News
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News
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News ✳︎
CEN member Lu Cunningham announces the opening of her latest curated exhibition.
EXHIBITION: Lubber Buds
Open: Thursdays to Sundays, 11-6pmFinal Day: Sunday 1st February, 11-4pm
At The Florence Trust, Holy Trinity, Cloudesley Square, Barnsbury, London N1 0HN
Lubber Buds presents Joe Preston’s cinematic film installation Closing the Loop, alongside etchings, photographs and drawings on paper.
The film attends to the routines and cycles that make up planet Earth’s delicate balance. This rhythm is one that over recent decades has been pushed more and more out of sync by climate change. It is part of a new body of work that examines human eco-systems and food and waste practices, at a time of environmental collapse. The film examines climate catastrophe, and the humans’ place within it, as a series of interlinked loops and cycles, like a musical score, that due to human interference is now out of time, with each cycle, season or year becoming more and more out of time with each other.
Filmed across the entire country, from the Masai Mara all the way across to the South Sudanese borderlands, Closing the Loop features an array of figures and organisations including Afriscout, Sanergy and The Bug Picture, centred around subsistence farmers and attempts towards ecological initiatives. Closing the Loop’s visuals are soundtracked by an original score by composer Euan Hinshelwood.
‘Preston highlights the pioneering work of an ecological initiative that aims to educate smallholder family farmers in organic alternatives for soil improvement, utilising material made from the offspring of abundant black soldier flies… Deftly switching between the micro and the macro, demonstrating how down-and-dirty hands-on involvement is a prerequisite of any well-meaning sustainable practice, [the film] Closing the Loop is disarmingly intimate, powerfully engaged and keenly observed.’
— extract from text by Steven Bode
Images: Lubber Buds, at The Florence Trust Gallery, Islington, of works by filmmaker Joe Preston. Photography by Roman Sheppard Dawson, @studio_reverse_magic.
Exhibition
Event
Iman Datoo and CEN member Siobhan McLaughlin will be hosting Resource Saturday on 24th January 2026 from 2-4pm at Radical Ecology studio in Webbers Yard, Dartington, UK.
Additional information:
Iman Datoo is a transdisciplinary artist and Head of Research and Community at Radical Ecology. Her practice investigates the world-making capacities of plants, soils and people - how we move, behave and make place. She is currently a PhD candidate at UCL’s Slade School of Art and is also the author of the 100 Year Care Plan, a report exploring the social and ecological value of Dartington’s North Wood.
Siobhan McLaughlin is an artist and curator based in Glasgow. Her practice explores themes of place, care and sustainability through painting and printmaking, to consider how past and current activities leave impressions on our ecologies. Since graduating from an MA in Fine Art at Edinburgh University in 2019, she has been awarded the SSA Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Award, a film commission from the Tate’s British Art Network, and the Stephen Palmer Travel Award.
Journal
Call for submissions: Special Issue- Conditions of Transcultural Curating: Ecology, Decoloniality, and Global Exhibition Practices
This Special Issue examines how curatorial practice mediates the transcultural circulation of art under contemporary ecological and geopolitical conditions. It invites contributions that explore exhibitions, collections, live programmes, and curatorial experiments engaging with environmental justice, extractivism, migration, and more-than-human relations. By foregrounding ecological and decolonial perspectives, the issue reframes global artistic circulation through locally situated, material, and ethical conditions of curatorial practice, addressing how art circulates, is interpreted, and is exhibited across cultures today.
Special Issue webpage:
https://www.mdpi.com/journal/arts/special_issues/957AG66HWM
Image credit: Gerd Eichmann, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Symposium
CEN members Dawit Algerson and Silla Simone announce NEW publications upcoming from the recent 'Two Many Chefs? Curating emotion, collaboration & imagination' Symposium.
More to follow. Please see below for information about the recent symposium.
A Two-Day Public Symposium on Collaborative Curating
Too Many Chefs? was a two-day public symposium exploring curating as a collaborative, imaginative, and emotionally engaged interdisciplinary practice. Hosted in Oslo at UKS Unge Kunstneres Samfund, the symposium brought together 24 curators from the Master’s programme in Curating at Aarhus University.
The event presented current research that rethinks curatorial work as a social, sensory, and political act rather than a strictly institutional role. Through experimental presentations, participatory formats, performed research, and collective exercises, Too Many Chefs? proposed curating as an expanded practice shaped by collaboration, affect, and shared responsibility.
The symposium’s title playfully challenged traditional hierarchies within curatorial work, using the familiar phrase “too many chefs” to question dominant models of authorship and authority. Instead, the symposium foregrounded co-creation, collective agency, and shared authorship as fertile grounds for developing new cultural forms and curatorial methodologies.
Across the two days, the symposium invited audiences to reflect on how three intersecting themes currently at the forefront of curatorial research shape the ways exhibitions and curated experiences are conceived, constructed, and sustained:
Collaboration focused on co-creation, audience involvement, and distributed authorship, asking how curators, artists, and communities can build projects together without replicating institutional power structures, and what happens when decision-making is shared.
Imagination addressed speculative thinking, activism, and interdisciplinary exchange as tools for re-reading the past and envisioning alternative futures. Presentations explored how curatorial work might generate new forms of knowledge, solidarity, and world-building.
Emotion examined affect, empathy, vulnerability, and embodied spectatorship, considering how feelings inform experience and how curators can design spaces that hold emotional complexity and encourage intimate, communal, or sensory modes of engagement.
Too Many Chefs? functioned both as a platform for presenting curatorial research and as a collective space for testing ideas, formats, and practices. The symposium emphasized curating not as a fixed professional identity, but as a dynamic, relational process shaped through collaboration, imagination, and emotional engagement.
Further information about the symposium, including documentation, updates, and future publications, will be made available through the Too Many Chefs? website and social media channels.
Video recordings from the symposium will be published on the website in the coming period,and the publication will be announced across the project’s Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook platforms.
www.instagram.com/too_many_chefs_curate/
Linkedin: too many chefs