London-based investigative arts organisation Siobhan Davies Dance premiere an ambitious new installation comprised of multiple pieces by choreographers, visual artists, scientists and designers. Exploring how the body feels when in the act of doing, the installation includes live performance, film projection and objects that are presented as an ever-changing arrangement. Each of the works draws upon the library and practices of the art historian Aby Warburg, who collected diverse images of gestures from different times and places and positioned them side-by-side to reveal previously-hidden relationships.

Artist Jeremy Millar provides a structure and concept for the work inspired by the practices of the art historian Aby Warburg. Warburg collected diverse images of human gestures and poses from different times and places, positioning them side by side to allow new relationships to emerge, and explore how meanings are constituted by the movement of imagery across time and space. In a similar spirit, material / rearranged / to / be presents a large-scale, modular architecture which is continually arranged and rearranged by the artists, creating new pathways through the installation and drawing visitors into a journey of discovery. The constantly altering juxtapositions mean that few visitors will have the same experience.

The artists and choreographers in material / rearranged / to / be have combined Warburg’s ideas on bodily communication with the latest research in neuroscience to investigate how movement is felt, observed, and we reveal and conceal thought in physical behaviour. Works include choreographies on concepts of instability and disorientation, how we archive or remember past movement, along with a taxonomy of imaginary actions. Performers engage directly with the public inviting them to participate in the bodily postures and rhythms associated with argument, or to think about how we feel in relation to the actions of another through everyday activities like shaking hands. A looped video projection that oscillates in the space between live movement and recorded image highlights how our embodied intelligence anticipates future events. A lustrous black, mobile is suspended from the ceiling, its forms derived from Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I (1514), one of the most influential images in Warburg's art historical system.

After the Barbican, the installation will tour to the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester; Bluecoat, Liverpool; and the Tramway, Glasgow in spring 2017.