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At the New Museum, Parallel Visions of Humanity’s Future Emerge

Oscillating between utopia and dystopia, a densely layered, sometimes difficult exhibition curated by Massimiliano Gioni visualizes possible futures in which humanity and technology have become irrevocably enmeshed.

New York clearly missed the New Museum during the extensive renovation that added a 60,000-square-foot expansion—designed by Pritzker Prize-winning architecture firm OMA’s Shohei Shigematsu and Rem Koolhaas in collaboration with executive architect Cooper Robertson. Blending seamlessly with the existing SANAA-designed flagship building on the Bowery, it not only more than doubles the gallery space but also introduces a new fluidity of circulation, making the museum feel like a truly living institution.

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To mark the start of the New Museum’s latest chapter, with his signature idiosyncratic and encyclopedic approach, artistic director Massimiliano Gioni has staged an inaugural exhibition that can only be described as an epic of the modern human. “The show will question how artists have envisioned the future, often predicting or dealing with shifting technological transformations while investigating how those transformations have ultimately changed our perception and representation of the self,” he told Observer ahead of the opening. “It looks into the shifting definitions of humans in the 20th and 21st Centuries.”

The era-defining show—aptly titled “New Humans: Memories of the Future”—is not easy to digest, resisting both quick reading and the distracted viewing that so often characterizes the museum experience today. Yet it is precisely in its density and complexity that the show conveys the sensation of living in a present too complex to grasp and a future too elusive to imagine—especially when viewed in light of the collective historical amnesia spreading across much of the Western world, which is something Gioni wanted to address directly after reading about a neurologist who found that people suffering from amnesia also have trouble envisioning the future.

In the catalog, he describes the exhibition as shifting from the traditional “space of purity and contemplation” to a “dynamic research lab or a device for distributing images.” Serendipitously, finding myself reading Emmanuel Carrère’s Ucronie in the same weeks provided an unexpectedly revealing lens through which to read this show, which seemed to resonate with a similar attempt to explore alternate histories and reveal the fragility of our given notion of reality. Weaving a dense web of utopias and afterlives of art between imaginative spiritual and technological visions across the 20th and 21st centuries, the exhibition ultimately reveals how often the utopias of the past have hardened into the dystopias of the present.

This is a show that may be difficult to fully appreciate without some grounding—not necessarily art-historical knowledge of the diverse avant-garde movements it presents, but, more ideally, of the anthropological and sociological conditions that produced them. This is not a story of modernism per se, but an intricate web of meanings and narratives that interrogates the very notion of the future by returning to the past and tracing its entanglement with technology in shaping both.

As the mixed early reactions to the exhibition suggest, many visitors may simply not yet be ready for its language and aesthetics, which reveal contemporary practices that have circulated widely outside the United States but remain less familiar here. Take, for instance, artists like Ivana Basic, who produces her alien forms in her New York studio despite rarely having had institutional exposure in the country. Klára Hosnedlová, who recently took over the entire Hamburger Bahnhof’s hall with the support of Chanel, is also making her first institutional appearance in the U.S. in the show. Even contemporary visionary Anicka Yi first found visibility in European and Asian institutions before her work began circulating in American museums.

“New Humans” is the culmination of two years of intense and expansive research across geographies—something closer to a biennale, though perhaps one staged for a civilization in crisis. One might even describe it as a counter-biennale: one that embraces a universal, multicultural and transhistorical perspective to interrogate what the “new human” is, when we began to define it and how that definition continues to evolve. At the same time, it is likely that only in a city as multicultural as New York could Gioni have assembled such a transhistorical global perspective, supported by an international curatorial team whose members brought both personal knowledge of regional art scenes and art histories and a capacity to foreground the singularity of lesser-known visionary practices across geographies.

A journey into post-humanist hybridity

The exhibition begins with a monumental, unsettling installation by Klára Hosnedlová, whose raw, earth-inflected forms unfold along the staircase, grounding the exhibition in an almost primordial materiality while also instilling a foreboding sense of displacement from traditional human-nature hierarchies. Directly ahead, pioneering artist Tishan Hsu has transformed an entire wall into an expansive, skin-like surface where digital circuitry, architectural structure and bodily membranes are enmeshed within a single organism, visualizing the composite infrastructure that binds together today’s organic and artificial, physical and digital life.

Past those unsettling first encounters, “Reproductive Futures” immerses visitors in a tension that feels long deferred yet unavoidable—a pull toward necessary symbiosis and embodiment, forced by the anxieties around the notion of the “human machine” that have so often prevailed over the mystique of the “New Man.” The artists in this section have alternatively portrayed the human body as stretched between organic matter and technological extension, between animality and post-humanist speculation. Their work oscillates between the illusion of technological optimization and the recognition of the body itself as a machine—one whose engineering is directly tethered to the earth, the mud and the organic cycles of decay and transformation that govern all matter. This hybrid condition finds resonant expression in Wangechi Mutu’s the first born (2025) and in Tamara Henderson’s Language of Mud (2018), a swollen, theatrical figure at the entrance whose ceramic limbs and metal armature leak, pulse and mutate like a living........

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