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

Designer: Kate Umnova
Photos: Zeynep Firat and John Whapham
Size: 210 x 135 mm
Pages: 134 
Printed: TW Graphics
ISBN: 9781036921408
£35.00 GBD - please email info@centrepress.org 

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


 

Making Possible follows the 2024 Making Possible Symposium organised by the Centre for Spatial and Digital Ecologies, which explored how, within austere regimes of tightening controls and oppressive surveillance, possibilities can be identified and constructed, potentialities realised. The symposium explored situations, spaces, and actions of making possible, opening a discussion of other futures constructed from care, generosity, and compassion - pursued with determination.

Contributors include: AbdouMaliq Simone, Anna S. Antonova, Maria Korolkova, Anushka Athique, Invisible Flock, Natasha Trotman, Kate Davies, Elisa C. Cattaneo, Justin McGuirk, Stephen Kennedy and Ed Wall. The publication is a collaboration between Centre Press and Testing-Ground: Journal of Landscapes, Cities, and Territories (Special Issue 06).

Publisher: Centre Press & Testing-Ground, London 2026
Designer: Guglielmo Rossi
Size: 148 × 210 mma
Pages: 66
Printed: TW Graphics
ISBN: 978-1-0369-6999-8