A showcase of collaborations between artists and researchers developed through the university's King's College London x Somerset House Studios partnership explored new critical perspectives on contemporary culture and society.

The event, hosted by Executive Director for Culture, Munira Mirza, and held in the River Rooms at Somerset House, brought together the output of the five collaborations between resident artists within Somerset House Studios and King’s academics and researchers from a variety of areas in the departments of Philosophy, Geography, Digital Humanities and Nutritional Sciences.

In panel discussions, in front of an audience of staff, students, Studios artists and the wider cultural community, the academics and artists shared their experiences of working on the projects and the findings and critical perspectives they’ve gained from taking part in the collaboration. 

Projects included Ted Hunt and Professor Matthew Soteriou from the Department of Philosophy’s Sense of Time, which gave critical new perspectives on how we individually and collectively perceive and inhabit time.

Artists Maeve Brennan, along with Frances Crowley and Dr Camilla Audia from the Department of Geography, explored personal testimonies and first-hand evidence of climate change from rural communities and scientists in their Mossi Forecasts: Reading Weather in Burkina Faso.

Technologically Fabricated Intimacy showcased the work of Marija Bozinovska Jones and Dr Alessandro Gandini from the Department of Digital Humanities to explore what blockchain technologies bring to the dating market.

Also in the Department of Digital Humanities, art collective FRAUD worked with Dr Btihaj Ajana to investigate the role of analytic and remote sensing technologies in the evolution of migrant flows in their project Euro-vision, or the Making of the Automated Gaze.

Finally, Mike Thompson from art and design research practice, Thought Collider, worked with Dr Charlotte Mills from the Department of Nutritional Sciences on 3 Days of Fat, a series of public experiments, happenings and discussions about our complex relationship with the material fat.

Find out more about the project here, and the work of the cultural community at King’s here.