Sofia Akram

Echo Chamber is a sanctuary. In 2055, as resources and materials became scarce, a meeting of world powers made the solemn decree that no more art was to be produced.

In 2125, Echo Chamber is the gathering place of a small resistance movement, a transient space for art to temporarily exist, a place where ideas reverberate, but can never leak into the outside world.

Echo Chamber is an exhibition-as-fiction, set in an art space of an alternate reality with different rules and possibilities. Using a strategy of collective authorship, four curators write the beginnings of a script that can only be completed through the responses of artists. To set the scene, a stage designer is invited to make this fiction a temporary reality. The questions and challenges that the space poses are played out through what takes place in the space, where artists are invited as characters and their contributions are documented as part of the continuous script.

Echo Chamber is a commission by acclaimed theatre designer Chloe Lamford. The project is a unique collaboration with Lamford, reframing relationships between contemporary art and theatre. The audience is invited into a dystopic future world, a theatrical set where a programme of artists’ interventions, performances and screenings unfold over the course of the exhibition. Artists include: The ARKA Group (UK), Louise Hervé & Chloé Maillet (FR), Chloe Lamford (UK), the editors of Living in the Future (UK), Silvia Maglioni & Graeme Thomson (FR), Bedwyr Williams (UK) and Mark Aerial Waller (UK).