data<bodies>water is a three-day process based exhibition that explores our relationship to death and dying from the perspective of data, datafication, digitalisation; and their aftermaths. The project takes place 31.7.–2.8.2026 at Forum Box during the gallery’s summer break.
The collective laboratory data<bodies>water brings arts-based research into dialogue with digital death research to explore a multitude of questions and responses to our current global conditions of existence, decay, and afterlives.
Through a workshop with scholars and artists, public programmes, and an exhibition, data<bodies>water will provoke dialogue, reflection, and agonistic debate over our collective digital futures and pasts.
We will ask each other a set of eternal and existential human questions, transposed onto the current moment:
- Why or when do we exist? When do we cease to exist? Do we exist in and as data?
- What happens when data of the dead, as fluid materiality, bends, breaks, transforms and fragments?
- What are the material and environmental consequences of current digital regimes of archivization and data storage? Data centers housing the dead demand unsustainable amounts of water and energy, infiltrating the lives of the living – what are the alternatives? How can we collectively imagine and enact those alternatives?
- What do we know, and not know, about death? Who holds those knowledges and how can we preserve and archive them?
- How are our histories and memories, of life and death, being stored, and by whom? How do we want to preserve them and what can we do to ensure that our wishes are followed?
PEOPLE
Anu A Harju, Ph.D. is a scholar of digital death at the University of Helsinki whose research explores the intersections of death and digital media, of data and digital afterlife, against the backdrop of increasing datafication of all areas of life (and death). The artistic provocation data<bodies>water is affiliated with Harju’s research project Death, Data, and Digital Media funded by the Kone Foundation.
Sade Kahra is a visual artist (MA) and social scientist (M.Pol.Sc.) working across photography, sound, and video, often in transdisciplinary collaboration. She has a background in teaching, educational development, project management, and leading independent organisations as well as international programmes. Kahra is currently Chair of the Board of Kuvasto, the Finnish copyright organisation for visual artists.
Dalida María Benfield, Ph.D. is an artist-researcher and Research and Programs Director at the Center for Arts, Design & Social Research (CAD+SR). Benfield is a media artist and writer who utilises research-based artistic and collective practices in producing installations, workshops, and other pedagogical and communicative actions across online and offline platforms.
Christopher Bratton is an artist and Director of CAD+SR, previously Professor of Practice at Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture, Helsinki. CAD+SR is a non-profit, artist-led educational organisation. Through the Center, Benfield and Bratton lead various artist-research projects, and their expertise lies in bridging social research with artistic practice.
http://www.centerartsdesign.org/about
+ additional collaborators and contributors
We would like to thank the Kone Foundation for funding and CAD+SR for collaboration.
OPENING TIMES at Forum Box
31.7.–2.8.2026
Open daily 15–21
The public programme will include several participatory events, published on the data<bodies>water Instagram account and onsite.
More info and programme updates: www.instagram.com/data_bodies_water_artproject/