Moi Tran - The Text is Restless

Moi Tran brings The Text is Restless to Leeds Art Gallery from Friday 6 to Sunday 15 November, and it's a bit of a first for the city: this is the work's first iteration, and the first time Tran's work has been shown in Leeds. It's a text performance installation, which is a fancy way of saying it's not something you just stand back and look at. You're invited to decipher clues sent by the artist and move the sculptures yourself to reveal the message, so you're as much a part of the thing as the art is.

Tran describes text as 'a compressed field of narrative potential' and 'a field of suspended possibilities', and that's exactly what the installation plays with. It looks at how meaning shifts when language structures are disrupted, so the whole experience is about taking something that seems fixed — written words — and seeing how they change when you start moving them around. It's the kind of thing that works better when you're actually in the room doing it rather than just reading about it.

Behind the work is Moi Tran, an award-winning UK-based artist, designer, researcher and educator of Vietnamese and Chinese heritage. Their practice spans contemporary art installations and live performances, but it also reaches into set and costume design for major theatre, opera and dance productions, so there's a strong sense of the theatrical in how this is put together. The Text is Restless is part of Compass Festival, Leeds' biennial live art festival, which returns for its eighth edition this year and is celebrating 15 years of creative encounters across the city.

You'll find it in the Central Court on the first floor of Leeds Art Gallery (The Headrow, Leeds, LS1 3AA), open daily from 10:00 to 15:00. Entry is free, so you can just drop in whenever suits you between the 6th and the 15th.