Who Runs the World? was a multidisciplinary group exhibition at The Bomb Factory Art Foundation’s Marylebone Gallery, exploring authorship, creativity and human labour at a time increasingly shaped by automation, machine learning and digital production.

Held in May 2025, the exhibition considered what happens to the value of human-made work as machines become increasingly capable of producing images, texts, music and other forms of creative output. Rather than offering a definitive answer, it brought together artists whose practices negotiated different relationships between physical making, technology and systems of production.

Across sculpture, painting, film and digital media, the works examined questions of authorship, touch, automation, labour and obsolescence. Together, they considered whether technological acceleration might diminish the significance of the handmade—or instead make material, embodied forms of making newly visible.

The exhibition reflected The Bomb Factory Art Foundation’s commitment to independent, artist-led programming and its interest in bringing emerging and established practices into dialogue around contemporary questions of technology, labour and culture.

Artists

Conor Ackhurst
Damaris Athene
Be Andr
László von Dohnányi
Katrin Hanusch
Kieran Leach
Isobelle Munckton
Josèfa Ntjam
Laurence Owen
Damien Roach
Rafał Zajko
00 Zhang