Exploring Risk Visual Arts Festival 2025 Showcase: Moving from Hazard and Risk to Resilience

Societies worldwide are confronted with escalating risks from hazards such as floods, landslides, earthquakes, and water pollution, as well as mounting social pressures driven by migration, population growth, and urbanisation. In response, we are enhancing our resilience to these challenges through innovative local initiatives, such as community-driven action, nature-based solutions, and novel financial strategies. This Exploring Risk Visual Arts Festival 2025 is about documenting, capturing, and inspiring the transition from being impacted by hazards to being resilient.

Exploring Risk 2025 explores stories of increasing resilience through visual arts approaches. We are looking for visual depictions of how communities and individuals adapt, endure, and thrive amid complex global shifts from environmental to societal crises. These could be stories from global scientists, practitioners, and artists' perspectives about our responses to, for example, floods or climate migration.

Exploring Risk with Film Showing

The Exploring Risk 2025 website will showcase up to 30 short videos of 1-3 minutes. A panel from across the host universities will select a long list of up to 30 videos and then decide on the top six videos that will receive awards.

We will host two online Exploring Risk 2025 Film Screenings on Tuesday, 20 May 2025, at 09:00 and 17:00 BST, covering working hours in many time zones across the globe. The screenings will feature the award-winning films and a discussion with the judges and award winners. Durham University will host an in-person screening of all long-listed films on Tuesday, 20 May 2025. 

Exploring Risk with Images

Up to 30 still images at A0 will be physically showcased for three weeks (up to 20 May 2025) in Durham University’s Teaching and Learning Centre, at other host universities, and on the Exploring Risk 2025 website. A panel from the host universities will select the long-listed images and the six images that will receive awards.

Find out how to submit your work.