Restoration: Now or Never is a public art exhibition organized by Anne Verhallen and Daria Borisova, in collaboration with SaveArtSpace. The exhibition, spanning across London billboards and bus shelters, is in conjunction with World Environment Day in the UK, a day committed to encouraging awareness and action to protect our environment. Bringing emerging and established artists together, this is the first UK activation by the non-profit SaveArtSpace.

This past year, art has proven to be of incredible value because it can both visualize the feelings of current circumstances or suggest a brighter, more progressive future. It is time to unite and restore our international communities after a time of such polarization. The exhibition will present art that pays ode to mother earth, suggests a path forward or expresses concerns about our global climate crisis. Our mission is to bring art to the public, with no museum entrance fees or intimidating white wall gallery spaces. Restore our communities and restore our connection to the earth.

The selected artists are Cara Romero, Coco Capitán, Formafantasma, Fred Tomaselli, Hayden Kays, Johan Deckmann, Khari Turner, Tianjiao Zhang, Edward Tsui, Lanmuzhi Yang, Lily Kwong, Misha Waks, Odinakachi Okoroafor, Olive Allen, Philomène Amougou, Piotr Krzymowski, Rewind Collective, Sophie Hughes, Stefan Brüggemann, Susan Unterberg, Tabita Rezaire, Wang Yuyang, Whitney Stolich, and Zhang Huan.

Curators are Anne Verhallen, Daria Borisova, Michael Xufu Huang, Aindrea Emelife, and Destinee Ross-Sutton.

During the week of May 31, 2021, SaveArtSpace will launch public art installations for each selected work on billboard or bus shelter ad spaces in London, UK. The public art will be on view for at least one month.

This public art exhibition is supported in part by Hauser & Wirth.

Participating Organizations

Founded in 2015, SaveArtSpace is a non-profit organization that works to create an urban gallery experience, launching exhibitions that address intersectional themes and foster a progressive message of social change. By placing culture over commercialism, SaveArtSpace aims to empower artists from all walks of life and inspire a new generation of young creatives and activists.

Curators

Anne Verhallen, a New York-based curator, is the co-founder of Art at a Time Like This, a multi-platform arts organization that gives free expression to artists and curators at times of crises with over 200,000 viewers in more than 100 countries. At Art at a Time Like This, Verhallen has curated numerous exhibitions, including Ministry of Truth: 1984/2020, a public art exhibition on 20 billboards in New York City which the New York Times called "one of the most important art moments of 2020." Additionally, as the current director of the fine art division at CXA, she has worked on projects for many leading artists, including Kehinde Wiley, Robert Wilson, Friedrich Kunath, DRIFT and Lily Kwong. In this capacity, Verhallen has overseen large-scale activations and installations in collaboration with brands in the luxury industry.

Born in the Netherlands, Verhallen brings a global perspective to her projects and seeks to cultivate the intersection between technology, design, art, and health. Previously, she collaborated with Roya Sachs, director of Mal-fa Miles, for the performance Virtually There at Mana Contemporary, featuring artists Kate Gilmore, Heather Rowe and the Campana Brothers. She also writes monthly for Arte Fuse and has contributed to other magazines such as Artshesays. 

Connect with Anne on Instagram at @Anne_Verhallen

Daria Borisova is a London based curator and art advisor. Borisova focuses on young emerging artists who inspire progressive understanding and promote lasting change. With an emphasis on transparency and education, Borisova has built collections for prominent private and corporate clients. Her most recent curatorial work includes: HerStory in collaboration with Beauty for Freedom, Global Call for Artists in partnership with W1 Curates x Amplifier – a digital public art installation in London, Winter Show at Harlesden High Street Gallery in London, House of Togetherness in London and Alla Gorka: Heroine presented by White Ribbon in the Ukranian Parliament and America House Kyiv. Borisova has an ongoing collaboration with The Art Gorgeous to educate women on the cryptic art of collecting art. A member of the Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum and ambassador for Beauty for Freedom, she advocates for gender equality and promoting women artists. Borisova is a global ambassador and curator for the non-profit organization ‘White Ribbon,’ the world’s largest male initiative against domestic violence towards women.

Connect with Daria on Instagram at @punh.

Michael Xufu Huang (b.1994) is the founder of X Museum in Beijing. He graduated from University of Pennsylvania, and is currently a trustee at the New Museum. In 2017, he is the USA Forbes 30 Under 30 recipient and is now acting as the only art world judge in selecting the candidates for 2018, 2019 and 2020 USA and Asia lists to Forbes. By the age of twenty-four, he has already given speeches at forums in Harvard University, Yale University, and Wharton Business School etc. Moreover, Michael has been invited by many multimedia art prizes as a jury member.

Further to his career, Michael also has a deep interest in the technology and consumption field with a focus on innovative products and platforms, of which he invests in.

Connect with Michael on Instagram at @michaelxufuhuang.

Aindrea Emelife is a 27-year-old art historian, writer, independent curator, author and presenter from London. Aindrea trained as an art historian at the prestigious Courtauld Institute of Art and has quickly gone on to become a ground-breaking new voice in an art world otherwise steeped in tradition.

Aindrea debuted her first column for the Financial Times aged 20 years old, and has been published widely and internationally, including articles in The Guardian, Vanity Fair, The Telegraph, BBC, GQ, Frieze, The Independent, BBC and ArtNet. She features regularly on podcasts, most recently Talk Art and The Art Newspaper Podcast and is dedicated to public speaking, usually pertaining to discussions of contemporary art, popularising art history and championing female, black or artists of colour.

Combining curation, writing, public speaking and broadcasting, Aindrea uses the sum of these many efforts to showcase diverse perspectives, global art and increasing public understanding of enjoyment of art; its histories and its contemporary.

Aindrea is currently writing two books: A Little History of Protest Art which will be released by Tate in 2022 and Art Can Change The World: A Manifesto, also released in 2022. Aindrea is also attached to a few TV projects.

Aindrea has delivered talks and lectures at The Times and Sunday Times Cheltenham Literature Festival, The Financial Times NextGen Festival, Courtauld Gallery, the Courtauld Institute of Art, the V&A Museum, the Other Art Fair and Elephant West.

Connect with Aindrea on Instagram at @aindrealondon.

Destinee Ross-Sutton is a young international art curator, advisor, gallerist, artist manager and advocate based in NY. She has co-curated and curated successful international group exhibitions at renowned institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA) and CFHILL, Stockholm, Sweden as well as Christie’s “SAY IT LOUD (I’m Black and I’m Proud),” a virtual selling exhibition dedicated to the promotion and empowerment of Black art, which ran July 31 – Aug.18, 2020. Most recently, Ross-Sutton opened a namesake gallery in New York. Her inaugural show, BLACK VOICES: Friend of My Mind, is the largest exhibition of emerging and contemporary artists from the African Diaspora ever staged in the United States. Independently, she advises several private institutions, international collectors and organizations on acquisitions of particularly –but not exclusively– within the field of contemporary African and African American art. The main body of her curatorial work over the last three years has been carried out in her capacity as curator for a major Black Arts Foundation opening in 2021. In her eyes, “showing a wide range of opinions, voices, and countless expressions of beauty is essential in a world where compassion and connection is needed now more than ever” (D. Ross-Sutton, quoted in exh. cat., BLACK VOICES/BLACK MICROCOSM, 8 April-9 May, 2020.

Connect with Destinee on Instagram at @desti.knee.

Selected Artists

Location: 332 Ladywell Rd, London SE13 7UW, UK

Cara Romero (b. 1977, Inglewood, CA) is a contemporary fine art photographer. An enrolled citizen of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe, Romero was raised between contrasting settings: the rural Chemehuevi reservation in Mojave Desert, CA and the urban sprawl of Houston, TX. Romero’s identity informs her photography, a blend of fine art and editorial photography, shaped by years of study and a visceral approach to representing Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultural memory, collective history, and lived experiences from a Native American female perspective.

As an undergraduate at the University of Houston, Romero pursued a degree in cultural anthropology. Disillusioned, however, by academic and media portrayals of Native Americans as bygone, Romero realized that making photographs could do more than anthropology did in words, a realization that led to a shift in medium. Since 1998, Romero’s expansive oeuvre has been informed by formal training in film, digital, fine art and commercial photography. By staging theatrical compositions infused with dramatic color, Romero takes on the role of storyteller, using contemporary photography techniques to depict the modernity of Native peoples, illuminating Indigenous worldviews and aspects supernaturalism in everyday life.

Statement: Maintaining a studio in Santa Fe, NM, Romero regularly participates in Native American art fairs and panel discussions, and was featured in PBS’ Craft in America (2019). Her award-winning work is included in many public and private collections internationally. Married with three children, she travels between Santa Fe and the Chemehuevi Valley Indian Reservation, where she maintains close ties to her tribal community and ancestral homelands.

As an Indigenous photographer, I embrace photography as my tool to resist Eurocentric narratives and as a means for opening audiences’ perspectives to the fascinating diversity of living Indigenous peoples. My approach fuses time-honored and culturally specific symbols with 21st-century ideas. This strategy reinforces the ways we exist as contemporary Native Americans, all the while affirming that Indigenous culture is continually evolving and imminently permanent.

Sometimes I portray old stories, such as creation stories or animal stories, in a contemporary context to show that each grows and evolves with ensuing generations. I use vibrant color, experimental lighting, and photo-illustration to explore ideas of how the supernatural world overlaps with our everyday lives. In combining form and content, I reflect a uniquely Indigenous worldview that shows the resilience and beauty of our thriving cultures. Here, self-representation through photography battles the “one-story” narrative that casts complex, living cultures into stereotypes, instead offering multi-layered visual architectures that invite viewers to abandon preconceived notions about Native art, culture, and peoples.

To further counter photography’s exploitive past, I actively collaborate with my models. Hailing from many tribal backgrounds and many geographic regions, these subjects are my friends and relatives. Together we stage photographs to tell stories that we feel (together) are important and give back to our Native community. My photographs explore our collective Native histories, and the ways in which our indigeneity expresses itself in modern times. I firmly believe Native peoples are as Indigenous today as we were prior to the advent of colonialism.

When we as Native people explore new artistic tools and techniques, such as photography, we indigenize those media. Our vision and intimate relationship to our communities are precisely what make Native photographers the people best equipped to convey the allure, strength, and complexity of contemporary Native life. I am deeply committed to making work that addresses Native American social issues and changes the way people perceive us in contemporary society. My style offers viewers sometimes serious and sometimes playful social commentary on pressing issues like the border wall, the hyper-sexualization of Native women in histories of photography, environmental destruction of Native lands, and stereotypes of Indigeneity in pop culture. In response, I unapologetically depict where we are now, in the present day, making sure to always respect cultural protocol and ancestral ties.

Connect with Cara on Instagram at @cararomerophotography.

Location: 82 Baker St, London W1U 6TE, UK

Coco Capitán is a Spanish-born London based artist known for her artistic and design work across different paths, practices and media. She likes making things, painting, thinking, writing, photography, listening to others, finding solutions to problems, making books, arranging spaces, mixing music, designing and exhibitions, among other things.

She was born in Seville in 1992, and moved to London at the age of 17, where she studied Photography at the University of Arts of London and majored as MA Fine Art Photography at the Royal College of Art.

Connect with Coco on Instagram at @cococapitan.

Location: 160 Strand, London WC2R 1EP, UK

Formafantasma is a research-based design studio investigating the ecological, historical, political and social forces shaping the discipline of design today. Whether designing for a client or developing self – initiated projects, the studio applies the same rigorous attention to context, processes and details. Formafantasma’s analytical nature translates in meticulous visual outcomes, products and strategies.

Our intervention is focusing on governance and the rights of non-humans living creatures. More specifically trees.

The billboard is a speculative document for the possible recognition of the rights of trees. The document has been drafted by Dr. Philipp Pattberg, professor of Transnational Governance and Policy in Amsterdam. The attempt here isn’t necessarily to suggest this is the (only) way to go (using legislation to impose environmental justice) but to introduce into the urban fabric of the city a provocative gesture that hopefully will initiate a public debate. As you can see the billboard is conceived as the first page of a hypothetical document already existing.

Connect with Formafantasma on Instagram at @formafantasma.

Location: 15 New Oxford St, London WC1A 1JS, UK

Fred Tomaselli creates psychedelic paintings that explore human perception and the vibrant complexity of the natural world. To build his collage-based works, he gathers a multitude of images from field guides, nature books and other sources, and assembles them into pulsating figures and geometric patterns. He blends formal and conceptual elements, and multiple artistic traditions, into works that vibrate with internal conflict and information overload. Tomaselli covers these rich compositions in resin, encapsulating layers of paint, collaged images, leaves and other objects into a floating surface that imbues them with a “sense of deep time.” For Tomaselli, painting is a route to alternative perception, and his colorful works transport us into a world of transcendent natural beauty that has been polluted by the pathologies of contemporary life. He invites us to get lost on our journey to this other dimension and to discover the boundless intricacy of nature. And when we arrive, he reveals a natural world that is at once sublime and afflicted by the countless battles that rage within it.

Connect with Fred on Facebook at facebook.com/fredtomaselli.

Location: 136 Woolwich High St, London SE18 6DS, UK

With a practice that encompasses painting, sculpture and printmaking, Hayden Kays has been widely acclaimed as one of the most vital and provocative artists of his generation, producing work that both celebrates and critiques the all-pervasive ‘culture industry’. Kays’s work is characterised by bold imagery, acerbic wordplay, accomplished craftsmanship and deadpan humour. His witty appropriations of everyday references both respond to and subvert the canons set out by 1950s Pop Art and the YBAs of the 1990s. In a world of non-stop livesteams and information economies, where the commercial and the political are simply two notes in the same chord and subversiveness has long been co-opted into the cultural mainstream, Kays’s creations challenge the viewer to question what they see both within the gallery space and in the world outside.

Connect wit Hayden on Instagram at @haydenkays.

Location: 15 New Oxford St, London WC1A 1JS, UK

Copenhagen-based Artist, Psychotherapist, and Author, Johan Deckmann produces work that delves into the complexities of life, through amusing and wittily fabricated book titles that are painted onto fictional self-help books and canvases. Deckmann’s art presents us with a hybrid between paintings, poetry, and psychology. Recognizing the immense capability of language in both therapy and art, Deckmann’s work forces the viewer to self-reflect. “I use the strengths from both of my fields, both creatively and intellectually to create a synergy that I would not otherwise be able to develop”.

Johan Deckmann's psychological background and practice is fundamental and central to his work, inspiring and providing the content, and furthermore, serving as a steady reminder of personal responsibility. A remarkable feature of Deckmann‘s work is the relatability of the book titles, regardless of gender, cultural background or age. Rather than solely presenting the sinister aspects, his work is made playful by adopting language that you may find on an instruction kit. Deckmann argues that for him, “humor is an essential characteristic if you want to stay, not only sane but also happy. Humor is somehow the instrument of the light-hearted.” The connection between his work, psychology, and his life is rational and thought out. The works reflect his perception of life with all its beauty, humor, fear, meaning and lack of meaning, but most importantly, he showcases ruthless honesty.

Though many of his works are humorous, Deckmann is still able to highlight and draw attention to the irony and tragic nature of our daily lives and what we often do to ourselves. These works aim to entertain yet also bring awareness and stimulate the imagination of the viewer. "The right words can be like good medicine. I want my works to be like mirrors. When you look at them you might not like what you see, but like in a mirror, you now get the awareness and the chance to change something. Like little personal reminders disguised as art"

As a psychotherapist Deckmann's main focus is on the ability to change people’s way of thinking for the better. "Every happiness, every misery, every good and bad deed on earth is a result of a thought. I can’t imagine a work area more important than this. That’s what drives me and I use art as my platform rather than my practice because I find that people are more receptive and less judging in a gallery than in a therapeutic session". Deckmann believes in the simple power and beauty of words, that they can cut through your layers just as well as figurative, sculptural, abstract and any other kind of art. He aims for the heart of his viewers and their ability to reason over their habits and choices that he believes determine their future. "I think that the art world is a perfect place to create awareness and awareness just might lead to a better wellbeing. Every day I meet people who blame bad habits when there are only bad decisions. We must reconsider the glasses that we have been given by our parents and by society, because we perceive the world and ourselves through these glasses. Make sure to see clearly."

Represented by: Angeliki Kim Jonsson (@dynamisk) Independent Curator and Founder of Dynamisk Independent Curating and Art Advisory, London UK.

Connect with Johan on Instagram at @johandeckmann.

Location: 17 Charterhouse St, London EC1N 6SA, UK

Khari Turner (born 1991) is an emerging artist from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and a current MFA graduate student at Columbia University. Khari is currently working on his first solo show in New York with Destinee Ross-Sutton at Ross-Sutton Gallery this July following his show in San Franscico, California and presences at Christie’s “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud)” and “I-54” exhibition, also curated by Ross-Sutton. He is in multiple collections including his alma mater Austin Peay State University, where he received his BFA. He has been featured in Artnews, Whitehot magazine, Hyperallergic, Juxtapoz Radio, and Widewalls magazine to name a few. His early inspiration was his grandfather that worked as a draftsman drawing small images that Khari would recreate at an early age. Growing up in Milwaukee, his landscape consisted of vast nature and dense cityscapes fighting amongst a city well known for its continued segregation. This created a relationship to Black people, water, and his environment that plays a major role in his work now. He currently takes water directly from different bodies of water including the Pacific and Atlantic oceans, his hometown’s Lake Michigan and Milwaukee River water. He incorporates them in the work either mixing the water with paint or pouring directly on the surface of the work. His aims are to eventually start work directly related to water health, environmental conservation, and bringing art to low-income neighborhoods.

Artist Statement

“I’ve been trying to convince my shadow that I’m someone worth following. — Rudy Francisco, My Honest Poem

I paint to create a deeper connection to my identity and history as a Black American. Metaphorically, I see Black people as personifications of the magic that is the ocean. My paintings and drawings combine abstraction with realistic renderings of Black noses and lips to rejuvenate the relationship of my history to my ancestor’s history with water. Lately my work has evolved and involves the material as abstractions. Seeing the abstract paintings as a passage into the figure but also into ideas and feelings the figure can’t always demonstrate. I use water from oceans, lakes, and rivers from places that have either a historical or personal connection to Black history -- water that I collect to mix with and pour onto my paintings. My focus is to create a direct relationship to my emotions and understanding of my past, a journey of spiritual connection. I paint to bring the stories and histories of the array of Black life with images holding an elegance and chaos that comes with this existence.

Khari Turner will have his first New York solo exhibition July 10 - August 7 at Ross-Sutton Gallery www.ross-sutton.com. And will partake in the 2nd edition of “SAY IT LOUD” exhibition & auction at Christie’s NY curated by Destinee Ross-Sutton, August 5 - 19.

Connect with Khari on Instagram at @khari.raheem.

Location: 49 Grove Rd, Bow, London E3 4PE, UK

Discarded masks and other protective equipment have become a new common street trash around the world. If you pay attention to the ground, you may easily find masks on the sidewalks, in the parks, near bus stations, and in parking lots. From a report of OceanAsia released recently (The impact of COVID-19 on Marine Plastic Pollution, Dec 2020), about 1.5 billion face masks likely polluted our oceans in 2020 - if these masks are connected end-to-end, the total length of them can circle the earth 75 times. After threatening our lives, COVID has certainly threatened our living environment. If we don’t take any action, the masks, which are currently saving our lives, will become a long term safety and environmental hazard over the next several decades.

Connect with Tianjiao, Edward, and Lanmuzhi on Instagram at @tjmiemie.

Location: 136 E Ferry Rd, London E14 3NA, UK

Lily Kwong is a next-generation landscape designer whose mission is to reconnect people to nature through art and community-building. Studio Lily Kwong's botanical art installations have been featured on The High Line, Grand Central's iconic Vanderbilt Hall, The Whitney Museum shops and more. Lily was named by The New York Times as one of the '9 Young New Yorkers Poised for Creative Greatness' and inducted into Forbes’s '30 Under 30: 2018' in the Art & Style category.

Here the “EARTH” trigram from the I Ching is collaged with astronaut Ricky Arnold’s image taken from the International Space Station. This haunting photograph captures the decimation of rainforests and coastal mangroves in the Betsiboka Estuary of Madagascar due to erosion and deforestation. Looking back at our planet from space, it is clear our fates are united under one ecosystem. Too often, now the images reflected back to us are of extinction and destruction. My prayer is we can look back on ancient wisdom for clues to a path forward, and align ourselves with philosophies that are harmonious with the natural world. 

“EARTH” emerged as a response to the recent wave of Anti-Asian hate crimes currently surging in America. As a reaction to the violence and fear, I was inspired to dig into my own Chinese heritage and share something beautiful about the culture. My great grandmother from Shanghai was a Buddhist, and my father as a younger man ‘threw’ the I Ching. The I Ching is the oldest of all the classical divination systems and provides a guide to harmony with the universe, an ethical life, one’s future & the future of the state. In the mythological version, Fu Xi studied the patterns of nature and the cosmos: markings on plants and animals, meteorological phenomena, and the human body. He discovered that everything could be reduced to eight trigrams, reflecting the yin and yang of the universe. 

Connect with Lily on Instagram at @lily_kwong.

Location: 197 Marsh Wall, London E14 9SG, UK

Misha Waks 

I have worked for the last 15 years for various corporations as a designer. I quit designing and started creating art thanks to which I can pay attention to things that are really important. From 2019 I started to create and in 2020 I realized my first exhibition in Warsaw. In 2021 I had already two group exhibition in Berlin.

In my work, I deal with topics such as climate change, women's and minority rights. I raise topics related to identity, body and the lack of authorities and role models. I am inspired by historic events and I am moved by everyday life injustas. I work with different techniques depending on the effect I want to achieve. Sometimes works illustrate stories I heard on the radio at other times, which I was inspired while watching a documentry movie or daily news. In the thousands of photos that I see every day in the press, internet or social network sites I choose and play with those that seems to me most important. I create my own internal collection of topics and content to share in a modified form.

As a human being, I feel that due to everyday small activities I can change reality on a very limited level. Art give me more opportunities to influence people who can emphasize with what is important to change the world for better so if I should say my manifesto it will go like this 

"Art is a form of activism" 

The Winter 2020 Nikkei SDGs Forum Symposium - Sustainable Development Goals - ( 26-27 Novembre 2020 ) participants discussed various ways business innovation and digital transformation could help create a more sustainable world”. Advertisement in Financial Times Wednesday 27 January 2021.

I took some great quotes from this “article” participants and some manipulated and changed to make it even greater and idealic. I put it to the vegan pill capsules and I added tree seed in it.

Big words like medicine are supposed to calm us down and give us positive perspective, but the truth is that not much has changed since the 1960s. Politicians, owners of huge companies are doing too little. Having so much money and doing nothing is a crime against nature and humanity. This cynical game takes us nowhere. Words, words, words.

Referring to the works of Joseph Beuys, each of us is an artist, just as each of us can have a positive impact on the world around us. Let us not expect politicians or large corporations to save us or our planet. We ourselves can save ourselves. We can be the medicine, our actions can contribute to changing the world for the better. Deeds, deeds, deeds.

Connect with Misha on Instagram at @mishawaks.

Location: 84 Charing Cross Rd, London WC2H 0DP, UK

Odinakachi Okoroafor (b. 1989, Abia, Nigeria) is a mixed media artist who presently lives and works in Enugu, Nigeria. He has a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka and creates paintings that feature line inspired black figures. He has taken part in group exhibitions such as Life in My City Arts Competition (LIMCAF), Spanish Visual Arts Competition (second runners up), Next of KIN (2020) and was among the featured artists for the 2018 UNESCO X BBUZZart Project.

The focal point of my art centres on the desires to stir up conversations on social issues and identity. My concise style expresses the vibrancy of daily life with an easy familiarity, touching on topics such as community, social and political struggles and the mundane issues that relate to my childhood experiences and community. A major characteristic of my oeuvre is the black Figure inspired by the idea of lines that can be found on barcodes painted alongside a tranquil scene, patterned or textured background. The Automatic Lines and shapes that made up the figures for me are scars and marks of one’s life experiences which defines our existence as a human. My paintings are formed using linocuts, screen printing, photo transfers, acrylics and brushes.

Connect with Odinakachi on Instagram at @odinakachi_okoroafor.

Location: 187 Grays Inn Rd, London WC1N 2AF, UK

Olive Allen draws on her background in both fine arts and technology to create new media art that captures the internet culture of the new age and exposes systems of value. She is a cryptocurrency early adopter and one of the pioneers of the NFT space. She uses token-based digital works to create social commentary. Her approach gamifies digital art objects to engender performative, interactive relationships with her audience. She has exhibited with König Galerie (Berlin), The Untitled Space (New York), Nagel Draxler Gallery (Cologne), and Save Art Space (London), among others. Her work has been written about in publications such as The New York Times, TheArtGorgeous Magazine, and CoinDesk.

Statement: Olive Allen is a new media artist who uses strategies such as branding, ‘drops,’ and gamification to offer a critical yet playful view on hype, the attention economy, and cultural mores. Through bright, colorful digital artworks composed of pop-cultural and nostalgic elements, Allen grabs attention and redirects it to today’s urgent issues.

An early adopter of NFTs and cryptocurrency, Allen blends pop-cultural elements such as Pokemon cards, Furbies, and hypebeast staples with witty social criticism. Just like artists she admires, Takashi Murakami and Joyce Pensato, who deconstruct existing pop culture characters and icons as well as invent their own, Olive creates character series, such as HYPEBIRDS, UnBearables, or The Sheeplezzz. These pieces engage viewers in conceptual collecting gameplay with rules, statistics, and deft societal critique.

Olive believes the work produced and released should be of the now. The relevance and relatable symbolism of her artworks serve the attention economy well, but Allen embeds deeper meanings within her pieces that can be missed in the scroll. Therein lies the tension of the work: vying for attention in a like-based economy while simultaneously seeking depth and connection.

The wry, sardonic rules around the works are a kind of performance by Allen, perhaps even a taunt. By setting up systems of engagement around her work, she compels her collectors the viewers to interact with her performance, participate in its meaning, and make decisions about their own values.

Connect with Olive on Instagram: @olive_allen & Twitter: @IAmOliveAllen.

Location: 107 Trafalgar Way, London E14 5SH, UK

Paris-born with Cameroonian roots, Philomène Amougou is a full-media artist who channels natural forces through her work and own body. Irrigated in the Earth like a seed in the soil, which grows from the river and sun, Philomène aligns herself with the eternal feminine. Energy is a boundless material grounded by science and the belief that universal energy runs throughout everything. From plants, insects to humankind’s need for introspection, she create as if to dig to the earth’s core and reconcile the fertile and destructive forces as the very dynamic of life. Understanding biodiversity as a way to explore the evolution of form, the seed of her work evolves through an ‘embryonic germination’. This process starts by drawing and painting, and runs through sculpture, installation and performance. Photography and filmmaking are the final stage, connecting the cells of her art. 

Trough a spinal thread that intertwine connection between geology, biology, anatomy, spirituality and technology; one may view her body of work as leaving in its own mythological world, yet proves the dilemmas and traumas that shape our time. Based on the biological imbalance she sees between the environment and society, Philomène explore themes such as feminine identity, life, death and rebirth with a grounding sense of place and belonging toward our nature.

Philomène performances often transcend the use of her own body as a living sculpture to re-enact the divine cycle of creation. By interweaving the female body with the land and its elements, she represent Mother nature as a living force, a biodiverse system with observable mutations and alienations. 

As an afro-European artist influenced by cultural rituals, ceremonies, and meditative techniques contrasted with relics of our mechanical World, Philomène continuously merges the spiritual and physical experience and re-cycled technologies to encourage a connective and sensed encounter. 

Philomène art, is synonymous of Utopian Alchemy, juxtaposing ancestral traditions from African culture with fragments of Western futuristic modernity; An eco-Synthetic science fiction remedy. Pollock Fine Art, London*

Connect with Philomène on Instagram at @philomenart.

Location: 109 Charing Cross Rd, London WC2H 0DT, UK

Piotr Krzymowski (b.1989, Poland) is a multi-disciplinary artist whose works span across a variety of media including: photography, installation, sculpture and moving image. The artist often examines current affairs and creates alternative visions of reality, drawing inspiration from everyday life and what he finds around him - the street, the city, Internet and nature. He carefully manipulates images, text and objects to visualize the countless possibilities packed within them. Krzymowski participated in many exhibitions in galleries and institutions including: ICA (London), CCA (Glasgow), Whitechapel Gallery (London), CoCA (Toruń), Liverpool Bienial, Tate Modern (London), Kasia Michalski Gallery (Warsaw), and l’étrangère gallery (London).

Connect with Piotr on Instagram at @piotrkrzymowski.

Location: 16 Baker St, London W1U 3BL, UK

We are a digital arts collective aimed at addressing the gender and minority imbalances throughout the art world.

We create original digital works, digital editions, and digital works in response to existing physical artworks. We aim to uplift women and minorities through our work, the largest groups of people who have been traditionally marginalised by the art world.

It is time to rewind back the patriarchy, misogyny and segregation and shine a light on those who deserve to be seen and heard.

Connect with Rewind Collective on Instagram at @rwd_collective.

Location: 27 West India Dock Rd, London E14 8AL, UK

Sophie Hughes is a multidisciplinary artist whose work focuses on humanity's relationship with the natural world. She is fascinated by stories we tell ourselves which map our personal landscape and in turn our global landscape. She is currently studying for her Masters in Art and Ecology at Goldsmiths in London.

Connect with Sophie on Instagram at @sophie_hughes_art.

Location: 1 Limehouse Causeway, London E14 UK

Spanning – and sometimes combining – sculpture, video, painting, and drawing, Stefan Brüggemann’s work deploys text in conceptual installations rich with acerbic social critique and a post pop aesthetic. Born in Mexico City and working between Mexico and London, the artist’s oeuvre is characterized by an ironic conflation of Conceptualism and Minimalism. In this way, Brüggemann’s practice sits outside the canon of the conceptual artists practicing in the 1960s and 1970s, who sought dematerialisation and rejected the commercialisation of art. Instead his aesthetic is refined and luxurious, whilst maintaining a punk attitude.

Connect with Stefan on Instagram at @stefanbruggemann1975.

Location: 4 Maverton Rd, Bow, London E3 2JE, UK

Susan Unterberg is a New York-based photographer. She has been represented by the Lawrence Miller Gallery, and later Yancey Richardson Gallery, both in New York. Her work has been exhibited broadly in the U.S. and abroad, with dedicated shows at such institutions as the New Museum and a retrospective at the Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati, Ohio. Unterberg is represented in the major public collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, the Jewish Museum, all in New York, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She has been awarded fellowships and residencies at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, Djerassi Artists Program, the American Academy in Rome, and Bogliasco. In 2019 she was awarded NYU’s Distinguished Alumni Award, as well as being honored at the Skowhegan Awards Dinner.

Her work is primarily color photographs taking the form of portraiture, human and animal, most recently manifested as digital photocollages and artist books which take into account contemporary politics. Her work has encompassed video installation, book form, and large and small format color prints. In 2018, Unterberg stepped forward as the founder and sole funder of the Anonymous Was A Woman Award, which has awarded $25,000 grants to over 240 women-identifying artists over the age of 40 since 1996.

Connect with Susan on Instagram at @susanunterberg.

Location: 229 Grays Inn Rd, London WC1X 8RH, UK

Tabita Rezaire is infinity incarnated into an agent of healing, who uses art as a mean to unfold the soul.

Her cross-dimensional practices envision network sciences - organic, electronic and spiritual - as healing technologies to serve the shift towards heart consciousness.

Navigating digital, corporeal and ancestral memory as sites of struggles, she digs into scientific imaginaries to tackle the pervasive matrix of coloniality and the protocols of energetic misalignments that affect the songs of our body-mind-spirits. Inspired by quantum and cosmic mechanics, Tabita’s work is rooted in time-spaces where technology and spirituality intersect as fertile ground to nourish visions of connection and emancipation.

Through screen interfaces and collective offerings, her digital healing and energy streams remind us to access our own inner data center, to bypass western authority and download directly from source.

Tabita is based in Cayenne, French Guyana. She has a Bachelor in Economics (Fr) and a Master of Research in Artist Moving Image from Central Saint Martins (Uk). Tabita is a founding member of the artist group NTU, half of the duo Malaxa, and the mother of the energy house SENEB.

Connect with Tabita on her website tabitarezaire.com/info.

Location: 25 West India Dock Rd, London E14 8AL, UK

Connect with Wang Yuyang on Instagram at @wyystudio.

Location: 294 Cambridge Heath Rd, London E2 9HA, UK

Born in Monterey, California Whitney Stolich spent her entire childhood on a fifty-acre horse ranch. Having lived in so much open space she questioned urban spaces and decided to immerse herself into one of the largest, Los Angeles, in 1993 to attend Loyola Marymount University. She chose to major in Urban Planning in an attempt to understand the choices that were made within cities and their surrounding areas. Four years after graduating from LMU with a B.A. she attended Otis College of Art and Design to further her studies. She obtained an M.F.A. in 2004. Her work is primarily photographic.

Her artistic interests focus on themes belonging to the common ground of these two fields: that is, the complex reality often caused by economic development in western societies, as well as the way this can be visualized through the photographic medium. For example, in her series Landuse (2003-2004) she examined aspects of the residential development in southern California, in a way that seems to be suspended between reality and the elliptical vision of a scale model. In her series Third Space 2004-2005) and Land Above Sky Below (2007-2008) correspondingly, she attempts to read into two different aspects of land ownership, constantly renewing her artistic language according to the subject matter requirements. In (2012-2018) I have continued to focus my work on urban planning issues. I have photographed benchmarks as the crows flies Every Ten Miles Southern California, I have taken images of WWII advertisements in the abandoned tunnels of Paris and now I am currently focusing on Space Between Places an off the grid eco-friendly community that has a community of people who desire to be free literally and figuratively on concrete slabs in the Sonoran desert with an assortment of objects as dwellings.

Spaces Between Places is a series that consists of 20 images that are color prints 30 inches x 40 inches that were taken at a unique place in the desert of Los Angeles called Slab City. Here again I combine my focus on urban uniqueness with landuse. Near the Salton Sea is a rent free ramshackle town where Slab City resides in the middle of the Sonoran desert. It is calculated that an annual-income of $110,000 is required to afford an average 2-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles. In the Slabs everyone spends less than $200 monthly.

But what binds these eclectic people, unlikely neighbors together is the desire for somewhere to free be-literally and/or figuratively. Slab City is an ill-defined square mile framed with craggy peaks: campsites of tarps and found objects, immobilized vehicles reimagined as dwellings; elaborate, cobbled-together compounds demarcated by tires; tents of all types, and myriads of motor homes, some the size of studio apartments.

Slab City is entirely off grid. It promotes a new consciousness of environmentalism as most Slabbers have solar panels, water tanks, and many hydroponic gardens. People become eco-responsible after living here awhile. There is an internet café, 2 airbnbs, a coffee shop, a skate park, a radio station, a library, a church, and a venue for concerts all for this community. A fourty-five minute walk leads to hot springs to bath. Summer month are rough as the heat intensifies to 130 degrees. This thins out this in between place and the so called snowbirders leave during the summer months. Originally a World War II marine corps barracks the concrete –slab foundations remain.

Slab city is a rent free town that first welcomes you with Salvation mountain a huge 50 foot art installation. Then a mixture of eco-friendly ramshackle dwellings exist amongst the harsh Sonoran desert land. As you explore you find a unique space between places and where people, dwellings, and sculpture gardens exist in a loosely free feeling eco-conscious community.

Connect with Whitney on Instagram at @whitneystolich.

Location: 16 Procter St, London WC1V 6NZ, UK

One of the representative of Chinese contemporary art who also enjoys high influence in the field of international art. From the 1990s to the present, Zhang Huan was constantly invited to held exhibitions all over the world. His artworks were widely collected by top museums, important private and public collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon Guggenheim Museum, the MacArthur Foundation, Centre Pompidou, Foundation Louis Vuitton Paris, Louvre Abu Dhabi, the National Gallery of Australia and Shanghai Art Museum etc.

Connect with on Zhang Huan Instagram at @zhanghuanofficial.