Delusion: A Cross-Sensory Exhibition

Sanchit Bembi has synaesthesia and visual snow syndrome. Sound arrives in his vision as colour and motion leaves chromatic trails that refuse to settle into a single moment. The show gathers a practice that has been steadily refusing to stay in one sense. Photographic works are made by compositing many moments of a single performance into one frame, so the image holds duration rather than an instant. Further works include a live installation in which the body of the visitor is captured and dissolved into a field of points by the sound of the room, surrounded by layered optical surfaces that generate patterns belonging to neither object individually, shifting continuously as you move past them. Sanchit also explores porous stone sheets as speakers that diffuse sound and scent outward into the space, placed beneath the photographs in place of wall text, so the works are interpreted through the body rather than read. Running through the exhibition is a fifth sense rarely admitted to a gallery. Sanchit's work with Sangra, an Indian vermouth built from native Indian wormwood, extends the enquiry into oxidation and scent positioning it as material for an artwork about how perception is inherited, shaped and unevenly distributed. The title is deliberate. What is called a delusion is often only a perception without a witness.