Vital Signs
Key info (name, location, dates):
Vital Signs was a major exhibition at Science Gallery London, 13 November 2024 - 17 May 2025.
Artists: Ackroyd & Harvey, Angela YT Chan, Birungi Kawooya, Gayle Chong Kwan,
Project aims and summary: Large-scale group exhibition and event programme featuring new commissions and existing work, which brought artists, academic researchers and other knowledge holders together to explore relationships between individual, community and planetary health.
What did I do and why?: As co-curator and lead producer of the exhibition and event programme, my focus was on identifying artists and the collaborative research which informed the new commissions. With over sixty interdisciplinary collaborators from around the world, reflecting a multiplicity of perspectives was a key priority. The curatorial approach for this project focussed on opportunities for sensory engagement within the exhibition and foregrounding everyday moments of interaction with our environments; the air we breathe, food we eat.
Outcomes/successes: the programme drew together high profile names in art climate science alongside activists, lawyers, and made connections between the local and global systems.
The health of our planet is essential for the survival of all living things, including you. To thrive, we need to build stronger alliances with each other, and with all other species.
Science Gallery London’s new exhibition, Vital Signs: Another world is possible brings together artists, designers and researchers to explore these relationships and how the health of the natural world - from our waterways to our atmosphere and the ocean floor - is intimately connected to our own health and wellbeing.
Revealing unique perspectives on our surrounding environments through creative, sensory works and multiple voices, this exhibition reinforces the fact that humans are fundamentally a part of nature rather than apart from it.
Vital Signs shares the ways people are shaping liveable and hopeful futures, here in London and around the world. It confronts environmental injustices and asks us to consider: what changes could we make if we understand that the planet’s health is an extension of our own?