Planet for our Future: How do we adapt to a transforming world?

We are embarking on a new approach to exhibition programming, empowering art to address fundamental societal challenges.

Artworks from all over the world will be travelling to the Sainsbury Centre to pose these urgent, global questions to visitors and to help them to find the answers. This is part of a radically new approach that understands art as alive and capable of engaging people with the fundamental questions of life.

The first of these new ‘Big Question’ seasons kicks off in autumn 2023 with Planet for our Future. This asks one fundamental question that confronts us all: How do we adapt to a transforming world?

An interconnected programme of exhibitions, interventions, collection displays, an artist residency, museum-late, artist-led workshops, and special projects, taking place across the whole art landscape and out into neighbouring communities, will empower art to generate a living dialogue with visitors, inviting them to consider the global challenges of pollution, environmental destruction, and climate change.

The aim is to mobilise the Sainsbury Centre as a space of hope through the transformative power of art: a space where we can imagine better futures in which collective human behaviour mitigates the effects of climate change.

The Stuff of Life | The Life of Stuff
10 September 2023 – 14 January 2024

In this major international exhibition, visitors will meet artworks composed of salvaged materials, resynthesised fragments, and e-waste. They will encounter new environmental zones, where synthetic and organic matter interact, providing a fertile ground for the invention of mythical worlds, dystopias and speculative future narratives. The Stuff of Life | The Life of Stuff is curated by Vanessa Tothill, Curator at the Sainsbury Centre.

Sediment Spirit: Towards the Activation of Art in the Anthropocene
15 October 2023 – 14 April 2024

Curated by John Kenneth Paranada, the first Curator of Art and Climate Change at a UK museum, this exhibition brings together local and international artworks from the 1960’s to the present day which are responding to the climate crisis in all its complexities. Sediment Spirit acts to remind audiences that our home is not just the house, the building, town or country we reside in, but the Earth itself.

Claudia Martínez Garay: Artist Residency
September – October 2023

Claudia Martínez Garay (born 1983, Peru) will come to the Sainsbury Centre for an artist residency responding to the question ‘How do we adapt to a Transforming World?’ in dialogue with the Sainsbury Centre collection. Martínez Garay will make new work that reanimates the fragments of lost histories, underscoring the diverse connections of Peruvian Indigenous cultures with the natural world.

Planet for our Future catalogue

Planet For Our Future poses the urgent question: How do we adapt to a transforming world? Despite the enormity and planetary scale of this question, this book demonstrates the power of creativity and the potential for solutions through human ingenuity. Edited by John Kenneth Paranada and Vanessa Tothill and published by the Sainsbury Centre.

Future Programming

Future Seasons will ask:
• What is truth? (Spring 2024)
• Why do people take drugs? (Autumn 2024)
• How do we resuscitate a dying sea? (Spring 2025)
• Can humans stop killing each other? (Autumn 2025)
• What is the meaning of life? (Spring 2026)

Images from top:

Fabrice Monteiro, The Prophecy, Untitled No.9, 2015, Photograph. Courtesy MAGNIN-A Gallery, Paris.

We Are Having The Time of Our Lives, 2019, SUPERFLEX. Courtesy of von Bartha. Photo credit: Pinelopi Gerasimou. Courtesy of Onassis Stegi.

Claudia Martínez Garay’s work on display in the Sainsbury Centre’s Living Area.