Running throughout the autumn and winter of 2025, Future Tense is an exhibition dedicated to celebrating contemporary artists, presented alongside the Aesthetica Art Prize throughout the ground floor of York Art Gallery. Contemporary artists Squidsoup and Liz West are set to exhibit a range of immersive works at York Art Gallery in this brand new exhibition.

Squidsoup is an artist collective who create immersive digital installations utilising light, sound, and space. Their interactive installations often explore the relationship between technology and human perception. Submergence, included in the Gallery’s exciting displays, was longlisted for the Aesthetica Art Prize in 2015 and has since been exhibited on six continents across more than 100 locations. This installation features over 8,000 individually suspended LEDs providing a sensory experience unfolding over a 12-minute rotation. It seamlessly blends the boundaries between human and digital landscapes, exploring presence, connectivity, and the idea of self in an increasingly digital age.

Liz West, another Aesthetica Art Prize finalist, this time in 2016, also uses light and colour to create rich, immersive, and interactive displays. The installation that will feature at York Art Gallery this September draws primarily on mathematician and physicist Isaac Newton’s experiments with light refraction through prisms. Titled Our Spectral Vision, and commissioned by the Natural History Museum, the work creates a vivid immersive environment that mixes luminous colour and radiant light using a mixture of LED lamps and dichroic glass in the form of seven prisms. Our Spectural Vision explores individual relationships and understandings of colour. West’s works evoke moments of reflection and optimism in wonderous explorations of light and colour which can bring people together in a fragmentary modern world.