"Critical Shifts," is a group exhibition reinterpreting the notion of displacement in contemporary culture, will be held at Barin Han art centre in Istanbul, Turkey.

The exhibition challenges conventional understandings of displacement, presenting it as a vital and dynamic force in shaping contemporary existence. While displacement often connotes challenges of contemporary conditions—migration, exile, or colonial extraction—"Critical Shifts" explores the creative potential within these shifts, celebrating the possibilities they offer for transformation and renewal.

“Displacement of people and matter may have become a common place within contemporary artistic and social context, yet most often it is associated with challenging conditions of migration or colonial extraction. With “Critical Shifts”  we propose to go beyond the fractures and dislocations into the possibilities of the new, when the shifted and the displaced is celebrated in its creativity and acknowledged as the new constant”, – the curatorial team states.

The choice of Istanbul and Barin Han art centre, located at the heart of the Old City, is also crucial as no other city can represent such powerful shifts and collision of displacements in its various forms and histories – between people and landscapes, land and water, the old and new, the historical and the contemporary. Taking up Barin Han four floors, Critical Shift follows the shifting narrative from works that measure the chaos, through works that deconstruct the old, culminating in the idea of shifting as a new constant.

Curators: Maria Korolkova, Margarita Osepyan, and Kate Umnova

Artists: Greta Alfraro, Rong Bao, Kerem Ozan Bayraktar, Burçak Bingöl, Gülizar Çepoğlu, Marjolijn Dijkman, Sinem Dişli, FRAUD, Jim Hobbs, Merve İşeri, Saodat Ismailova, Ege Kanar, Jiabao Li, Marie-Luce Nadal, Yağiz Özgen, Julien Prévieux, Sümer Sayin, Pip Thornton, Dimitri Venkov, Emma Waltraud Howes, Cansu Yıldıran

Photo: Sümer Sayin - 'Island(s) of Escape', installation fragment, 2022

'Landscape Encounters' is a research project run by Anushka Athique + Hannah Lammin, which explores how our bodies interact with landscapes. It asks the question: how can embodied creative practices enable us to empathise with other species and reinstate a more empathetic relationship with the ecosystems we operate within? 

The project aims to develop an innovative methodology for community engagement that enhances participants’ awareness of their entanglement with other species.  It seeks to encourage a sense of empathy with the more-than-human world through inclusive and situated creative practice.  

On the 9 + 10 of July we ran a residential workshop at Wilderness Wood in Sussex to test these ideas. Over the 2-days we investigated our embodied relations with the wooded-world and how this differs from other species. Moving-through and observing-with the landscape, we worked together to imagine the life-worlds of other types of beings, whilst also examining our own ways of being. We documented the affective transmissions between ourselves and others using drawing, writing, making and movement. And we prototyped bodily attachments, using  a selection of simple materials (cardboard, cord, wire, wadding, etc., and other materials found in the landscape) that would alter our sensoria, amplifying or occluding particular senses, or re-shaping body parts to change how they affect/are affected by their surroundings, through this we explored inhabiting the landscape otherwise.'

Collectarium (Sophie Beard + Allyson Waller) exhibit at the interactive festival NOW PLAY THIS, Somerset House, New Wing Gallery, London, 6-14 April 2024. 

Selecting 3 contributions from the Lockdown Space Collection Collectarium created participatory activities responding to the festivals theme of “Liminality: Playing between worlds” - an invitation to think of PLAY as a place both for introspection and connection. Encouraging self-reflection, the interactive festival explored the transitory, borderless spaces between artist’s imaginations and audiences' inner worlds. 

The Lockdown Space collection invited people to submit observations on how their home environment had changed during lockdown. Domestic spaces became extraordinary through the way in which people had to rapidly re-imagine their homes. The collection documents these unusual temporary and ‘in-between’ liminal spaces. The domestic home became the place where we work, socialise, exercise, learn, create, entertain, play, celebrate and escape. 

The project is in collaboration with Peter Maloney. Thanks to the original contributors: N Rodriguez (Indoor Hopscotch), Madeline Tanoto (Pineapple Dance) & Kerri Burton (Stair Slide) and to Artistic Director Luján Oulton, Lead producer Nick Murray, Assistant producer, Susie Buchan & tech lead Jo Summers.

Silvio Carta was keynote speaker at Datathink 2024 / AI & Cities: Sampling the Past, Interpreting the Present in Future Tense as a part of the Winter School organised by the Max Planck Institute for Art History, in Rome. The presentation took place at the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome and the event was organised by the Max Planck Society and hosted by the University of Zurich.

The presentation addressed timely societal and urban questions related to AI and new technologies including: How do algorithmic techniques like deep learning and computer vision challenge or complement existing methods in fields like architecture, urban studies, and architectural and urban history? What new questions and blindspots emerge? As urban data extraction and analysis grows increasingly automated, how does this transform disciplinary notions of evidence, objectivity, and knowledge production? How do algorithmic interfaces, predictive policing, and automated urban management systems constrain or enable social justice claims and aspirations in the city?

Cloud Data is multidisciplinary project that aims to explore the intersection of associative intelligence and creative thinking in neural networks. Led by Dr Maria Korolkova in collaboration with the artist-curator Kate Umnova and machine engineer Artem Konevskikh, the project focuses on machine-human imagination, represented as a thousand-year-old guessing game of cloud watching. 

It begins with development of a software that uses machine vision to conduct visual analysis of clouds in the sky and the associations they evoke through the lens of AI and human imagination. The extracted human-made metaphors are mixed with the metaphors collected from image captioning neural networks. The resulting text prompts are then used to generate imagery that reveal the machine's subconscious imagination. By combining human-made and machine-generated metaphors, Cloud Data encourages viewers to question their understanding of perception of nature and the role of AI in shaping it.

The AHRC-funded p_ART_icipate project investigates the effect of participatory arts on social connectedness and best practices in the design and facilitation for participatory online interfaces. Led by Dr Oliver Gingrich at the University of Greenwich, with research partners Claire Grant, Trust Head of Arts Psychotherapies at Central North West London NHS Foundation Trust, Prof. Dominik Havsteen-Franklin at Brunel University and collaborators National Gallery, Royal National Institute for the Blind, Analema Group, NeuroCreate, Queen Mary University and the Noise Abatement Society. 

The project asks important questions regarding the facilitation of participatory arts online with a focus on vulnerable groups. Can online-facilitated, participatory art contribute to perceived social connectedness? What are best practices in participatory art facilitation in online, collaborative conditions? What are specific challenges experienced by vulnerable groups during online facilitation of participatory art, and how are they best addressed? 

The p_ART_icipate research project has been supported by the an Arts and Humanities Research Council Early Career Research standard grant.

This is a FOREST tells the story of 50 sites from across the city of Leeds that have the potential to be forests. These lands currently exist as in-between spaces, seemingly dormant, many locked in bureaucratic loopholes and murky ownership structures, some fenced-off for over 20 years, others waiting until they reach their desired financial value. The exhibition documents the journey to understand these sites, articulating the complexities of our place-based value relations with land, and offering, where possible, new possibilities for the spaces of Leeds and the communities that share them.   

A series of interventions by artists including Invisible Flock, Anushka Athique, Vandria  Borari, Nwando Ebizie, Outi Pieski and Jenni Laiti take place in the gallery and on a selection of sites which have formed part of the search. These works range from text-based banners visible from train lines, large ceramic sculptures placing alternative value systems onto brownfield sites and acts of collective ritual and mourning.    

Forest Bodies – We Are Forest and A Walk with The Forest are two pieces by Anushka Athique, commissioned specifically for the exhibition, builds on some of the projects central questions to do with value and ownership whilst also unravelling new ones. The two pieces present a visual-poetic exploration of the transgression between body and land. Conceived of in three voices Forest Bodies explores non-cognitive relationships and combines both artistic and academic methodologies. Forest Bodies invites the viewer to consider how we might make a forest, how we experience the forest and asks what if we held the forest within our bodies?

Forest Bodies by Anushka Athique was commissioned as part of This is a FOREST by Invisible Flock Co-produced by Leeds 2023 and Invisible Flock. Made possible with National Lottery Heritage Fun Supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.

For the first time, the Venice Biennale included the Biennale College Architettura, which ran from June 25 to July 22, 2023. Fifteen renowned international tutors - Samia Henni, Marina Otero, Nana Biamah-Ofosu, Thireshen Govender, Lorenzo Romito, Jacopo Galli, Philippa Tumubweinee, Ngillan Gbadebo Faal, Rahesh Ram, Guillermo Fernández-Abascal, Urtzi Grau, Samir Pandya, Alice Clancy, Sarah de Villiers, and Manijeh Verghese - worked with fifty students, early career practitioners, and academics from around the world on the theme of decolonisation and decarbonisation. 

Rahesh Ram, co-wrote a brief called Radical Empathy: Human Vessels & Fabulous Outpourings that asked precipitants to look at other forms of knowledge (knowledge that has previously been marginalised), such as indigenous knowledge and use it a creative and working methodology.  This knowledge was used to create a film that asks the viewers to empathise with Monsters, a symbol of human and non-human condition.