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curateforchange, London (2026)

02/03/2023

Wild Table of Love
June 2022 - Now
London

ABOUT THE PROJECT This public sculpture experience is an invitation to join the best banquet in the world. Expertly crafted in bronze, the table is set and the animals are already tucking in, all that is left is for the public to take their seats. Rabbitwoman and Dogman, the internationally beloved hybrid characters who have travelled the world spreading messages of love, acceptance, and adventure, play host to the party.

They sit at a huge banquet table, adorned with some of the most delectable foods imaginable. Their guests; six of the worlds most endangered animals. Rabbitwoman and Dogman have opened their table to the animals in a symbol of love and support, welcoming them into their family and promising to protect them in every way they can. But this sculpture is not just to be looked at, it is an interactive experience. Two empty seats will be placed around the table alongside the animals, ready for the public to take their seats.

The Wild Table of Love is on show now until May 2023. At Paternoster Square, St Paul’s, City of London.

British and Australian artists, Gillie and Marc have been called “the most successful and prolific creators of public art in New York’s History” by the New York Times. Creating some of the world’s most innovative public sculptures, Gillie and Marc are redefining what public art should be, spreading messages of love, equality, and conservation around the world.

28/02/2023

Anish Kapoor
Brooklyn Bridge Park, Pier 1, NYC.
Curated by Public Art Fund Director and Chief Curator Nicholas Baume

Anish Kapoor was born in 1954 in Mumbai, India. He lives in London, where he moved in the early 1970s to attend art school. For more than 35 years, Kapoor has been among the most inventive and influential artists of his generation. He has created compelling and poetic bodies of work using a range of materials that include raw pigment, stone, stainless steel, synthetic polymer, resin, and wax. He also has a longstanding interest in the sculptural potential of water. Descension, presented for the first time in the United States, represents a breakthrough with this inherently challenging, slippery substance.

Like all of Kapoor’s works, Descension is the result of intensive research into material and process, exploring the potential of water to behave in surprising ways. The continuous swirling motion of this 26-foot-diameter liquid mass converges in a central vortex, as if rushing water is being sucked into the earth’s depths. We thus experience Kapoor’s abstract form on multiple levels. Its powerful physicality has a visceral and mesmerizing impact. Yet Descension also stimulates the imagination and suggests a social, cultural, and even mythic dimension.

22/02/2023

Diana Policarpo
The Soul Expanding Ocean #4
Curated by Chus Martinez
Ocean Space, Venice.

For her newly commissioned work at Ocean Space, Diana Policarpo is developing a multimedia installation, using film and audio to enhance a certain sense of presence while capturing her own research process. Taking her point of departure from a research trip to the Portuguese administered Ilhas Selvagens (Savage Islands) in the North Atlantic Ocean, Policarpo creates a case study of mapping colonial histories through tracking natural biodiversity.

'Our eyes become lenses, we see like a microscope, we see like a camera recording the depths of the seas, we see like a drone. Diana Policarpo plays with our physical presence in space to render visible the many ways the Ocean makes sense to life. The installation is an island, a wild island, untouched by humans.' - Chus Martínez

20/02/2023

Shirin Abedinirad
“Dilemma”, Iran

“Dilemma is my new land art project which is installed in Iran. In the current situation of my country, I feel like we are stuck in the dilemma and we need to make an important choice. I wish this pathway will bring us to the light.”

17/02/2023

Christo and Jeanne-Claude
Wrapped Trees, Fondation Beyeler.

Verhüllte Bäume, or Wrapped Trees, was completed in 1998. Individual canopies had to be constructed for each tree in order to ensure the most impressive visuals.

Starting on Friday, November 13, 1998, 178 trees were wrapped with 55,000 square meters (592,015 square feet) of woven polyester fabric (used every winter in Japan to protect trees from frost and heavy snow) and 23 kilometers (14.3 miles) of rope. The trees are located in the park around the Fondation Beyeler and in the adjacent meadow as well as along the creek of Berower Park, northeast of Basel, at the German border.

As they have always done, Christo and Jeanne-Claude paid the expenses of the project themselves through the sale of original works to museums, private collectors and galleries. The artists did not accept any sponsorship.

The wrapping was removed on December 14, 1998 and the materials were recycled.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude have worked with trees for many years: In 1966, Wrapped Trees was proposed for the park adjacent to the Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri, and the permission was denied. In 1969, the artists requested permission for Wrapped Trees, Project for 330 Trees, Avenue des Champs-Élysées, Paris. This was denied by Maurice Papon, Prefect of Paris. The Wrapped Trees in Riehen were the outcome of 32 years of effort.

The branches of the Wrapped Trees pushing the translucent fabric outward created dynamic volumes of light and shadow, moving in the wind with new forms and surfaces shaped by the ropes on the fabric

15/02/2023

ATELIER POEM: Alice Cecchini & Roman Joliy,  “La casa della narrativa”. Urbino, Italy.

A chapel-like home can be seen among the summits. A haven, a shelter, but the closer you get, the sooner you realise it is not a traditional home: it is but a cut-out, a wooden, double-layered facade whose shapes dissolve by fragmenting in an incalculable number of possible windows, each of which has been opened or which can be opened. Our gaze falls through the window and enters the private sphere from outside, the public sphere.

However, the pandemic turned the concept of a private home into a fragile idea and transformed it into an individual microcosm constantly yearning for a new condition and shape where everything is possible. It will never satisfy all the demands of a free individual but it also remains the only possible solution.

Alice Cecchini and Roman Joliy use “la casa della narrativa” to showcase how the concept of “nest” and domestic refuge have dispersed. They ask visitors to reflect on existing conditions and on the concept of transformation as an opportunity.

13/02/2023

Heavens – Revital Cohen & Tuur Van B***n

Part of Serpentine’s Back to Earth. Curated by Rebecca Lewin, Lucia Pietroiusti and Kostas Stasinopoulos. Composition by Pan Daijing. The Swiss Church, London, 12-17 October 2021

You look away from Heavens, an immersive installation conceived for planetary-style projection methods, inspired by Walter Benjamin’s mournful comment in his essay “To the Planetarium,” that the development of astronomical technology brought about the death of the cosmic experience of the ancients: the more we see, the less we sense; the more we know, the less we conceive.
Heavens itself is dedicated to that cosmic trance, and to the peculiar and otherworldly behavior and biology of the octopus, that age-old oracle, a being perhaps too alien to turn out to be alien, and yet it might just be, as a scientific paper suggests, hypothesisng that the mass increase in biodiversity that occurred on Earth some 500 million years ago may have been due to extra-terrestrial DNA. Given a potential cosmic origin to the octopus’s secret history, the artists work their way back from the animal’s odd properties to a vast, cosmic state, an obsessive perception of interconnections, an apophenia delirious enough one might lose oneself in it.
On the other hand, if all ecology is interplanetary, then there is no outside, the virus didn’t come from anywhere, there’s nowhere to escape to, and the colonial, survivalist dream of resettlement is nothing but a su***de cult at the end of history – of this history.
(…) The event is in the future, and it is in the past. The event, the dramaturgical scaffold of a religious ritual that takes you through the tunnel and out the other side – the hole you disappear into: gravity at its most inescapable, swallowing what can be known into nothingness.
We are all children of the event, drifting bits of space junk ejected from original wholeness. Desperate for wholeness: loving, dissociated, euphoric, desperate.
– Lucia Pietroiusti

09/02/2023

“Swale”, by Mary Mattingly
New York.

Swale is an intentionally provocative public artwork and a floating edible landscape on a reclaimed barge that launched in 2016. Growing or picking food on New York’s public land has been illegal for almost a century for fear that a glut of foragers could destroy an ecosystem. Swale utilizes marine common law in order to be public yet circumvent local public land laws. Swale is a folly, a floating edible landform that provides free food for harvest at the intersection of public art and service. With Swale, we want to reinforce water as a commons, and work towards fresh food as a commons too.

Swale came out of learning that in addition to over 100 acres of community garden space in NYC, the city cares for 30,000 acres of public parkland, while access to fresh food is limited. People visit Swale to pick edible and medicinal perennial plants for free.

In 2017, due to a confluence of Swale, a NYC Parks commissioner supportive of edible landscapes, and the strength and support of many community groups and stewards, NYC opened its first "foodway" in Concrete Plant Park in the Bronx. If there continues to be stewardship interest, they could build more.

I grew up in an agricultural town outside of NYC where the drinking water was polluted. That framed my understanding of clean water as an increasingly rare resource that needed to be protected. So Swale came out of a need to connect with and rely upon New York's waterways and public land in order to better care for it, and by proximity, for each other. Swale has been a tool to advocate for policy change. Since marine common law is different from New York City's public land laws, Swale can pave a pathway to create public food in public space.

07/02/2023

Lounging Through the Flood, 2019
Jenny Kendler + Jeremy Bolen

In our current era of climate crisis, catastrophic flooding events on the Mississippi river—so-called ‘1000 Year Floods’—have become increasingly common. Evoking a madcap vessel built by climate refugees or disaster-wary survivalists—Lounging Through the Flood is a sculpture created to ride these rising waters.

Echoing the white-painted “ghost bikes” placed to memorialize cyclists, the sculpture’s one hundred life rings—which memorialize as many flood events—are also painted white: in this case an off-white with a curious name. The Behr Paint company calls this particular shade ‘Climate Change’—and without irony, suggests it harmonizes with ‘Back to Nature’ and ‘Rain Dance.’

Emulating cradle-to-cradle strategies, the project trajectory contains its own afterlife. At the conclusion of the sculpture’s travels, the work will be disassembled and each lifesaver printed with a photographic cyanotype depicting—and created using—flood waters. The printed tubes will then be used as props for Extinction Rebellion Chicago’s climate activism before being auctioned to raise funds for flood relief.

Simultaneously occupying an uncanny hope and a recognition of massive systemic failure, Lounging Through the Flood asks us to consider the complex—and particularly American—constellation of apathy and survival, denial and ingenuity which wends its way through our society, rushing towards environmental catastrophe.

03/02/2023

STUDIO DRIFT
Fragile Future FFC Venice Mantegna / 2019

Ralph Nauta and Lonneke Gordijn are the minds behind Studio Drift, an Amsterdam-based artists’ duo founded in 2007, who create works which may best be described as natural phenomena, captured by technology.

Their vast array of work is frequently inspired by, or mimics, occurrences such as the flight of birds, the blooming of flowers, or the way a tree interacts with its surroundings. They then apply their inspiration using cutting-edge technology like virtual reality, drones and sophisticated kinetic sensors, occasionally partnering up with researchers at the Technological University of Delft (TU Delft) if what they are looking to do is not possible yet. The result is dreamlike; it is an ode to nature, an enhancement of its charms, and reveals a deep fascination with its complex systems.

The works of Studio Drift are also deeply concerned with mass and space. Flirting with sculpture and the way sculpture occupies space, many of their works interact with a room beyond having an ornamental function. More importantly, they react to human presence in that room. DRIFT manifests the phenomena and hidden properties of nature with the use of technology in order to learn from the Earth’s underlying mechanisms and to re- establish our connection to it. With both depth and simplicity, DRIFT’s works of art illuminate parallels between man-made and natural structures through deconstructive, interactive, and innovative processes. The artists raise fundamental questions about what life is and explore a positive scenario for the future. All individual artworks have the ability to transform spaces. The confined parameters of a museum or a gallery does not always do justice to a body of work, rather it often comes to its potential in the public sphere or through architecture. DRIFT brings people, space and nature on to the same frequency, uniting audiences with experiences that inspire a reconnection to our planet.

01/02/2023

Serge Attukwei Clottey
The Wishing Well

The Wishing Well is a sculptural installation of large-scale cubes draped with sheets of woven pieces of yellow plastic Kufuor gallons used to transport water in Ghana. Transforming a public park into a destination, The Wishing Well refers to the wells to which many people around the world must trek daily to access water. Europeans introduced Kufuor gallons, or jerrycans, to the people of Ghana to transport cooking oil. As repurposed relics of the colonial project, they serve as a constant reminder of the legacies of empire and of global movements for environmental justice. Sited in the Coachella Valley, whose future is deeply dependent on water, The Wishing Well creates a dialogue about our shared tomorrow.

Serge Attukwei Clottey (Accra, Ghana, 1985) explores the sociopolitical, economic, environmental, and cultural legacies of the colonial project in Africa. Using yellow plastic jerrycans known as Kufuor gallons, he creates sculptures, installations, and performances that speak to histories of colonial pillaging and its effects on trade and migration. These gallons function as material and a striking symbol in Attukwei Clottey’s practice: a reminder of the way violent pasts manifest in the everyday.

30/01/2023

Cheryl Wing-Zi Wong
Azimuth, New York, 2023

Located at Pike Street Malls between East Broadway and Division Street is AZIMUTH, a recycled public artwork originally installed in Washington DC as MERIDIAN. The installation was created by Cheryl Wing-Zi Wong, a New York-based artist focused on exploring the boundary between architecture and art.

After its time in DC from 2021 through 2022, AZIMUTH was rehabbed and transformed by the Chinatown BID and NYC Parks with a new vibrant color makeover. Accompanying AZIMUTH is a ground mural that extends from the installation. With AZIMUTH’s installation, an underused public park median has been transformed into a venue perfect for reflection, frolic, and play. AZIMUTH will be on display through November 5, 2023.

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