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.
Creating a Floating Island
Athina Kanela
Athina Kanela Creating a floating island performance (public intervention/ installation), 2020 The human entity constantly creates new objects and structures for use, dedicated to replacing the older things, set obsolete. Earth functions as a huge landfill, based on capitalism and the modern consumerism. Could the already existing structures and objects be occupied through a function or series of poetic acts, aiming to reclaim a new aesthetic? In the project Creating a floating island, Kanellopoulou is performing a utopian intervention to a boat-wreck, left on the coast of Athenian Riviera; Βy importing soil and seeds to the deck and creating planting areas, Kanellopoulou creates a utopian coastal microclimate, seeking to reuse the floating wreck and relocate it from its primary and temporary situation; the artificial nature of such a boat is being changed and regenerated, turned into a vivid environmental floating structure, which will host entities of Plantae and Animalia. The new hosted species are going to be added over-water, in the body of the wreck, to its already existing ecosystem, that was created underwater during the period of its abandonment. Nature rules over the human creations, reclaiming an earthly reality for the specific space, after this poetic generative process.
Athina Kanela Creating a floating island performance (public intervention/ installation), 2020 The human entity constantly creates new objects and structures for use, dedicated to replacing the older things, set obsolete. Earth functions as a huge landfill, based on capitalism and the modern consumerism. Could the already existing structures and objects be occupied through a function or series of poetic acts, aiming to reclaim a new aesthetic? In the project Creating a floating island, Kanellopoulou is performing a utopian intervention to a boat-wreck, left on the coast of Athenian Riviera; Βy importing soil and seeds to the deck and creating planting areas, Kanellopoulou creates a utopian coastal microclimate, seeking to reuse the floating wreck and relocate it from its primary and temporary situation; the artificial nature of such a boat is being changed and regenerated, turned into a vivid environmental floating structure, which will host entities of Plantae and Animalia. The new hosted species are going to be added over-water, in the body of the wreck, to its already existing ecosystem, that was created underwater during the period of its abandonment. Nature rules over the human creations, reclaiming an earthly reality for the specific space, after this poetic generative process.