Birds have been among humans’ closest artistic inspirations since the earliest cave paintings, with avian forms carrying dreams of flight, freedom, and transcendence. Yet alongside these uplifting images, darker contemporary realities remain; attending to birds is to attend to both wonder and loss.
Today, artists such as Hanna Tuulikki, Jasmina Cibic, and the collaborators behind Infrastructure of a Migratory Bird revisit these long traditions with contemporary urgency. Working across performance, sound, installation, and data visualisation, their practices all engage with how natural and political systems are entwined. By tracing these interspecies exchanges, the artists ask us to see and listen differently. At a moment when both species survival and human displacement are pressing global realities, their works remind us that to care for birds is also to care with birds, and ourselves.
Their works have recently been shown across the UK, inviting audiences to explore more-than-human relations with birds.
Looking for a connection
Through vocal mimesis, or mimicry, artist Hanna Tuulikki offers alternative approaches to making kin with more-than-human beings. A visual artist, composer, and performer based in Glasgow, much of Tuulikki’s work relates to landscapes. Since developing her performance work with birds and bats in Scotland as part of the Dartmoor exhibition Invasion Ecology (2024), Tuulikki returns to southern England once again to raise the alarm for another endangered species – the Marsh Warbler.
In Love (Warbler Remix) (2025), created for the Folkestone Triennial (on view till October 19), the artist conceives a fictional creature called the Love Warbler, a human-bird hybrid, composing its song from traditional love songs collected from 27 countries along the Marsh Warbler’s migratory route across Europe and Africa. Taking on the role of “nature’s original DJ”, Tuulikki creates a musical mashup using the birdsong structure and live sounds from the concrete sound mirrors at Denge near Dungeness in Folkestone, England. The audio is then broadcast locally into a former World War I shelter that overlooks the English Channel and internationally on shortwave radio.
Meeting 64 species in just over seven minutes, Tuulikki’s work takes a bird’s eye view over the routes which humans and animals have long travelled. Both celebrating histories and forming new connections, it is the result of many collaborations, including one with ornithologist Geoff Sample and musicians from the Western Balkans.
“Meeting 64 species in just over seven minutes, Tuulikki’s work takes a bird’s eye view over the routes which humans and animals have long travelled.”
But it’s not the first time the artist has brought attention to critically endangered birds in her practice. the bird that never flew (2023) examined the Glasgow Cathedral’s roots in ornithological entanglements. In air falbh leis na h-eòin – away with the birds (2010-2015), the audience was invited to “navigate through the depths and breadths of the composition, research, and performance”, with the music responding to the Scottish island’s topography and exploring the co-existence of tradition and innovation. “The ensemble sings the sea and the winds. They sing the motion of birds – wading on the shoreline, swooping before the cliffs, and beating skeins”, as the artist states herself.
The intersection of birds and humans’ inner lives also takes form in Tuulikki’s solo performance-to-camera vocal improvisation, cloud-cuckoo-island (2016). In this tale of the Irish King who, cursed by a saint, had “gone cuckoo”, madness and mythology, trauma and psychology are looked at through the lens of “wildness” and “wilderness”. Under the image of this wandering bird-man, the artist “sings his wordless call, her high-pitched voice strangely at odds with her mossy beard, her nonsensical song appearing trapped within a manic cycle”.
As such, Tuulikki’s work is both inspired by and critical of romantic depictions of natural landscapes and national identities. As part of the artist’s work with this year’s Folkestone Triennial, the artist was resident at Prospect Cottage, the former home and sanctuary of artist, filmmaker, gay rights activist, and gardener Derek Jarman [Read more about Jarman in the second issue of Mindscapes here]. On the EMPIRE LINES podcast, Tuulikki discusses an encounter with a Qur’an, washed up on the shore of the southern coast, and singular British media representations of the “migrant crisis”. Through the warbler, her work delves deeper into entangled ecological and geopolitical crises, as well as individual stories behind transnational journeys that often risk being lost at sea.
Avian allegories
In Jasmina Cibic’s recent bodies of work, humans, objects, plants, and animals come together as actors, proposing a shared politics of collaboration, justice, and care. Cibic has previously engaged with birds in their work in performance, installation, and film; works such as 20th Century (2010), Ideologies of Display (2008), Forged Territories (2007), and For the Birds (2007) are only some examples of her long investigation into the relations between human and avian beings. All of which speaks for what it means to be both care-ful and care-less – the idea of “care thinking”, so prevalent in her art, which she also discussed in this podcast episode.
Dawn Chorus (2024), presented at Belvedere21 in Vienna, is an immersive installation featuring recorded birdsongs from the different homelands of the majority of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children residing in Austria. They are, incidentally, also all countries that were members of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) from its inaugural conference in Belgrade, Yugoslavia (now Serbia) in 1961, with Pakistan joining in 1979.
“Layering these archival images with white pencil, the artist erases the surrounding geographical landscapes, directing the viewer’s attention solely to the animals’ portraits.”
The birds in the installation are all named after European naturalists, colonial administrators, and missionaries, agents of empires who facilitated global exchanges. With bird “discoveries” by the Europeans, and the “gifting” of new, “common” names according to the Linnaean taxonomy, local knowledges were erased. Scientific discovery thus became a part of the colonial destruction of worlds.
The countries in Dawn Chorus include Afghanistan, Syria, Pakistan, Egypt, Tunisia, and India. Most of these nations, except for Tunisia, also participated in the historic Bandung Conference in Indonesia in 1955, a symbol of solidarity among developing countries. Whilst exploring transnational connections, Cibic more explicitly scrutinises the legitimacy and function of the nation-state in the face of global crises, including climate emergencies. Like Tuulikki, she collaborates with those working in the fields of natural sciences – here, scientific illustrators – altering the standard workflow of their practice by offering them only the Latin and/or common name of the bird to imagine its appearance on paper.
In The Gift Ecology, Cibic’s ongoing exploration of gifting continues with her first solo exhibition on the island of Ireland, which features photographs of Yugoslavian government documents detailing the exchange of animals during the Cold War. Cibic explores the ritualistic functions these gifts served in constructing a new transnational political space, namely, again, the NAM. Layering these archival images with white pencil, the artist erases the surrounding geographical landscapes, directing the viewer’s attention solely to the animals’ portraits. Once symbols of soft power, they are reframed as agents, now inhabiting the ruins of national, colonial, and ideological structures.
Symbiosis of systems
Meanwhile, departing from contemporary exhibitions focusing on gardens, the More than Human exhibition at the Design Museum in London (on view till October 5) examines closely large-scale, technological, and architectural approaches to interspecies relations. The exhibition, which presents the works of artists like Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg and Solange Pessoa, brings together art and science to consider how we can shift the focus of design beyond solely human needs.
One of the works included in the exhibition is Infrastructure of a Migratory Bird (2022), a diagram constructed by Vladan Joler, Gordan Savičić, and Felix Stalder, realised in the framework of the research project Latent Spaces: Performing Ambiguous Data (ZhdK, 2022-2023). Similar to Jasmina Cibic, the group is also somehow positioned towards the Western Balkans. For instance, though he jokes he was raised in “the Internet”, Savičić was born in Vienna and spent time in Bosnia and Herzegovina, “where his roots are”. While Joler is a professor at the New Media department of the University of Novi Sad, Serbia. Their collaborative work’s first public appearance was as part of the exhibition curated by !Mediengruppe Bitnik – Can You See Me Now? Practices of Tracking, Control, and Resistance? (2022) in Zürich, a city in which they all currently work.
The Northern Bald Ibis (Waldrapp) was previously thought to be extinct due to overhunting and harsh climatic conditions in the 17th century – a perception explored by conceptual photographer Hrair Sarkissian in the context of Syria (who was also a guest on the EMPIRE LINES podcast). Now the bird is tracked and protected to ensure its population grows back to self-sufficiency. The Infrastructure diagram visualises how this endangered migratory bird is being rewilded. During the first ten years of their research project (2013–2022), the birds shifted the start of their autumn migration dramatically, from mid-September to mid-October.
Their diagram maps out this process with scientific precision. For this exhibition, a new panel titled Adaptation to Climate Change was added, which documents this new migration route that had to be adopted to deal with the effects of climate change. “The objective was to visualise and comprehend the intricate network of data, energy resources, and dependencies deeply enmeshed within the project’s framework”, they say. “Technology, the real-time tracking and social media coverage, serves as a way to increase the autonomy of the bird, supporting them to survive outside captivity, yet within densely populated, deeply cultured environments”.
This visualisation – not unlike Tuulikki’s accompanying visual score of large-scale drawings that map their composition – is one lens through which to view our relations and responsibilities to avian beings. Combining scientific approaches with artistic sensitivity, these artists open up new ways of imagining and visualising more-than-human relations with birds. Through their practices, we might find ways to restore and heal ecologies.
“Technology, the real-time tracking and social media coverage, serves as a way to increase the autonomy of the bird, supporting them to survive outside captivity, yet within densely populated, deeply cultured environments”.
Written by Jelena Sofronijevic
