Eliana Willis

This spring, Tate Britain announced the four artists shortlisted for the 2023 Turner Prize, the most prestigious contemporary art award in the U.K.
Along with an exhibition of their work at Towner Eastbourne, a museum on the southeast coast of England, the shortlisted artists will all receive a cash prize: £25,000 ($31,000) for the overall winner and £10,000 ($12,000) each to the other artists. The winner will be announced on 5 December, at an award ceremony in Eastbourne’s Winter Gardens.
The shortlisted artists were chosen by a jury of experts, which included Martin Clark, director of the Camden Art Centre; Cédric Fauq, chief curator of Capc musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux; Melanie Keen, director of Wellcome Collection; and Helen Nisbet, artistic director of Art Night, chaired by Alex Farquharson, director of Tate Britain. Here’s what to expect from each artist in the show, ahead of its opening on 24 September.

Jesse Darling
Jesse Darling, “No Medals No Ribbons,” installation view at Modern Art Oxford, 2022. Photo: Ben Westaby. © Modern Art Oxford.
Age: 41
Nominated for: Solo exhibitions” No Medals, No Ribbons” at Modern Art Oxford and “Enclosures” at Camden Art Centre
What the jury said: Darling’s manipulation of materials “in ways that skillfully express the messy reality of life,” was a pointed out in particular by the jurors, who felt that Darling’s work exposed the world’s “underlying fragility.”
In their own words: Writing in an Instagram post last year about the show that got him nominated, Darling said: “I’m having an exhibition of the last 10 years of my work, and it’s happening in my hometown on a full circle Ferris wheel roll up vibe. Venice Biennale was a fancy gig but not as wild a feeling as seeing my flyer in the local chippy. Though why am I conflicted and haunted by many ghosts, is it the war weather or the retrospective? Thinking of everyone who made me what I am for well and for ill, and f— it, I’m still alive even if “mid-career” means half-embalmed in the zombie art circus. And I still got work to do in this world goddamit.”

Barbara Walker
Barbara Walker, “Burden of Proof” (2022), installation view: Sharjah Biennial 15, Old Diwan Al Amiri, 2023. Commissioned by Sharjah Art Foundation with the support of The Whitworth, The University of Manchester. Photo: Danko Stjepanovic.
Age: 58
Nominated for: “Burden of Proof” at Sharjah Biennial 15.
What the jury said: Jurors praised Walker for her use of portraits at a “monumental scale” to tell stories of a “similarly monumental nature,” particularly highlighting one work—an installation wall drawing in the Sharjah Biennial.
In their own words: Walker spoke last year about the show that got her nominated in a video published by the Sharjah Art Foundation.
“I’ve been developing a series of drawings that reflects on individuals and families experiencing stories that have been affected by the Windrush scandal,” Walker said, referring to the political scandal that started in 2018, when British citizens mainly of Caribbean descent were detained, denied legal rights, and threatened with deportation. “Some even lost their home and income and were categorized as illegal immigrants,” Walker explained.
In Sharjah, Walker presented eight framed portraits of individuals swept up by the Home Office’s “hostile environment” policies, which led to the scandal, with the backgrounds reproducing documents that were presented as evidence by the government for these citizens being wrongly categorized as illegal immigrants. “There isn’t a blueprint. The work happens as it develops,” Walker said of the series. “What preoccupied me was the creation of wall drawing portraits of three of the survivors.”

Rory Pilgrim
Rory Pilgrim, RAFTS (2022), HD Video Still (l :06:55). Courtesy andriesse~eyck galerie.
Age: 35
Nominated for: the commission RAFTS at Serpentine and Barking Town Hall, and a live performance of the work at Cadogan Hall in London
What the jury said: Jurors called the project a “standout example of social practice” in art and called Pilgrim’s musical arrangements “beautiful and affecting.”
In their own words: “Making connections between work, mental health, home, recovery, and our environment, additional voices of people from near and far join the chorus, including members of Barking and Dagenham Youth Dance and Project Well Being: a group for people experiencing homelessness in Boise, Idaho,” Walker wrote about the show that got them nominated in an Instagram post last year.

Ghislaine Leung
Ghislaine Leung, “Fountains,” installation view at Simian, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2023. Courtesy the artist and Simian, Copenhagen; and Maxwell Graham, New York; and Cabinet, London. Photo: GRAYSC
Age: 42
Nominated for: her solo exhibition “Fountains” at Simian in Copenhagen
What the jury said: The jury felt that Leung’s work exuded “warm, humorous and transcendental qualities” which challenged “the way art is produced and circulated,” establishing the gallery as a co-performer for her “score-based” work.
In their own words: “The term ‘shedding light’ is often used in the context of explanatory texts. I have dozens of photos I have tried to take of some weird thing in the inside of my mouth using the flash on my phone, or sometimes a combination of torch and flash, awkwardly both positioned in one hand. To see some little fleshy nodule or chewed bit of mouth. And the photos are inevitably over or under exposed or blurry or at the wrong angle,” Leung said of her work, in the publication YYYYMMDD. “Illumination is perhaps not the same as more light, it is often something that happens in and because of the dark.”
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When Susie M. Barstow was in search of artistic inspiration, she would head to the mountains, sketchbook in tow, reportedly hiking as many as 25 miles a day while capturing views of the natural landscape.
This dedication to her practice is all the more remarkable considering Barstow began her career in the 1850s, at a time when bloomers were still considered daring attire for women.
“Going out in long heavy woolen skirts and heels and petticoats and all of these layers was so cumbersome,” Nancy Siegel, an art history professor at Maryland’s Towson University and curator of a new exhibition on Barstow, told Artnet News.
“So there were bloomers, trousers worn under a short skirt. And women like Susie would raise the hems of their walking skirts. Some women wore boy’s tennis shoes, or would use a clothes pin to pull their dress up almost to create pantaloons while they were hiking,” she added. “There were lots of ways that women carefully and strategically manipulated their dress so that they could navigate the landscape.”
Unknown photographer, Portrait of Susie M. Barstow (ca. 1870). Private Collection, Photo by Dennis DeHart.
Born in New York City in 1836, Barstow was among some 50 women who were part of the Hudson River School, painting in the tradition started by Thomas Cole. Now, the Thomas Cole National Historic Site, the home of the founder of the movement, is hosting Barstow’s first ever retrospective, “Women Reframe American Landscape: Susie Barstow and Her Circle/Contemporary Practices.”
In 2010, the museum had staged “Remember the Ladies,” the first exhibition dedicated to the movement’s women, curated by Siegel and art dealer Jennifer Krieger. A decade later, Betsy Jack, director of the Cole house, reached out to Siegel about organizing a follow-up show, this time focused on a single artist.
Barstow—who has more than 100 documented paintings—soon emerged as a natural choice, both due to her success during her lifetime and the availability of her work, as well as a wealth of archival materials preserved by her surviving family members (much of which they recently donated to the Albany Institute of History and Art).
Susie M. Barstow’s paint box (ca. 1876). Private Collection. Photo by Dennis DeHart.
“I had access to hundreds of letters and photographs and personal memorabilia, like her certificates from school and the tickets that she saved from seeing the Columbian Exposition, as well as hundreds of drawings and watercolors as well as paintings,” Siegel said. “It was this incredibly unique opportunity first to find that much existing biographical material about any artist, much less one of these women of the Hudson River School.”
The result is a two-part exhibition pairing work by Barstow—who already had one piece in the Cole house collection—and other women of the Hudson River School, with that of contemporary women artists responding to the landscape. It’s a collaboration between Siegel, who handled the historic material (and also wrote a new monograph about Barstow), and Thomas Cole National Historic Site chief curator Kate Menconeri and assistant curator Amanda Malmstrom, who enlisted the show’s living artists.
Ebony G. Patterson, …the wailing…ushers us home…and there is a bellying on the land… (2021) in “Women Reframe American Landscape” at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site. Photo courtesy of the Thomas Cole National Historic Site, Catskill, New York.
A total of 13 contemporary artists each made new work, some site-specific, for the show: Teresita Fernández, the Guerrilla Girls, Marie Lorenz, Tanya Marcuse, Mary Mattingly, Ebony G. Patterson, Anna Plesset, Jean Shin, Wendy Red Star, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Cecilia Vicuña, Kay WalkingStick, and Saya Woolfalk.
“In this exhibition, we wanted to recenter women in the canon of American art, and then expand and complicate how we think about in a landscape today, because it feels like we’re in this really urgent moment,” Menconeri told Artnet News.
Teresita Fernández, Small American Fires in “Women Reframe American Landscape” at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site. Photo courtesy of the Thomas Cole National Historic Site, Catskill, New York.
Some of the works speak to contemporary concerns about the land and the environment, such as the Fernández installation Small American Fires, a series of 12 of wood panel graphite drawings of fire and a dramatic charcoal wall drawing. It’s inspired by the destructive power of fire, especially as climate change fuels more deadly blazes, but also its potential for rebirth, and the long Indigenous history of using fire to promote new growth.
Other pieces tie into the history of the Hudson River School and the Cole house more directly, like a new Guerrilla Girls poster installed in the stairway decrying the exclusion of women and artists of color from the movement—and its idealization of a landscape quickly falling victim to rampant industrialization.
Guerrilla Girls, .Guerrilla Girls Reality Check: The Hudson River School (2023) in “Women Reframe American Landscape” at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site. Photo courtesy of the Thomas Cole National Historic Site, Catskill, New York.
Cole, of course, was an early environmentalist who used his work to advocate for the preservation of the natural landscape. In his preserved studios, the curators have placed a site-specific installation by Lorenz, featuring sculptures she’s crafted from plastic and other detritus collected in New York City waterways, as well as video footage of her excursions by boat.
“Rather than painting the landscape like Cole did, Marie brings people into the landscape through this project called The Time and Tide Taxi—it’s very intrepid,” Menconeri said. “In our post-industrial moment, the land is filled with flora and fauna and plants, but also plastics and particles and toxins. So the work is really exciting. The land is damaged and it’s imperfect, but this is where we are, and she still kind of embraces it.”
Marie Lorenz’s site-specific installation in Thomas Cole’s studio in “Women Reframe American Landscape” at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site. Photo courtesy of the Thomas Cole National Historic Site, Catskill, New York.
And then there’s Plesset’s American Paradise, a new edition of the catalogue for the 1987 Hudson River School show of the same name at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art that did not include a single woman. Plesset’s version of the publication is open to the title page and frontispiece, which now features a Barstow painting, creating an alternate history where the accomplishments of women are included and properly appreciated.
“We felt that bringing art about land and the landscape by contemporary women artist into and in conversation with the historic interiors of our 1815 main house was important to complement and expand upon the Susie Barstow presentation in the new studio,” Malmstrom told Artnet News.
“I like to think of Susie Barstow and her circle as the founding mothers of the Hudson River school. They paved the way for future women artist to engage with the landscape,” Siegel added.
Anna Plesset, American Paradise (Second Edition) 2023. Photo courtesy of the artist.
The exhibition also includes a number of historic paintings by Julie Hart Beers, Fidelia Bridges, Charlotte Buell Coman, Eliza Greatorex, Mary Josephine Walters, and Laura Woodward—women artists who showed alongside Barstow and are equally deserving, Siegel insisted, of rediscovery.
“For so many years, the scholarship has focused on the male artists of the Hudson River School,” she said, “Hopefully, this show will usher in a new curatorial era of solo exhibitions devoted to these 19th-century women landscape painters.”
Susie Barstow Skelding, Susie M. Barstow in Her Brooklyn Studio (1891). Private collection. Photo by Dennis DeHart.
Born to a middle class family in Brooklyn, Barstow studied art at the Rutgers Female Institute and Cooper Union in New York. Though there were certainly still obstacles for women interested in a professional art career, Barstow benefitted from changing attitudes about women in the second half of the 19th century.
“There was a reform movement that acknowledged the importance of women exercising,” Siegel said. “Women were riding bicycles, they were hiking, they were getting outdoors—fresh air was considered to be really restorative.”
Susie M. Barstow, The Floor of Yosemite (1889). Barstow Family Trust Collection. Photo by Chrome Digital.
And Barstow took full advantage of that new freedom of movement, extensively hiking the Catskills and Adirondacks in New York, as well as New Hampshire’s White Mountains and trips overseas to Europe and to other parts of the U.S.
She also never married or had children, which freed her of many of the domestic responsibilities that so often limited women’s art careers. Barstow did, however, have a companion, a fellow landscape artist named Florence Nightingale Thallon, with whom she lived and traveled for some 20 years.
Susie M. Barstow, Early October Near Lake Squam. Collection of Suzanne H. Arnold Gallery, Lebanon Valley College Fine Art Collection, Lebanon, Pennsylvania. Photo by Andrew Bale, courtesy of the Thomas Cole National Historic Site, Catskill, New York.
“I don’t want to speculate in terms of whether this was a relationship of a sexual nature, but I would certainly say it was a very intimate friendship,” Siegel said.
Though we may never know the full details of her personal life, what’s clear is that Barstow worked incredibly hard in her 87 years. Early in her career, Barstow wrote that “I will overcome every obstacle to success.” Remarkably, she did just that.
Susie M. Barstow, The Ruins of Kenilworth Castle (1880). Barstow Family Trust Collection. Photo by Chrome Digital.
“Susie Barstow was incredibly well known. Her work sold for comparable prices as her male counterparts, and she showed in all the exhibitions that men like Asher B. Durand and Albert Bierstadt were showing in,” Siegel said.
“But there’s this moment of art historical amnesia in the interwar years between, after World War I and before World War II and all these women artists seem to disappear,” she added. “And now it’s time that we’re writing them back into history.”
“Women Reframe American Landscape: Susie Barstow and Her Circle/Contemporary Practices” is on view at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site, 218 Spring Street, Catskill, New York, May 6–October 29, 2023, and at the New Britain Museum of American Art, 56 Lexington Street, New Britain, Connecticut, November 16, 2023–March 31, 2024. It will also travel to the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum, 700 North 12th Street, Wausau, Wisconsin. 

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Naples and Paris share a checkered history, one bound by Catholicism, pastry, and a centuries-old artistic exchange—and fractured by conflict and Napoleonic occupation. Its principal art institutions, however, are getting along famously.
The Capodimonte Museum has just sent 70 Renaissance masterworks to get cozy with period counterparts from the Louvre’s collection. It’s a six-month show, one whose opening saw the French and Italian presidents in attendance, and the Louvre’s director, Laurence des Cars, joyously declare “it’s Neapolitan season.”
“Naples in Paris”, which is set to run through January 24, 2024, is being billed as the largest-ever exhibition focused on the Italian Renaissance. It may well be and, even if size isn’t everything, it’s a well-curated affair. All the great Italian painters are present and accounted for—Michelangelo, Massacio, Raphael Caravaggio, Bellini, Titian, Artemisia Gentileschi and more—with Capodimonte filling in the gaps in the Louvre’s inestimable collection (since the 17th-century French Kings Louis III and XIV preferred the Venetian and Roman schools over the Neapolitan).
Caravaggio, The Flagellation (1607). Image: courtesy Capodimonte.
It’s a remarkable and rare collaboration between two vast European museums. Though, with the former Bourbon royal palace undergoing major renovations through 2024, “Naples in Paris” has come about more through pragmatism than fraternal love.
Sylvain Bellenger, Capodimonte’s director, is also hoping associating with the world’s most famous museum might draw attention to the Naples institution. “Many visitors will already be familiar with some of the masterpieces in the Capodimonte collection,” Bellenger said in a statement, but the museum is “still unknown by the public at large” since most tourists head to Pompeii and Herculaneum instead. Maybe this grand outing will do the trick.
Massacio, La Crucifixion (1426). Courtesy: Capodimonte
The exhibition is spread across three separate spaces inside the former seat of the French monarchy. The Grande Gallerie, as the name suggests, makes the biggest statement. Thirty-one Capodimonte paintings are interwoven with the Louvre’s works by Titian, Caravaggio, and Guido Reni. Standouts are Massacio’s The Crucifixion, a work backed in brilliant gold that brings the viewer to the level of Mary Magdalene, who swoons at the feet of Jesus, her hands contorted. Differently captivating is Parmigianino’s Portrait of a Young Woman, a figure who in dress, pose, and gaze seems of an indeterminable age. To Bellenger’s point, she’s a figure we recognize, though we might not know which museum she lives in.
In the Salle de l’Horloge, the institutions turn to drawings, or cartoons, of which Capodimonte boasts more than 30,000. The most celebrated here were inherited from Fulvio Orsini including Raphael’s Moses before the Burning Bush, a charcoal work of no flame and full expression, with the prophet crouched and calm in the presence of his lord. Another is Michelangelo’s preparatory cartoon for the Vatican’s Group of Soldiers, exhibiting intricate armor work and a quiet intimacy not commonly associated with 16th-century military men. The Louvre, in response, offers up work by Raphael and his pupil Giulio Romano.
Michelangelo, Group of Soldiers (1546–50). Image: courtesy Capodimonte.
The Salle de la Chapelle takes a broader focus, staging a miscellany of wonders from Naples: an El Greco and a Titian here, a miniature Filippo Tagliolini sculpture and a gilded casket of silver and crystal there. It’s a space that shows the full diversity of the Capodimonte collection, largely courtesy of its Farnese and Bourbon families.
The two museums “are symbols of the historical links between France and Italy,” des Cars said in a statement. “This exceptional and unprecedented partnership is a perfect example of my vision for the Louvre’s future role in Europe and museums.”
See more images from “Naples in Paris” here:
Raphael, Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione (1514–15). Image: courtesy The Louvre.
Parmigianino, Portrait of a Young Woman (Also known as Antea, c. 1535). Image: courtesy Capodimonte.
Annibale Carracci, Pietà with Saint Francis and Saint Mary Magdalene (1600–25). Image: courtesy the Louvre.
Annibale Carracci, Pietà (1599–1600). Image: courtesy Capodimonte.
Correggio, Venus and Cupid with a Satyr (1524–27). Image: courtesy the Louvre.
Titian, Danae (1544–45). Images: Capodimonte.
José de Ribera, The Clubfoot (1642). Image: courtesy the Louvre.
Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Slaying Holofernes (c. 1612–13). Image: Capodimonte.
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During the colonial period, the camera became something of an imperial device, as Western images defined narratives about the history, culture, and identity of the African continent. Now, in its first major exhibition of contemporary African photography, the Tate Modern in London is showcasing the work of a new generation African artists using the medium on their own terms.
“A World in Common: Contemporary African Photography” features 36 artists—working in photography, video, and installation—who represent different generations and a wide span of geography. Each offers their own unique perspectives on Africa and its relationship with the wider world, informed by history while looking to the future with hope.
The exhibition is curated by the museum’s international art curator, Osei Bonsu, together with assistant curators Jess Baxter and Genevieve Barton and former assistant curator Katy Wan.
“It’s not a traditional photography survey. I don’t really think that Africa can be summarized or distilled into one large exhibition,” Bonsu told Artnet News. “This was more of an attempt to tell very specific stories about Africa through the lens of artists who were either living and working on the continent, or were paying homage to many of the traditions and visual practices that, in my opinion, best reflected the way that we see photography in Africa.”
Khadija Saye, Andichurai, “in this space we breathe” (2017). Photo courtesy of the artist.
Osei Bonsu: “Khadija Saye was an artist who tragically died very young. But rather than focusing on the circumstances surrounding her death, we really wanted to show her contribution to the landscape of contemporary African photography.
An artist of Gambian/British heritage, Khadija’s work is testament to her mixed faith upbringing, with a Muslim father and a Christian mother. These images are an attempt to ground herself within that spiritual understanding of her own identity through the traditional Gambian rituals.
It’s a tribute to her ancestral background and faith through photography. She used a wet collodion tintype process, which was popularized in the 19th century and is rarely practiced any longer. It’s a labor intensive process that leaves much to fate and to chance.
When the artist spoke about the experience of working this way, she related it to kind of spiritual transcendence in which the process becomes somewhat of a kind of a means of surrendering to the chemical outcome. The process captures these very irregular and almost kind of ghostly presences of herself.”

Zina Saro-Wiwa’s “Invisible Man: The Weight of Absence”
Zina Saro-Wiwa, from “The Invisible Man” (2015). Photo courtesy of the artist.
Osei Bonsu: “Zina Saro-Wiwa is an artist of Nigerian heritage who is based in the U.S., but grew up in the U.K. She worked as a journalist and is widely recognized for her work as a filmmaker and as an artist.
In “Invisible Man,” you see the artist reckoning with the her experience of loss in her own family, notably the death of her father, a climate activist and Nobel Prize nominee. She is posing in these photographs in a mask, because when one puts on a mask, you enter a realm between the living and the ancestral world.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, masks became very desirable objects, both as objects of ethnic culture and for the avant garde. But these masks were part of the way that African people related to their environment, the cosmos, to their ecosystems, and are still part of a living culture. The mask still has a very particular relationship to environment and to the way people relate to the ecosystem, which is under threat due to ongoing extractive practices particularly in relation to oil.
There’s a beautiful quote on the artist’s website saying that she was told that these masks were too heavy for women to carry. So, she had her own mask commissioned as a protest against this very gendered practice of excluding women from the politics of masquerade.
“Invisible Man” is one of the more poetic attempts for an artist to think about African history and cultural heritage, but really through their own lived experience.”

Sabelo Mlengani’s “Country Girls”
Sabelo Mlangeni Couple Bheki and Sipho, 2009. From the series “Country Girls.” Photo courtesy of Tate and the artist.
Osei Bonsu: “Sabelo Mlengani is a South African photographer who grew up in the province which is where the “Country Girls” series was shot. It’s a very personal reflection of LGBTQ life within the South African countryside.
We often associate these queer lives with kind of cosmopolitan environments, but there are also queer people who fashion their own identities within the countryside. The artist makes his subjects visible through these very intimate family portraits that both celebrate the kind of communities that are portrayed, but also think about their precarity and the vulnerability.
What he does by looking at this community is to upend or challenge many of the assumptions that people have that this is a recent trend or it’s kind of Western import. Queer culture, queer subjectivity is actually part of everyday life and very much in the spirit of the country.
We’ve included the ‘Country Girls’ series in an area of the exhibition titled ‘The Family Portrait,’ because we often see more conventional or normative depictions of family. This was an attempt to think about a more expanded idea of family that had more to do with one’s chosen family rather than one’s biological family.”

Dawit L. Petros’s “The Stranger’s Notebook”
Dawit L. Petros, Untitled Epilogue II Catania Italy (2016), “The Stranger’s Notebook.” Photo courtesy of the artist.
Osei Bonsu: “Dawit L. Petro is an artist, now based in Chicago, whose family migrated from East Africa to Canada. In this work, he’s thinking about the longer histories of migration and border crossing, and his own experience as an outsider in many contexts.
This series was created over a year-long period of traveling Africa to Europe along the Mediterranean coast, retracing the journeys of migrants seeking better lives—the kind of sites of journeys of border crossings that we know often end in tragedy.
In the photographs, taken in Sicily and Mauritania—sites of arrival and departure for migrants—the subjects are holding mirrors that [reflect] back to the viewer, revealing coastline, power lines, all of these kinds of liminal spaces beyond the reach of the camera. ‘Stranger’s Notebook’ is a meditation on the ways in which we often aren’t able to humanize those who are the statistics on the global news reel, whether it be the refugee crisis or successive forms of of economic migration around the world.
It’s an attempt to grapple with the complexities of what it means to represent a subject that is unrepresented. And it makes you think not only about the contemporary implications of migration, but the much longer interconnected history and relationship between Africa and Europe.”
“A World in Common: Contemporary African Photography” is on view at the Tate Modern, Bankside, London SE1 9TG, July 6, 2023—January 14, 2024.

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Would you let a robot wash you? This question was posed by artist group Blast Theory while investigating the ethics of artificial intelligence in care systems. The Brighton-based collective is showing in “A.I.: Who’s Looking After Me?” at Science Gallery London (until January 20), which brings doctors, patients, artists and scientists together to explore key issues surrounding A.I. and care.
“In a care setting, being washed by a robot is a realistic possibility,” Blast Theory’s Matt Adams told Artnet News. “There’s this tension where you might not want a robot to do something so intimate; you want human contact. But the flip argument is, it’s better for a robot to wash you so you’re not dealing with the embarrassment of another person; you have some privacy. There are these tensions between what impersonal means versus private.”
Fear and suspicion of A.I. is escalating, raising questions of privacy, artistic authenticity, and human redundancy. The exhibition avoids easy resolutions, exploring the entangled benefits and risks of artificial intelligence in contemporary life. “A.I. is here,” Siddharth Khajuria, director of Science Gallery London, told Artnet News. “It’s not dystopian or future hopeful. It’s present and messy.”
The gallery, connected with King’s College London, combines diverse knowledge bases. “We need to bring different perspectives together to grapple with increasingly knotty societal problems,” said Khajuria. “The projects that feel messy in the best sense are collaborations between patient groups, medical engineers, and artists. When you encounter them, it will be tricky to know whose imagination has led or shaped it.”
Installation view, Wesley Goatley, Newly Forgotten Technologies (2022).Courtesy of Wesley Goatley. Photo by George Torode.
Projects include sound artist Wesley Goatley’s immersive installation about defunct voice assistants and Fast Familiar’s exploration of the romance potential of a machine which has learned everything about love on the internet. For Vine, Dr Oya Celiktutan, Head of the Social A.I. & Robotics Lab at King’s Department of Engineering, collaborated with soft robotics studio Air Giants and King’s students Jeffrey Chong, Theodore Lamarche and Bowen Liu. The result is a “huggable” robot, which interacts emotively with visitors.
“I’m interested in non-verbal communications between people,” Celiktutan told Artnet News. “I’m interested in how we can imitate that with robots so they can be clear and build trust with humans. This robot really doesn’t have any resemblance to a human, but with this basic shape it can communicate and connect using nonverbal movements.”
In stark contrast with the violent image of robots often stereotyped in movies, Vine invites trust and touch. “One of the big questions is ‘What can we do to make a robot seem more approachable?’” said Chong. “Also, what can a robot do for you to be able to trust and want to interact with it? What buttons can it press on the human brain or what behaviours can it display to make you think of it as a conversational partner?”
Vine’s cuddly appearance raises the question of aesthetics in robotics. “Soft robotics are interesting because they look cute,” said Lamarche. “I think a lot of the time people are scared of A.I. because of job replacement, but soft robotics see a lot of interest in the health sector where there are not enough people. There is an example the PARO robot, which is a little seal. It can be used for dementia patients and has a gentle soothing light to keep people physically and mentally interacting.”
Installation view, “AI: Who’s Looking After Me?” at Science Gallery London, King’s College London, 21 June 2023 – 20 January 2024. ©George Torode.
Artist Mimi Ọnụọha delves behind the scenes of A.I., focusing on the human workforce that enables it to run. While the end user may see A.I. as independent from humans, many systems require vast amounts of manual tagging. Ọnụọha’s The Future is Here! investigates the working spaces of the crowdsourced labour force, which largely operates remotely from bedrooms, front rooms and cafes in the Global South.
“It’s so tedious and intense,” Ọnụọha told Artnet News. “It’s important work but they won’t be paid the same as A.I. specialists or researchers. A.I. saves time, but whose time?” She points out the similarities between this labour distribution and the injustices of longer-running industries, such as fast fashion. “They are old patterns of labour architecture, but the aims are for this new technology.”
Ọnụọha does not call for an about turn on our relationship with these technologies, but a considered approach to their use. “We need to insert a little friction into how people approach these tools,” she said. “What is this ecosystem and how do we want it to be? What types of power differentials are we considering? If folks can consider this while at the same time holding the potential of A.I., I think that’s great. We’re past the point of being able to throw it out. The question becomes how to think strategically.”
Mimi Onuoha, The Future is Here! (2019). Courtesy of Mini Onuoha.
While most of the projects focus on human relationships with A.I., Blast Theory invites a third species into the conversation: house cats. For Cat Royale, the group, its collaborators, animal behavioral experts and welfare officers set up a controlled experiment. For 72 hours over three-hour stints, cats were observed interacting with a robotic arm offering a “game” every six minutes, such as dragging a feather or throwing a ball. The system gradually learned each cat’s response, calculating the happiness levels of each game and adapting its offerings.
Of all animals, cats added an interesting dimension because of their standoffish nature. “Cats are famously imperious, opinionated and not biddable,” Adams said. “There was something interesting about a cat out of all animals that we have a close relationship with. They aren’t going to just be gulled into accepting something.”
The resulting video raises questions about the role of humans. Naturally, this kind of care system in the home could supplant the owner. “There were moments where the robots were playing a game with a cat and it almost felt like the cat was enjoying it more than if it was playing with a human,” said Adams. “The human is kind of an interrupting, disrupting factor. The cat wants to do prey behaviour, but if a human is there, they are making noises and have emotional weight. They might be a power figure, potentially the owner of the pet. Of course, that is threatening to us humans who want to be special.”
The exhibition is a timely reminder of the extent to which A.I. is entangled with humans, reflecting the good and evil that already exist within our structures. “Ultimately robots are what we make of them,” said Chong. “I think the reason scary robots are so popular in the media is because it reflects a fear that we have of other humans. It’s a reflection of the danger inherent in humanity.”
Kahjuria agrees with this take, highlighting the importance of questioning the underlying prejudices that underpin A.I. systems. “There’s so much emerging technology that is deliberately presented to feel magical and sleek,” he said. “But ultimately, all A.I. is the result of humans in a room making decisions, and there is usually a certain kind of person in those meetings and a certain power dynamic. Those conversations embed value systems and prejudices into the products they churn out. I hope the show will remind people just how human this stuff is.”
“AI: Who’s Looking After Me?” is on view at Science Gallery London, King’s College London, through January 20, 2024.
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