Dr Laura Yuile

Bio

Laura is an artist, researcher, and educator working at the intersection of contemporary art, digital culture, and spatial politics. Her practice-based research examines how infrastructures – such as housing, retail, logistics, and networked technologies – shape everyday life, produce cultural imaginaries, and mediate forms of value, labour, and community. Working across installation, moving image, sound, performance, publishing, and collaborative research, she is particularly interested in how large-scale economic and technological systems are experienced at the level of the intimate, domestic, and everyday.

Laura holds a PhD from Northumbria University, where her doctoral research developed a sustained investigation into artistic interventions addressing financialised housing, speculative urban development, and the socio-spatial impacts of property-led economies. Laura’s work has been shaped by feminist and situated methodologies that foreground care, materiality, and the politics of everyday space.

A central strand of her ongoing research is ASSET ARREST (2015 - ongoing), a long-term investigative art project and podcast series that critically examines financialised housing, speculative urban development, and real estate as cultural infrastructure. Through fieldwork, interviews, sound recordings, and alternative image-making strategies, ASSET ARREST explores how housing functions not only as shelter, but as asset, abstraction, and speculative instrument. The project has addressed sites including London’s Balfron Tower, property guardianship schemes, and under-occupied developments often described as “ghost cities.” Each episode of the podcast series centres around a viewing of a different residential property, with Laura and invited guests posing as potential buyers.

ASSET ARREST has been developed through a number of research collaborations, including work with the Politics of Urban Social Innovation research group in the Geography Department at Durham University, and with the London Cultural Diversity Lab at City, University of London. The latter forms part of the Creative Impact Research Centre Europe (CIRCE), a network of five research labs based in Berlin and funded by the German Ministry for Media and Culture and the Brexit Adjustment Reserve Fund. These collaborations have supported interdisciplinary exchange across art, geography, urban studies, and cultural policy, and have informed the project’s emphasis on public-facing research and collective inquiry.

More recently, Laura has extended ASSET ARREST to the Chinese context, undertaking field research that critically engages Western media narratives around so-called “ghost cities.” This work includes research in Ordos (Inner Mongolia), particularly the Kangbashi New Area, examining how metaphors of vacancy and failure obscure longer temporalities of urbanisation, state planning, and lived experience. Alongside ASSET ARREST, she is developing Yiwucore, a research-led art project based on fieldwork in Yiwu, China – home to the world’s largest small-commodities wholesale market. Rather than treating Yiwu as spectacle, Yiwucore approaches the city as a highly functional, infrastructural environment defined by repetition, standardisation, and global circulation. The project positions Yiwu as an unintentional “core” aesthetic, in dialogue with online “-core” genres such as normcore and liminalcore, while deliberately resisting image-saturated or AI-driven approaches.

Laura’s earlier work includes the Heavy View series, a group of installations and publications centred on broken, obsolete, and malfunctioning electronic appliances sourced from suburban environments across London. These works explored technological obsolescence, domestic infrastructures, and the afterlives of networked devices through sculptural assemblage and moving image. A related publication, A Pixellated Crust of White Noise, brought together materials from the research process, including field notes and reflections on obsolescence, circulation, and care. 

Laura is the founder of the Museum of Modern Shopping (MoMS), an ongoing curatorial and artistic platform that examines shopping, retail, and consumption as cultural systems. MoMS has taken the form of exhibitions, publications, performances, and collaborations with artists working across media. Projects such as Islands of Predictability have explored algorithmic architectures, domestic screens, and platform capitalism.

Alongside her research practice, she has extensive experience as an educator across undergraduate and postgraduate levels in the UK and internationally. Laura’s teaching emphasises art as a socially aware and research-led practice. She supports students in developing independent creative voices while also helping them situate their work within wider social, political, and technological frameworks. Laura’s teaching often integrates site-based research, collaborative projects, alternative forms of documentation, and critical engagement with contemporary issues including digital infrastructures, sustainability, and emerging technologies.

Her work has been presented internationally across galleries, project spaces, broadcast platforms, and academic contexts. Recent exhibitions and screenings have taken place at SCHIRN Kunstahlle (Frankfurt), Fruitmarket Gallery (Edinburgh), Kunstraum Kreuzberg for Transmediale Festival (Berlin), Museum of Contemporary Art Chengdu (Chengdu) and Belvedere 21 (Vienna). Laura’s recently published writing in Arts of the Working Class, Viscose Journal, and SPAZIOMENSA magazine. She regularly contributes to talks, lectures, and panels on art, infrastructure, urban space, and digital culture, and is committed to building collaborative research networks across disciplines and geographies.

Further information about Laura’s work can be found at https://laurayuile.com. You can also visit the project-specific websites of ASSET ARREST and the Museum of Modern Shopping.