SYDNEY .- Artspace announced the opening of its latest exhibition, Amongst the clouds (digital materialities in the 21st century) from Thursday 8 May to Sunday 20 July 2025.

Amongst the clouds (digital materialities in the 21st century) profiles Australian and international artists who explore the ways in which digital realms are determinedly tied to the physical world. As the distinction between the digital and the material world becomes increasingly blurred, how we think about art, society and technology is radically shifting and evolving. This exhibition features artists who are pioneering new ways that - art and technology - reshape our physical and digital worlds.

Amongst the clouds includes recent work and some work not seen before in Australia from featured artists: Liu Chuang (China), Nina Davies (Canada/UK), Archana Hande (India), Lawrence Lek (UK), Sophie Penkethman-Young (Australia), and Liam Young (USA).

Each artist will look closely at human and machine intelligence and creativity through a range of materials, platforms, and technologies including an immersive installation of Jacquard loom punch cards referencing Ada Lovelace; a film scripted and narrated by an AI Chatbot; a fictional TikTok dance trend; a participatory videogame featuring a cyborg therapist, a cinematic journey through cryptocurrency and bitcoin mining; and a kaleidoscopic video essay on human relationships with programmable beings from service robots to pedigree dogs.

Artspace’s Senior Curator, Katie Dyer, said: ‘The prevailing image of ‘the cloud’ and the digital conveys a weightless, ethereal and frictionless existence that disguises technology’s material origins. The artists in Amongst the clouds chart new imaginaries where the realm of the ‘cloud’ is in fact tangible and ever present. For these artists, the contemporary digital environment is, and has always been, profoundly material.”

Amongst the clouds emphasises Artspace’s longstanding commitment of supporting artists experimenting with new technologies, starting from its first year of programming in 1983 with the Open Video Festival and the international AUDIOEYES.

Amongst the clouds opened at Artspace on Thursday 8 May 2025 and runs until Sunday 20 July 2025. The Amongst the clouds program features talks, performances and workshops.

Liu Chuang (b. 1978, Tianmen) currently lives and works in Shanghai. Chuang works primarily with film, sculpture, readymade and installation to integrate long-term histories and ecological arcs for imagination, tracing the social, cultural and economic transformations of contemporary China. Weaving narratives that connect the micro and macro, past and present, fiction and reality, Chuang explores how vast and complex changes in nature, tradition, demographics, cutting-edge technology, and socio-economic systems affect individuals and their engagements with the world as a whole. Chuang has recently exhibited in to carry, Sharjah Biennial 16 (2025); Pulse of the Hinterland, 4th Xinjiang China International Art Biennial (2024); After Rain, Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale 2024 (2024); and has had work featured in art museums including: Centre Pompidou, Paris, FR (2024); Luma Westbau, Zurich, Switzerland (2024); Swiss Institute, New York, US (2024); Kunstverein in Hamburg (2024); Centre Pompidou × West Bund Museum Project, Shanghai, China (2024); M+ Museum, Hong Kong, China (2024); and Toyota Municiple Museum of Art, Aichi, Japan (2024; among others.

Nina Davies (b. 1991, Vancouver) is a Canadian-British artist based in London, UK. Through her work, Davies considers the present moment by observing dance in popular culture and how it is disseminated, circulated, made, and consumed. Previous research projects have included the recent commodification of the dancing body on digital platforms and rethinking dances of today as traditional dances of the future. Oscillating between the use of fiction and non-fiction, her work helps build new critical frameworks for engaging with dance practices. Davies has recently had numerous solo exhibitions including For An Imaginary Page, The Photographers Gallery, London (2024); Becoming The Edit, Seventeen Gallery, London (2024); Precursing, Matt’s Gallery, London (2023); and Bionic Step, Overmorrow House, Flatland Projects, Battle (2022). She’s exhibited extensively in group exhibitions, most notably Bloomberg New Contemporaries, Camden Arts Centre (2023), and GetxoPhoto, a duo presentation with Lu Yang, Getxo, Spain (2024). She graduated in 2022 from Goldsmiths University of London with a Master of Fine Art, where she was awarded the Almacantar Studio Award and the Goldsmiths Junior Fellowship position.

Archana Hande (b.1970, Bangalore, India) is a Bombay-based artist, curator, and organiser. Hande’s multidisciplinary practice reflects on the nuances of growing up in the shadow of colonialism in India and the reproduction of power through industrialisation. She contemplates how we understand oneself in a postcolonial schema. Desire and memory often converge as an interwoven pattern of shadow and lines. Challenging normative ideas, Hande’s work often explores a wide range of social themes, spanning from religious and sociological traditions of arranged marriages to the role of institutions and museums as sites of power. Hande has participated in numerous international and national group exhibitions, including most recently: Anka Banka, Bengal Biennale (2024-25); In Our Veins Flow Ink and Fire, Kochi-Muziris Biennale05 (2022–23); Thinking Historically in the Present, Sharjah Biennial 15 (2023); This Too, is a Map, 12th Seoul Mediacity Biennale, 2023; amongst many others since 2003.

Lawrence Lek 陆明龙 (b. Frankfurt, 1982) is a filmmaker, musician, and artist who lives and works in London, UK. He unifies diverse practices—architecture, gaming, video, music and fiction—into a continuously expanding cinematic universe. Over the last decade, Lek has incorporated vernacular media of his generation, such as video games and computer-generated animation, into site-specific installations and digital environments which he describes as ‘three-dimensional collages of found objects and situations.’ Often featuring interlocking narratives and the recurring figure of the wanderer, his work explores the myth of technological progress in an age of artificial intelligence and social change. In 2021, he was the recipient of both the 4th VH Award Grand Prix and the LACMA 2021 Art + Technology Lab Grant, and in July 2024 he was announced as the winner of the Frieze London 2024 Artist Award. Lek has recently featured work internationally in numerous exhibitions, biennales and film festivals including most recently: Ctrl + ↑ for Coyote Time, Trafó Gallery, Budapest (2024); Synthetic Imaginaries, Matadero Madrid (2024); NEXT LEVEL Festival, Dortmund (2024); Life After Life, HOW Art Museum, Shanghai (2024); Biennale de I’Image en Mouvement 24 (BIM’24): A Cosmic Movie Camera, Centre d’Art Contemporian, Genève (2024); Connectivity Construction, Asia Culture Centre, Gwangju (2024); The 24th Biennale of Sydney: Ten Thousand Suns, White Bay Power Station (2024); among others.

Sophie Penkethman-Young (b. 1991, Sydney, Australia) is an artist and digital producer living and working on unceded Gadigal Land. Through her practice she explores how ideas and experiences translate digitally, questioning how humanness could be described and how it could be uploaded to the cloud. Penkethman-Young has had solo exhibitions at Mais Wright, Sydney (2025); Verge Gallery, Sydney (2021); and Seventh Gallery, Melbourne (2019). In 2022, she created and performed a live streamed performance lecture called In Progress: The Wait of Expectation as part of Performance Space’s Liveworks Festival. In addition, she has held positions at the Sydney Opera House, Creative Australia, Carriageworks and Firstdraft. She was previously on the board of Runway Journal and has worked with or consulted for Sydney College of the Arts, Sydney Contemporary, Art Month Sydney, Ensemble Apex, and FBi Radio.

Liam Young (b.1979, Brisbane, Australia) lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Young is a designer, director and BAFTA nominated producer renowned for his visionary films and speculative worlds at the intersection of design, fiction, and futures. Embodying the role of a worldbuilder, he visualises the cities, spaces and props of our imaginary futures for the film and television industry, offering both extraordinary images of tomorrow and urgent examinations of the environmental questions facing us today. Young’s films have been premiered with platforms ranging from Channel 4, Apple+, SxSW, Tribeca, the New York Metropolitan Museum, The Royal Academy, La Biennale di Venezia, the BBC and the Guardian. His films have been collected internationally by museums such as MoMA New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Gallery of Victoria, and M+ Hong Kong. He has held guest professorships at Princeton University, MIT, and Cambridge and now runs the groundbreaking Masters in Fiction and Entertainment at SCI Arc in Los Angeles. He has published several books including most recently Machine Landscapes: Architectures of the Post Anthropocene and Planet City (2019).