Welcome to the Social Art Award 2025 – Online Gallery!
We are grateful for the many powerful contributions from artists across the globe. The selected works reflect the diversity of contemporary social art practices and address urgent issues such as climate and water crises, social and economic inequality, migration, conflict, discrimination, and the protection of human and more-than-human life.
Below you will find the submissions from the edition of 2024/2025 that passed the initial jury round. The Online Gallery offers public visibility to these works and supports dialogue around their themes; it does not replace the final jury decision.
Thank you to all artists for sharing your inspiring and committed work. We invite you to explore the gallery and engage with the perspectives shaping the Social Art Award 2025.
Protective Seal
Elena Knox
Artist Elena Knox took a seal-shaped robot, Paro, on a real journey from its origin in Tokyo all the way “home” to an island near the North Pole — an enormous, poignant adventure for a robot who had never even been outdoors before. Along the way, the two spoke at length with many elders living in cold-climate communities, who shared with Paro how their lands and their technologies have changed over their lifetimes. Paro’s epic homecoming is presented as a 7-channel video installation. Collaborating with roboticists and public participants, this work aims to bring social awareness to the impact of global practices on the extreme cold landscapes of our shared Earth, before it is too late and even seals are no more. It does not vilify advanced technologies, but gently places as their ambassador a small robot who realises the irony of its casting as a harp seal and sets out in concern to research its own complicity in Arctic ill health. Paro’s goal is an interspecies harmonious existence.
Artist Elena Knox took a seal-shaped robot, Paro, on a real journey from its origin in Tokyo all the way “home” to an island near the North Pole — an enormous, poignant adventure for a robot who had never even been outdoors before. Along the way, the two spoke at length with many elders living in cold-climate communities, who shared with Paro how their lands and their technologies have changed over their lifetimes. Paro’s epic homecoming is presented as a 7-channel video installation. Collaborating with roboticists and public participants, this work aims to bring social awareness to the impact of global practices on the extreme cold landscapes of our shared Earth, before it is too late and even seals are no more. It does not vilify advanced technologies, but gently places as their ambassador a small robot who realises the irony of its casting as a harp seal and sets out in concern to research its own complicity in Arctic ill health. Paro’s goal is an interspecies harmonious existence.