Lines of Escape: Isil Ezgi Celik and the Art of Curating Between Worlds

This International Women’s Day, a Turkish curator based in London opens an exhibition at Shoreditch’s art’otel that asks what happens when machines dream. Isil Ezgi Celik — founder of capitArt and capitArtX, PhD from Nagoya, alumna of Istanbul and the world — has built a practice in the spaces between things. ‘Artificial Lines of Flight’ is her most ambitious statement yet. TBMag profiles the woman and the work.

There is a particular kind of intelligence that refuses to be located. Not because it is elusive, but because it genuinely operates in the gaps — between disciplines, between languages, between the categories that institutions use to sort the world into manageable units. Isil Ezgi Celik is this kind of intelligence, and she has spent the better part of a decade building a curatorial practice that turns the gaps themselves into the subject.

Celik is the founder and director of capitArt, a London-based art platform, and capitArtX, a global cross-media curatorial initiative. She holds a PhD in international co-operation in art from Nagoya University in Japan. She has curated exhibitions for the Women’s March in London, participated in The Wrong Biennale and the London Design Festival, and built a network of artists and institutions that spans continents and disciplines. On 7 March 2026 — the day before International Women’s Day — she opened ‘Artificial Lines of Flight’ at art’otel London Hoxton, a private screening running until 12 March. It is, by any measure, the most intellectually ambitious project capitArtX has mounted.

art’otel, which featured Celik in its International Women’s Day ‘Her City, Her Stories’ editorial alongside other women shaping London’s creative landscape, describes her method with precision: she works within thresholds — the spaces where categories blur and identities are not yet fixed. She curates between cultures, languages, disciplines and media. It is in these interstitial zones, she argues, that creative potential intensifies. The machine, in this framing, is not the opposite of the human. It is another threshold. Another space in which something new might happen.

“I work within thresholds — the spaces where categories blur and identities are not yet fixed. Difference, for me, is a force to be sustained. I seek to open spaces where divergent practices meet the mainstream without being absorbed by it — where dialogue becomes a site of quiet transformation.”

The Exhibition: What AI Does When It Escapes

‘Artificial Lines of Flight’ takes its conceptual framework from Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the ligne de fuite — the line of flight, or line of escape: a movement of transformation and rupture away from systems of power, structure, and fixed sense. It is a rich theoretical frame for an exhibition about AI and algorithmic creativity, because it reframes the question entirely. The exhibition is not asking whether machines can be creative. It is asking what happens when the collaboration between humans and machines becomes a site of genuine escape — not from responsibility, but from the predetermined.

The exhibition’s own statement puts it with the kind of compressed poetry that good curatorial writing achieves when it is working: ‘Artificial Lines of Flight drift where code dissolves into organism, where algorithmic absurdity stumbles into meaning, where machines whisper ruptures into dreams. The exhibition traces escapes — lines that fracture power, unsettle indifference, and open trembling thresholds of the not-yet. Here, difference becomes resistance, uncertainty a vector, absurdity a counter-force to its contemporary forms, and collaboration with machines a flight toward unpredictable becomings.’

This is not, emphatically, the kind of AI art exhibition that presents generative imagery as spectacle. The artists gathered by capitArtX under this framework are using machine collaboration not to produce impressive outputs but to unsettle the norms of authorship, aesthetics, and intention. The question the exhibition poses — what emerges when human-machine collaboration embraces uncertainty as a condition for political potential? — is one that sits directly in the centre of the cultural conversation of 2026. In a week when AI has been deployed for military surveillance, state propaganda, and the manipulation of civilian populations, an exhibition that asks whether machine collaboration can instead be a form of resistance is not an escapist gesture. It is a necessary one.

The Artists: An International Constellation

The seventeen artists whose work constitutes ‘Artificial Lines of Flight’ form one of the most genuinely international groupings in a London exhibition this spring. They represent a range of nationalities, practices, and relationships with AI that together refuse any single definition of what ‘AI art’ means or should mean. The full list:

Blanche The Vidiot  ·  Copy Planet  ·  Domenec Miralles Tagliabue

Domenico Barra  ·  Francesca Fini  ·  Hyun Cho

Jean-Michel Rolland  ·  Jie Shuai  ·  Lewis Brown

Marcus Wallinder  ·  Mark Cypher  ·  Miguel Ripoll

Mike Petrakis  ·  Mizuho Nishioka  ·  Paulius Sliaupa

Una Raneta (Toñin Lizana)  ·  Zivia Li

The range is striking: European, East Asian, and Middle Eastern artists working in video, installation, performance, and digital media, united by a shared willingness to treat the machine as a collaborator rather than a tool — and by Celik’s curatorial conviction that it is precisely in the diversity of their approaches that the exhibition’s argument emerges. There is no house style here. The ‘line of flight’ is not a single direction. It is a multiplicity.

The Context: Women’s Month, The Wrong Biennale, London Design Festival

The timing of ‘Artificial Lines of Flight’ is multiply resonant. Opening on the eve of International Women’s Day, at a venue that has made a programmatic commitment to women’s creative leadership, the exhibition sits within a broader cultural moment in which London’s creative institutions are — with varying degrees of seriousness — interrogating the structures that have historically shaped who gets to make art, who gets to curate it, and whose frame of reference defines what counts as significant.

Celik is acutely conscious of this context. Her own description of her practice — as a woman professional and a mother ‘living and curating across thresholds (geographic, bureaucratic, disciplinary, and existential)’ — locates her work within a personal as well as an intellectual geography. The ‘present global climate of uncertainty,’ as she names it, is not an abstraction for her. It is the condition in which she is raising a child, building an institution, and making work that argues, quietly but insistently, for care, difference, and true inclusivity.

Last year, capitArtX curated the Aurorae exhibition for the Women’s March in London — a collective effort of women and non-binary creatives that brought feminist themes into the streets and galleries of the city. This year’s presence at both The Wrong Biennale (the world’s largest digital art biennial, taking place across multiple international venues) and the London Design Festival, alongside the art’otel exhibition, marks a significant expansion of capitArtX’s platform. Celik is not building a niche. She is building a presence.

art’otel Hoxton: Where Art and Hospitality Actually Meet

The choice of art’otel London Hoxton as the venue for ‘Artificial Lines of Flight’ is significant in a way that goes beyond the obvious observation that it is a gallery space within a hotel. art’otel’s commitment to creative programming — evidenced by the current residency of multimedia artist Ekaterina Adelskaya in its studio, by the hosting of Makiko Harris’s acclaimed ‘Needle Dance’ exhibition in February 2025, and by its IWD gallery takeover by HXR FEST on 8 March — represents a model of cultural institution that takes art seriously enough to structure its hospitality around it.

For Celik, working within a space like art’otel’s Hoxton gallery means operating at the intersection of two kinds of publics: the art world audience that will come specifically for the exhibition, and the hotel guests and Shoreditch passers-by who encounter contemporary art as part of a broader urban experience. This is entirely consistent with her curatorial philosophy. The threshold between the dedicated art space and the everyday world is, for capitArtX, not a boundary to be policed but a zone to be inhabited.

A TBMag Note: On Supporting London’s Turkish Creative Community

TBMag has followed Isil Ezgi Celik’s work since the early days of capitArt, and we are proud to count her among the circle of Turkish creative professionals in London whose work we believe deserves both celebration and serious critical attention. She represents something that TBMag has always tried to document: the particular quality of cultural work that emerges from a position between worlds — the work of people who carry more than one cultural inheritance, who operate in more than one language, and who have learned, sometimes at considerable personal cost, that the threshold is not a place of weakness but a place of unusual clarity.

In a creative landscape that has been shaped, for decades, by the logic of belonging — to a school, a movement, a nationality, a market — Celik’s insistence on the threshold as the site of creative potential is both an artistic position and a political one. It is also, we think, the right position for this moment: a moment in which the boundaries between human and machine creativity, between organic and algorithmic authorship, between Western and non-Western art histories, are all in genuine flux.

‘Artificial Lines of Flight’ runs until 12 March 2026. It is well worth the journey to Hoxton.

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

• Exhibition:  Artificial Lines of Flight
• Dates:  Private Screening 7–12 March 2026
• Venue:  art’otel London Hoxton  ·  Shoreditch, London
• Curated by:  Isil Ezgi Celik / capitArtX
• Also shown:  The Wrong Biennale  ·  London Design Festival
• Concept:  Inspired by Deleuze & Guattari’s ligne de fuite — line of escape, transformation and rupture
• Artists:  Blanche The Vidiot, Copy Planet, Domenec Miralles Tagliabue, Domenico Barra, Francesca Fini, Hyun Cho, Jean-Michel Rolland, Jie Shuai, Lewis Brown, Marcus Wallinder, Mark Cypher, Miguel Ripoll, Mike Petrakis, Mizuho Nishioka, Paulius Sliaupa, Una Raneta (Toñin Lizana), Zivia Li
• capitArt:  capitart.co.uk
• capitArtX:  Global x-media curatorial initiative