Subject to Change: Nouf Aljowaysir, Morehshin Allahyari, Memo Akten, Brendan Dawes, Jake Elwes, Entangled Others, Primavera De Filippi, Auriea Harvey, Aziza Kadyri
What happens when artists slow down the rapid pace of artificial intelligence, dismantling its systems and rebuilding them with care?
Gazelli Art House presents Subject to Change, a major group exhibition bringing together nine internationally recognised artists who work critically with artificial intelligence in the form of algorithms, datasets, and machine learning. While acknowledging the impact of rapidly developing AI tools, the exhibition shifts the lens toward artists who are actively reshaping this landscape, foregrounding practices rooted in reflection and resistance.
Highlights include Nouf Aljowaysir’s 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 for the AI models of today; Morehshin Allahyari’s moving image and sound installation Moonfaced (2022), reviving erased traditions of gender fluidity in Persian portraiture; Memo Akten’s poetic and psychedelic film All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace (2021); and Brendan Dawes’ Altarpiece: Ascension (2025), a triptych exploring AI’s utopian and dystopian futures. Jake Elwes transforms corporate legal jargon into an absurdist score in new piece Terms & Conditions Opera (2025), while duo Entangled Others present fictitious aquatic
lifeforms encoded in synthetic DNA in their groundbreaking work, self-contained (2024). Primavera De Filippi extends her pioneering speculations on blockchain-based lifeforms through projects Plantoid 14 (2023) and Arborithms (2025), exploring authorship and agency in decentralised systems. Auriea Harvey’s Black Ship (2024) reclaims AI-generated imagery of enslavement as a vessel of resistance, and Aziza Kadyri’s AI Suzani Series: Self-exoticisation Archives (2023–ongoing) reimagines traditional Central Asian embroidery through algorithmic tools, addressing the complex question of self-exoticisation.
Marking the tenth anniversary of GAZELL.iO, the gallery’s pioneering platform dedicated to art and technology, Subject to Change opens a new chapter in its evolution. The exhibition invites visitors to slow down, to look closely, and to consider how artists resist the easy narratives of technological inevitability—reframing AI not as an endpoint, but as a field of possibility shaped by human intention, critique, and care.*
*The text was edited with the assistance of ChatGPT
