Everything shifts. Everything is being shifted. Alongside larger geosocial and geopolitical migration of peoples and matter come daily shifts that remain unnoticed, yet often become agents of critical transformation, openness and new beginnings. By exploring these smaller movements of matter, form and meaning, Critical Shifts offers two techniques of following subtle alternations, impalpable variations, and illusive temporalities of constant change – extraction and displacement.

‘Critical Shifts’ showcases works of contemporary artists who embrace shifts – whether through material, metaphorical or invisible form – as a method of their diverse practices and consider extraction and displacement as internal to any knowledge production. Fish are being caught in Spanish waters; women move silently through a deserted landscape in Uzbekistan; a word from a nineteenth century poem is inserted into a Google Ad and becomes a commodity; a water fountain outside a mosque in Istanbul becomes a drinking point for pigeons. We are surrounded by the spontaneous and the unknown. We navigate if by shifts.