18 October 2025
Food for Landscapes at Kirstenbosch Botanical Garden
The talk takes place during the anniversary event organised by the indigenous nursery and botanical studio Happy by Nature.
23 - 26 October 2025
Food for Landscapes: Recipes for Slow Disasters at Design Week Cape Town
An exhibition and public session in Cape Town, resulting from a Field Kitchen activation in the Lynedoch Valley, South Africa.
06 and 10 December 2025
Webinar on the DYCP grant by Arts Council England
Two webinars from our "Funding in the Arts" series for practitioners who want to apply to the DYCP grant.
We are a forward-thinking curatorial office based in London
Founded in 2019, Looking Forward works internationally across contemporary art, design, and socially engaged practices. As curators and cultural producers, we bring together artists, researchers, institutions, and publics through medium and long-term projects that span exhibitions, publishing, public programming, outreach, communication and critical research.
Reimagining
curating as a tool for social and ecological repair
Looking Forward is a curatorial office and non-profit Community Interest Company based in London. Founded in 2019 by Carolina Lio, currently includes a core team of five and an expanding distributed network of curators, cultural producers, artists and institutions with an international reach. We operate as both an independent curatorial platform and a support structure for others, offering coordination, research, programming, editorial and cultural production expertise to partners in the UK and beyond. Partnership is central to our approach. We co-design projects from the ground up, taking care of every stage of the development process with ethics and responsibility. We build alliances across disciplines, geographies, and sectors, from museums to universities, grassroots spaces to foundations. Some crucial points around our vision and mission: - Promote access, empathy, and equity in cultural work. - Produce and curate great art and ambitious projects. - Embed ethical methodologies in every stage of cultural production. - Foster environmental, social, and organisational sustainability. - Creating frameworks that support collective learning and authorship. - Merge creative practice with care, ecology, and mental wellbeing. - Build inclusive ecosystems where artists, institutions, and communities can work together towards meaningful, lasting change.
What's On
The talk takes place during the anniversary event organised by the indigenous nursery and botanical studio Happy by Nature.
An exhibition and public session in Cape Town, resulting from a Field Kitchen activation in the Lynedoch Valley, South Africa.
Two webinars on December 3 and 10 as part of our "Funding in the Arts" series for practitioners who want to apply to the DYCP grant.
From Our Journal: Looking Forward - Art Notes
Published on Substack, it brings together writing on art, culture, and the conditions that shape creative life today. You’ll find news on our projects, spotlights from our network, short essays, reviews, and field notes that explore curatorial practice, cultural infrastructures and creative wellbeing.
A reflection on the exhibition at the Design Museum and its call to rethink design as political, relational, and more-than-human.
Do Ho Suh, Heidi Bucher, and Mona Chalabi approach the weight of home in radically different ways.
Ethical issues around corporate sponsorship and ambiguous philanthropy polarise museum professionals. But what if we could reframe gifts from high-impact sectors as part of a duty of repair?
The Arts Pay Survey 2025 reveals a deepening financial precarity and a growing mental health crisis within the UK cultural sector.
Cherri subverts the visual language of monuments and oppressive authority, reflecting, in his own words, on “the fragility of power, and the shifting nature of collective memory.”
Set in the narrow corridors of Tokyo’s red-light district, Gifted by Suzumi Suzuki is a short, sparse novella about an unnamed young woman navigating grief with an unsettling cold detachment.
