Upcoming Projects:
Suspended Ecologies
Co-Lapses 2025 iterations
​Larnaca Biennale (Cyprus) & Arte Laguna Shanghai 20th Edition (China)
​In 2025, Karma will present two major international iterations of her evolving durational installation CO-Lapses as part of prestigious contemporary art platforms in Cyprus and China.
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​Larnaca Biennale 'Along Lines and Traces'
Larnaca, Cyprus
15th October - 28th November 2025
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CO-Lapses (2025): Selected for Larnaca Biennale
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​Karma Barnes has been selected to represent Aotearoa New Zealand/Australia at the Larnaca Biennale 2025 in Cyprus, presenting a major new iteration of CO-Lapses as part of the Biennale’s fourth edition themed Along Lines and Traces. This highly competitive international event, curated by Sana López Abellán, has selected 117 artworks from 43 countries. The Biennale invites artists to explore how movements, memories, and mark-making shape human experience, how the traces we leave on the land and within each other carry meaning across time. With over 60,000 visitors expected, Larnaca Biennale is the largest and most significant contemporary art event in Cyprus, supported by the Deputy Ministry of Culture, the Municipality of Larnaca, and the ARTION Cultural Association.
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​CO-Lapses is an evolving sculptural installation that draws from Barnes’ ongoing material research into earth pigments, climate adaptation, and human-nonhuman collaboration. At the core of the work is an observation made in her Australian studio: solitary mud dauber wasps harvesting local ochres to construct their intricate nests. These elegant biomorphic forms informed the suspended vessels of CO-Lapses, each containing local sand and pigment that slowly releases over time, mapping a quiet, durational landscape of accretion and erosion. This 2025 iteration resonates profoundly with the Cypriot context, where Sceliphron spirifex, a local species of mud dauber, similarly creates mud structures on human-built surfaces, offering a cross-continental dialogue on adaptation, labour, and ecological interdependence.
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“These lines become even more fascinating when they start reflecting connections between people: when the lines become an abstraction through which we communicate, but also a testament to our movement in history, a convergence or node.”
- Sana López Abellán, Larnaca Biennale Curator
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Visit: https://biennalelarnaca.com
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CO-Lapses, 2024, Arsenale Nord, Arte Laguna Prize 18th & 19th Edition, 2024, Venice, Italy
Arte Laguna Prize Venice: Shanghai 20th Edition Exhibition 2025
CO-Lapses (Refuge 2025 iteration)
Shanghai, China | 1st November - 15th December 2025
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Following her selection as a finalist in the 18th edition of the Arte Laguna Prize (Venice 2024), Karma has been invited to present work in the 20th Edition Arte Laguna Prize Exhibition in Shanghai, China, as part of the prize’s international network program.
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Presented at EKA Tianwu, a visionary urban renewal site in a restored 100-year-old customs factory in Pudong, the exhibition will feature over 100 international artists in a newly transformed 1,500 sqm space dedicated to contemporary art. EKA Tianwu, described as an “open-air architectural museum,” is a landmark cultural destination that blends historical structures with forward-facing, sustainable design.
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Barnes will exhibit CO-Lapses (Refuge 2025 iteration), a sculptural installation that continues her investigation into biomimicry, ecological materiality, and the entanglement of personal and environmental transformation. This iteration builds on the conceptual and material frameworks developed during previous presentations in Venice (Arsenale Nord, 2024) and Grafton Regional Gallery, NSW, Australia (2023). The work was originally presented in her exhibition Relative Terrains, which was initially scheduled for Lismore Regional Gallery but relocated due to the devastating 2022 floods.
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The CO-Lapses series emerges from research conducted amidst ongoing environmental upheaval drought, bushfires, and floods and reflects on the temporal forces that shape both landscapes and lives. Produced in collaboration with Kite Studios, the Shanghai edition introduces new hand-rendered, 3D-printed components made from post-consumer composite materials. Each form operates as a slow-release vessel of earth pigment and sand, referencing adaptation, disintegration, and renewal.
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Drawing on biomimicry specifically the nest structures of mud dauber wasps the work proposes a language of refuge that articulates the layered conditions of climate disruption and emotional resilience. It situates material transformation as a site for navigating instability, vulnerability, and adaptation within broader ecological and sociocultural systems.
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Visit: https://artelagunaprize.com/network/shanghai-exhibition-2025/
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