A PERCEPTUAL ZONE | 1 OCT 2025 - 25 OCT 2025
A Perceptual Zone was a month-long exploration of dance in dialogue with the elements, bringing together workshops, installations, film, photography, and performance, and unfolding as a space for moving together and witnessing in continual contact with the biosphere. Below, you’ll find more information about the exhibition, artist biographies, and images from the show.
About the Exhibition
A Perceptual Zone was honoured to announce a month-long exploration of dance in dialogue with the elements. Born from bodies attuning to land, season, and storm, it coalesced in continual contact with the biosphere.
Dance arose from the necessity to respond, moving in step with shifting conditions, shaped by the forces of nature. It was an origin of ecological art: wisdom inscribed in fascia, constellations of movement resonant with animals and elemental intelligences. It proposed an ethics of listening and being-with. It unfolded as a communion with what exceeded the self: the stretch of trees into sky, vibration of soil, pressure of air, gravitational pull of another body. In this reciprocity, rhythm became a living cycle — an environmental intimacy through which the human was re-imagined.
Throughout the month, artists Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome, Nicol Vizioli, Nissa Nishikawa, Kapila Venu, Lewis Walker, and Yen-Ching Lin offered workshops, installations, film, photography, and performance within the galleries. Their practices, experimental and traditional, were gestures that honoured the earth while remembering dance as both instinct and offering.
Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome initiated the month, holding public somatic workshops rooted in the potentials of collective embodied power while building towards a Saturday evening performance-in-progress centred within ecologies of liveness, risk, care, and access.
For the second week in Gallery I, Nicol Vizioli and Nissa Nishikawa presented a series of 12 C-Type photographs extended from handmade black and white fibre darkroom prints sourced from their ongoing collaboration of dance-journeys in open-air spaces. In Gallery II, during this same week, a film by Kapila Venu titled Yakshi was screened on continuous rotation. The film held image, landscape, sound and character from the folklore of Kerala. There was a finissage on the Saturday evening with Vizioli and Nishikawa present to discuss their processes.
Lewis Walker activated the galleries in the third week with open workshops focused on research and development into deeper states of consciousness, encompassing rituals of shared energy and expression. On Saturday evening, they exhibited the culmination of the week’s work for all to experience and attend.
In the fourth week Yen-Chin Lin offered three improvisational movement workshops open to everyone, regardless of dance experience. Her pedagogical practice aimed to deepen awareness through the connection of body and emotions. This was also extended to a final Saturday evening public sharing session.
A Perceptual Zone was not performance alone. It was an opening, a space for moving together and witnessing, a centre where dance became relation, navigating the currents of co-existence.
Curated by Nissa Nishikawa
Artist Biographies
Of English-Chilean descent, Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome is a London-based artist, choreographer, dancer and researcher creating immersive performances and workshops. Through somatic practice and her process driven approach, she explores the potentials of solo and collective embodied power and the temporary building of micro-communities. Collaboration is key, crafting ecologies of liveness, risk, care, and access. Her work shifts perspectives, rippling between human and more-than-human space-time. Approaching dance and voice through the deep poetics of the body and the contradictions of how to be in the world.
Image credit: Binta Kopp
Nicol Vizioli is a visual artist and educator working primarily with photography and film. Trained in Fine Arts and Cinema in Rome and in Photography at the University of the Arts London, Nicol’s practice is grounded in raw physicality and a symbolic visual language. Drawing on mythology, painting, and a profound connection to the natural and animal world, her work weaves together the representational and the primal. Guided by these core principles, she moves across disciplines, currently expanding her studio practice through film and, more recently, sculpture.
Recent commissions include the London Contemporary Orchestra, Akram Khan Company, South London Gallery and Kew Botanical Gardens. Her work has been exhibited in international galleries and art fairs such as Scope Basel (CH), Somerset House (London, UK), the Zabludowicz Collection (London, UK), Trienniale di Milano (IT), The XV Biennale de la Mediterranée (Thessaloniki, GR), Roundhouse (London, UK), Watou Festival (Poperinge, BE), Rosphoto (St.Petersburgh, RU) amongst others.
Nissa Nishikawa’s multidimensional practice comprises performance, poetry, painting, sculpture, and moving image. She researches and interprets traditional forms of dance, ritual, and craft in ways that illuminate animistic and alchemical philosophies through an embodied and structural approach. Nishikawa often works in the open air and in studios equipped to house fire, interconnecting the arcane with the supra-sensual, the living earth, and its conscious inhabitants.
Kapila Venu is a practitioner of Kutiyattam, one of the oldest living theatre traditions in the world, from Kerala, India. She is a disciple of the legendary Kutiyattam maestro Guru Ammannur Madhava Chakyar and the renowned exponents Guru G Venu and Guru Usha Nangiar. She is also a practitioner of Mohiniyattam dance, which she learned from her mother Guru Nirmala Paniker. For more than two decades, she has travelled the world performing, teaching, and giving workshops on Kutiyattam. She has studied with renowned Japanese avant-garde dancer Min Tanaka and has performed in two of his choreographies, – Rite of the Forest (2005) and Thottangal (2007).
She has also collaborated with internationally recognised artists and scholars such as Dr. Eberhard Fischer, Peter Oskarson, and Wally Cardona. She is a guest lecturer at the National School of Drama in New Delhi and a Master Teacher at the Intercultural Theatre Institute in Singapore. A film on the life and work of Kapila Venu, titled “Kapila”, directed by Sanju Surendran, won the National Award for Best Cultural Film at the 62nd National Film Awards of the Government of India in 2014. Kapila was awarded the highest honour for young artists by the Government of India – the Ustad Bismillah Khan Yuva Puraskar, the Kumar Gandharva Samman of the Government of Madhya Pradesh and the Sanskriti Award of the Sanskriti Pratisthan.
Lewis Walker is a London-born queer, non-binary movement artist. A former Great Britain gymnast and Acrobatic Gymnastics World Champion, they trained from age 6 to 21 before earning a degree in Contemporary Dance. Their work spans theatre, film, fashion, music, and the commercial sector. Walker continues to choreograph gymnastics competition routines for the Great Britain, Italian and French national teams. Their creative vision and dynamic movement style have led to collaborations with Tim Walker, Yorgos Lanthimos, ANOHNI, Tirzah, BULLYACHE, Burberry, UNTITLAB, and the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA).
Beyond performance, Walker is dedicated to teaching movement as a tool for accessing deeper states of consciousness and developing a deeper understanding of consensual touch. Their Connecting to Improv workshop explores dance improvisation as a ritual of shared energy and expression, while MOVE HYPNO, a collaboration with hypnotherapist Michele Occelli, blends movement and hypnotherapy for personal transformation.
Walker is currently a Studio Wayne McGregor RESIDENT 6 artist-in-residence.
Yen-Ching is a London-based movement artist, choreographer, and teacher. Her independent research and creative practice explore the dialogue between dance, stillness, photography, and film, shaping a distinctive interdisciplinary approach.
Originally from Taiwan, Yen-Ching studied at the Taipei National University of the Arts before completing the Postgraduate Diploma Program (Edge05) and earning an MA in Contemporary Dance at London Contemporary Dance School. This rigorous training provided her with a strong technical foundation and a profound understanding of movement.
She has collaborated with a wide range of esteemed artists and companies, including Hofesh Shechter Company, Bern Ballet (under Stijn Celis), Akram Khan Company, Charles Linehan, Didy Veldman, Theo Adams Company, Stefan Jovanovic, BalletLorent, Clod Ensemble, AE, Waldorf Project, Alice Anderson, Lee Mingwei, Punchdrunk, FOS (Thomas Poulsen), and Bullyache, among others.
Image credit: Gediminas Sass
Credits
Curated by Nissa Nishikawa
Graphic Designers Nicol Vizioli and Andrew Merritt