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.
Cat Island talks to me
Olga Dyakina
Humans have become the salt of the Earth that leaves wounds and corrodes. The voids proliferate and lead to disappearance. Through an underwater tunnel, I reach Kanonersky Island and walk forward to a long spit flowing into the Gulf of Finland. I stop and hear the island breathing. I imagine the island talking to me in an unknown language. Through the trees and buildings, through the past of the land, washed by the water. It feels like I can pet it like a cat. Kissasaari, or Cat Island, is one of its former names. The sense of time here disintegrates into a silence in which one can reassemble oneself. Watching nature slip away makes me experience excruciating contrasts every time. I see trash everywhere; it grows into the ground and intertwines with the roots. Problems with cleaning up the island have long hung in the air. It makes the place look forgotten and abandoned. That spring morning I watched a flock of whooper swans on the island. The swans were making strange sounds, that blending into a single motif. And I was thinking what a miracle and a rarity it was. The beauty of life, despite human actions and inactions. Then I realized I want others to hear the voice of the island, too.
Humans have become the salt of the Earth that leaves wounds and corrodes. The voids proliferate and lead to disappearance. Through an underwater tunnel, I reach Kanonersky Island and walk forward to a long spit flowing into the Gulf of Finland. I stop and hear the island breathing. I imagine the island talking to me in an unknown language. Through the trees and buildings, through the past of the land, washed by the water. It feels like I can pet it like a cat. Kissasaari, or Cat Island, is one of its former names. The sense of time here disintegrates into a silence in which one can reassemble oneself. Watching nature slip away makes me experience excruciating contrasts every time. I see trash everywhere; it grows into the ground and intertwines with the roots. Problems with cleaning up the island have long hung in the air. It makes the place look forgotten and abandoned. That spring morning I watched a flock of whooper swans on the island. The swans were making strange sounds, that blending into a single motif. And I was thinking what a miracle and a rarity it was. The beauty of life, despite human actions and inactions. Then I realized I want others to hear the voice of the island, too.