The 2025 Artangel Open invited artists based anywhere in the world to submit ambitious ideas. We received over 1,000 submissions from 80 countries, conveying the breadth of what artists are thinking about across the world.
The panel for the 2025 Open included artist Zineb Sedira; musician, producer and composer Nitin Sawhney CBE; Artistic Director and co-Chief Executive of Dance Umbrella Freddie Opoku-Addaie; previously-commissioned Artangel Open artist Andrea Luka Zimmerman; and director of Artangel Mariam Zulfiqar. Read more about each of the panelists at the bottom of this page.
Longlisted Ideas: 2025 Open
The following are summaries of the longlisted ideas, arranged in alphabetical order by the artist’s last name. Shortlisted artists who received a bursary of £2000 are included below.
We will be announcing the resulting commission later this year. Stay tuned by subscribing to our newsletter or following us on Instagram, Threads, LinkedIn, or Bluesky.
All ideas remain the intellectual property of the respective applicants.
Aliaskar Abarkas (shortlisted)
A broadcast sound work examining Ayat al-Kursi as a site of early sonic formation. Through layered recitations by children, elders, and the artist, it explores tajwīd and maqām as systems of vocal transmission. The project considers how sacred sound encodes memory, structures attention, and shapes the experience of belief.
Whitechapel Gallery and Counterpoints Arts are commissioning this work independently, with the first outcome of the project to be shared as part of the Backyard Biennial in July 2026.
Instagram: @aliaskar______abarkas
Website: aliaskarabarkas.com
Thomas Abercromby
Arctic Abolition is an immersive installation exploring justice, mental health, and community resilience in extreme environments. Using sound, olfaction, and sculptural elements, the project reimagines the 2018 Maxim Popov incident in Svalbard through an abolitionist lens, engaging local communities to reframe our preception of care and crime.
Instagram: @thomasabercromby
Action Hero (Gemma Paintin & James Stenhouse)
Satellite of Love: Love songs are sung acapella and recorded, one song for every language spoken on the planet. These 7000 songs are sent into space on a satellite. As the satellite orbits the earth, the love songs broadcast back down to the world below. As it passes overhead, listeners tune in via radio to listen. The orbit lasts 1 year.
Website: actionhero.org.uk
Instagram: @ActionHeroLive
Substack: actionherolive.substack.com
Valerie Asiimwe Amani (shortlisted)
A multimedia performance that re-writes/imagines Beckett’s Waiting for Godot through Black womanhood. Blending prose with humour and absurdity, the work follows two interdependent figures in a coastal, post-apocalyptic landscape, waiting for an unnamed arrival. Waiting unfolds as a condition shaped by systemic cycles; reflected through a relationship that quietly traces the fragile and cyclical nature of power, survival, and complicity.
Website: valerieamani.com
Instagram: @ardonaxela
Holly Antrum
Hill Swift Swiftly looks skyward to situate a decolonial-ecological dialogue within a moving image installation. It holds a transcontinental collaboration with endangered migratory swifts over Ghana, Gibraltar and UK, and participating youth groups in each country. Proposed for the disused Chapels of Rest overlooking Stroud in Gloucestershire, England, it exists from PM to sundown daily, May to August. Lasting until the swifts are called south again, their nearby feeding swarms are a live score against fragile, tertiary colour sequences shaped by sustainable processing. Local plant-based chemistries and historical plant dyes connected with each of the locations flood the grain of the images.
Website: hollyantrum.com
Ewan Atkinson (shortlisted)
Atkinson’s goal is to open and operate the offices of The Neighbourhood Audio Visual Research Unit. The unit will house the objects and ephemera from The Neighbourhood that Atkinson has collected, a TV studio where the educational series Stories from the Neighbourhood will be produced, a research library, and other obtuse facilities.
Website: theneighbourhoodproject.com
Instagram: @ewanvision
Alex Baker
People will get to see All the Universe at Once. Satellites will capture live images covering both celestial hemispheres, 24 hours a day, creating a truly global view. A complete 360 degree Earth-perspective view in all directions. Looking outward at everything all around us, experiencing the giddying sense of how we are floating through space.
Website: alexbaker.co.uk
Instagram: @a_l_e_x__b_a_k_e_r
Dickie Beau
This project reimagines queerness as a ‘return’, rather than being framed as existing *in opposition to* a perceived ‘norm’. Pilgrimage, ancestral memory, and ritual interweave via film, sound, sculpture, and movement, mapping a philosophical reorientation of queerness onto a constellation of sites - portals to hidden histories and future ways of being.
Instagram: @dickiebeau
X: @dickiebeau
Threads: @dickiebeau
Jay Jay Revlon (shortlisted)
Bloom: Rising in Authenticity is a visual narrative that captures the growth, self-discovery, and resilience within the Ballroom community. The project explores the deeply personal and collective journeys of individuals who navigate societal challenges to embrace their authentic selves. Through immersive storytelling and striking visuals.
Website: justjayjay.com
Instagram: @jayjayrevlon
Facebook: JayJayRevlon
Ellen Carey
© The title is Women in Colour: Anna Atkins, Colour Photography and Those Struck by Light. My research on the origins and history of colour photography noticed an absence, prompting a question: “Where would colour photography and women practitioners be without the work of Anna Atkins?"
Website: ellencareyphotography.com
Phil Collins
Dub I reimagines Samuel Beckett’s 1972 play Not I as a starting point for a reflection on queer experience in the Caribbean. Developed with collaborators in Jamaica and the diaspora, the unexpected conversation between queer politics, dub music and modernist drama brings forth the emancipatory potential of language and sound. Dub I builds on Collins' ongoing work with communities in the region to create a vibrant clapback to British colonialism and a celebration of resilient queer life.
Nick Crowe & Ian Rawlinson
We want to create a pop-up cinema built from handmade briquettes that are fabricated from straw and waste paper. These will be produced in a workshop housed in a retail park unit in the East of England. The cinema will show a film that has been shot in the nearest town to where the retail park is located. The film's title will be Grief.
Website: croweandrawlinson.net
Casper Dillen
A durational performance staged in theatres, stadiums, and public squares across the UK, where audiences and performers enact an uninterrupted standing ovation for days, weeks, or even months.
Website: casperdillen.com
Samuel Domínguez
Atacama Garden (unplugged) is a live music performance using Andean woodwind instruments and electronic music composed with astronomical data from the Orion constellation (ALMA Observatory). This new iteration expands the ensemble and seeks a site resonant with themes of territory, land, and weather, deepening its connection between sound, space, and cosmology.
Website: samueldominguez.net
Instagram: @samueldominguez
Susan Eyre
Cosmic rays impact technology and life on Earth but their origin and source of enormous energy is still a mystery. I seek to activate the historically remarkable yet humble Haverah Park detector huts abandoned in various states of collapse across the North Yorkshire moors, through workshops, performance, dark sky gazing, creating artworks that interact directly with cosmic rays and installations that respect local land use, to reflect on pioneering cosmology, human curiosity, and wonder.
Website: susaneyre.com
Instagram: @eyresusan
Karolina Halatek
Spectra is an immersive installation that transposes a natural phenomenon of the Brocken Spectre into an urban environment.
Website: karolinahalatek.com
Instagram: @karolinahalatek
Camilla Hanney
I hope to use this opportunity to immerse a full lace wedding dress in porcelain slip and then have it fired at Gladstone Pottery in Stoke-on-Trent. The fibres in the wedding dress will cremate upon entering the kiln however the porcelain will solidify into a perfect impression of the wedding dress and create a large ceramic sculpture.
Website: camillahanney.com
Instagram: @camilla.hanney
Wezile Harmans
How do we locate conversations? - With this idea I am interested in locating spaces of urgency, a compelling exploration of how informal mobile spaces - like public transport - serve as a site of both crisis and connection to further the conversation, using collected records I want to suggest possible impact on long-term societal change.
Website: wezileharmans.art
Joseph Ijoyemi
An experimental film exploring the African diaspora’s search for belonging in new places. Set in Sweden’s forests, it follows Black community through music, sports, and fashion. It captures joy and resilience. A linked live sound performance weaves in archival conversations, highlighting cultural memory, Afrofuturism, and the power of creativity.
Website: josephijoyemi.com
Instagram: @mrjosephyemiart
Aziza Kadyri
A community-led, interdisciplinary oral history and performance project taking place in the Aralkum, the world’s youngest desert, bringing together Uzbekistani ecological artists and Karakalpak activists: a living memorial to ecological loss, cultural resilience, and collective memory, documented through a film and a transferable methodology.
Website: azizakadyri.com
Instagram: @aziza.kadyri
Lidija Kononenko
I propose creating a sculptural installation using reconfigured DLP projector systems. These projectors use spinning RGB disks, which filter white light through colour segments. I plan on creating multi-channel projections where disk speeds respond to environmental factors outside of a gallery space, like solar energy, temperature, or air quality.
Website: lidijakononenko.com
Joshua Leon & Daniela Ruiz Moreno
Liquidity is an exhibition project and coinciding education programme developed by artist and writer Joshua Leon (United Kingdom/Austria) and curator Daniela Ruiz Moreno (Argentina), which recognises the Olive trees of the Umbrian landscape as the guardians of an imaginary archive/institution. The works in this exhibition will articulate a specific encounter with this archive/institution by understanding the Assisi - Spoleto Olive Belt as an institution itself alongside the Musei, Spoleto, and will deal with the imaginary of this institution and its subconscious.
Website: joshuajleon.com
Email, Joshua: studiojoshualeon@gmail.com
Email, Daniela: dpruizmoreno@gmail.com
Mriganka Madhukaillya
Slow Universe: Three films dramatising Nilmani Phookan’s poem Dancing Earth about the industrialisation of the Assamese landscape. The synchronisation of the senses through cinema in the industrial age manifests as depleted aesthetic experience: it is displaced through sublime cinema. Making space for an aesthetic experience outside of singularity.
Website: mrigankamadhukaillya.in/
Instagram: @mriganka_madhukaillya
Enzo Medeiros
A clock's minute hand performed by a line of people, whereby the innermost person is essentially still on the spot and as the radius of the circle increases people have to walk, walk faster, run and sprint to make the full circle within 60 seconds. It is a minute hand that can be imposed on any space and navigate varied terrain, a maintenance of form.
Instagram: @5bucksvenmo
Sabine Mirlesse
Meridian Hymn: A procession of international musicians, singers, and instrumentalists walk between Little Diomede and Big Diomede, two islands only a few kilometers apart. The musical crescendo occurs at the International Date Line location in the Bering Strait, where the ice freezes so thick that one can safely travel across it on foot.
The work references our human history of measurement, of deciding where today becomes the start of tomorrow. Disseminated by way of a live radio transmission and subsequent film, the event inhabits a larger dialogue about how we assign meaning to environment, land, and sea.
Website: sabinemirlesse.com
Instagram: @sabine_mirlesse
Les Portes de Givre
David Musgrave
COMMCEN Fort Southwick, an abandoned, part-subterranean NATO communications centre in Portsmouth, will host a residency for The Signals, an imaginary post-apocalyptic band with a changing international line-up of sound artists and musicians.
Instagram: @dvdmsgrv
Momar Ndiaye
This project materialises the last chapter of a two phased project on SAPE, a subculture that emerged in the Congo area more than a hundred years ago. The first phase consisted of the release of a documentary film that addresses the transgressive aspect of the subculture politically and socioculturally. For the second phase, I will choreograph a performance that will feature the performative aspect of the subculture. I will work with nine artists to craft a multidisciplinary piece adaptable to proscenium, and arts gallery.
Alison Neighbour
Playing Up The Sun traces the rising sun across the UK through heralding the sun with music in a rolling series of locations from east to west. It is a live experience and a film that invites deeper reconnection of ourselves as humans to the natural rhythms of the earth that holds us, and elevates this every day occurrence to ceremonial status.
Website: alisonneighbourdesign.com
Instagram: @alisonneighbourart
Philip Newcombe
Some Time Waiting (place for an eventual bird) is an intervention and public sculpture in an urban space; an 8.5cm x 5mm Ø perch installed perpendicular to an exterior wall behind a diner or gas station, between an airport and a landmark. Slightly out of reach. Strong enough to take the weight of a small bird. A bird that might never alight.
Website: philipnewcombe.com
Instagram: @philip_newcombe
Kira O'Reilly
The Monument is a Telescope proposes to restore Robert Hooke’s well-known memorial to the Great Fire of London to its original purpose of a zenith telescope. The project will create and realise artistic strategies by which this historical, architectural scientific apparatus might be reconceived and reimaged as such.
Website: kiraoreilly.com
Instagram: @untitledbodies
Cat Phillips
Brings It Home: A collaboration with the Ministry of Defence and the Royal Air Force to bomb a location in the United Kingdom. The democratic process played out in the streets across the world said NO to war but the governments took soldiers to war with little to no public support. The Artangel Open offers me an opportunity to exercise my democratic right, to put forward a proposal which, I believe, has the power to create a pause for thought in the latest, greatest build up to world war.
Website: kennardphillipps.org
Instagram: @catphillipps, @kennardphillipps
Anusha Thulung Rai
This project explores the acoustic memory of the Nepalese diaspora in the UK, particularly the Gurkha community. It examines how sound lingers in spaces after its source has gone, shaping collective memory and identity. Through multi-channel sound and video, it investigates how listening cultures influence remembrance and belonging in migration.
Website: kontekstcollective.com/anushathulungrai
Instagram: @anusharaini
Leo Robinson
A Time of Stone is a study of ancestry, belonging and mythmaking, realised as an ambitious, multi-screen, responsive moving-image installation presented simultaneously in the Lesser Antilles, Nigeria, and the UK; transcending the boundaries of the imagined and real worlds contained within it, and awakening threads in present time and space.
Website: leorobinson.info
Instagram: @llleorob
Roberto Santaguida
A network of sculptural listening stations across Canada will allow visitors to transmit their voices into deep space and receive signals in return. Installed in remote locations such as decommissioned radar stations and prairie silos, these structures will turn personal confessions, questions, and reflections into radio waves.
Website: mediatheque.labandevideo.com
Jennie Savage
The Urban Orchard proposes an artwork that is a functioning orchard covering three miles of urban area and situated across private gardens, open space, and council owned parks and green areas. The trees would be maintained and harvested to give back to the local community whilst establishing new traditions and forms of celebration for new ecologies.
Website: jenniesavage.co.uk
Katie Schwab
Working with weavers, knitters and furniture makers from Scottish mainland and island communities, I will co-design a dormitory in a Scottish youth hostel which will be open for visitors to stay in. The dormitory will include functional furniture, textiles & bedding which draw on Scotland’s heritage craft traditions & the original interior designs of the Scottish Youth Hostels Association (SYHA).
Website: katieschwab.com
Grace Schwindt
Little Birds and a Demon is an “opera for the camera” to be filmed at a lighthouse in Shetland Island. It will use the oil industry as an example to explore how capitalism alters everyday lives and bodies through the perspective of birds and a birder, who has monitored the seabird population for oil contamination in Shetland since the 1970s.
Website: graceschwindt.net
Instagram: @grace.schwindt
Malena Szlam (shortlisted)
Exploring volcanic environments in Aotearoa's Taupō Volcanic Zone (New Zealand) through 16mm film, field recordings, and “walkscapes” to interpret visible and hidden geology. Collaborating with marine scientists, I’ll use sound mapping to investigate underwater volcanoes. The result will be an immersive film and sound installation reflecting volcanic time.
Website: malenaszlam.com
Sur Gallery
Swapnaa Tamhane
A drawing as an operatic environment, through a composition played on looms by weavers, block printers, and musicians, to consider mark-making as a collective experience. This performance would become an installation as sound would echo through swathes of yardage hanging and draping, some adorned with mirrors, in an environment that replicates a block printer's workshop. The performance considers the idea of Kabir - the 14th Century poet-weaver-mystic - as an unarchivable myth, and a chorus of authors.
Website: tamhane.net
Instagram: @swapnaa_tamhane
John Vella
Iamsorryforyourloss
- get a racehorse
- name it Iamsorryforyourloss*
- race the horse
- record the race
Iamsorryforyourloss brings compassion to competition.
* Iamsorry4yourloss may replace Iamsorryforyourloss to comply with international horse-naming character-count rules
Website: john-vella.com
Yibo Wan
A large mirror floats on the Thames—vanishing into sky and water on clear days, becoming a rupture on turbulent ones. Reflecting everything yet connecting to nothing, it quietly observes. This large-scale installation explores disappearance, emotional rupture, and the longing to connect. It confronts the city with its own silence and fragility.
Instagram: @yibo.wn
Andy Welland
Ascending Together: A large-scale participatory art installation and performance centred around a giant hot air balloon. The balloon will serve as both a functional aircraft and a canvas for artistic expression, symbolising unity, connection, and the shared human experience.
Website: andywelland.com
Instagram: @andywelland
Tony White
Discovering Britain’s disused outdoor pulpits and bringing them back to life (with local partners and a national campaign) for a country-wide programme of local outdoor spoken-word events, developing writers networks, local history and opportunities via an overlooked outdoor performance infrastructure that is hiding in plain sight.
Website: pieceofpaperpress.com
Instagram: @pieceofpaperpress
Nathan Witt
Climate Controlled Chamber: A curated program of air, presenting different environmental atmospheres to test both artworks and audiences. Proposal for an approx 10 sq metre programmable negative pressure chamber, whereby specific environments (humidity, aridity, gelid, moisture, high pressure, vacuums) are presented to the public for set periods.
CERN Arts Geneva, 2019-25
Jerusalem Quarterly, Special Issue: Tawfiq Canaan
Commission for Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, Ramallah, 2023
Jacob Israel de Haan: A Queer and Lapsed Zionist in Mandate Palestine
Thomas Wray
Pilgrimage is a global sound installation that connects every Roman Catholic cathedral in the world through a live audio transmission into a single space. Using discreet listening devices placed in each cathedral, the work streams real-time ambient sounds—prayers, footsteps, hymns, and silence—into an immersive listening environment.
Instagram: thomaswrayartist
The Panel
The 2025 Artangel Open panel consisted of five members across various artistic disciplines and areas of expertise. Read more about them below.
Freddie Opoku-Addaie is the Artistic Director and co-Chief Executive of Dance Umbrella (DU), London’s International Dance Festival. Prior to this role, he served as DU Guest Programmer, curating Out of the System (2016–2019), a platform showcasing innovative, established and emerging talent from the UK and beyond.
With over 20 years of experience as an independent artist, Freddie has performed and toured internationally, presenting his own work and collaborating with renowned artists and companies. Born and raised in East London’s vibrant multicultural community, rooted and partly raised in Ghana, he draws on these influences to shape his artistic practice. His work spans projects of varying scales and contexts, fuelling his commitment to cultural equity and representation in the creative sector. This commitment is exemplified by SystemsLAB (founded in 2016), a platform addressing the discourse of lived experience in 21st-century arts and culture.
Freddie is a patron of StoneCrabs Theatre, a member of the Board of Advisors for Jorge Crecis’s Fullness, and a sought-after speaker on global panels. He also leads international lectures and choreographic workshops, sharing his expertise and passion as a multidisciplinary artist with the next generation of makers and thinkers.
Nitin Sawhney is a British musician, producer and composer who is a recipient of over 20 international awards, a CBE, an Ivor Novello Lifetime Achievement Award, several independent honorary doctorates from various UK universities along with two fellowships and works as an ambassador for and is on the board of multiple charities.
Often appearing as Artist in Residence, Curator or Musical Director at international festivals, Sawhney is devoted to musical education, having acted as patron of the British Government’s Access-to-music programme and the East London Film Festival.
Nitin Sawhney has received over 20 major national and international awards for his work and is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences (Oscars), BAFTA and The Recording Academy (Grammys).
He has made over 20 studio albums, 12 under his own name, his most recent being Identity (2023). He has worked with artists including Paul McCartney, Sting and has recorded as a member of Pink Floyd in his genre-defying career.
Zineb Sedira was born in Paris to Algerian parents. Her work addresses migration, storytelling, and the bias of official histories. In the mid-1980’s, she relocated to London where she studied art at Central Saint Martins, Slade School of Art, and the Royal College of Art.
Working across the mediums of photography, film, installation, performance and more recently, object making–Sedira is most known for her explorations of the human effects of geography. Preserving and transmitting memories of the past to leave a legacy for the future has often been at the core of Sedira’s work. In her earlier works, her story and that of her family quickly became fertile ground for artistic experimentation. Since then, Sedira has turned to various kinds of archives, interrogating the historical narratives that they hold.
As well as her work being held in multiple UK collections including but not limited to: Tate Gallery, Arts Council England, Gallery of Modern Art Glasgow, and The Victoria and Albert Museum–she is the founder of aria (artist residency in Algiers), a residency program which supports the development of contemporary art in Algeria through international cross-cultural exchange.
Zineb Sedira represented France’s national pavilion for the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022.
Andrea Luka Zimmerman (they / them) was selected alongside Adrian Jackson by Artangel and BBC Radio 4 as part of the 2014 Open Call for proposals. Artangel produced Here for Life (2019) which premiered at Locarno Film Festival, Switzerland.
As an award-winning artist, filmmaker and cultural activist, Zimmerman’s multi-layered practice is concerned with marginalisation, social justice and structural violence and fragile refusals and counter memories, itinerant lives, human and otherwise, in relation to structural and political injustice.
Andrea’s films are held in the Arts Council England Collection, Archives and libraries. Andrea is the co-founder of the cultural collectives Fugitive Images and Vision Machine (collaborators on Academy Award® nominated feature documentary The Look of Silence). Andrea is a Reader at Central St Martins, University of the Arts London.
Mariam Zulfiqar is the Director of Artangel. Prior to joining the team in January 2022, Mariam led the National Art Programme at Forestry England where she implemented a new strategic direction, developing partnership projects at the intersection of art, design, architecture, environment, and ecology.
As Deputy Director and Chief Curator at UP Projects, Mariam curated new commissions and oversaw Constellations – an artist development programme for artists working in the public domain, and This is Public Space – a programme of digital commissions that explore the internet as a site for art.
Mariam’s primary area of focus is art in the public domain and as an independent curator, she has commissioned projects for Film and Video Umbrella and Art on the Underground. In 2021, Mariam curated Bring into Being – the inaugural programme of events, activities and contemporary art at Chiswick House. The programme marked a new chapter by inviting contemporary voices in the arts and sciences to respond to the historic 18th Century site.
Mariam regularly consults for various international public art programmes and has guest lectured at academic institutions in the UK and internationally. In 2013 she was the recipient of the Queen Elizabeth Diamond Jubilee Scholarship Fund. Mariam holds a BA in Design and Public Art from Chelsea College of Art and an MA in Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art.
