http://www.lookingforward.online/

Looking Forward Arts Projects CIC, London (2026)

18/09/2026

We are proud to announce that Norwich University of the Arts (NUA) and Looking Forward have been awarded the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s (AHRC) Design Generators fund, run by the Design Museum’s Future Observatory, to support the UK-based strand of Andrew Merritt's project Slow Disasters. 'Field Kitchen: Designing Edible Futures for Rewetted Landscapes'.

Taking place across the Norfolk Broads, the project will bring together creative practitioners, climate scientists, farmers, chefs and community organisations to explore how wetter forms of farming, known as paludiculture, could support biodiversity, sustainable food production and climate adaptation 🥣🤝🌾🌊🌱.

We will work with the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia, the Broads Authority, Broadland Catchment Partnership and the University of Cambridge to identify crops suited to wetter landscapes. They will then collaborate with Norfolk farmers, the Norfolk Food and Farming Discovery Trust and the Royal Norfolk Agricultural Association to develop food products and new economic models for regenerative farming.

Project core team:
▶ Andrew Merritt, Lead Artist
▶ Carolina Lio-Rodrigues, Project Curator and Director at Looking Forward
▶ Louis Nixon, NUA Dean of Research and Knowledge Exchange
▶ Dan Lockton, Director of the Institute for Sustainable Worlds
▶ Andrew Ferrell, NUA Senior Research Fellow
▶ Candice Allison, NUA Development Curator
▶ Francesca Fantoni, Assistant Curator at Looking Forward

Stay tuned in the next few months for updates and programme announcements!

13/07/2026

🧶 Our community engagement programme Soft Ground is back!

We are excited to announce the continuation of Soft Ground. These are a series of free weekly drop-in textile-based art sessions designed to support mental wellbeing.

Every Friday (2–4 pm), starting on 31 July and running until 11 September, you can find us at SET Social Peckham (Note 🧐 No session on 21 August).

🤩 Artist/facilitators Sue Mayo and Jenny McIlhatton will each lead a series of mindful workshops using recycled materials and fashion waste.

🔗 The sessions are open to all and particularly welcoming to neurodivergent participants. For more information and to reserve your free spot, head to the Soft Ground Eventbrite page via the link in our bio.

This programme is curated by Sylvia Keck, Community Engagement Curator at Looking Forward, and generously supported by the National Lottery Community Fund.

04/06/2026

Tomorrow! Conversation at 7:30PM with Marzia Migliora and Eva Brioschi at Galleria Franco Noero, Turin.

Sette Mostre Immaginifiche—published by NERO Editions and produced by Looking Forward Art Projects with the support of Archivorum, Fondazione Torino Musei, and Collezione La Gaia, and curated by Anna Cestelli Guidi, Matteo Lucchetti and Galleria Lia Rumma, Milano / Napoli—is the first monograph dedicated to Migliora’s work.

.brioschi

21/04/2026

💭On the 19th of March, Looking Forward convened the second iteration of its Feedforward series 🌀Curating in a Climate Crisis 🌀, bringing together curators and researchers to address the role of curatorial work within the climate and ecological emergency.

Here is a glimpse of the conversation and you can read more about the session on our website. (🔗Link in bio)

With thanks to the participants:
▶ Anna Bates: Curator of Product and Furniture (1900 - Now) at the V&A; lead for Make Good: Rethinking Material Futures. �
▶ Madeleine Collie: Curator at Stanley Picker Gallery and founder of Food Art Research Network. �
▶ Laura Herman: Curator of Digital Art at the V&A and co-founder of Utrecht University’s Inclusive AI Lab.�
▶ Janice Li: Head of Curatorial Programme at Future Observatory, Design Museum.�

Feedforward is a peer-to-peer format developed by Looking Forward where curators, artists, and cultural practitioners come together to reflect on the ethics of cultural work. Feedforward creates a slower, care-based space for sharing questions, resources, and practices.

09/03/2026

🔗 While we prepare to host the second session in a couple of weeks, you can read the summary 💬 of the first session on our website. Link in bio.weeks ago.

Participants in the session:
▶ Abbie Adams: Future Observatory Curator, Design Museum.
▶ Marleen Boschen: Adjunct Curator for Art & Ecology at the Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational and Post-doctoral Research Fellow at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
▶ Louis Buckley: Senior Curator, Nature + Love Project, Horniman Museum and Gardens.
▶ Daisy Gould: Curator and Researcher, PhD Candidate at The Courtauld Institute of Art and formerly (through late 2025) Assistant Curator of Live Programmes at Serpentine Galleries.
▶ María Montero Sierra: Associate Lecturer at Royal College of Art, Media Studies, School of Architecture; PhD Candidate at the University of Warwick and formerly Head of Program of TBA21–Academy.

🔗 While we prepare to host the second session in a couple of week, you can read the summary 💬 of the first session on our website. Link in bio.

Feedforward is a peer-to-peer format developed by Looking Forward where curators, artists, and cultural practitioners come together to reflect on the ethics of cultural work. Feedforward creates a slower, care-based space for sharing questions, resources, and practices.

18/12/2025

Our Substack 👀 Looking Forward Art Notes (thisislookingforward.substack.com) ✨ is a journal for rethinking how we engage with art, culture and life.

We’re catching you up on everything you might have missed in the past couple of months, from exhibition reflections to expanded critical inquiries. Here’s a roundup of what we wrote about in November:

📗A Death in the Family and The Knausgaard Effect
▶ A raw portrait of paternal conflict and grief, and how Knausgaard transformed his deepest personal struggles into a universal experience.
📸 Photo 1: Karl Ove Knausgaard with his father and brother. Photo: The Guardian

📕 Sculpture for the Blind, by the Blind
▶ Lenka Clayton re-engages the blind community with Brâncuși’s untouchable sculpture.
📸 Photo 2: Lenka Clayton, Sculpture for the Blind. Photo: Lonnie Graham

📘 A Song of Science and Humanities
▶ Advocating for an ecosystem where the next great scientific innovation is born in dialogue with the arts.
📸 Photo 3: Penelope Cain, Entanglement of Desert Water. Photo: Penelope Cain
📸 Photo 4: Nick Laessing, Plant Orbiter (2019). Photo: Tim Bowditch

📗Mapping Recipes for "Slow Disasters" in the Lynedoch Valley
▶ The exhibition and public activation "Food for Landscapes" at Design Week South Africa marked the South African launch of our "Slow Disasters" project.
📸 Photo 5 and 6: Andrew Merritt, Slow Disasters

📙 Towards an Aesthetic Preference in Generative Imagery
▶ Generative AI is becoming as familiar as minimalism has in our interior design, photography on our nights out, and readymades in and out of our fruit bowls.
📸 Photo 7: Paul Chan (2025). Photo: Frieze
📸 Photo 8: Heidi Bucher, Herrinzimmer (1978). Photo: Hans Peter Siffert

🔗 link in bio for direct access
➕ follow along and join us on Substack for the full conversation
👾 uncredited photos are AI-generated

16/12/2025

Our Substack 👀 Looking Forward Art Notes (thisislookingforward.substack.com) ✨ is a journal for rethinking how we engage with art, culture and life.

We’re catching you up on everything you might have missed in the past couple of months, from exhibition reflections to expanded critical inquiries. Here’s a roundup of what we wrote about in October:

📕 Designing Otherwise: Notes from More Than Human
▶ A reflection on the exhibition at and its call to rethink design as political, relational, and more-than-human.
📸 Photo 1: Anna Tsing. Photo: Drew Kelly
📸 Photo 2: Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, detail of Perceptual Field 7SzzLn6GnY97DSo7hCSLMf (2025). Photo: Luke Hayes
📸 Photo 3: Elena Landinez and César Rodríguez-Garavito, detail from More-Than-Human Rights Mural (2025). Photo: Looking Forward
📸 Photo 4: Ursula Biemann, Forest Mind (2021). Photo: Looking Forward

📘 Creative Health: Towards a New Creative Industry
▶ A recent report affirms that creativity is not simply beneficial for cultural and economic growth, but is essential to how we imagine, support, and sustain public health in the years ahead.
📸 Photo 5

📗Ernst Gamperl: The Life Within Wood
▶ “I cannot put my will directly on the wood,” he explains. “If I do, it dies. The wood is forming me as much as I am forming it.”
📸 Photo 6: Ernst Gamper, Urkraft Exhibition. Photo: Sarah Myerscough Gallery

📙 About Degrowth
▶ What does prosperity mean if not accumulation? Degrowth as a theory, a movement, and a practical framework.
📸 Photo 7: Myvillages, The Rural School of Economics. Photo: Myvillages
📸 Photo 8: Futurefarmers, Flatbread Society. Photo: Max-McClure; Situations
📸 Photo 9: John Akomfrah, Purple. Photo: Smoking Dogs Films; Lisson Gallery

📕 After-Decay: On the Practice of Eleanor Lakelin
▶ Through the burr’s unconventional patterns and proliferation of irregular cells, each piece tells a story of the wood’s struggle, survival, and self-healing.
📸 Photo 10: Eleanor Lakelin. Photo: Quest

🔗 link in bio for direct access
➕ follow along and join us on Substack for the full conversation
👾 uncredited photos are AI-generated

11/12/2025

Our Substack 👀 Looking Forward Art Notes (thisislookingforward.substack.com) ✨ is a journal/space for rethinking how we engage with art, culture, and life.

Over the next few days, we’ll catch you up on everything you might have missed from August to now with a few carousel posts. In this post, images from what we posted in September:

📕 The Arts Sector in the UK: Burnout and Underpay
▶ The Arts Pay Survey 2025 reveals a deepening financial precarity and a growing mental health crisis within the UK cultural sector.
📸 Photo 1

📘 Heidi Bucher: Rooms as Skins
▶ In her works, private and public histories of enclosures and confinement intersected, as she investigated the psychological and social resonances embedded in architecture.
📸 Photo 2: Gentlemen’s Study, 1978, Haus der Kunst © The Estate of Heidi Bucher, Photo: Markus Tretter

📗 Museums and Ethical Sponsorships
▶ Ethical issues around corporate sponsorship and ambiguous philanthropy polarise museum professionals. But what if we could reframe gifts from high-impact sectors as part of a duty of repair?
📸 Photo 3: The British Museum

📙 Ali Cherri's Sphinx and the History of Mud
▶ Cherri subverts the visual language of monuments and oppressive authority, reflecting, in his own words, on “the fragility of power, and the shifting nature of collective memory.”
📸 Photo 4: Ali Cherri. Seated Figure (2022) in How I Am Monument at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, 2025. Photograph by Reece Straw.

📕 What Happens to Memory when Home is Destroyed?
▶ Do Ho Suh, Heidi Bucher, and Mona Chalabi approach the weight of home in radically different ways.
📸 Photo 5: Nest/s (2024) by Do Ho Suh is a centrepiece of the Tate show. Credit: Do Ho Su / Jeon Taeg Su.

📘 Review of "Gifted" by Suzumi Suzuki
▶ Set in the narrow corridors of Tokyo’s red-light district, Gifted by Suzumi Suzuki is a short, sparse novella about an unnamed young woman navigating grief with an unsettling cold detachment.
📸 Photo 6

🔗 link in bio for direct access
➕ follow along and join us on Substack for the full conversation
👾 uncredited photos are AI-generated

07/12/2025

You might have seen a few stories lately about our Substack 👀 Looking Forward Art Notes (thisislookingforward.substack.com) ✨ a journal/space for rethinking how we engage with art, culture, and life.

Over the next few days, we’ll catch you up on everything you might have missed from August to now with a few carousel posts. In this posts, images from what we posted in August:

📕 "Connecting Thin Black Lines 1985–2025" at ICA, London
▶ From the margins to the main galleries, but not without compromise. A critical look at how legacy is curated under the lens of visibility politics
📸 Photo 1: Sonia Boyce’s Rice n Peas (1982)
📸 Photo 2: Sutapa Biswas’s Birdsong (2004)

📘 "Virtual Beauty" at Somerset House
▶ What does beauty look like when shaped by algorithms, avatars, and AI? This exhibition explores how technology reframes identity, desire, and the politics of self-presentation
📸 Photo 3: Andrew Thomas Huang and James Merry’s Björk Virtual Avatars (2016).
📸 Photo 4: Lil Miquela's Rebirth of Venus (2020)

📗 Review of "Giovanni’s Room" by James Baldwin
▶ One of the earliest works in American fiction to explore same-sex desire.
📸 Photo 5

📙 Museums and Mental Health: A Quiet Shift in Practice
▶ A reflection on participation, responsibility, and the redefinition of public space
📸 Photo 6

📕 Rest, Digest, Heal: Understanding the Vagus Nerve (and How Art Helps)
▶ Have you ever wondered why you feel calmer after being in art gallery? There’s a reason, and it starts with a “wandering” nerve inside you.
📸 Photo 7

📘 Review of Vladimir Nabokov’s "Despair"
▶ A novel about the longing to be someone else and the trap of mistaking fantasy for reality.
📸 Photo 8: Image from the film "Despair", adaptation of the novel directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder

🔗 link in bio for direct access
➕ follow along and join us on Substack for the full conversation
👾 uncredited photos are AI-generated

16/10/2025

"Food for Landscapes: Recipes for Slow Disasters" at Design Week Cape Town > An exhibition and public session in Cape Town, resulting from a Field Kitchen activation in the Lynedoch Valley, South Africa.

Exhibition Venue
Church House, 1 Queen Victoria Street, Cape Town

Exhibition Opening Hours
23 - 25 October 2025 10:00 - 17:00
26 October 2025 10:00 - 16:00

Interactive Session with the Public
26 October 2025 14:00 - 15:30
(RSVP: https://luma.com/fkdue6bh)

Field Kitchen is part of Field Hospital, a methodology being activated across three continents. It uses art, food, and ecological research as a provocation to explore restoring damaged landscapes of Slow Disasters and rebuilding relationships between people and place.

Slow Disasters is a term artist Andrew Merritt (UK) coined to describe the long-term destruction of landscapes and their bioculture. For the first step of a long-term activation in South Africa, Andrew and local collaborator Loubie Rusch of the Sustainability Institute in Lynedoch are partnering with British Council and Design Week South Africa.

In a first exploration in the Lynedoch Valley, a group of local participants interacted with visual representations and food flavours that indicate how relationships with food and place have altered across time. Four maps of the Valley, each representing a different period in its history, along with tasters and sample packaged foods from each period, illustrate how the Valley’s Slow Disaster has played out.

Questions such as “What food does the landscape need?” and “Is there an appetite for interventions that regenerate lost relationships?” prompted participants to mark on the maps how they envision recipes or interventions revealing pathways to healing.

https://linktr.ee/slowdisasters

Looking Forward Arts Projects CIC

18/09/2026

13/07/2026

04/06/2026

21/04/2026

09/03/2026

18/12/2025

16/12/2025

11/12/2025

07/12/2025

16/10/2025

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