Set Piece, by Daniel Von Sturmer is currently showing at Site Gallery, Sheffield until October 31. Based in Melbourne, this is his first solo show in the UK, having represented Australia at the Venice Biennale and working internationally.

The exhibition is an installation of a series of small video screens and projections arranged in a space designed by Von Sturmer himself. In the centre of the gallery, a large partition has been built, which narrows the space and creates strong perspectives towards either end. The works set in this space become inter-related as the viewer has to move between them - unexpected views between pieces occur as you move around the gallery.

Von Sturmer wants to investigate measurements, scales and the ubiquitous definitions of space that are around us. The backgrounds of some of his videos feature deformed grids and scales, in others small scale, hand made ‘modernist’ shapes are arranged into compositions. The measured, perspectival understanding of space is confronted by the flat picture plane. Article spoke to him at the opening of the exhibition.

To begin with, explain this exhibition in the context of your other works.

I’m quite interested in looking at exhibition spaces, existing gallery architecture and trying to either work with it or intervene in how it’s working. In this show I had the idea of making a structure that sat in the middle of the space and changed the way that you move through it quite radically. It creates an impression of corridors or antechambers whereas before it was one open space. Part of the reason for that was to let you move through and provide long views of things that I put in it, so videos come out from the wall; the video space intervening into the real space of the gallery, an interface between pictorial space and real space.

What’s distinctive or interesting about the Site Gallery space for you?

The main thing that I had to deal with was that there are two spaces and the main space is divided up by two large columns. I’d had a few ideas around the columns and a few ideas about floor based work, about making a kind of topography on the floor. I settled on this idea because I wanted to completely change it, almost like erasing the memory of these columns. I wanted to take that experience away and extend the viewer’s reading of the space over time.

It seems quite architecturally influenced, how do your experiences of architecture influence your work?

For me, I try not to think too much about architecture per se, it’s almost like it’s a different practice, but I do think about the creation of space and the nature of how the viewer is going to move through it. I like using existing architecture, so I like to see some existing way of how viewers might enter a space and then exit and then trying to relate something very simple within that. So it’s a very kind of elemental idea about architecture rather than thinking about specific feeling qualities of space.

You don’t deal with typology for instance?

No, definitely not. It has less to do with the idea of the site of the gallery but the general idea of a Site. It’s less about history and more about the immediate feeling the viewer has. In previous works I’ve worked in an artist run space in Melbourne called 1st Floor and one of the works I did there was removing a section of wall and replacing it with glass, creating a view both into and out of the space. But it was integrated so fully that it was almost invisible to anyone who didn’t know the space that well. So it’s about setting up those interplays between the way that you interact with space and what you might be seeing. 

There’s a strong pictorial element to the work, and I wondered how you started with that and how it developed into video work.

I studied painting and my interests were always to do with perception and psychology. I was always trying to work with paint and find a language with it, but I was never really comfortable with where I could get to with it. I started integrating film and video in relation to image based things I was doing on the wall which were kind of more collagic or assemblage in nature. Gradually it just kept moving off the wall, and the space of the viewer became more and more important to me. At the same time I had this interest in image making and how you activate the space through images. It was quite organic in that sense.

And what about materials, the blu-tak and the handmade elements?

It’s something that I only really thought about a few years ago was that a lot of the things I was interested in back then were to do with the material quality. They were things that sat between definition, they had utilitarian function, but when you examined them as objects and materials, they are quite strange - they are familiar, but they have this oddness and I like that sense that they slip between linguistic parameters.

That’s interesting in reference to scale and measurement in the works and it seems like you are trying to turn something that can be measured into something that can be appreciated as an image, an aesthetic.

It also that there’s a tension between something that’s nebulous and unformed and tenuous, like these videos are quite performative in nature. They’re not unstructured, but the camera is allowed to record all the actions that are there. It’s quite awkward, and could be perceived as mistakes. And it’s about that struggle to find form within an informal structure.

So do you start with an image that you want to create, are we watching you playing in these videos?

There is an element of that, definitely, but it’s deliberately open ended. I would do lots and lots of takes and then discover the work through that, so it’s quite analogous to painting, where you might find and reveal stuff as you go over it and then cover other stuff up. It’s a very similar studio based process to me and with this body of work it’s quite interesting to try and explore that quite palpably and make it very much a clear factor of the work. With the performance element, even though you don’t see it, the hand in the work is deliberately left out, there’s a slightly gawky awkward quality. And hopefully there’s also an empathic moment in that as well, where it’s recognisably like doodling.

You work in Melbourne, how is that in relation to exhibiting internationally, and looking at Europe?

That’s an interesting perspective, it might be the perspective from here. I think that anyone who perceives Australia and New Zealand to be away from what they perceive to be the centre will feel that distance. But that’s a model of thinking that I’m not that interested in maintaining, and I think in lots of ways has fractured now. The condition of working is that there’s a sort of shared simultaneity of information, on the internet, in magazines - we all read the same magazines, at least in the western world. So the idea of a centre-periphery model is very questionable in the current climate. But, having said that, there are always little differences and qualities that will come through in someone’s work. Part of the reason why I’ve chosen to maintain connections with that part of the world is that it’s the culture I’m familiar with and involved with, and there must be something in it that maintains me, if you like. If I was just to move from that space and move into a new space I’d have to start again. At first you’re an outsider, and then you slowly become involved in that culture. Australia has a lot of similarities to here, but at the same time it’s definitely different.

In other forms of contemporary art that deal with the conditions of a specific location, there’s a lot of emphasis put on the process, the journey, the recording. Do you consciously move away from that?

A little bit. I think that it can be more valid in some peoples’ practices than others. Some people have a very autobiographical relationship to their work and in that context it makes more sense. I’m quite clinical about the work, and the work in a sense is quite clinical, it’s about very specific conditions and testing things. I see art really as a mode of enquiry, a way of testing knowledge and testing our thinking, so I’m not really interested in imbuing it with a personal flavour. It’s inescapable, it’s like the trap of embodied experience - you can’t actually step outside of it, but you can maintain a wary critical perspective. 

It’s always to a degree, there is no utter objective perspective because there’s going to be multiple perspectives from the viewer.    

Site Gallery, Sheffield. Free entry.