A monumental solo project by internationally recognised, Newcastle-based contemporary artist Izabela Pluta as part of a major international co-commission with Trafo Center for Contemporary Art, Poland, and presented with key partner New Annual Festival.

Cavitation unfolds across water, sound and fractured cartographies, examining how systems of orientation fail under pressure, repetition and displacement. For Izabela Pluta, place is always relational–through movement, migration and encounter. As a child, Pluta left Poland in 1986. This departure marked a formative moment in the artist’s life, reflected throughout Cavitation as a tectonic shift that reorganised geographies and belonging. Rather than a biographical account, the project approaches mapping through notions of erasure and containment that attempt to fix land and water through fixed coordinates.

Across photography, sculpture, sound, moving image and textile, Cavitation presents a constellation of material forms to create sensory encounters and bodily echoes of oceanic movements and planetary orbits, where water becomes both atmospheric field and temporal force.