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Yinka Shonibare CBE RA (b. 1962, London, United Kingdom) has an interdisciplinary practice which uses Western art history and literature to question the validity of contemporary cultural and national identities within the context of globalisation. As a celebrated British-Nigerian artist working between London and Lagos, Shonibare was awarded the honour of ‘Commander of the Order of the British Empire’ in 2019.

In 2004, he was nominated for the Turner Prize and in 2008 and in 2010, his first public art commission, Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle, was displayed on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, London. The Tetley commissioned Shonibare’s Hibiscus Rising, a major public memorial in Leeds for David Oluwale, which opened in November 2023.

In November 2022, Shonibare launched Guest Artists Space (G. A. S.) Foundation, a non-profit based in Nigeria dedicated to facilitating cultural exchange through residencies, public programmes, and exhibition opportunities.

In 2024, the Serpentine, London UK, presented a solo exhibition of works in their Serpentine South gallery titled Suspended States. Shonibare's work is also featured at the Venice Biennale 2024 as part of the Nigerian Pavilion, in the group show: Nigeria Imaginary.

jiandyin (Jiradej Meemalai and Pornpilai Meemalai) an interdisciplinary duo lives and works in Ratchaburi, Thailand. Their work consists of artistic research, field work, genealogically layered with references to multiple sources and evidence, forms and matters upon a wide range of disciplines and mediums, with collaboration and social engagement. jiandyin create spaces/platforms or situations to analyze relationships between man and society in relation to context and history of the place and space, issues regarding the political conflict or effect on marginalized groups which is a paradox of nation-state. In 2011, they found Baan Noorg Collaborative Arts and Culture, a not-to-profit artist initiative that runs artist residencies, curatorial, interdisciplinary exchange and off-school programs, located in Nongpo community, Ratchaburi, Thailand.

Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC) is an artists’ collective of Congolese plantation workers, based in Lusanga in the heart of the Democratic Republic of the Congo on a plantation formerly owned by the British-Dutch multinational Unilever. CATPC holds companies like these responsible for exploiting their forests and societies, causing extreme poverty and destroying biodiversity.

Since 2014, by creating and selling artworks abroad, CATPC has been buying their ancestral lands back and transforming them into biodiverse agroforests.

Irena Haiduk directs Yugoexport, a blind and non-aligned oral corporation whose founding logic is equivalence, loyalty, and familial solidarity between people and things. Initiated as a copy of the former Yugoslav apparel and weapons manufacturer Jugoeksport, Yugoexport is formally incorporated in the United States (where corporations are people), launched in Paris and headquartered in New York. Their maxim, How To Surround Your Self With Things In The Right Way, powers the production of images, books, apparel, orations, films, scenographies, and variable spaces, all designed to nourish the organ of imagination.

Haiduk’s work is invested in relationships between aesthetics and economy, image ecology and the way that economic infrastructures leave clear aesthetic marks. She believes that to work in an aesthetic field rooted in making desires, to make art today, is to share the responsibility for what aesthetic economies maintain. Desires, many of them powered by art, brought us here. As our planet becomes impossible to physically inhabit, it is urgent to ask again, from many directions and on every level: how can we desire differently?

Simone Fattal was born in 1942 in Damascus, Syria, and raised in Lebanon, where she studied philosophy at the École des Lettres in Beirut. She then moved to Paris, where she continued her philosophical pursuits at the Sorbonne.

In 1969 she returned to Beirut and began working as a visual artist, exhibiting her paintings until the start of the Lebanese Civil War.

She left Lebanon in 1980 and settled in California, where she founded the Post-Apollo Press, a publishing house dedicated to innovative and experimental literary work. In 1988 she enrolled at the Art Institute of San Francisco, which prompted a return to her artistic practice and a newfound dedication to sculpture and ceramics.

Fattal currently lives in Paris. Her work is included in several public collections, such as the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Yves Saint Laurent Foundation, Marrakech; the National Museum of Qatar, Doha; the Sursock Museum, Beirut and the Sharja Art Foundation, Sharja.

The Institute of Queer Ecology (IQECO) is an ever-evolving collaborative organism, founded in 2017 and co-directed by Lee Pivnik and Nicolas Baird. IQECO has worked with over 150 different artists to present interdisciplinary programming that oscillates between curating programs and directly producing artworks. IQECO projects are interdisciplinary, but unified and grounded in the theoretical framework of Queer Ecology, an adaptive practice concerned with interconnectivity, intimacy, and multispecies relationality. IQECO explores the overlaps between queer cultural production and multispecies biological adaptation to reveal a vibrant and complex world of belonging.

The works of Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson (b. 1967) explore the relevance of art in the world at large. Since 1997, his wide-ranging solo shows – featuring installations, paintings, sculptures, photography, and film – have appeared in major museums around the globe. His art is driven by his interests in perception, movement, embodied experience, and feelings of self and community.

Eliasson is internationally-renowned for his public installations that challenge the way we perceive and co-create our environments. In 2003, he made The weather project, a glowing indoor sun shrouded in mist at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in London. In 2008, Eliasson constructed four expansive artificial waterfalls along the Manhattan and Brooklyn shorelines for The New York City Waterfalls. He has also explored art’s potential to address climate change: for Ice Watch, he brought large blocks of free-floating glacial ice to the city centers of Copenhagen in 2014, Paris in 2015, and London in 2018. Passers-by could touch fragments of the Greenlandic glacial ice and witness its fragility as it disappeared before them. In 2019, Eliasson was named UNDP Goodwill Ambassador for climate action and the sustainable development goals.

Born London 1958. Based in London and the Pyrenees. A pioneer in the new media field since 1989, Treister works across the permeable boundary separating the frontiers of scientific enquiry from mystical revelation. Her projects interrogate the relationship between emerging technologies, society and alternative belief systems to suggest unseen forces that shape our present reality and have implications for the future that we are only beginning to understand.

Maya Lin interprets the natural world through science, history, and culture, to create works that have had a profound impact on how we view our history and how we relate to the natural world.

From her very first work, the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial, she has since gone on to a remarkable and highly acclaimed career in both art and architecture, whilst still being committed to memory works that focus on some of the critical historical issues of our time.

Lin has been recognized around the world for her distinct aesthetic vision with groundbreaking site-specific art installations such as Ghost Forest at Madison Square Park, to award-winning architectural projects from the library at Smith College to Novartis’ campus headquarters in Cambridge MA. Currently, projects include the new performing arts lab space for Bard College and the new design for the Museum of Chinese in America for downtown Manhattan. She is deeply committed to sustainable and site sensitive design methods in all her projects.

Her work asks the viewer to reconsider nature and the environment at a time when it is crucial to do so. A committed environmentalist, she is at work on her final memorial, What is Missing?; a cross-platform, global memorial to the planet, calling attention to the crisis surrounding biodiversity and habitat loss.

Lin is a member of the Bloomberg Foundation, the What is Missing? Foundation, and she is a National Geographic Explorer-at-Large, in 2016 she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, by President Barack Obama, the nation's highest civilian honor.

The NOMASMETAFORAS collective, integrated by Clara Melniczuk and Julian Dupont, works articulating contemporary art practices, pedagogies, philosophy and spiral imagination. Committed to the Indigenous process of resistance in the Cauca territories in todays Colombia, their practice is embodied through vegetal conversations as decolonial emancipation.

They currently work in alliance with the Autonomous Intercultural Indigenous University of the Indigenous Regional Council of Cauca, in where they coordinate spaces of encounter and alliance between the arts and pedagogies of Abya-Yala, among them the pedagogical residence 'The School of the Pluriverse’ and the workshops with ritual plants ‘technologies of collective dreaming’.

For NOMASMETAFORAS, the problem is less about giving subject rights to forests and more about imagining a legislation in where we become something-more-than-subjects in our relationship with that something-morethan-
forests. Emancipation lies in the many in me towards becoming something other than ourselves. How to enter into resonance with plant and mineral beings to envision a different resolution of what is conceived as an
object oriented artificiality?

Antonia Taulis works with art and communications in projects that combine politics and spirituality. In 2019 she created Mercvria, an urban wall magazine in the form of poster campaigns to develop collective thinking around common causes. As a visual artist she builds objects and architectural spaces dedicated to meditation and ecstasy. Lives and works in Santiago de Chile, South America.

Among the leading pioneers of the eco-art movement, the collaborative team of Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison (often referred to simply as "the Harrisons") have worked for almost forty years with biologists, ecologists, architects, urban planners and other artists to initiate collaborative dialogues to uncover ideas and solutions which support biodiversity and community development.

The Harrison's concept of art embraces a breathtaking range of disciplines. They are historians, diplomats, ecologists, investigators, emissaries and art activists. Their work involves proposing solutions and involves not only public discussion, but extensive mapping and documentation of these proposals in an art context.

Eduardo Navarro, (Argentina) 1979.
Lives and works in Uruguay.

I feel a statement somehow contradicts the nature of what I do, mainly because I believe the experience should take place beyond the rigidity of the mind, like for example; eating drawings or dancing with clouds, becoming a horse or asking a volcano to write a poem. An important question for me is how can I transform our language-centered perception of the world in order to expand and speak to the uncertain? I guess my works are rooted in providing a different belief system, although I have to say these belief systems require a certain complicit vulnerability and a state of deeper contemplation in order to allow us to BECOME the subject matter from within. In my work, I or we, have to believe we are truly transforming, otherwise it just does not work. When this transmutation occurs I think then some sort of real collective or individual cognition manifests, mainly because it takes you to a new place. Sometimes this transformation happens by playing, which in my opinion is the ultimate universal language. Only humans talk but everything else communicates in infinite ways. Can we communicate with a palm tree? Sure, but maybe it’s better if we first listen to one, then we might also understand how the palm tree communicates to the wind, the clouds and time and ultimately how it delicately whispers back to us. Communication is a circle, and like the circular function of the heart, blood has to return back to where it once left. Ok, so, what makes us human then? Maybe the answer is a question, maybe the best way to know this is by asking a turtle.

Futurefarmers is a transdisciplinary working group founded in San Francisco in 1995. They are artists, architects, computer programmers, designers, farmers, scientists and anthropologists aligned through a common interest in creating frameworks of participation that facilitate encounter, exchange and tactile forms of inquiry. Their various practices coalesce in many forms - from the far reaching digital realms to the deeply rooted earthly domains. Their work primarily manifest in public as long-term engagements that lead to permanent commons through a process-led approach. This often starts as performances or workshops including sound, walking, sculpture and temporary architecture. Through time and the practiced presence of Futurefarmers, the meeting place of people and materials transform from provisional arrangements into durable programs which have influence on public policy and city design. Futurefarmers' work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Solomon R. Guggenheim, New York; MAXXI | Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo, Rome.

Raqs Media Collective is a contemporary art practice and curatorial configuration based in New Delhi. Raqs was founded in New Delhi in 1992 at a turbulent moment, and since then, has never stopped thinking about, with, and in time. The word “raqs” in several languages denotes an intensification of awareness and presence attained by whirling, turning, being in a state of revolution. Raqs Media Collective take this sense to mean ‘kinetic contemplation’ and a restless and energetic entanglement with the world, and with time.

Raqs have shown at various international exhibitions including Documenta and the Venice, Istanbul, Sao Paolo, Sydney, Taipei and Liverpool Biennales.

MAHKU - Huni Kuin Artists Movement (Acre - Amazon - Brazil) paints Chants and Miths related to their Huni Kuin ancestry. They translate and transform the Huni Meka Chants, the ceremony in which ayahuasca medicine is consecrated, into images. These songs, in turn, are paths that place participants in ayahuasca (nixi pae) rituals in relation to otherness. The MAHKU therefore paints a relationship of technology, paintings that are bridges towards the non-indigenous world.

MAHKU’s strategy comes across with their statement “Vende tela e compra terra” (Sell paintings, buy land). For the past 10 years, MAHKU has been developing a contemporary artistic practice that is both a methodology for safeguarding and renewing Huni Kuin ancestral knowledge and a strategy for territorial recovery. For MAHKU, the sale of artworks becomes a tactic to divert the art market in order to buy plots of land, which are then restored for their community.

Mobile Makers is a nonprofit organization based in Chicago, Illinois and Boston, Massachusetts that makes design education accessible to all people. Through youth design and skill-building workshops, community engagement, public installations, and pop-ups hosted out of a retrofitted mail truck, Mobile Makers encourages conversations about positive change in the built environment.

Mobile Makers was founded in 2017 by Maya Bird-Murphy, an architectural designer who believes the design field must expand to include more people and perspectives. She was selected by Theaster Gates and the Prada Group as an Experimental Design Lab awardee and named a 2024 United States Artists Fellow.

Canal Street Research Association was founded in 2020 in an empty storefront on Canal Street, New York City’s counterfeit epicenter. Delving into the cultural and material ecologies of the street and its long history as a site that probes the limits of ownership and authorship, the association repurposes underused real estate as spaces for gathering ephemeral histories, mapping local lore, and tracing the flows and fissures of capital. They have occupied storefronts, empty office buildings, a storage unit, and most recently a basement. The fictional office entity is operated by Shanzhai Lyric (Ming Lin & Alex Tatarsky), a roving poetic research unit and archive that takes inspiration from 山寨 (shanzhai or counterfeit) goods to examine how bootlegs use mimicry, hybridity, and permutation to both revel in and reveal the artifice of global hierarchies.

Otobong Nkanga’s multidisciplinary practice examines the complex social, political, ecological and material relationships between bodies, territories, minerals and the earth. Unsettling the divisions between minimal and conceptual or sensual and surreal approaches, the artist’s research based practice constellates humans and landscapes, organic and non-organic matter. Through drawing, installation, performance, photography, textiles and sculpture, Nkanga creates pathways translating the natural world – its plants, herbs, minerals and living organisms – into networked, aggregated situations evoking memory, labour, home, care, ownership, emotion, touch and smell. Reframing people and objects as compressed multitudes and as entities that come into being in relation to other entities, Nkanga deftly weaves insights from geology, botany, poetry and non-Western knowledge systems. Her works’ allusions to the reparative potentials of connectivity urgently gesture towards the possibility of more livable futures.

Robert Zhao Renhui (born 1983, Singapore) is an interdisciplinary artist who explores the complex and co-mingled relationships between nature and culture. Working in installation, photography, video and sculpture, Zhao is interested in the multifarious beings and objects that constitute the living world, and whose experiences and knowledge enrich our collective existence.

New Red Order is a public secret society that collaborates with informants to create exhibitions, videos, and performances that question and rechannel subjective and material relationships to indigeneity. New Red Order orients their work through the paradoxical conditions of Indigenous experience, and explores the contradictions and missteps that embody desires for indigeneity in the myths, dreams, and political foundations of the so-called Americas. Through modes of entertainment and corporate address, museological display, re-appropriation, and a multiplicity of swerving artistic strategies, NRO aim to collectively advance understandings of how identity is conveyed and configured within contemporary art practices, in order to create sites of acknowledgment that promote solidarity and shift obstructions to Indigenous growth.

New Red Order is facilitated by core contributors Adam Khalil (Ojibway), Zack Khalil (Ojibway), and Jackson Polys (Tlingit).

Taking place during the 79th United Nations General Assembly, The Summit of the Future is a high-level event, bringing world leaders together to forge a new international consensus on how we deliver a better present and safeguard the future. This once-in-a-generation opportunity serves as a moment to mend eroded trust and demonstrate that international cooperation can effectively tackle current challenges as well as those that have emerged in recent years or may yet be over the horizon.

The Summit of the Future will look at the "how" – how do we cooperate better to deliver on the above aspirations and goals? How do we better meet the needs of the present while also preparing for the challenges of the future? The aim of the Summit is twofold: accelerate efforts to meet our existing international commitments and take concrete steps to respond to emerging challenges and opportunities. This will be achieved through an action-oriented outcome document called the Pact for the Future. The Pact will be negotiated and endorsed by countries in the lead-up to and during the Summit in September 2024.