Faces and Threads: Expanding Controversy Mapping through Artistic Synthesis (2025–2026) is a 12-month community art and research project led by Dr Lone Sørensen at the University of Leeds. Parham Ghalamdar is the lead collaborating artist and workshop facilitator; curator Chris Bailkoski of PROFORMA and community partners Longsight Art Space (Manchester) and BasementArtsProject (Leeds) helped develop the public programme. Funded by the University of Leeds Cultural Institute and School of Media and Communication, the project builds on the AHRC-funded Mediated Climate Change Politics research programme on social media and climate-policy debate.
Dr Lone Sørensen’s research examines how climate-change claims gain authority on social media, and how misinformation can marginalise people already affected by climate change. In Faces & Threads, that inquiry moved from online debate into workshops: residents responded to real posts and images, bringing lived experience into a discussion often shaped by people speaking about them from a distance.
Tarot gave the group a shared visual structure for reading those posts. Its familiar archetypes helped participants recognise recurring roles in climate debates, then remake them through painting. The cards were not used to predict the future; they opened a way to ask how images assign authority and whose account is dismissed.
WORKSHOPS — APRIL–MAY 2026
Four free workshops took place at Involve Community Centre in Hunslet, Leeds (21 April); Longsight Art Space in Manchester (23 April and 13 May); and BasementArtsProject in Leeds (15 May). Residents worked with paint, paper cut-outs, stencils, markers and canvas, responding visually to real social-media content about climate change. Tarot offered a framework for discussing political archetypes, power and who gets to speak. The sessions shaped large collaborative banners and a tarot-inspired installation built from participants’ words, images and experiences.
DR LONE SØRENSEN — PAINTINGS
Sørensen is a painter and Associate Professor of Political Communication at Leeds. Her oil portraits depict political leaders, broadcasters and online personalities whose faces circulate through news and social media. Heavy impasto makes familiar faces appear unstable and almost sculptural; the eyes remain sharply observed. In the reversible portraits, turning a work over leaves the figure recognisable but reduced to a trace, shifting the image of political authority toward fragility.
PARHAM GHALAMDAR — CERAMICS
Ghalamdar’s ceramic vessels have dark, heavily textured surfaces that suggest objects coated in tar or saturated with oil. Blue glaze evokes polluted water. Slumped glass cups and saucers extend the work into a domestic setting; as Woolley observes in her review, the objects suggest a family space damaged by fire or bombing. The basement installation gives the ceramics the appearance of things recovered from a ruin.
COMMUNITY BANNERS
Residents made large painted and collaged banners from social-media images and phrases, using tarot cards to discuss the figures and patterns repeated in climate debates. The outdoor banners at The Corner in Beeston were pulled down and damaged twice. Local artists and participants stitched tears, repainted sections and added new work; in the later gallery installation, repairs remained visible in red thread.
CORNER POCKET SCULPTURE PARK, BEESTON — 9 JULY 2026
The first public presentation placed the community banners outdoors at The Corner, the pocket sculpture park in Beeston, Leeds. The opening programme included live music by Rick Holland and FURU.
LONGSIGHT ART SPACE, MANCHESTER — 10 JULY 2026
The indoor programme at Longsight Art Space included a screening of five films exploring transmission, memory and digital platforms: Memory Stone (Nikta Mohammadi, 2024), Thought Broadcasting (Nick Jordan, 2017), Truth Performed / Truth Disrupted (Parham Ghalamdar and Dr Lone Sørensen, 2026, 5 min), PalCoreCore (Dana Dawud, 2023/24), and Welcome to the Platform Era (antimemoria, 2026). The co-created five-minute work uses synthetic voices, archival footage and AI imagery to examine political performance and climate misinformation.
CROWCROFT PARK ORCHARD GARDEN, LONGSIGHT — 24 JULY 2026
The outdoor programme continued at Crowcroft Park Orchard Garden with a climate cabaret by Fossilheads.
BASEMENT ARTS PROJECT, BEESTON — 1 SEPTEMBER–4 OCTOBER 2026
The exhibition opened at Basement Arts Project on 1 September and remained on view through 4 October 2026. Its opening included a second screening of the five films, alongside the portraits, ceramics and repaired community banners.
The project was developed with Longsight Art Space and Basement Arts Project, and supported by the University of Leeds Cultural Institute. All four public events were free and open to the public.
REVIEW
Woolley follows the project from the banners at The Corner in Beeston to the final installation at BasementArtsProject. She singles out a Beeston Devil card bearing Xi Jinping’s face and a Longsight Tower collage showing Greta Thunberg falling, tracing how participants joined tarot imagery to current climate-media narratives. Her review also links the banners’ repeated damage and red-thread repairs to the unequal pressures behind climate debate, and reads the tar-marked ceramics and slumped glass cups and saucers as remnants of a domestic space damaged by war.
Dawn Woolley, “Faces and Threads”, Corridor8, 6 October 2026.
BASEMENTARTSPROJECT / STUDIO JOURNAL
Journal entries by BasementArtsProject documenting the project:
