Forming Karikis’ latest work investigating climate change, its psychological impacts and the sonic memory of nature, Songs for the Storm to Come is a sound and video installation focusing on collective and individual responses to impending climatic transformations, while searching for ways to activate our trust in the possible, and to imagine hopeful shared futures. Engaging with the urgency of climate change, the work proposes listening and communal sound-making as strategies to cultivate empathy, foster climate care and prepare us for what is to come. While voicing an acoustics of resistance, the work declares that change is in our hands. 
 
Continuing his practice of collaboration with communities, Karikis worked with members of Manchester-based SHE cooperative choir for women and non-binary people, as well as with sound researchers from the School of Digital Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University. The film centres on listening and the collective production of sound as calls to action and as a power to bring us together in the face of change. Participants 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 sociopolitical changes required, and imagine possible alternatives, following the ‘deep listening’ workshop methods of queer composer Pauline Oliveros, guided by Karikis. The group also reflect on the book Ideas to Postpone the End of the World by indigenous leader and philosopher Ailton Krenak, as well as Timothy Morton’s All Art is Ecological, and read extracts from the text The Universal Right to Breathe by Cameroonian political thinker Achille Mbembe. 
 
Alongside the film, placards will display visualisations of London and the UK’s projected geographies modelled by the latest climate data; with a large-scale printed textile from Karikis’ series of thermal maps, recording annual record-breaking heatwaves since he began the project during the COVID-19 pandemic.
 
Karikis will collaborate with local young people on a range of activations, including workshops to create placards that will form part of the final installation. Materials displayed will include archival imagery of environmental protest and messages conceived by participants during the workshops. 

The artist will also work with the group on a newly devised choral performance exploring the climate emergency, scheduled for Friday 4 July. More information about the performance will be available soon.

On Thursday 3 July Karikis will be in conversation with curator Sofia Victorino at the Hellenic Centre where they will delve into the power of sound, breath, and deep listening as tools for collective action and social transformation. For more information click here

Mikhail Karikis is an award winning Greek-British artist living between London and Lisbon, working with moving image, sound, performance and other media, and exhibiting internationally. Through collaborations with individuals and/or communities located beyond the circles of contemporary art, and in recent years with children, refugees, support workers and people with disabilities, he develops socially embedded projects that prompt an activist imaginary and rouse the potential to invent hopeful and sustainable futures. His projects highlight alternative modes of action and solidarity, while nurturing critical attention, dignity and care.

Karikis is recipient of the Paul Hamlyn Award 2024, and was finalist for the Film London Derek Jarman Award 2016 and 2019, as well as the Anglo-Japanese DAIWA Art Prize 2015.

Solo exhibitions in 2025 include the comprehensive mid-career retrospective Voices, Communities, Ecologies, Kunstmuseum St Gallen, CH and Estamos Juntos Porque…, Centre for Modern Art Gulbenkian CAM, Lisbon PT; Songs for the Storm to Come, HOME Gallery, Manchester, UK and survey show Voices, Communities, Ecologies Cukrarna Centre for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana, SO (2024); a mid-career survey exhibition Because We Are Together, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens GR (2023); Ferocious Love, Tate Liverpool (2020); Children of Unquiet, Tate St Ives, 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) and elsewhere.

Group exhibitions include 54th Venice Biennale, (2011), IT; Manifesta 9, Ghenk, (2012); 19th Biennale of Sydney, (2014); Kochi-Muziris Biennale, IN, (2016); MediaCity 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.

In his most recent works for the stage, he created performances for 300 participants in his role as artistic director for UNESCO’s Creative Cities Network inaugural cultural event in Braga PT (2024) and for his project Sons de Uma Revoluçã for Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, PT (2024).

Karikis’s creative endeavours include music performances at Royal Opera House Covent Garden and Barbican Theatre, music albums in collaboration with Björk, DJ Spooky and his three solo albums – Orphica (2007), Morphica (2009), Xenofonia (2012) – on the Belgian record label Sub Rosa.