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.
Dialogue(s) Before Sunset
shannonxiao@temporaryshow.com
Dialogue(s) Before Sunset is a three-screen video art capturing the sunset interplay of day and night, self and other, and the past and future narratives of the Taniwha. Taniwha are Māori water spirits and kaitiakitanga (spirit gardian) along Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington Harbour's water space. It honors the creature who guards the modern harbour—areas that were once swamps and streams—remembering its post-colonial presence. On my journey from streets of China to shorelines of Aotearoa/New Zealand, I busked with Chinese filmmaker Lu, until one day I heard a whisper from the waters underneath the city. We responded with sounds, embodying spiritual messages through birch bark pieces from northern China. Encountering Māori artist Tanya enriched the journey with her everyday captures of the Taniwha Ngake and Whātaitai, sunlight, clouds, and giant stingrays. Around the shoreline, stories were shared in gardens with Māori healer Paula, setting wishes with poetry and native plants around a bonfire during Māori New Year’s eve. In this digital space of art, multiple narratives, images, sounds, and places of encounters are presented, alongside my ongoing dialogues with other women, the land, and the water. Different energies coexist in the space, in dialogue with others. We believe that the Taniwha is present, and guiding us towards a future where the divine connections with land and water, inherent between cultures, can be seen, heard, felt, and remembered.
Dialogue(s) Before Sunset is a three-screen video art capturing the sunset interplay of day and night, self and other, and the past and future narratives of the Taniwha. Taniwha are Māori water spirits and kaitiakitanga (spirit gardian) along Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington Harbour's water space. It honors the creature who guards the modern harbour—areas that were once swamps and streams—remembering its post-colonial presence. On my journey from streets of China to shorelines of Aotearoa/New Zealand, I busked with Chinese filmmaker Lu, until one day I heard a whisper from the waters underneath the city. We responded with sounds, embodying spiritual messages through birch bark pieces from northern China. Encountering Māori artist Tanya enriched the journey with her everyday captures of the Taniwha Ngake and Whātaitai, sunlight, clouds, and giant stingrays. Around the shoreline, stories were shared in gardens with Māori healer Paula, setting wishes with poetry and native plants around a bonfire during Māori New Year’s eve. In this digital space of art, multiple narratives, images, sounds, and places of encounters are presented, alongside my ongoing dialogues with other women, the land, and the water. Different energies coexist in the space, in dialogue with others. We believe that the Taniwha is present, and guiding us towards a future where the divine connections with land and water, inherent between cultures, can be seen, heard, felt, and remembered.