The gaze of the viewer: participation and agency

An artwork is never completed by the artist alone. Materials, gestures, images, sounds and spaces may be carefully composed, yet meaning continues to shift when another person enters the work. The viewer brings memory, expectation, discomfort and desire into that encounter. Looking becomes an active practice: a way of testing what is visible, what has been withheld and what kind of presence the work allows.

For Alexandra Mawimbi, this relationship between artwork and audience can unfold across sculpture, two-dimensional art, video, performance, sound and installation. Each medium creates different conditions for attention. A photograph may hold the viewer at a measured distance; a performance may make that distance unstable; an installation may ask the body to navigate, pause or remain alert. Across these forms, the gaze is treated as a force with consequences, and the viewer is given room to recognise their own agency within the work.

Looking as an active encounter

To look is often described as a simple act of reception, as though an artwork sends a message and the audience receives it. Contemporary practice complicates that model. The viewer interprets, selects, compares and remembers. A face, object or gesture can trigger associations that were never entirely determined by the artist. Meaning arises through contact between the work and the person standing before it.

This does not make every interpretation equally detached from the artwork. Composition, scale, texture, lighting and rhythm guide attention. A work can draw the eye towards a particular detail, delay recognition or create a sense of unease. Its structure offers an invitation, yet it does not necessarily dictate a single response. The viewer’s participation is shaped by the work while remaining partly open.

That openness is especially important in practices concerned with representation and mourning. Such themes can easily become fixed into familiar images: the grieving body, the absent figure, the preserved object, the solemn room. A more searching artwork allows these references to remain unsettled. It asks the viewer to notice how they are looking, including the assumptions they bring to another person’s story or image.

The gaze therefore carries ethical weight. It can be curious, possessive, empathetic, cautious or avoidant. A viewer may want to understand everything immediately, while the work may insist on slowness and partial knowledge. The resulting tension is part of the experience. Agency begins when looking becomes self-aware rather than automatic.

The body within the work

Participation does not always mean touching an artwork or following an instruction. It can be physical, emotional and temporal. A viewer participates when they adjust their position to see an altered surface, listen for a distant sound or remain in a room after an initial reaction. These small decisions turn the body into an instrument of attention.

Installation makes this especially apparent. Space can determine whether people feel exposed, enclosed, watched or invited to move freely. The distance between a viewer and an object may resemble a social boundary. A narrow passage can produce hesitation, while an open arrangement may encourage wandering. Even the choice to stand still becomes meaningful when the environment has been designed to make stillness perceptible.

Video and performance add another layer because time cannot be absorbed all at once. A moving image unfolds through duration, and a live action changes according to the conditions of its presentation. The viewer may arrive midway, leave before the end or notice details on a second viewing that were invisible at first. There is no single stable vantage point. Attention becomes a negotiation with time.

In a gallery in Naarm/Melbourne, for example, an audience might move between the concentrated quiet of a project space and the public energy of the street outside. In Sydney, the pace of a visit may be shaped by the scale of a major institution, ferry connections or a busy weekend programme. These local conditions affect how people encounter art. Participation is influenced by tiredness, weather, access, crowding and the habits of a particular place, as well as by the work itself.

Agency, distance and the right to withhold

An artwork can give the viewer agency without making them responsible for completing it in a simplistic sense. Agency may involve choosing how long to look, where to stand or whether to accept the image being offered. It can also involve refusing a demand. A viewer may decide not to consume an image of pain as spectacle, or may recognise that some meanings should remain incomplete.

This question of distance matters in works addressing mourning and living presence. Grief is often represented through absence, but absence is not empty. It can be felt in a pause, a trace, a damaged surface, a voice that fades or an object that appears to retain the pressure of a former life. The viewer is drawn towards what is present while remaining conscious of what cannot be recovered.

Such works may resist the expectation that an audience should respond with an immediate emotional performance. There is no requirement to appear moved, enlightened or certain. A person may feel recognition, discomfort, confusion or nothing that can be named at the time. The artwork can accommodate these responses without reducing them to a prescribed lesson.

This refusal of emotional coercion is a form of generosity. It protects the viewer’s freedom while preserving the work’s complexity. It also prevents the artist’s subject matter from becoming a service supplied for easy consumption. In the Australian art market, where artists often move between commercial galleries, public institutions, artist-run spaces and commissions, this distinction can be significant. A visually striking work may attract attention quickly, yet sustained practice depends on allowing difficult ideas to remain difficult.

The social life of the gaze

Looking is never entirely private. Other viewers influence how a work is read, even when no conversation takes place. We notice where people gather, what they avoid and how long they remain. A child standing close to an installation, a group speaking softly in a corner or one person returning to the same image can alter the atmosphere for everyone else.

This shared situation is particularly visible in artist-run initiatives and smaller exhibition spaces across Australia. In Brisbane, a modest room may bring artists, curators, students and neighbours into direct contact. In a regional centre, an exhibition can function as a rare meeting point for people who do not regularly encounter contemporary art. The scale of the audience changes the conditions of attention, while local knowledge can add meanings that are not available elsewhere.

Language also shapes this social encounter. Australian audiences may describe a work as “a bit full-on”, “quietly powerful” or “hard to shake”, using informal phrases that hold uncertainty without pretending to offer a final judgement. That conversational register has value. It allows viewers to test an impression among others rather than presenting interpretation as expert property.

The gaze can therefore become collective without becoming uniform. A work may create a temporary public in which different forms of knowledge coexist: personal memory, cultural history, visual literacy, bodily response and everyday observation. Participation is strengthened when people feel permitted to bring their own perspective, while still being attentive to the histories and identities represented in the work.

From viewing to an ongoing relationship

A portfolio website changes the conditions of looking again. The screen offers access across distance, yet it also flattens scale, texture and sound. A sculpture may appear easier to understand in a photograph than in person, while a video or performance may gain a different rhythm when viewed alone with headphones. Digital documentation is never a neutral substitute; it is another encounter with the work.

The minimalist presentation of Alexandra Mawimbi’s website keeps this distinction visible. By placing selected works, exhibitions, news and biographical information in a clear structure, the site does not compete with the practice for attention. It acts as a threshold. Visitors can move between media and periods of work, forming connections across sculpture, image, sound, performance and installation.

This kind of archive gives viewers time to develop a relationship with the artist’s concerns. A person may first arrive through a single image, then return to read about an exhibition or locate a related work in another medium. The act of browsing becomes a form of participation. Each path through the archive produces a slightly different understanding, shaped by what is noticed and what remains outside the frame.

For Australian viewers, online access also addresses the practical geography of the arts. Someone in Perth, Hobart or a regional town may encounter a practice that would otherwise require substantial travel to Sydney or Melbourne. Commercial visibility, public programming and professional networks are often concentrated in major cities, while digital archives allow artists to speak across that distance. The website does not remove the importance of physical exhibitions, but it extends the life and reach of the encounter.

A strong archive also preserves uncertainty. It does not need to explain every symbol or close every interpretive gap. When documentation leaves room for questions of presence, representation and loss, the viewer remains involved after leaving the screen or exhibition space. The work continues through recollection, conversation and the changed awareness of one’s own gaze.

Explore Alexandra Mawimbi’s portfolio as an active field of encounter, moving through sculpture, two-dimensional art, video, performance, sound and installation at your own pace. Visit the archive, follow the connections between works and exhibitions, and use the contact details to engage with the artist’s practice, documentation and ongoing professional activity.