For the past few years Olivia Arthur has been making work about the relationship that we have to our bodies as humans. The work grew out of a fascination she developed after being pregnant and feeling her body as a machine performing an incredible task. She went on to explore intimacy, touch, physical connection, stability and the ways we use technology to enhance all those things. It became quite a journey that ended up taking her to make intimate portraits, create Muybridge-style motion series and find emotional connections with robots. Ultimately though the work is about people, our inner strength and our never-ending need for physical closeness.
Parts of this work have been shown at Focus Festival Mumbai, Brighton Photo Biennale, ICP in New York, Fuji X-Space in Shanghai and the Mattatoio Museum in Rome.
In 2021 Olivia gave a TED talk about the intersections of humanity and technology.
Olivia Arthur is a London-based documentary photographer and visual artist. Her work explores themes such as gender, intimacy, the human body and physicality as well as the cultural influences of East and West. She studied mathematics at the University of Oxford and photojournalism at the London College of Printing before moving to Delhi in 2003 to become a photographer. Her early books, Jeddah Diary (2012) and Stranger (2015), document the daily lives of young women in Saudi Arabia and the story of a shipwreck in Dubai. By shifting to large-format portraiture, Olivia Arthur began examining the human relationship with the body, touch, physicality, and the intersection of the body and technology. This work became her third book Murmurings of the Skin, published in 2024. She is the co-founder of Fishbar, a publishing house and space dedicated to photography in London. She is a member of Magnum Photos and served as its president from 2020-222.
Dr Susan Bright (Aus/UK) is an experienced arts leader with a specialty in curating lens based art. Over the course of her career she has developed expertise and networks worldwide realizing projects in Europe, The Americas and Australia. She has been invited to curate exhibitions at Tate Britain, The National Portrait Gallery (UK), Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna (Italy), Princeton University Art Museum (USA), Lismore Castle Arts (Ireland) amongst others.
She has been guest curator/ artistic director for festivals in France, Spain and Germany and published seven books on art and photography. She is a regular contributor to exhibition catalogues, journals, magazines and broadsheets including The Financial Times, The Guardian and Vogue. She has broadcast for BBC Radio 4. She is one of the five selected curators for Unseen in Amsterdam later this year and is working on exhibitions for 2026 at Alice Austen House Museum in New York, and the Stone Gallery at Boston University.