Ikon Eastside, 183 Fazeley Street, Digbeth, Birmingham, B5 5SE

In 2010, Ikon Eastside presented Hitchcock Hallway, an installation by Danish artist duo AVPD, whose work typically consists of complex spatial and perceptual experiments that analyse the ways in which people respond to their environments. The title makes reference to director Alfred Hitchcock who employed spatial effects to create psychological intensity in many of his films. For this major new work, commissioned by Ikon,  the entrance to the gallery was replaced by a door.

In addition, the artists produced a number of off-site projects around Birmingham. At Ikon, Brindleyplace a window at the gallery entrance was covered by multiple layers of glass in Conceal; paradoxically, with each transparent sheet the window becomes more opaque. Meanwhile in locations around the city, Level, a series of simple graphic posters appeared, black with a white horizontal line, each one subtly different, exploring memory, recognition and expectation. A fourth project, Rotoobjects, was a discreet, unpublicised, sculptural action – white Perspex objects, each the shape and size of a drinks can, were abandoned at the top of public escalators around Birmingham – there they rotated, hypnotically, until removed.

AVPD are Aslak Vibæk and Peter Døssing, both graduates of The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Often inspired by ways in which space is re-imagined in literature, film and science, their works challenge socially conditioned or innate perceptual habits, emphasising how our bodies ‘read’ spaces and react to them, be it physically, intuitively and intellectually. They see the human subject as defined by space; shaping it and in turn being shaped by it, and as such their experiments with constructions are suggestive of new possibilities for imaginative space. www.avpd.net