"Urban Heat Chronicles" at the Venice Biennale of Architecture 2025

The MIT Future Heritage Lab is proud to present Urban Heat Chronicles at La Biennale di Venezia, addressing one of our time's most urgent climate challenges through the power of collaborative design.

Our static installation transforms Venice's narrow alleyways with suspended textile canopies inspired by the city's traditional laundry lines. These upcycled textiles were indigo-dyed and screen-printed with intricate patterns depicting plant species' heat adaptation strategies. As they create much-needed shade, these botanical textiles tell stories of resilience and survival, turning Venice's dense urban fabric into a living lesson on passive cooling.

This installation is part of a larger collaboration with our amazing Italian partners: T12 Lab's mobile pavilion that follows the sun's path, and participatory workshops led by QuasiQuasi and Project for People that engage visitors in textile pattern design and printing.

As temperatures continue to rise globally, Urban Heat Chronicles demonstrates how traditional knowledge, community collaboration, and simple technologies can help us navigate an increasingly hot world.

The project is on display at the Arsenale from May 10–November 23, 2025. Learn more: https://urbanheatchronicles.com

Credits:

Static installation by:

MIT Future Heritage Lab (FHL) / Azra Aksamija. FHL Team: Merve Akdoğan, Christopher Hassan Allen, Ganit Goldstein, Kailin Jones, Lillian P. H. Kology, Penelope Phylactopoulos. Supported by the MIT Artfinity Festival.

Mobile Pavilion by: T12 Lab / Elisabetta Bianchessi

Participatory Workshops by: QuasiQuasi / Alberto Wolfango Amedeo D’Asaro. Project for People / Anna Doneda

Coordinated by: Emma Greer

'Weft of Waste–Ikat Reimagined' on view in 'The Next Earth' at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025

Azra Akšamija’s installation Weft of Waste– Ikat Reimagined is currently on view at The Next Earth: Computation, Crisis, Cosmology, a collateral exhibition of the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale presented by Berggruen Arts & Culture at Palazzo Diedo. Running from May 10 to November 23, 2025, the show brings together two visionary research platforms—Antikythera’s Planetary Sapience and MIT Architecture’s Climate Work: Un/Worlding the Planet—to explore how architecture can respond to the planetary urgencies of climate change, computation, and ecological crisis. Akšamija’s work, presented as part of MIT Architecture’s contribution, merges traditional craft and speculative design to address the environmental toll of the global fashion industry.

Weft of Waste– Ikat Reimagined transforms shredded cotton T-shirts—the detritus of fast fashion—into a monumental loom inspired by the blurred patterns of Uzbek ikat. Each T-shirt, symbolizing the 2,700 liters of water required for its production, becomes part of a woven archive critiquing cotton monoculture and disposable consumer culture. By channeling the intelligence of textile traditions, the installation challenges the boundaries between heritage and innovation, positioning craft as a form of ecological resistance and cultural continuity. The piece was developed in collaboration with the Future Heritage Lab team, Kailin Jones and Lillian Kology, and stands as a call to imagine regenerative futures where environmental justice is interwoven with design. Find out more about this exhibition here.

Dust to Light exhbited at the Cologne Cathedral until April 26, 2025

My artwork “Staub zu Licht” is currently exhibited at the Cologne Cathedral as part of the International Art Competition for the Cologne Cathedral. This prestigious competition was launched to create a permanent artwork that addresses the complex historical relationship between Christianity and Judaism, promoting dialogue and reconciliation. The initiative responds to decades of reflection and dialogue inspired by the Catholic Church’s paradigm shift since the declaration of Nostra Aetate in 1965.

“Staub zu Licht” is a site-specific installation made of 7,500 hexagonal glass vessels infused with dust from the Cathedral’s façade. The artwork represents a continuous process of renewal and dialogue, using materials that evoke the intertwined histories of Christianity and Judaism. It invites visitors to interact with the installation through candle lighting and the leaving of messages, creating a living memorial that evolves over time.

The exhibition, showcasing all competition entries and the final results, will be open to the public from April 3, 2025, following a press conference at 2:00 PM. It will remain on display until April 26, 2025, during the Cathedral’s regular opening hours (except during Mass).

Learn more about the Staub zu Licht project (presentation video).

Click here for more information about the international competition.

New Public Art Commission: Memorial for Victims of Nazi Medical Crimes in Austria

Azra Aksamija and the team at Future Heritage Studio have been awarded the commission to create a permanent memorial for the victims of Nazi medical crimes at the Mauer-Öhling State Hospital in Lower Austria. The project will transform a previously unmarked mass grave into a dignified cemetery and contemplative space for remembrance. More than 2,850 patients were murdered at the site during the Nazi "euthanasia" program, and many others perished due to systematic neglect or direct killings. To this day, there has been no proper place to honor these victims, making this project especially meaningful and timely. The memorial is scheduled for completion in late 2025 as part of the 2026 Lower Austrian Provincial Exhibition focused on the history of mental health.

Location: Landesklinikum Mauer, Hausmeninger Str. 221, 3362 Amstetten, Austria

Hallucinating Traditions on view at the MIT Museum until Aug.31, 2025

Hallucinating Traditions is on view at the MIT Museum from February 28 to August 31, 2025. The exhibition explores the impact of large language models and AI technologies on cultural heritage through speculative animations and hybrid artifacts. Speculative AI-generated designs reference historical traditions while foreshadowing a future in which technology influences both cultural and personal expression. Artist Azra Akšamija blends traditional clothing with imagined futures in a series of morphing images, where AI-generated headgear transitions fluidly from one form to another. These visual transformations reveal evolving relationships between artificial intelligence, tradition, and cultural identity—blurring the perceived boundaries between cultures and eras.

Location: MIT Museum, 314 Main Street, Cambridge, MA

Akšamija co-leads ARTFINITY: MIT's New Campus-Wide Celebration of the Arts

ARTFINITY is a new, Institute-wide arts festival that launched at MIT on February 15, 2025, with an unforgettable evening of performances, projections, and community celebration at the Edward and Joyce Linde Music Building. Over the next three months, the festival will feature more than 80 events across campus, including concerts, exhibitions, film screenings, augmented reality experiences, impromptu performances, and public art interventions. ARTFINITY brings together artists, students, faculty, and the broader MIT community to reimagine the role of the arts in science and technology while celebrating their ability to inspire, provoke, and unite.

The festival is co-directed by Professor Azra Akšamija, Director of the Arts, Culture, and Technology Program, and Institute Professor Marcus A. Thompson. As co-chairs of the ARTFINITY committee, they led a two-year collaborative planning effort to create a festival that centers the arts as a vital force for critical inquiry and cultural transformation at MIT. In her opening remarks, Akšamija described ARTFINITY as a platform for "radical hope, joy, and connection"—an invitation to dream and act together through the arts.

Click here for more information and the full program of the festival.

Palimpsest of ’89 on view at San Francisco’s Museum of Craft and Design in RugLife

Azra Akšamija’s Palimpsests of ’89 (2017), a 20-minute single-channel digital animation, is now on view at the Museum of Craft and Design in San Francisco as part of RugLife, a group exhibition running from December 14, 2024, through April 20, 2025. Guest curated by Ginger Gregg Duggan and Judith Hoos Fox of c2-curatorsquared, RugLife brings together 14 international artists who use the form of the rug to address issues such as social justice, housing, environment, identity, and memory. With rugs historically tied to ritual, domesticity, and symbolic space, the exhibition explores how contemporary artists activate this medium as both art object and cultural critique.

Palimpsests of ’89 contributes to this discourse by visualizing how Sarajevo’s cultural and religious institutions have shaped the common heritage of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Conceived as a “digital palimpsestual carpet,” the animation traces the weaving of integrative and disintegrative narratives across Sarajevo’s history—from the Pre-Ottoman era to the Post-Dayton Peace Agreement—revealing how common heritage is constantly redefined. As symbols accumulate across the animated textile, the work reflects the fragility and resilience of collective memory in the face of crisis. The piece transforms carpet iconography into a storytelling device that reclaims history as a dynamic, contested, and participatory process.

Take a virtual tour of the exhibition here.

See the exhibition in a curator-led tour (video) here.

Sanctuary: Azra Akšamija’s Retrospective at Kunsthaus Graz

Sanctuary, on view at Kunsthaus Graz until October 6, 2024, is Azra Akšamija's first major solo exhibition in Austria and a significant mid-career retrospective. Transforming the museum's domed gallery into a space for reflection and action, the exhibition explores themes of safety, belonging, and resilience in the face of climate crises, migration, and global inequality. Through immersive textile installations and wearable technologies, Akšamija redefines the concept of sanctuary, drawing on her deep engagement with textile art, wearable architecture, and technological innovation. Visitors will encounter thought-provoking new works including "Bishty" (modular wearable architecture), "Hallucinating Traditions" (AI-generated cultural imagery), "Spectacles of the Sacred" (3D glasses reimagined as miniature stained glass), and "Flocking" (an interactive carpet installation that doubles as wearable slippers).

The exhibition recontextualizes several significant projects from Akšamija's career, including "Coring" (2022), which uses stacked discarded T-shirts to critique the environmental impact of the global textile industry, and "Silk Road Works," originally created for the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale, whose delicate glass helmets address migration and transcultural exchange. Throughout "Sanctuary," Akšamija aims to balance aesthetic pleasure with ethical inquiry, blending poetic material reuse with critical global concerns to create frameworks for examining increasingly complex socio-political realities. By reimagining discarded materials and cultural traditions, "Sanctuary" challenges visitors to participate in a collective reimagining of our shared world—one in which creative reuse, community engagement, and cross-cultural understanding become essential tools for building environmental sustainability and social harmony.

Click here for further information about the Sanctuary exhibition.

More images of the exhibition.

Order the exhibition catalog here.

Abundance & Scarcity at Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale, February 20–May 24, 2024

The second iteration of the Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale, titled After Rain, opened on February 20th and has welcomed more than 100,000 visitors in just the first three weeks of the show. Integral to this year’s Biennale is a commissioned installation by current ACT Director Azra Aksamija titled Abundance and Scarcity. Produced with her interdisciplinary team at the Future Heritage Lab, the project epitomizes an artistic and environmentally conscious approach to historic preservation. It comprises an outdoor shading canopy crafted from recycled textiles and a wearable Bishty cloak that reinterprets traditional nomadic garments.

After Rain. Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale 2024
February 20–May 24, 2024

Read more: https://act.mit.edu/2024/03/act-at-the-2nd-diriyah-biennale/