Two ACT alumni, Christopher Joshua Benton (SMACT ’23) and Marisa Morán Jahn (SMVisS ’07), have been invited to present their work at Culture Summit Abu Dhabi, a global annual gathering of exceptional collective of creative thinkers, decision-makers, artists, designers, changemakers, and leaders engaged in transforming societies and communities worldwide and turning ideas into actions and solutions.
Culture Summit 2025: Culture for Humanity and Beyond will explore the dynamic relationship between culture and humanity in this period of unparalleled transformation for Humanity. The first quarter of the century has seen profound global power shifts, leading to the sense of an uncertain future, and to us questioning what it means to be Human in a post-Human world. This may require a collective rethinking of human emancipation, humanism and new common ground to build a sustainable future together.
Commissioned by Public Art Abu Dhabi, Benton’s “Where Lies My Carpet is Thy Home” is a football field-sized public park located at the Abu Dhabi Carpet Souk. On Tuesday, April 29, 2025, Benton will be leading a workshop entitled “Dialogic Art Dialogues: Conviviality As Art Practice” at 3:30pm with artist Mark Salvatus.
About the workshop: How can we work with communities outside of our own with care, intention, and love? How can we collaborate non-extractively while centering ethics? How can we make sure the process of art is a conduit for civic engagement, social change, and making our cities stronger? Join Abu Dhabi-based artist Christopher Joshua Benton as he shares his personal methodology for co-creating civic-scale socially engaged art with the community.
Artists are experts at reimagining space and proposing alternative ways of seeing, so we should sit at the table with diplomats, planners, and the people who run the city. The Culture Summit, a mini-Davos for the arts, knows this and puts artists in the room with other leaders in culture and government to make those connections and conversations happen.
– Christopher Joshua Benton
Above images: Christopher Joshua Benton, Where Lies My Carpet Is Thy Home. 2024. Astroturf. 6600 x 4200 cm. Commissioned by the Department of Culture and Tourism – Abu Dhabi for the Public Art Abu Dhabi Biennial 2024-2025. Image by Lance Gerber.
Created by Marisa Morán Jahn and Rafi Segal, an artist-architect duo who met while teaching at MIT Architecture, the HOOPcycle is a MesoAmerican basketball court on wheels. Commissioned by The National Public Housing Museum, the HOOPcycle uses play to explore the evolving history of the sport and recreational equity. A 2007 alum and former lecturer in ACT, Jahn will join a panel conversation on Sunday, April 27, 2025 at 3pm with Elisabeth Millqvist, Director of Moderna Museet Malmö, and Gina Duncan, former President of Brooklyn Academy of Music and Sundance Film Festival, moderated by Cyra Levenson, Deputy Director of The Guggenheim Museum.
About the panel: This session will focus on artists who move between making, community building, and institutional thinking as a creative practice. The discussion will illuminate the connections between individual and collective creative practice and challenge the separations that have historically existed between them. In doing so, the panel will propose new models for deeper sensory and perceptual engagement and a path beyond the “single genius” as creator that might expand the definition of art making and connection building.
When I was little, I often said that when I grew up I wanted to be an ambassador: as a kid growing up in Texas with parents from China and Ecuador and relatives all around the world, I loved the challenge of navigating between cultures. As an artist working in the public domain, my work strives to engage diverse policy makers, thinkers, and practitioners. Art actively carves the channels and highways by which we crosscut differences.
– Marisa Morán Jahn
Additionally, Hashim Sarkis, Dean of MIT School of Architecture, joins Maja Hoffman, Executive Director of Luma Foundation in a featured Creative Conversation at 12:40 pm on April 29th.
Above images: Marisa Morán Jahn and Rafi Segal, HOOPcycle. Photos: Merawi Gerima and Scott Shigley.
