Shifting Thresholds – Seismographs of the present

We live in a time when the ground beneath us, political, social, technological, ecological, and even perceptual, feels in constant motion. Borders shift, narratives fracture, and the coordinates through which we orient ourselves are repeatedly unsettled. In such conditions, images often register these transformations before language can fully articulate them. Like seismographs of the present, images capture subtle tremors of displacement: movements of people, identities, landscapes, and systems of meaning.

For this Guest Room, we invite photographic and image-based works that engage with displacement as both a lived experience and an aesthetic condition. Displacement may emerge through migration, body transformation, exile or environmental change, but also through more subtle forms: the dislocation produced by digital mediation, algorithmic vision, and the fragmentation of attention in contemporary image cultures. We are interested in artists who explore how images themselves can shift, circulate, and transform across contexts, platforms, and geographies.

In this sense, displacement is like a method. Images may act simultaneously as anchors and agents of movement: stabilizing fragile memories while opening new perceptual thresholds. They can reveal how identities and territories are continuously renegotiated, and how visual practices might resist fixed narratives by embracing ambiguity, opacity, and multiplicity.

Rather than documenting instability from a distance, the works we seek inhabit it. They explore how images respond to uncertainty, how they translate rupture into form, and how they imagine alternative ways of inhabiting a world defined by movement and transformation. We are particularly drawn to practices that experiment with the image as a site of negotiation: images that fracture, migrate, repeat, or mutate; images that hold together multiple temporalities or perspectives. In this sense, instability becomes a challenge and a space of potential, an opening through which new visual languages and new imaginaries of collective life can emerge.

How can images articulate forms of displacement, migration, technological mediation, ecological change, or emotional estrangement? And how might they also propose new forms of orientation within a constantly moving world?

CURATORS BIOS

Auronda Scalera
Auronda Scalera is an Artistic Director, curator, and lecturer working at the intersection of contemporary art, digital culture, and critical theory. She is curator of DIng Yi: Cosmotechnique at Fondazione Querini Stampalia during the Venice Art Biennale 2026. Together with Dr. Alfredo Cramerotti, she forms a curatorial duo that has advised and curated major international initiatives including Alula Design 2026, Noor Riyadh Festival, Art Dubai Digital, the Lumen Prize for Sotheby’s. 

Dr. Alfredo Cramerotti
Alfredo Cramerotti is a curator, writer, and cultural strategist. He is Director of the Media Majlis Museum at Northwestern University Qatar, President of IKT, the International Association of Curators of Contemporary Art and Chair of Digital Steering Committee of AICA. He has curated more than 90 international exhibitions, biennials, and festivals, and is the author of five books on art, media, and communication.