Section 1
Biography
paula roush is a portuguese artist and researcher working across photography, publishing, installation, and computational processes. Her practice investigates how images are produced, circulated, and transformed within ecological, technological, and archival systems, with particular attention to what resists prediction, stabilization, and representation.
Her work unfolds through msdm (mobile strategies of display & mediation), an ongoing artistic research programme and editorial platform through which she develops speculative, participatory, and site-responsive projects. msdm operates as a mobile framework for thinking with images — as material, relational, and epistemic processes — bringing together publishing, fieldwork, and experimental image-making.
Within this framework, paula develops long-term cycles of work engaging river ecologies, post-industrial landscapes, botanical processes, and artificial intelligence. Her projects often combine situated, tactile protocols — such as cameraless photography and textile printing — with algorithmic and language-based systems. Across these works, images are approached not as representations but as events shaped by contingency, error, and collective authorship.
paula’s recent projects include Torn, Folded, Curled [+], an investigation into archival systems, classification, and practices of care developed through dialogue with institutional collections; ‘paula’ & Work: A Document on Machinic Enslavement in Academic Capitalism [ + ], an AI-driven exploration of technobiography, algorithmic governance, and machinic legibility within academic infrastructures; One Green Eye, the Other Blue — Herbarium of the Anthropocene [+], a multi-layered project combining post-industrial fieldwork, botanical processes, and generative image-making to explore material and algorithmic entanglements; and Liquid Memories [+], a residency-based research project approaching water as an epistemic system, using diffraction, participatory laboratories, and publishing as methods of knowledge production. Alongside these, her ongoing work with the Found Photo Foundation [+] extends her research into vernacular archives, orphan photographs, and collective authorship, exploring how found images can be reactivated through editorial, pedagogical, and participatory practices.
Her practice proposes artistic research as a form of situated intelligence — attentive, relational, and accountable to the incalculable dimensions of contemporary life.
Section 2
Working position
I write this not as a biography pulled from elsewhere, but from within a practice shaped by sustained work, decisions, refusals, and continuities. This is what I know, cleanly and without mythology.
I work as an artist, researcher, editor, and educator across photography, publishing, installation, pedagogy, and computational processes. My practice is not medium-led but infrastructural: I treat images, books, platforms, workshops, and institutions as materials to be handled, reconfigured, and sometimes resisted.
I am the founder of msdm — mobile strategies of display & mediation, which functions as a para-institutional platform rather than a conventional publisher or collective. Through msdm, I have developed a long-term practice of editorial experimentation, treating publishing as a spatial, relational, and ethical practice rather than a format.
My work is grounded in situated research: walking, fieldwork, archival handling, collective making, teaching, and long-duration engagement with sites and communities. I work with found photographs, orphan archives, herbariums, industrial ruins, and vernacular image cultures, often mobilising fiction, fabulation, annotation, and computational processes as critical tools.
Methodologically, my practice is shaped by feminist and decolonial thought, technobiography and autoethnography, posthuman and more-than-human perspectives, and slow, relational, care-based pedagogies. I consistently use publishing as methodology rather than documentation — books, zines, cards, tables, exhibitions, and online platforms operate as mobile architectures where knowledge is activated rather than concluded.
My recent projects, including one green eye, the other blue — herbarium of the anthropocene, engage artificial intelligence alongside post-industrial fieldwork, botanical processes, and material image-making, exploring how algorithmic and ecological systems co-produce images, knowledge, and classification. More broadly, my work has critically engaged with algorithmic governance, academic capitalism, and artificial intelligence, particularly from within the university. I have articulated a critique of the managerial, metricised, and platformised university, using installation, editorial practice, and AI-generated images as forms of counter-infrastructure rather than compliance.
Across this work, what matters to me is not a signature style but a consistent stance: a refusal of optimisation and scale, a commitment to care, slowness, and relation, an understanding of institutions as materials rather than authorities, and a willingness to remain in instability rather than resolve it.
If I had to say it simply:
I build conditions for thinking, making, and publishing inside the cracks of institutions, without seeking to stabilise those cracks into new structures of power.
That’s what the work keeps doing.
Working infrastructurally
When I say that my practice is not medium-led but infrastructural, I mean that I don’t begin with a medium and then produce work within its limits. I begin with conditions — with how things are organised, supported, circulated, and sustained. I’m interested less in what an image, a book, or a project is, and more in what makes it possible, what it depends on, and who or what it holds in place.
I treat images, books, platforms, workshops, and institutions on the same plane. None of these are just outputs or contexts for me. They are materials. I handle them, work with their weight and constraints, and pay attention to how they shape relations, time, and labour. An image can function like an infrastructure; a workshop can become a publishing space; a platform can act as an archive; an institution can be temporarily reconfigured as a site of care or experimentation.
Working infrastructurally means rearranging what already exists rather than inventing from scratch. It means staying close to systems, touching them, learning their limits, and intervening from within. Sometimes that involves reconfiguration — bending formats, slowing processes down, shifting roles. At other times it involves resistance: refusing legibility, withdrawing from optimisation, or misaligning myself from expectations of efficiency and scale.
This way of working doesn’t come from theory alone. It comes from experience — from moving between artistic, editorial, pedagogical, and institutional contexts, and from living through their failures as much as their possibilities. Thinking and making happen for me inside these systems, not outside them. My practice operates there, in the tension between use and refusal, care and exhaustion, continuity and breakdown.
That’s what I mean when I say my practice is infrastructural. It’s not about mastering media or producing stable forms, but about working on the conditions that shape how work, knowledge, and lives are organised — and finding ways to keep those conditions open, relational, and accountable.
EXHIBITIONS (SELECTION)
Andamentos no espaço e no tempo, MiraForum Gallery, September 2025
Isto não é um herbário! Alberg'art Gallery, Porto September 2025
One green eye the other blue. Herbarium of the anthropocene, MiraForum Gallery, March 2025
Follow Y/Our River (Books of Water), Totally Thames Festival and Copeland Gallery, London, 2024
'paula' & Work: A Document on the Machinic Enslavement in Academic Capitalism 2023-24, Borough Road Gallery, London, 2024
Publishing as Watery Strategy - The work of paula roush and msdm publications, IMAGO Gallery Lisbon, 2024
Places of Unrest and Restoration, The Silver Record Festival, Platform Gallery, Vaasa, 2024
The Library of Artistic Print on Demand, German National Library, Leipzig and Museum VILLA STUCK, Munich, 2024)
"A title that brings us together”, msdm House-Studio-Gallery Woolwich, London, 2023
Follow Y/Our River Lea-minal Edges: Borough Road Gallery, London, 2023
Liquid Memory, Water Museum, Lisbon 2023
liquid memories ~to read with water, 2022, Borough Road Gallery, London, 2022
Museums Without Walls, Isabel Bader Centre, Kingston CA, 2022
BOX. UNBOX, Godsbanen Arts Centre, Aarhus Denmark, 2022
Memoria Liquida, Casa da Imagem Vila Nova de Gaia, 2021
Trabalhos Liquidos & Jerricans, Cozinha Gallery, Porto, 2021
Paintball Field, Barreiro Photography Month, The Red Gallery, Barreiro 2019
Infinite Multiple, Carrol Fletcher and Arebite Galleries, London, UK, 2017-2018
UNBOUND, Herbert Read Gallery, University for the Creative Arts, Canterbury UK, 2017
Torn Folded Curled, Makan Project Space, Beirut, 2015
Queer Paper Gardens, Museu da Electricidade, Lisbon, 2013
Dreaming Through –On & Into the Exotic, Contemporary Arts and Learning, London, 2013
CURATORIAL PROJECTS (SELECTION)
ə/uh/-books project space for material publishing, London South Bank University, 2016-2018
The Book Dispersed, publishing as relational experience, Casa das Artes +Sput&Nik the Window, Porto, 2017
Faz Tu Mesmx- Arte por Instrução/ DIY: Art by Instruction, Sput&Nik The Window Gallery, Porto, 2016
Hetero q.b.,international video programme, Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea, Lisboa, 2013
Off the s{h}elf: the self and subjectivity in the artist’s book, Stockwell Studios, London
New Territories/Novos Territórios
Pavilhão 28 Espaço Expositivo do Centro Hospitalar Psiquiátrico de Lisboa, Lisbon, 2009
Mundos Locais Local Worlds
Centro Cultural de Lagos, 2008
Welcome Goodbye Adeus Obrigada- Journeys, dislocations and imaginary nations
Blue Elephant Theatre & Little Portugal, UK 2006
POSTSCRIPT (Part One): Portuguese Live Art in the Age of Scripted Reality, [SPACE] London, 2004
PUBLICATIONS (SELECTION)
-One Green Eye, the Other Blue: Herbarium of the Anthropocene, Monograph, 2025:
A pocket-sized publication emerging from a passage through industrial ruination, historical and domestic archives, and territories in transformation. Structured as a speculative herbarium rooted in the Campanhã area (Porto), the book combines cyanotypes, botanical materials and editorial fragments, unfolding as a technobiography in dialogue with more-than-human ecosystems.
ISBN: 978-1-7396192-7-5
-Wide Load [Bred Last]: A House Moved, Monograph, 2023:
A collaborative publication documenting architectural house-moving practices through photography, archival research and collective authorship. The book developed across multiple institutional contexts and editions, exploring mobility, labour and reuse as spatial and cultural strategies.
ISBN: 978-1-7391803-1-7
-Photobook Is / Did You Mean Photo Book Is, Photobook, 2020:
An AI-generated publication investigating photobook print-on-demand as a critical media practice. Structured in two sections, the book examines the term “photobook” across vernacular, technical and theoretical contexts, alongside patent diagrams related to automated photobook production systems.
ISBN: 9798669289034
- Follow Y/Our River Lea-minal Edges: Prompts for Transitory States of Being, Artist's Book, 2023: Documents the "Follow Y/Our River" project, highlighting ecological awareness
and personal development through artistic inquiry.
ISBN: 978-1-7390996-4-0
- Follow Y/Our River: A Manual for Deep
Mapping in the Lower Lea Valley, Educational
Manual, 2023: Guides a place-based teaching
approach, utilizing deep mapping techniques
for exploring watery landscapes.
ISBN: 978-1-7390996-5-7
- Liquid Memories~ to read with water,
Artist's Book, 2022: Accompanies the
"LiquidMemories" project, exploring water's
interconnection with memory and narrative
through participatory art practices.
ISBN: 978-0-9553793-5-2
-WATER PRINTS, 2022
An archive of experiments testing the interaction of prints with water, and varied painting and paper folding techniques.
ISBN: 9781739099602
AWARDS
Fundació Mies van der Rohe Lilly Reich Grant for Equality in Architecture
The Instituto Camões and the Embassy of Portugal in Denmark award for BOX. UNBOX exhibition at Godsbaden Aarhus
London Erasmus grant recipient in collaboration with Victoria Browne, Publishing Studio / KHiO Oslo Art Academy
Bus-Spotting + A Story (photobook) short-listed for Photo-Text Award, Arles Rencontres de Photographie
School of Arts & Creative Industries grant recipient, Research for monograph on photobook publishing Arab Image Foundation residency in the photographic archives,
Beirut PlanBEY Makan residency in the publishing studio, Beirut
Nothing To Undo (photobook) First Prize: The Sheffield International Artist’s Book Prize
Nothing To Undo (photobook) shortlisted for The Kassel Fotobook Festival
Centre for Media & Culture Research (LSBU) grant recipient to research printmaking technologies integrated into photobook publishing at the Thames Barrier Print Studio
ADXISTUR grant recipient to develop participatory project Xistorias, Gois Schist Villages, Pt
Gulbenkian UK/ Instituto Camoes, grant recipient to curate ‘Welcome Goodbye Adeus Obrigada’
SPACE Commission to develop participatory project Bowville, Bow road pop-up space,
London Arts Council England, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Southwark Council, South East London Community Foundation and Community Renewal Unit grants, grants recipient in collaboration with Coleman Project Space to develop participatory project SOS OK Emergency Biscuit, London
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE
- Founder & Lead Artist | msdm (mobile strategies of display & mediation) | 2004 -Present
- Spearheads a collective platform at the nexus of art, curatorial and publishing practices, focusing on contemporary mobility and ecological issues.
- Directs projects utilising mobile strategies, transforming vacant sites into spaces of artistic and cultural exchange.
- Fosters interdisciplinary collaborations, integrating para-architectural methodologies, digital technologies and relational aesthetics.
- Senior Lecturer | London South Bank University, School of Arts and Creative Industries | 2006 - 2025
- Develops and delivers curriculum on contemporary art practices.
- Supervises innovative student research projects, emphasizing social and ecological engagement.
EDUCATION
paula holds an Honorary PhD as an Art Work from the South London Gallery / Contemporary Art Society Fund Award (UK) and a Master’s degree in Creative Arts Therapies from Emporia State University / Fulbright Research Award (US). She also holds a BA in Social Psychology from Lisbon University. paula has participated in artist residencies at Mira Galerias (Chão Terra Pessoas project), Bauhaus Kolleg (Event City project), the Arab Image Foundation (Photobook publishing from the archives), and Frans Masereel Centrum (Memory of Stones project).
SKILLS & COMPETENCIES
-Expertise in place-based research, decolonial and hydrofeminist methodologies.
-Proficiency in artistic and computational practices, including digital and analogue photography, cameraless photographic processes, generative AI, and experimental web tools.
-Advanced skills in curatorial practice, book design and independent publishing.
=Experience in community engagement, participatory frameworks and interdisciplinary collaboration.
LANGUAGES
- Portuguese: Native;
- English: Fluent
- French: Proficient (reading and speaking)
