The Word For World Is? opens a portal to our shared futures. Working across sculpture, painting and installation, four London-based artists interweave myths and folklore to explore universal themes such as human nature, evolutionary history and utopian desire.

The exhibition takes its title from 'The Word For World Is Forest’ (1971), a speculative fiction written by American author and political activist Ursula Le Guin in the aftermath of the American War in Vietnam. The Hugo Award-winning novella tells the harrowing tale of native inhabitants Athsheans defending their forested planet against the militant human occupiers. The story reflects on colonialism and condemns a regime of resource extraction, forcing a once-peaceful indigenous community to adopt violence as a means of resistance. 

One of the things people often associate with the future world is technological innovation as a creative or democratising force. In contrast, current economies have been increasingly restructured around conflict and defence, redirecting resources that might otherwise have gone to education, preservation, healthcare, and other sectors. The embodying narratives of technological advancements have centred around heroic conquers and survivals against tragedy. In the visionary essay ‘The Carrier Bag of Theory of Fiction’ (1986), Le Guin redefines human origins from “Man conquers earth, space, aliens, death, the future and apocalypse” to  “using technology and science as a cultural carrier bag rather than a weapon of domination”. This revisionist view of history offers new relations to engage with knowledge production and paves the way for a generation of influential thinkers such as Marylin Strathern, Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing. 

How can we resist domination and cope with the intensification of social and ecological crises? Artists in the exhibition create new forms of human-nonhuman-environment interactions, from how we live and connect to how we relate to other entities like animals and machines. Drawing on cultural anthropology, botany, and the laws of physics, Xiu Ching Tsay explores transformations in multispecies ecological networks and the evolution of human communication technology, using what the artists describe as ‘automatic self-making images drawn via the diverse flows of the ecosystem.’ Through a microscopic lens, Rosalind Howdle traces contradiction and tension by mimicking processes of life origins in the natural world. Emerged between botanical and animal forms, Howdle’s bioluminescent patterns reconfigure different stages of biological evolution: origins, reproduction, and self-repair. 

Alya Hatta’s strange, familiar, and playful forms of fantastical figures are deeply personal. Her autobiographical works forage the expressiveness of everyday materials. Secondhand clothes, bike chains, and pearls sourced from local communities in Malaysia and London's East Street Market are intricately remixed and assembled to capture the diasporic human conditions. Alluding to ideas, systems and experiences, Tommy Camerno appropriates chandeliers and silhouettes of enigmatic public statues to superimpose layers of pattern, intuitive brush marks, and fields of colour. Exploring the boundary between public and private space, Camerno engages with ornamental structures in architecture as theatrically symbolic, unfolding narratives of desire, intimacy, and exposure.

Like one wading through deep waters, the exhibition presents a defiant, joyful and vital response to understanding relationality for and with the Earth in the continuous quest for what stories we tell to make worlds.