Subject to Change: Memo Akten, Nouf Aljowaysir, Morehshin Allahyari, Brendan Dawes, Jake Elwes, Entangled Others, Primavera De Filippi, Auriea Harvey, and Aziza Kadyri

Gazelli Art House presents Subject to Change, a major group exhibition bringing together nine internationally recognised artists who work critically with algorithms, datasets, and machine learning – processes often bundled together under the term artificial intelligence (AI). While acknowledging the significant societal impact of fast-developing AI tools, this exhibition focuses on artists who critically engage with their biases, limitations, and possibilities, and in doing so actively shape this new landscape.

Together, their artworks offer a nuanced counterpoint to prevailing narratives around AI, challenging the assumption that such technology is defined solely by speed, efficiency, and automation. Instead, these artists slow the process, building bespoke systems, deconstructing existing models, and working with a meticulous attention to materiality. The results encompass sculpture, print, video – and even encoded DNA – and are the outcome of labour-intensive, conceptually rigorous practices that expand our understanding of what it means to create in a new age of AI.

Three distinctive approaches can be seen across the exhibition. A number of artists address the legacy of colonialism and the biases contained within today’s online space and AI models. Nouf Aljowaysir presents a new body of work in her Ancestral Seeds series (2025), where fragments of colonial-era photographic archives are selected and partially erased to highlight their ongoing legacy in the AI models of today. Morehshin Allahyari’s moving image and sound installation Moon-faced (2022), revives erased traditions of gender fluidity in Persian portraiture. Auriea Harvey’s sculptural and augmented reality project Black Ship (2024) reclaims AI-generated imagery of enslavement as a vessel of resistance. Aziza Kadyri’s Self-Exoticisation Archives (2024) reimagines traditional Central Asian embroidery through algorithmic tools, addressing the complex question of contemporary female identity.

A second line of enquiry explores the parallels between data and the natural world. Entangled Others, the duo comprising Feileacan Kirkbride McCormick and Sofia Crespo, examines the metaphor of coding, mutation, and AI as an organic structure in which new forms evolve. Their groundbreaking self-contained project (2023—2024) features fictitious aquatic lifeforms encoded in synthetic DNA. Primavera De Filippi extends her pioneering speculations on blockchain-based lifeforms through projects Plantoid (2015—ongoing) and Arborithms (2025), exploring authorship and agency in decentralised systems. In her new work, The Artist is Present (2025), an AI version of Primavera’s own voice, heard through a vintage telephone, explains her projects to visitors. 

A third strand of the show finds artists satirising aspects of the Big Tech version of AI associated with speed and efficiency, while also asking viewers to reflect on their own interactions with technology. Memo Akten’s All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace (2021) is a poetic and psychedelic film, made using his own bespoke text-to-image models before such tools were commercially available. Brendan Dawes’ Altarpiece: Ascension (2025) is a printed triptych with accompanying ERC-721 token, exploring AI’s utopian and dystopian futures, and in a musical finale, Jake Elwes transforms corporate legal jargon into an absurdist multi-genre score in new video Terms & Conditions Opera (2024—2025).

Many of the works on display are phygital, pairing digital artwork with physical components and authenticated through Verisart’s patented blockchain certification technology. 

Subject to Change invites visitors to slow down, to look closely, and to consider the ways in which narratives of technological inevitability can be questioned. In doing so, it repositions AI not as an endpoint, but as a field of possibility shaped by human intention, critique, and care.