav Kander but there will also – because Akram Khan is in charge – be dancers hanging from the ceiling: the Lowry Centre in Salford will on Saturday open to the public one of the most ambitious visual art projects it has ever staged.
Khan, one of the UK’s most celebrated contemporary dance artists, has been asked to curate a show in which he chooses the art and decides how it is seen.
In practice that means an exhibition that will have sculpture, painting and photography for six days of the week. But on Saturday the space will become, in addition, a performance – with visitors led through what becomes a live installation with dance and music.
Khan said he hoped it would be an almost Alice in Wonderland experience for visitors.
“When I look at visual art I’m interested in the space around it, I want to live in the space that the artwork exists in,” he said.
Khan is the second artist in a series the Lowry has called Performer as Curator and follows the exhibition curated by musician Alison Goldfrapp a year ago.
He was delighted to be asked, but he admitted: “I thought what do I know about curating? I thought this is suicidal for them. I was terrified by it.”
The show has works by artists he admires greatly. “I feel blessed to be born in a generation where I’ve come across Anish Kapoor’s and Antony Gormley’s work,” he said.
“Anish is the only artist apart from Rothko where he doesn’t have to talk about the spirituality of his work. It just is spiritual. He is one of those artists who will be remembered 100 years later, people will still be speaking his name.”
The exhibition is curated by Khan but is also about Khan, exploring themes that he comes back to time and again in his dance work – the extremes of things, whether young and old, light and dark, truth and fiction, doubt and certainty.
“I want to awake people’s senses. The experience is about my relationship with visual art, or visual things, visual objects.”
The young and old theme can be seen clearly in the decision to hang the excellent work of 8-year-old Thomas Newton. Like so many of his older peers it is ‘Untitled’ and it was chosen after the Lowry asked pupils at Ellenbrook primary school in Salford to submit artworks that explored nature.
Other artists in the show include Kate MccGwire, Serena Smith, Darvish Fakhr and if you look very closely in the last part of the exhibition, some lichen along the skirting board installed by Miz Nakaishi, a site-specific piece called Fluffs Between the Gaps of Society.
Khan said art had always been: “A great source of nourishment for my mind, my body and my heart.
“Its form is irrelevant, whether it be painting, dancing, singing, acting, because in the end all forms of ‘art’ are primarily about connecting, communicating, telling stories, emotionally provoking the other.”
Michael Simpson, the Lowry’s director of visual art and engagement, said the Performer as Curator series was “one of the most ambitious exhibition projects in the Lowry’s history.”
He added: “Handing over the reins of our galleries to a performer from a completely different art form, be they singer, dancer or actor, is incredibly exciting. We were delighted when Akram agreed to be part of the series and his exhibition will be a surprise to many.”
Khan is the curator but he stressed it is a collaborative show, with creative direction by Sasha Milavic-Davies.
Undoubtedly the best time to come is on a Saturday when there are guided performances at 10.30am, 11.30am, 12.30pm, 2.30pm and 3.30pm. They are free but demand is expected to be high so the Lowry is asking that places be pre-booked.
How audiences react remains to be seen. Khan fears they might emerge from it baffled.
For him though the whole experience had been “exhilarating to create a sort of surreal, Alice in Wonderland landscape of extremes and whatever may be in between.”
• One Side to the Other curated by Akram Khan is at the Lowry 15 November – 1 February
