Critical Shifts: Displacing and Extracting in Contemporary Culture explores techniques of dislocation and extraction that change the fundamental structures of human and non-human objects. In modern world, everything is displaced – and if it is not, it is about to be. Modernism, colonization, geopolitical conflicts are powerful agents of displacement. Yet, alongside larger migration of peoples and matter come daily acts of displacements that can remain unnoticed, but often become agents of fundamental transformation, openness and new beginnings. 

The book showcases works of contemporary artists who embrace displacement – whether through material, metaphorical or invisible form – as a method of their diverse practices and consider displacement internal to any knowledge production. 

Texts: Greta Alfaro, Rong Bao, Kerem Ozan Bayraktar, Gülizar Çepoğlu, Elisabeth von Samsonow, Emma Waltraud Howes, Jim Hobbs, Merve İşeri, Maria Korolkova, Jiabao Li, Christian Oxenius, Margarita Osepyan, Julien Prévieux, Sümer Sayin, Dimitri Venkov, Pip Thorton.

Editors: Maria Korolkova, Margarita Osepyan, Kate Umnova
Publisher: Centre Press, London, 2025

Photos: Zeynep Firat and John Whapham
Designer: Kate Umnova
Size: 210 x 135 mm
Pages: 134 pages
Printed: TW Graphics
ISBN: 9781036921408
£35.00 GBD

Exhibition: https://criticalshifts.com
Centre Press Exhibition Feature