Under Construction is an evolving collaborative architecture project, under construction at the Stanley Picker Gallery throughout September – December 2024. The exhibition surveys more than a decade of ambitious live-build projects guided by architect Takeshi Hayatsu, working with students and a growing cohort of participants and community partners (including The Community Brain, Citizen Zoo, 121 Collective and more). Throughout the exhibition an entirely new live build will take place at the gallery developed with the 2024-25 cohort of Unit 5 MArch students from the Department of Architecture & Landscape at Kingston School of Art, Kingston University, London. This will include a temporary rammed earth Shrine outside the entrance and a Sauna on the Gallery’s riverside terrace.

Thomas Pausz’ solo show Haunted Ecologies intersects the research fields of media, ecology and ‘hauntology’ – the understanding that our perception of contemporary environment and culture is always haunted by spectres of the past and by hopes and visions of the future – to propose an immersive installation echoing the transformations of local ecosystems.

Stanley Picker Gallery is situated on an island along the Hogsmill River, a tributary of the Thames.The installation echoes the transformations of the river over time and traces how, from Eadweard Muybridge’s landscapes and spirit photography to contemporary digital image making techniques the media constellations we design are evolving with and changing our perception of the ecosystem.

Ana Brotas X Balázs Budai & Balázs Virág X Collectif Trouble (Jeanne Astrup-Chauvaux & Garance Maurer & Mathilde Dewavrin) X Calla Bettina Ernst X Kitti Gosztola & Bence György Pálinkás X Fuzzy Earth (Tekla Gedeon & Sebastian Gschanes) X Gideon Horváth X Hajnal Gyeviki X Harun Morrison X Marie Ouazzani & Nicolas Carrier X Rita Süveges X szabadonbalaton (Diána Berecz & Dániel Bozzai &  Éva Bubla & Bence Fülöp & András Zlinszky and collaborators Gergely Ofner X GUBAHAMORI X Mária Schuller & Borbála  Vértesi  X Anna Tüdős X Anna Varga) X The New Liquidity (Selma Boskailo & Anders Ehlin) X Áron Tóth-Heyn X Ádám Ulbert X Anna Zilahi

This exhibition aimed to present a series of projects around the culture and ecology of Lake Balaton and the Balaton Uplands region in Hungary, more specifically, the research and conversations developed as part of the BALATORIUM project, in collaboration with PAD Foundation, local and international artists, university students of MOME, and in scientists and researchers working in the region, including the Tihany-based Balaton Limnological Research Institute, the Department of Limnology at the University of Pannonia in Veszprém, and the a Balaton-felvidéki National Park. The project was commissioned by Veszprém-Balaton 2023 European Capital of Culture.

For Flo Kasearu’s first UK solo show 'Host' at Stanley Picker Gallery, visitors were not able to visit her major piece the Flo Kasearu House Museum as this is in Tallinn, so instead she produced soap replicas of her 113-year-old family house. This does not only provide a lifetime’s soap supply for Flo’s home sauna but helps divert her fear of running out of soap to other worrisome dangers, such as her wooden house catching fire, the gap in her garden fence, and public space being ‘parasited’ by order.

The projects featured in this show depart from Indonesian artist Elia Nurvista’s interest in recipes and food as cultural value. The exhibition highlights different political agendas and discrepancies between the acceptance of goods, including food products, and the rejection of humans, for example, asylum seekers/migrants. It further explores the difference between the representations of local (traditional) and global (exotic) food cultures. 

As an outcome of my research residency, I launched a podcasts series that discuss the different layers of earth under our feet, and how they are associated with different influxes of people, plants and animals. The deeper we dig, the less familiar it gets. How these newcomers continue to shape the landscape, and how this might give us new perspectives and critical approached to understanding the temporal nature of us tending to this land?

Curated by Borbála Soós, Fugitive Seeds considers how endemic, alien and fugitive seeds connect to colonial histories including in Northern Ireland and more specifically Derry~Londonderry and its port.

Performative readings by Borbála Soós at the Botanical Garden of Comenius University. The texts re-created a journey of colonial discovery as they were aligned with different habitats in the Botanical Garden of Bratislava. The readings reflect on the creation of botanical gardens as aspirational colonial structures, and their role in the collection, banking and dissemination of seeds, species and ideas of the exotic Other.

A screening programme shown at the Pink Whale, Bratislava. Curated by Borbáls Soós with moving image works by artists Ana Vaz & Tristan Bera, Laura Huertas Millán, Pilar Mata Dupont, Pedro Neves Marques, Asunción Molinos Gordo, Gerard Ortín Castellví and Jonas Staal. The films reflected on colonial journeys of discovery and how nature is politically, culturally and cinematically constructed.

– curated by Judit Angel, Alessandra Pomarico, Borbála Soós, Ovidiu Ţichindeleanu

How can we unlearn the violent and destructive paradigms of colonial, racial, patriarchal capitalism, and imagine a world in which different knowledge systems are equally valuable and cooperate to defend life in all its forms?

Grounding ~ Seeding is a way to commit, through exhibition making, to laying the foundations for a long-term trajectory of epistemological reconstruction, and seeding decolonial ideas and gestures toward a different future, one that looks at several generations before and after ours.

 Grounding ~ Seeding is the inagurates the long-term programme, A World of Many Worlds, sharing the Zapatista vision of a world based on horizontal, inclusive and equitable relations, where all forms of knowledge are considered valuable.

Lecture presentation with the Border Ecologies Network, as part of the event The ​​Border Environments. The roundtable programme set out to critically examine the ways in which environmental systems become active agents in the management and control of migrant bodies and their modes of circulation, resulting in violent and even deadly consequences. Over the two-days of the programme addressed a number of urgent issues including the weaponisation of semi-natural landscapes in border struggles, the role of conservation projects and nature reserves in demolishing migrant camps, and the transformation of ecologies into tactical security regimes.

* Elena Agudio * James Bridle * Joélson Buggilla & Jorgge Menna Barreto * Sunoj D & Namrata Neog / Lakshmi Nivas * Sári Ember * Saskia Fischer * Oto Hudec * Areej Huniti * Zayaan Khan / Seed Biblioteek * Jumana Manna * Emma Nicolson / Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh * Elia Nurvista * Uriel Orlow * Martin Piaček * Tabita Rezaire * Sara Rodrigues & Rodrigo B. Camacho / Landra * Vivien Sansour / Palestine Heirloom Seed Library * Ai Weiwei * Ayman Zedani * Amy Watson / Pool *

This exhibition in the format of a seed library includes contributions by artists, curators, designers, gardeners, farmers and organizations from various parts of the world, containing actual seeds, conceptual seeds, artworks, spells, instructions, videos and sound recordings.

Residency with Re_Act Contemporary Art Laboratory; collective expedition of the Azores Archipelago; presentations at the local school and at Casa do Sol – artist association at Angra do Heroísmo, Terceira Island. Exhibition as residency outcome at Carmina Galeria, Terceira, Azores.

The content of this class shall be bodies, animate and inanimate… (–Yvonne Rainer, Lecture on Moving from Three Distributions) While the objects in the exhibition may be inanimate, they certainly convey a sense of bodies. Ember often uses stories that are at once personal and universal. Her works carry strong symbolic values through the depiction of classic, archetypal scenes, including those of bathing or the tree of life, while the stylised characters bring a feeling of life and history to the objects.

Ingela Ihrman’s The Giant Hogweed and Sonia Levy’s For the Love of Corals  are two interrelated solo exhibitions presented simultaneously at Karlin Studios curated by Borbála Soós. They each address issues around nature management techniques in relation to specific species and touch upon colonial histories, breeding, care, landscape management and future ecologies. Which plant and animal persons are invited and welcome in our idealist vision of nature? Who are to be saved from extinction and who are deemed invasive and prosecuted for their specific qualities? The projects question what kind of species and relationships will constitute our future landscapes, and how are the new paradigms constructed for environmental conservation and natural history that emerge in the wake.

Sonia Levy’s For the Love of Corals and Ingela Ihrman’s The Giant Hogweed are two interrelated solo exhibitions presented simultaneously at Karlin Studios curated by Borbála Soós. They each address issues around nature management techniques in relation to specific species and touch upon colonial histories, breeding, care, landscape management and future ecologies. Which plant and animal persons are invited and welcome in our idealist vision of nature? Who are to be saved from extinction and who are deemed invasive and prosecuted for their specific qualities? The projects question what kind of species and relationships will constitute our future landscapes, and how are the new paradigms constructed for environmental conservation and natural history that emerge in the wake.

I was selected to lead a series of Peer Forum meetings engaging with the scientific work, collections and displays of the Horniman Museum and Gardens. The group is running a reading group, regular meetings with the Horniman curators. They discusses how each of their artistic practices relate to the ecologies of rewilding and what sort of ideas, forms and methodologies this might encompass, such as communal projects and projects in unusual locations; in collaboration with scientists and other researchers; and exercising practices of care...

The underlying condition in which this exhibition and related events and online activities came about is a global emergency, one which is emerging out of an unfolding ecological crisis and can be attributed to the violent process of rampant deforestation, which constitutes a continuation of imperial methods of territorial control. This massive reshaping of the land, together with the shifting baselines regarding what kind of green deserts we are willing to accept as forests, might be seen as a symptom of our Anthropocene epoch. The show conjures up the ghosts of lost or near-extinct species, forests and sensations.

The reading group explored themes such as forest ecologies, permaculture, rewilding and radical care in relation to the exhibition 'Ecologies of the Ghost Landscape. The Word for World is Forest' I curated for tranzit.sk in Bratislava, Slovakia.

The lecture performance was part of the events at the forest gathering with WOODS, Community for Cultivation, Theory and Art, near the village of Písečná, Ústí nad Orlicí, in the foothills of the Orlické Mountains, Czech Republic. Titled WE ARE WOODS: About Plant Intelligence and Interspecies Communication, artists, theorists, curators, sociologists, plant and star experts met, discussed, cooked, and shared time in a forest removed from agricultural use and devoted to the common exploration of our interconnected existence.

Joana Escoval solo exhibition.

The exhibition transplants us into a fictional landscape. It is a strange, yet familiar place, potentially of the future. Clearly dependent on human interaction, it is a result of complex forces, pre-determined by hybrid histories.

For the closing event of her residency at Blitz, curator Borbála Soós creates an exhibition in a form of a talk. Bringing the audience on a journey evoking a series of existing and imagined spaces in Malta and on other similar islands, she flexibly opens up the mind to what a space of an exhibition could contain, expanding and contracting along the way.

Plant: You are obsessed with things to come... Just a thought, maybe instead of going crazy over this, you need to embrace what’s around you, here and now. Like your first proposition about metamorphoses. Can’t you notice how we all mutually constitute each other in codependency? If you think about it this way: we might go to heaven , or to hell, but either way, we will be still mutually reliant on each other...

These two interrelated solo exhibitions by Petra Feriancová and Nicolás Lamas look at our current times as a moment when complex systems and ecologies are more and more vulnerable, and in fact quickly falling apart. They consider instances of accelerated entropy as moments when transformations happen.

The panel discussion with former SPACE Art + Technology artists in residence explored the residency focused on emerging technologies, looking at how artists react and adapt to digital trends.

Metabolism is not personal. It is engineered. The metabolism of cells rewired to get more efficient, to grant them the ability to generate new products. Fuels, chemicals, foods, and drugs. Not entirely artificial, not wholly organic. Perfect enough to keep the engines running. Just make sure to keep the by-products in a dark dry place.

Expanding the idea of the present, the works in this show were conceived and enacted at various historical moments over the last two decades, and yet remain viscerally relevant to our current times. Carrying the potential for transformation and activism, rather than being directly reactionary to contemporary politics, they build a new language and meaning bottom up, and through their own logic. Rather than creating utopian or parallel circumstances, the works exist in this reality and articulate empowering statements.

CONGLOMERATE is a collaborative Gesamtkunstwerk presented in the form of a television network. The project is realised by a core team of five Berlin-based artists and filmmakers: Sol Calero, Ethan Hayes-Chute, Derek Howard, Christopher Kline and Dafna Maimon.

The multiple voices within the exhibition reflect on stories about communities that are formed through shared attitudes and aspirations. Sharing these accounts of various modernist utopian, avant-garde, Marxist, anarchist, or even naive teenage strategies provides an opportunity to transfer their energies into contemporary structures of thought.

Looking at plants as model for collaboration among human and non-human spheres, the four-day programme aimed to generate a climate of knowledge through cohabitation, exploration, distributed and situated learning promoted by artistic and cultural production.

CONGLOMERATE is a collaborative Gesamtkunstwerk presented in the form of a television network. The project is realised by a core team of five Berlin-based artists and filmmakers: Sol Calero, Ethan Hayes-Chute, Derek Howard, Christopher Kline and Dafna Maimon. ‘Station ID’ is CONGLOMERATE’s first project to be realised in London. Inspired by the Rube Goldberg Machine, the installation is an absurdly complicated arrangement of devices, linked together to perform a simple task.

The exhibition maps relations between various species in a landscape both strange and familiar. It strives to open up a world of imagination where all other beings have the same agency as humans, and where, if you wish, species are capable or becoming, or transforming into one another.

Mushrooms sprout to life even in the darkest conditions. Spores of inspiration spread on the breeze of science, awash in irrepressible fantasy. Tropical climates are ripe for fermentation. While the yeast ferments, the revolution foments. Look through the cellular membrane: nostalgia therapy. Simulation leads to stimulation. The mountain pulls away turbulent weather, leaving sunshine over the beach. Escapism is a fundamental aspect of human life and mental health. All options are the best options. Heaven is a Place on Earth...

As part of the residency at Rupert my research focused on the organisational systems of fungi species, slime mould, plants and deep sea creatures in relation to social structures...

Imagine a land full of swamps emitting suffocatingly sweet scents in the heat. The air is thick with poisonous substances left over after the party, which involved snorting and getting high on the lusciousness of the Earth. The intoxicating dance of consuming degenerates into entropy. Rhizomatic connections happen underground, underwater, and in the air. Algorithms mimic natural growth. Cells permutate and exchange. The senses are overloaded with the magical and the exotic, while we wonder about a nature after nature...

Tell me the story Of all these things is an accumulation of several narrative threads drawing together intimate conversations between the artist and her two sisters, ominous animated visions of a metamorphosing body, e-learning training on Prevent, and staged, performed gestures. The work takes its title from Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, a novel that deploys a variety of texts to examine themes of dislocation and fragmentation. Taking Cha’s work as a departure point, the exhibitions explores processes of disassembling as constitutive of lived experience.

The event series took shape in variety of formats, including talks, discussions, seminars, workshops, tours and publication launches. The gallery also hosted an exhibition, including a research library and a debate space on the ground floor, and a screening downstairs. Can Altay's ongoing journal, 'Ahali, Setting a Setting' unfolded into an installation, including new contributions. Adelita Husi-Bey's video ‘Ard’ (Land), 2014 presented a specific case study of ‘Cairo 2050’, a government-backed and privately funded metropolitan development plan of epic proportions, which threatens the livelihood of many settlements...

'Mr. Palomar's mind has wandered, he has stopped pulling up weeds. He no longer thinks of the lawn: he thinks of the universe. He is trying to apply to the universe everything he has thought about the lawn. The universe as regular and ordered cosmos or as chaotic proliferation. The universe perhaps finite but countless, unstable within its borders, which discloses other universes within itself. The universe, collection of celestial bodies, nebulas, fine dust, force fields, intersections of fields, collections of collections.' – Italo Calvino, Mr. Palomar ...

Taking place in both gallery spaces of Tenderpixel, the exhibition Things That Tumble Twice looks at the sphere of duality. It recalls ideas of juxtaposition, complementarity and interrelated parts (i.e. matter and its absence, light and darkness, signifier and significant, thesis and antithesis, animate and inanimate objects, 0 s and 1s, yin and yang). On the other hand, and at the same time, the exhibition in its entirety is informed by the principle of multiplicity as becoming and unity— as something that cannot be described as the sum of its parts or qualities but simply as an irreducible whole (i.e. complex systems, hermeneutic circle, organicism, life, a cloud)...

In his book, ‘The Nightmare of Participation’, first published in 2010, Markus Miessen describes participation, collaboration and collectivity as only pseudo-democratic terms. The words participation and consensus have become increasingly overused, and their uncritical, naive or even romantic applications are frightening. Miessen enters the discussion as an architect, but also advocates for vigorous cross-disciplinary intrusions...

‘[...]dancing together is as much about how we come together to enact a community as it is about enacting and expressing the ideological framework that a community requires to persist. It is about doing community, as action and as ideology.’
– Benjamin Pohlig on Social choreography...

The exhibition considers artworks that use the structure of the stage and certain conventions of scriptwriting as a framework for investigations into relationships, social interactions, and political ecologies. Taking theatre as an open ended process with its multiple contexts and references, the exhibition acts as catalyst for performances, screenings, talks and other forms of engagement...

In the latter part of the nineteenth century, Georg Cantor revolutionised mathematics with the concept of a set. Not only a collection of objects, a set includes the rules we apply to them. By multiplying the reservoir of parameters conveyed through situations, objects and scores, the works in this exhibition plead for the rediscovery and conscious reflection on the construction of reality...

This exhibition brings together practices that revisit the idea of RITUAL as a catalyst for transformative experience; a notion explored in the work of Lygia Clark (‘I manipulate the rite without the myth’). Her work, which existed only through the agency and subjective experience of an audience, acts as a point of departure from which to re-examine the function of ritual today. By exploring ritual as medium, Clark shifts the focus from the field of the spiritual to patterns of social interaction, creating potential for the production of alternative forms of subjectivity.

This exhibition brings together practices that interrogate MYTH as a set of beliefs that sustain our social structures. In the works presented, different bodies of culture are devoured and devour in turn; a strategy that can be related to the concept of antropofagia (the cannibalisation of culture, as first defined within Brazilian avant-gardes). Rather than incorporating the other, this process involves a transformation, a becoming. Devouring mythologies allows the possibility of re signifying them, in order to decentre the colonial, social and sexual norms that constitute modernity...