Flow 400 by Marta Marce. Courtesy South London Gallery

Exhibition Preview: simple pleasures and challenging ideas are both embraced at South London Gallery, Camberwell until September 4

Playing should be about freedom. However, the current exhibition and forthcoming series of events based at South London Gallery and the streets and estates beyond, aims to challenge our perceptions of both ideas.

To help in the process, international contributors to the programme - which runs until September 7 - take on the job of awakening our perceptions and helping us rethink what it means to play.

Games and Theory is not a highbrow intellectual exploration of what should be an innocent and fundamental instinct, but instead engages everyone in considering how environment helps or hinder us to use playtime effectively. In so doing, the contributors hope to give us new ways to explore and engage with the themes on offer.

Starting with the concept of how free play and taking risks builds childhood experience and shapes our social and emotional skills, Games and Theory aims to make us as adults rather more aware of where all this goes when we pass the play stage.

Installation 1. Courtesy South London Gallery

The exhibition itself is displayed on and around specially constructed ‘play architecture’. Visitors can play on this and become active parts of the exhibition. The aim is to explore how modern art can be explored with a playful spirit rather than merely through pondering and discussion.

Once you’ve had some indoor play, you can join in with Marc Herbst’s informal outdoor games and activities around the local area. Details of these events are available at the gallery. More invitations to play are opened up to visitors in the So Sceaux Games between August 1 – 6 at the nearby Sceaux Gardens estate. Games will be run by contributing artists such as Joanna Brinton and Lucy Panesar and estate residents.

All of this is not, however, just about getting back to physical and mental play spaces you used to inhabit. Political and social theory underpins much of what is on offer.

For instance, is play an alternative culture or is the design of the spaces we inhabit or the development of ‘play’ as another Government initiative, detracting from the play and freedom relationship? Sunday July 27 sees these issues debated in The State of Play, led by exhibition curator, Kit Hammond, author Pat Kane and Paul Durr of Play England.

Installation 1 by Dan Shipsides. Courtesy South London Gallery

Beyond theory comes action and many of the artists draw on Situationist ideology and radical political positions when it comes to play. Play as resistance to oppression, as observed in the activities of children in Brazilian favela, or reclamation of environments as seen by those who free-climb modernist buildings, are put before us.

This later way of playing is an extreme response to environment, perhaps, but how behaviour is determined by environment is explored further in Lottie Child’s Street Training tour on Sunday August 3. This will enable participants to find Paths of Joy and Paths of Safety in the city.

Play spaces as environments are sometimes seen as outside the normal adult public realm. This is the starting point for Tour De Play with Grant Lambie on Saturday August 9 where a bike ride takes in the play sites and the ‘tourists’ are invited to have fun on death slides, massive swings and play structures they would never normally consider trying out.

As an artistic and social reinterpretation of games and play, Games and Theory also aims to show how play as an approach can broaden perceptions about creativity generally and involvement in contemporary art.

After all, play helps us grow as children. Perhaps it can do the same for adults too.

Further details of the events being staged in and around the exhibition can be seen at the South London Gallery website.