2013 Expanded Architecture at the Rocks exhibition in Sydney, by architects, artists and academics, investigated the act of looking.
Reverse Projections, co-curated by Sarah Breen Lovett and Dr Claudia Perren, was an exhibition about the act of looking, but also about multiplicities of time, history and place. It was an exhibition, too, that performed these multiplicities, became them, and went beyond them. It was an exhibition that actively transgressed, shifted and multiplied thought, turning beyond its limits — beyond the diurnal — beyond a divide between past, present and future and into an expanded space, a contracted time, an infinite depth, a night of the night, or what Maurice Blanchot calls, enigmatically, the Other night.1
Reverse Projections was, for a single night, an exhibition. A night where the depths of art were experienced, depths necessary to any work of art.2 In these depths alone a work of art is put to the test and only reveals itself as art in the forbidden act of the reversed gaze — that is, of Eurydice. It began at dusk, but ended in the darkness of night, a darkness and a depth — Orpheus’s descent — which was subject to the power of art, a power causing the night to open, a gaze to turn, and an exhibition to reveal something beyond itself, as a movement into the night.3 Though it was to Reverse Projections that the work and the night seemed to lead, it went beyond this end: becoming a work in its own right, and a movement into the Other night – where the very concealment of the invisible becomes itself the visible, where the work of art, in all its depth, is revealed.4