Artwork with purple hue with person in foreground and shadow of person in background below large arabic script.

New artworks on display at Summit Photo

Friday 8 August 2025

This September, the Society is hosting a new, three-day event called Summit Photo, investigating how photography and photojournalism can address the environmental and humanitarian challenges of our time.

As part of Summit Photo, the Mechatronic Library, in association with Photoworks, will present From Below So Above, an immersive exhibition curated by Helen Starr, featuring new works by Sarah Al-Sarraj, Anna Bunting-Branch, Jack Ky Tan and Kinnari Saraiya.

The exhibition includes pieces created in response to our expansive Collections and will be exhibited alongside archival photographs by explorers such as Charles Kenneth Howard-Bury. Each artist channels one of the alchemical elements – earth, air, water, and fire – through their own speculative lens. The artists will bring new perspectives to our Collections, responding from non-traditional and non-Western angles.

Learn more about the exhibition, the artists and their works created specifically for Summit Photo – exhibiting from 26-28 September at the Society's building in London.

From Below So Above

Step into a near-futurist vision of the Royal Geographical Society, where techno-culture is no longer a tool of domination, but a means of understanding the more-than-human world.

Within its high-ceilinged Victorian architecture, the language of plants and weather has been deciphered by AI; ceramics hold visual memory; and futuristic artefacts arrive through ancestor simulations. At the centre of this speculative ecology is photography—not as documentation, but as an instrument of witnessing and worldbuilding.

The works in From Below So Above explore our entangled relationship with the natural world through mythology, ritual, and speculative ecology. Traversing the intersections of technology, spirituality, and postcolonial critique, the exhibition invites audiences to imagine alternate modes of presence, perception, and planetary care.

إن الأعلى من الأسفل والأسفل من الأعلى (Inna al-aʿlā min al-asfal wa-l-asfal min al-aʿlā)That which is above is from that which is below, and that which is below is from that which is above. (English translation of Arabic.)

Artworks

Isthmus Ancient River (2025) – by Sarah Al-Sarraj

This immersive film is made with AI technologies and is exhibited alongside hand painted 3D-printed objects. Viewers are invited to follow an Ancestor Simulation on a journey down the river of time, witnessing the remnants and ruins of their descendants.

Sarah Al-Sarraj (b. 1997, Leicester, UK) graduated with a BASc from UCL, majoring in anthropology and minoring in neuroscience. Her first solo exhibition Separated by Millennia (2024) opened at Two Queens Gallery commissioned by the Arab British Centre. Her work has been shown in group shows and events including at the Mosaic Rooms, Reference.Point, Richmix, Glasgow Women’s Library, Centrala Space, Leicester Gallery, Camden Arts Centre and Wysing Arts Centre.

Dose Makes The Poison (2025) – by Anna Bunting-Branch

Dose Makes the Poison is a HMTL web-based artwork that brings together text, painting, digital animation and sound. Inspired by the myth and mystery of silphium, an ancient plant conceived in the Western imagination as the 'first victim' of man-made extinction. In this feminist counternarrative, silphium offers a tainted lens through which to look again at plant-human relations in the Western tradition.

Dose Makes the Poison is presented as a futuristic installation of an archivist’s workstation. It will launch along with an artist book that makes the work accessible to audiences beyond the gallery.

Anna Bunting-Branch (b. 1987, Cambridge, UK) is a London-based artist and researcher working across painting, writing, animation and craft. Her practice explores feminist worldbuilding through speculative fiction, collective action and fan cultures.

Solo shows include Holding Space (God’s House Tower, 2024), Warm Worlds and Otherwise (QUAD, 2020; FACT, 2019 Wysing, 2018) and The Labours of Barren House (Jerwood Space, 2017). She has shown work at Arebyte, BALTIC, Barbican, Bergen Kunsthall, ICA, Somerset House and internationally. Her writing appears in Fandom as Methodology (MIT/Goldsmiths Press), MAP, and the forthcoming Thresholds of Irigaray (SUNY).

A CEREMONY FOR THE UNBORN FUTURE (2025) – by Jack Ky Tan

This installation invites audiences into a space of speculative ritual, resisting simple binaries of right/wrong or good/bad, and encouraging third possibilities. Jack Ky Tan asks: What if Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is not an alien rupture, but a contemporary emanation of these cosmic forces?

In response, the room will be transformed to become a listening space: attuned to past, present, and future; to human and more-than-human voices; to technologies as part of a living world - pushing audiences beyond European Enlightenment thought.

Jack Ky Tan is a UK based interdisciplinary artist working across performance, sculpture, installation and institutional critique. His work attempts to rethink our entanglement with the human and more-than-human worlds, and looks towards alternative ways of living and working.

Tan is the Guest Curator of Organisational Development at John Hansard Gallery, researcher-in-residence at Camden Art Centre, a decolonial methods consultant for the Centre for Equity and Inclusion (University of Sheffield), a special adviser for the Contemporary Visual Art Network London, a Fellow on Joseph Rowntree Foundation's inaugural Visionaries Programme, and a potter.

The View from Above (2025) – by Kinnari Saraiya

The View from Above is an immersive installation that interrogates how artificial intelligence and mapping technologies shape our understanding of territory, power, and perception. Suspended in the gallery is a sculptural kite, both screen and symbol, onto which an AI-generated world is projected in real time. Drawing on the history of colonial aerial surveillance, when kites lifted cameras skyward to map and control land, the work connects these early techniques of domination to today’s algorithmic infrastructures.

Artists photograph of dark mountains with overlay of person on a horse.

Kinnari Saraiya (b. 1998, Bombay, India) works fluidly across curation, art, dance, and writing. She holds a Visharad (degree) in Indian Folk Dance and a BA (Hons) in Fine Art from Arts University Bournemouth.

Residencies include Boundary Crosser Residency at CYENS in Cyprus (2023) and Hotel Generation by Arebyte (2023). Her works have been exhibited at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Frieze Art Fair, and The Bowes Museum, FORMAT Festival, VISUAL Carlow, the Kyiv Biennial. Upcoming solo exhibitions include Phoenix Art Space and inclusion in the Copenhagen Documentary Festival.

Biography: Curator and Founder of The Mechatronic Library

Helen Starr is an Afro-Indigenous Trinidadian world-building curator and founder of the interactive commissioning platform The Mechatronic Library (2010). Her immersive commissions have been exhibited nationally and internationally.

Starr has established an Indigenous Carib Cosmotechnic with a focus on feminism, gender fluidity, virtual realities and nature-godded worlds. Her central thesis is that the brain subjectively renders reality. She lives in London and is devoted to the writings of the Jamaican philosopher Sylvia Wynter.

To widen access, Dose Makes The Poison (2025) by Anna Bunting-Branch will be streamed online in September 2025 as part of the Mechatronic Library’s Home Delivery Offer.