Ignacio Acosta is a Chilean-born artist and researcher who works with photography and video in territories under pressure from extractive industries. His multilayered collaborative practice and spatial installations seek to connect audiences with these complex but critical concerns. Ignacio is a postdoctoral researcher at Centre for Multidisciplinary Studies on Racism (CEMFOR), Uppsala University, where he leads the collaborative research project Indigenous Perspectives on Forest Fires, Drought and Climate Change: Sápmi funded by the Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development (FORMAS). He is also a research associate at the Royal College of Art (RCA), London, as part of Solid Water, Frozen Time, Future Justice: Photography and Mining in the Andean Glaciers, a visual research project developed with Louise Purbrick and Xavier Ribas (Traces of Nitrate) and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

Ravi Agarwal (New Delhi) has an interdisciplinary practice as an artist, writer, curator and environmental campaigner. His research-based work mediates between art and activism to address the entangled questions of nature and its futures using photography, video, text and installation. His work has been shown widely, including at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art (December 2022), the Biennials of Havana (2019), Yinchuan (2018), Kochi (2016), Sharjah (2013), Indian Highway (2009) and Documenta XI (2002) amongst others, besides numerous solo and group exhibitions. He curated New Natures, A Terrible Beauty is Born at the Goethe Institute and CSMVS Museum, Mumbai (January 2022), Imagined Documents at the Les Recontres d' Arles (July 2022), and the project on multispecies worlds Samtal Jameen, Samtal Jameer (www.multispeciesart.org). He is the curatorial advisor for the forthcoming exhibition Carbon (August 2023) at the Science Gallery, Bengaluru, India. Ravi works alongside the founder and director of the environmental NGO Toxics Link based in New Delhi, and The Shyama Foundation’s – Shared Ecologies programme, which supports emerging initiatives at the intersection of art and ecology in India. www.sharedecologies.org at www.raviagarwal.com) His new photobook, The Power Plant – Fragments in Time, is currently under publication. He has been invited as a co-convenor for the Bergan Assembly 2025.

Mónica Alcázar-Duarte is a Mexican-British multidisciplinary visual artist whose work acknowledges her Indigenous heritage while exploring current ideals of progress. She embraces themes related to science and technology and their influence over society and the natural world. In her projects she mixes images and new technologies, such as augmented reality, to create multilayered work, producing meaning through seemingly disconnected narratives. Mónica’s work references Western society’s obsession with speed, expansion and resource accumulation as an index of advancement at a time in which ecological disaster looms, and considers other ways of seeing, knowing and being in the world. In 2023 she was nominated for the Prix Pictet, and her work was acquired by the V&A. She has also been awarded a National Geographic storytelling grant to complete a film in early 2024. In 2022 she was awarded, a Wayfinder Award from National Geographic, as well as a residency with Light Work through Autograph Gallery in London. Mónica has been granted fellowships by the MEAD Foundation, Ampersand Foundation, Bar-Tur Foundation and the British Arts Council. Her work has been exhibited and collected throughout Europe, Mexico and the United States in places such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Autograph Gallery, the V&A Museum in London and the Wilhelm-Hack-Museum in Germany.

Tobah Aukland-Peck is a PhD candidate in art history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her research on British nineteenth- and twentieth-century art investigates themes of environmental change and pollution, the industrial provenance of artistic materials and the integration of working-class perspectives in the visual arts. She has published essays on related topics in Grey Room and with Courtauld Books Online. Her dissertation "Mineral Landscapes: British Art and Extraction 1937–1975" addresses artistic encounters with extractive sites and proposes a relationship between the subject matter of mining and the abstract experiments of British modernism and postwar art. 

Eline Benjaminsen work deals with the challenge of perceiving market processes through photographic follow-the-money narratives that combine prints, video and text in mixed media installations. Concerned by how the lacking visuality of socio-economic processes affects our ability to engage with them, she investigates the potentiality in imagery to enable us to observe such processes clearer. Collaboration plays a central role in all her projects, and she work closely with a variety of platforms and individuals, from researchers and activists to the financial press. Recent exhibits of my work include Radius CCA (NL), Wereldmuseum Amsterdam (NL), Mannheim Biennale für Aktuelle Fotografie (DE) and Atelier Néerlandais (FR).

Crystal Bennes, “Like a prophetess-professor” (Latitudes, 2023), is an artist and writer who critically and poetically examines knowledge systems and power structures. Using a method that often begins with feminist reinterpretations of archival histories or myths, her way of working makes essential, often surprising, connections between science, history, capitalism, colonialism, gender and political power.

Her publications, artworks and installations range from jacquard textiles woven with computer punchcard programmes to photobooks connecting early computing, nuclear colonialism and women computer programmers. They include the pseudo-archaeological recreation of a nineteenth-century Roman hay meadow, a story of unintentional plant migration; a wide-ranging investigation of one of the only human-made chemicals that both nourishes and destroys us: fertiliser; and a performance installation featuring a Pythia-like oracle that speaks of corrupt global commodities traders.

Recent exhibitions include: Inching Towards, Freelands Foundation, London (2024); About Exchanging of Women, Edinburgh Art Festival (2023); Flora Italica, Thorvaldsens Museum, Copenhagen (2023); Mauvaises Herbes, Centre Photographique d’Ile-de-France (2023); and No Island Is an Island, Landskrona Foto, Landskrona (2022).

Sria Chatterjee is Head of Research and Learning at the Paul Mellon Centre. Sria’s research interests lie at the intersection of art, science and environment and she publishes extensively on these topics. Sria leads the multi-year Climate & Colonialism research project at the Paul Mellon Centre. In 2020, she founded and led the award-winning digital project, Visualizing the Virus.

Before coming to the Paul Mellon Centre, Sria was a fellow at the Max-Planck Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz and an advanced researcher at the FHNW Academy of Art and Design in Basel, Switzerland, where she held a Swiss National Science Foundation fellowship. She served as a contributing editor for British Art Studies from 2020–22 and remains involved in the journal as Editorial Advisor. In 2024, Sria is on research leave from the Paul Mellon Centre on a fellowship at the Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University. In 2023, Sria served as a judge for the Pen Hessell-Tiltman Prize for historical non-fiction. Sria received her PhD from the Department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University in 2019.

Nancy Demerdash is an assistant professor of art history in the Department of Art & Art History and the Associate Director of the Prentiss M. Brown Honors Program at Albion College. At Albion, she teaches a diverse array of courses in global modern and contemporary art and architecture. She received her Master of Science in Architecture Studies (SMArchS) degree from the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and her Ph.D. from the Department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University. She has published widely and is currently working on her book manuscript, “The Architectural Politics of Tunisian Modernity: Reconstruction, Decolonization, and Development”, contracted with the University of Nebraska Press (“France Overseas: Studies in Empire and Decolonization” series), due out in 2025.

Radha D’Souza is a professor of international law, development and conflict studies at the University of Westminster (UK) and co-founder of the Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes (CICC). She is an academic, lawyer, social justice campaigner, critic and commentator from India where she has worked with trade unions and the democratic rights movements supporting anti-globalisation movements and campaigns against anti-terrorism laws. She is author of several books and articles including What’s Wrong with Rights: Social Movements, Law and Liberal Imaginations? (Pluto Press, 2018) which forms the theoretical basis for the CICC.

FRAUD (Audrey Samson and Francisco Gallardo) is an artist duo whose work has been exhibited internationally. With their spatial practice, they develop forms of art-led enquiry that examine financialisation through extractive practices and cultivate ways in which we might encourage relations of solidarity that promote the inseparability of land, water and bodies.

Somerset House Studios alumni, the duo, currently Stanley Picker Fellows, has also been selected for Artangel’s Making Time, as well as awarded the HBK Braunschweig Fellowship (2020), the King’s College Cultural Institute Grant (2018) and has been commissioned by Contemporary Art Archipelago (2022), the Istanbul Design Biennial (2020), RADAR Loughborough (2020) and the Cockayne Foundation (2018). Audrey is a professor in More-Than-Computational Arts at l’École de Recherche Graphique. Francisco is an architect who was awarded the Wellcome Trust People Awards (2016) and authored Talking Dirty published by Arts Catalyst (2016). They are Studio Tutor in Architecture at Loughborough University and in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins. The duo’s work is part of the permanent collections of the European Investment Bank Institute (LU) and the Art and Nature Centre – Beulas Foundation (SP).

FRAUD’s current investigations can be explored through the EURO⁠—VISION platform euro-vision.net.

Hit Man Gurung is an artist and curator based in Lamjung near Kathmandu. Hit Man’s diverse practice concerns itself with the fabric of human mobilities, frictions of history and failures of revolutions. While rooted in the recent history of Nepal, his works unravel a complex web of kinships and extraction across geographies that underscore the exploitative nature of capitalism. These narratives revolve around the lived experiences of migrants caught between a dehumanising transnational labour-based industry and an apathetic nation state. He furthermore invokes Indigenous methodologies and epistemologies to fundamentally reconfigure contemporary artistic praxis.

Hit Man is one of the curators for the 17th Biennale Jogja 2023 and Colomboscope 2024. He was a co-curator for the Kathmandu Triennale 2077 (2022); Nepal Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2022); Garden of Ten Seasons at S A V V Y Contemporary, Berlin (2022); and 12 Baishakh, Bhaktapur (2015) alongside Sheelasha Rajbhandari. He has also co-founded ArTree Nepal, an artist collective, and Kalā Kulo, an arts initiative. He has participated in exhibitions at S A V V Y Contemporary, Berlin (2020); Biennale of Sydney (2020); Artspace Sydney (2019); Weltmuseum Wien (2019); Kathmandu Triennale (2017); Yinchuan Biennale (2016); Para Site, Hong Kong (2016); Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, Brisbane (2015–16); and Dhaka Art Summit (2014, 2016, 2018, 2020).

Stephanie Hankey is a creative director, curator and social entrepreneur with twenty-five-years’ experience primarily focused on exploring the social, political and environmental impact of technology on society. Stephanie co-founded Tactical Tech in 2003 which is now the leading international NGO at the forefront of public education on digital literacy. She is a co-curator of Nervous Systems, HKW (2016); Everything Will Be Fine (2022); and the groundbreaking touring exhibition, The Glass Room (2016 to present) now shown in over fifty countries, enabling over half a million people worldwide to reflect on their relationship with technology and its impact on their environment. She was a principle on Synthetic Landscapes, shown at the Venice Architecture Biennale (2023) and a ‘22 Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Stephanie is dual-professor of design at the University of Applied Sciences in Potsdam and the founder of Chemical Sisters.

Sasha Huber is a Helsinki-based, multidisciplinary visual artist-researcher of Swiss-Haitian heritage. Sensitive to the subtle threads connecting history and the present, she uses and responds to archival material within a layered creative practice that encompasses performance-based interventions, video, photography and collaborations. Sasha frequently reclaims – aware of its symbolic significance – the compressed-air staple gun as an artistic “weapon”, tapping into its potential to renegotiate unequal power dynamics. She is known for her artistic research contribution to the Demounting Louis Agassiz campaign which aims to dismantle the glaciologist’s lesser-known but contentious racist heritage. Sasha also often works in a creative partnership with artist Petri Saarikko with whom she initiated the long-term project Remedies Universe.

She holds an MA in visual culture from the Aalto University and is presently undertaking a practice-based PhD at Zurich University of the Arts. Sasha has had numerous solo presentations, artist residencies and participated in international exhibitions and festivals, including the fifty-sixth Venice Biennial in 2015. In 2021 her solo exhibition tour YOU NAME IT began at Kunstinstituut Melly in Rotterdam and continued to The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto; Autograph in London in 2022/23; and Turku Art Museum in Finland in 2023. In 2018 the Arts Promotion Centre Finland awarded Sasha the State Art Award in the category visual arts and in 2022 she received a multi-year artist grant.

Elias Kimaiyo is a Sengwer indigenous community leader from Embobut forest. He is also a land and human rights defender as well as a community journalist. Together with other community leaders he lobbies for ancestral land tenure rights and recognition. He works closely with community allies like civil societies, journalists, researchers, and paralegals to raise awareness about the violence that is taking place towards his people as a consequence of neoliberal conservation. In 2017 he was the declared Human Rights Defender of the Year by Defenders Coalition.

Nina Kolowratnik is an architect and PhD candidate in law within the Human Rights Centre at Ghent University in Belgium, where she is part of the European Research Council advanced grant project DISSECT: Evidence in International Human Rights Adjudication. Her doctoral study focuses on Indigenous peoples’ knowledge at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the impact of the Court’s evidentiary regime on access to justice and knowledge representation. She is the author of the book The Language of Secret Proof: Indigenous Truth and Representation (Sternberg Press, 2019).

Syowia Kyambi a distinguished facilitator at the Transart Institute and visiting professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg, is a co-founder of Untethered Magic, an initiative supporting contemporary arts in Nairobi. Her work merges artists with creatives across disciplines, fostering knowledge building and process-based practices. Kyambi’s artistry employs photography, video, drawing and sculpture to explore cultural identities and contemporary human experiences. Her installations narrate stories and activate objects, addressing issues of loss, memory, race and gender. Kyambi’s approach takes aim at the politics of the time and its legacy today – questioning what is remembered, what is archived and how we see the world anew.

Godofredo Enes Pereira is an architect and researcher. He is the Head of Programme for the MA Environmental Architecture, RCA, London. Prior to joining the RCA, he taught at the Bartlett School of Architecture. He was a member of Forensic Architecture at Goldsmiths, where he investigated the interception of resource extraction and human rights violations across Latin America. Between 2017-22, at the RCA, he led the Lithium Triangle Research Studio, a collaborative research project on the socio-environmental impacts of lithium extraction in the Atacama Desert. In 2022 Godofredo created the Territorial Research Group (G.I.T.), providing support to communities resisting the advances of the extractive frontier in Portugal. He is member of Povo e Natureza do Barroso (PNB) an organization dedicated to the protection of nature in the north of Portugal.

Marie Petersmann is an assistant professorial research fellow at the LSE Law School (UK). Her project Anthropocene Legalities: Reconfiguring Legal Relations Within More-than-human Worlds is funded by the Dutch Research Council (2022–2025). It explores new strategies for reparative legal actions and climate justice by focusing on de-anthropocentric, decolonial and dehumanist legalities. The project engages works from critical ecofeminism, posthumanism and Black studies to reconfigure the material, subjective, spatial and temporal boundaries of environmental laws in a changing climate. In 2022, she was Resident Fellow at the Istituto Svizzero in Rome (2022–2023). Her book When Environmental Protection and Human Rights Collide was published with Cambridge University Press in 2022.

Julian Posada is an assistant professor of American Studies at Yale University and a member of the Yale Law School’s Information Society Project and the Yale Institute for Foundations of Data Science. His research integrates theories and methods from information science, sociology and human-computer interaction to examine how technology is developed and used within various historical, cultural and social contexts. His current project investigates the dynamics between human labour and data production in the artificial intelligence industry. Incorporating elements of Latin American critical thought, this study emphasises the experiences of workers in the region who are employed by digital platforms to produce machine learning data and validate algorithmic outputs.

Sheelasha Rajbhandari is an artist and curator based in Kathmandu. Her works draw upon an embodied and speculative lineage of femininities to question the positioning of women across time, landscapes and cosmologies. Her practice is a provocation to reflect beyond a neo-liberal conception of time in order to decentre patriarchal structures that perpetuate cycles of industrial extraction and individual exhaustion. For her, art-making is about creating space for collective action. This questioning feeds into her recent artistic and curatorial approach that recomposes notions of Indigeneity, gender, worth and productivity.

Sheelasha is one of the curators for the 17th Biennale Jogja 2023 and Colomboscope 2024. She co-curated the Kathmandu Triennale 2077, Nepal Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2022); Garden of Ten Seasons at S A V V Y Contemporary, Berlin (2022); and 12 Baishakh, Bhaktapur (2015) alongside Hit Man Gurung. Her textile installation was exhibited at the Museum of Art and Design, New York (2022) and Footscray Art Centre, Melbourne (2022). Her installation in the travelling exhibition A Beast, a God, and a Line (2018–2020) was presented at Para Site, Hong Kong; TS1 Yangon; Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; Kunsthall, Trondheim; and MAIIAM Contemporary Art Museum, Chiang Mai. She has also been an artist in residence at the Bellas Artes Projects (2019) and Para Site (2017). She has furthermore exhibited at Weltmuseum Wien (2019) and Kathmandu Triennale (2017). With her collective, she has been a part of Dhaka Art Summit (2020) and the Biennale of Sydney (2020). She is also a co-founder of ArTree Nepal, an artist collective, and Kalā Kulo, an arts initiative.

Rahul Ranjan is a lecturer in environmental/climate justice at the School of Geosciences, University of Edinburgh. He is the author of The Political Life of Memory: Birsa Munda in Contemporary India (Cambridge University Press, 2023) and also edited At the Crossroads of Rights: Forest Struggles and Human Rights in Postcolonial India, (Routledge Press, London, 2022). Prior to lecturing, he held a postdoctoral research fellowship appointment funded by the Research Council of Norway for the Riverine Rights project based in Oslo.

Gabriela Saenger Silva is a Brazilian-UK-based arts practitioner, educator and researcher specialising in education and socially engaged practices. She is a PhD candidate at the Exhibition Research Lab at Liverpool John Moores University. Gabriela was operations coordinator for the Mercosul Biennial pedagogical and public programme from 2007 to 2013, guest curator for Bienal de São Paulo in 2018 and mediation coordinator for the Liverpool Biennial in 2016 and 2018, where she was responsible for the experimental programme The City Is a School.

Mark Sealy OBE is Executive Director of Autograph (1991–) and Professor, Photography, Rights and Representation at University Arts London – London College of Communication. Mark is interested in the relationship between art, photography and social change, identity politics, race and human rights. He has written for many of the world’s leading photographic journals, produced numerous artist publications, curated exhibitions, and commissioned photographers and filmmakers worldwide. Lawrence & Wishart have published his more recent critical writings on photography. These titles include Photography: Race, Rights and Representation, published 2022 and Decolonising the Camera: Photography in Racial Time, published 2019.

Marie Smith (she/they) is a neurodivergent visual artist and writer born, living and working in London. Marie graduated in 2017 with an MA in History of Art with Photography at Birkbeck, University of London. Being a neurodivergent person with dyspraxia and anxiety has informed how they navigate the world. Their practice incorporates digital and analogue photography alongside text as a form of visual language that addresses identity, nature, sustainability, mental health and wellbeing. Marie utilises low-toxic plant, food or herb-based developers to process their analogue film. Marie is an associate lecturer at Kingston University London.

Jelena Sofronijevic (@empirelinespodcast, @jelsofron) is a producer, writer and researcher, who makes content at the intersections of cultural history, politics and the arts. Beyond their works in print, they are the producer of EMPIRE LINES, a podcast which uncovers the unexpected flows of empires through art and historicity, a new series of audio walking tours, exploring how cities got to be the way they are, recorded on location in London (2022) and Tokyo (2023). You can listen to EMPIRE LINES on all podcast platforms, and follow on Instagram and Twitter. Their full portfolio of work is available on their website and social media.

Jonas Staal is a visual artist whose work deals with the relation between art, democracy and propaganda. He is the founder of the artistic and political organisation New World Summit (2012–ongoing). Together with Florian Malzacher, he co-directs the training camp, Training for the Future (2018–ongoing), and with human rights lawyer Jan Fermon he initiated the collective action lawsuit Collectivize Facebook (2020–ongoing). With writer and lawyer Radha D’Souza, he founded the Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes (2021–ongoing) and with Laure Prouvost, he is co-administrator of the Obscure Union. Jonas completed his PhD research on propaganda art at the PhDArts programme of Leiden University and is the author of Propaganda Art in the 21st Century (The MIT Press, 2019).

Wilfred Ukpong is a French Nigerian interdisciplinary artist and researcher whose distinctive socially engaged practice utilises several interwoven mediums, including photography, film, sculpture, performance, architecture and creative workshops, to tackle pertinent social issues with community participation and intervention. Wilfred’s photographic and art film projects have been exhibited at Alliance Française/Mike Adenuga Centre (Nigeria), FotoFest, Houston (USA), Institut français du Nigeria Abuja (Nigeria), MARKK Museum Hamburg (Germany), Pipe Factory Glasgow (UK), Royal Society of Arts, London (UK) and Weltmuseum Vienna (Austria) amongst others. His long-term project Blazing Century 1 received a special grant from the Prince Claus Fund Amsterdam (2010); his film Future World (2017) won the Golden City Gates Excellence Award at ITB Berlin (2018) and was presented at the Nigerian Senate to encourage environmental change in the Niger Delta. Wilfred received his BA/MA in Fine Arts from École Supérieure d'Art Lorient, France, and his PhD from Oxford Brookes University (UK).

Bindi Vora is a British-Indian artist working with expanded photography, associate lecturer at London College of Communication and curator at Autograph. Since joining Autograph, she has curated Eric Gyamfi (2023), Poulomi Basu: Fireflies (2022), co-curated Sasha Huber: You Name It (2022), Care I Contagion I Community – Self & Other (2021–2022); Lola Flash: [sur]passing and Maxine Walker: Untitled (both 2019) and contributed to a series of in-conversations with multidisciplinary artists include Mónica Alcázar-Duarte, Maryam Wahid, Tobi Alexandra Falade, David Uzochukwu amongst others. She has independently curated Poulomi Basu: Centralia for Recontres d’Arles Louis Roederer Discovery Award (2020) and Let’s Go Through This Again (2018).