Songs for the Storm to Come

Songs for the Storm to Come is an immersive sound and multi-screen video installation, by award winning, internationally renowned Greek/British artist, Mikhail Karikis. It focuses on collective and individual responses to the impending transformations of the UK, as forecast by climate change scientists. Powerfully evocative, the work searches for ways to activate hopeful shared futures.

Continuing his practice of collaboration with communities, Karikis worked with members of Manchester based SHE cooperative choir for women and non-binary people, and with sound researchers from the School of Digital Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University. In Songs for the Storm to Come, the choir members observe maps sourced from climate modelling data, showing Britain’s transformed geography for 2050 as a result of rising sea levels. They reflect on the radical social and political changes required, and call for the power to bring us together to form communities in the face of these changes.

Karikis exhibits internationally. In his most recent work for the stage, ‘Universe of Solutions’, he was artistic director for UNESCO’s Creative Cities Network inaugural cultural event for which he collaborated with 150 young people. Solo presentations include Sounds of a Revolution, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, PT (2024); Voices, Communities, Ecologies, Cukrarna Centre for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana, SO (2024); Because We Are Together (2023), National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens GR; Ferocious Love, Tate Liverpool (2020); For Many Voices, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (MIMA), UK (2019-20); Children of Unquiet, TATE St Ives, UK (2019-20); I Hear You, De la Warr Pavilion, UK (2019-20); Mikhail Karikis, MORI Art Museum, Tokyo, JP (2019); No Ordinary Protest, Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (2018); Ain’t Got No Fear, Turku Art Museum, FI (2018); The Chalk Factory, Aarhus 2017 European Capital of Culture, DK (2017) and Love Is the Institution of Revolution, Casino Luxembourg Forum d’art Contemporain, LU (2017).

Group exhibitions include 54th Venice Biennale, (2011), IT; Manifesta 9, Ghenk, (2012); 19th Biennale of Sydney, (2014); Kochi-Muziris Biennale, IN, (2016); Media City Seoul, KR (2015); British Art Show 8 (2016-7); 2nd Riga International Biennale of Contemporary Art, LV (2020), 2nd Saitama Triennale (2024), JP and others.

Karikis’s creative endeavours include music performances at Royal Opera House Covent Garden and Barbican Theatre, and musical collaborations with Björk, DJ Spooky and the Belgian record label Sub Rosa.