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

08.04.2026 00:17

New York Observer

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.

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 apparatus that is at once maternal and machinic, earthy and cyborg.

Technology, here, is at once an extension of the body and a force that destabilizes and alters it, dissolving binary definitions into a triadic condition in which human, nature and machine are entangled—often with technology asserting a dominant role. The entire exhibition is a hymn to hybridity that embraces a new notion of humanity deeply entangled with technology, yet inseparable from its original interdependence with nature. This inevitably aligns with recent anxieties around A.I., revealing how much they echo those of the past, when humanity first confronted the specter of mechanization and automation introduced by electricity and modern transportation at the turn of the 20th Century.

These technologies have also afforded humanity opportunities to deepen its observation of human life and, someday, extend and modify it. That idea is present in Jean Painlevé’s surrealist protoplasm film L’Œuf d’Épinoche (1927), whose seemingly abstract aquatic imagery finds resonance with Lennart Nilsson’s fetal photographs from A Child Is Born and Sara Deraedt’s conceptual c-prints of a baby born from a computer. Together, the three works map a continuum in which birth, technology and imagination collapse into a single fluid condition where Francis Picabia’s Fille née sans mère has left the domain of speculation and entered that of contemporary science.

This picture of our changing relationship with technological advancement is both a utopia and a warning. El Lissitzky, in his unrealized electromechanical figures for Victory Over the Sun, envisioned a programmed modernity optimized with technological rationality. That same threat and fascination finds a more playful expression in the mechanical ballets of the 1920s avant-gardes, whose legacy finds its continuation in works like Daria Martin’s Soft Materials (2004), which stages an intimate choreography between dancers and responsive robotic devices, bodies and machines learning from one another in a reciprocal exchange.

The show thoughtfully traces the evolution of the cyborg aesthetic, from early 20th-century experiments through to contemporary works like Lucy Beech’s Out of Body (2025), where fluids circulate across infrastructures of waste and reproductive science, revealing a body no longer self-contained but distributed across an intercorporeal network of human, animal and technological systems.

Re-enchanting the mechanical

“New Humans” traces how this enmeshment has gradually reshaped visual imagination itself, culminating in the digital abstraction that surrounds us today, which is perfectly embodied in Jacqueline Humphries’s large-scale works built from ASCII codes, emoticons and A.I.-generated gestures. Here, the glow of the screen is translated into dense, tactile surfaces that collapse the boundary between digital interface and painterly abstraction.

Several more works in the opening section reveal an often-overlooked mystical impulse running through the avant-gardes—an early desire to re-enchant the machine that Gioni explored via a more mystic reading of art history in his recent Milan exhibition “Fata Morgana,” and which one can see in Dada’s humorous appropriations and Surrealism’s speculative reimaginings. Constantin Brâncuși’s polished, alien Newborn, Marcel Duchamp and Picabia’s mechanomorphic fantasies and Salvador Dalí’s luminous Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man—in which a figure violently tears itself from the globe, staging birth as rupture and the violent emergence of a new civilization—all find a natural home here. So does Dadaist Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven’s God, a found assemblage of pipes and hydraulic materials that transforms into a scatological digestive system, drawing parallels between industrial machinery and the human body. It’s as if by absorbing the machine’s logic, humanity might yet domesticate the forces that had irreversibly altered every natural cycle of life.

“Dream Machines” explores this imaginative and spiritual reappropriation of technology, approached here as both a new artistic medium and a mystical vehicle for the collective unconscious and creative impulse. From early fantasies of “influencing machines” to Brion Gysin’s Dreamachine, which uses rhythmic light to induce hallucinatory states, the mechanical becomes a device for unlocking inner vision. This impulse extends through Nanni Balestrini’s algorithmic poetry, where language escapes authorial control—anticipating the generative excess of contemporary A.I.—to A.C.M.’s bricolage architectures assembled from technological debris, Goshka Macuga’s robot-drawn scrolls tracing the genealogy of transhumanism and June Leaf’s anthropomorphization of the machine as imaginative re-enchantment.

This fracturing of machinic rationality opens an erotic and ludic dimension where control dissolves into performance and pleasure. The “New Woman” who emerged with the freedoms of modern society became a particular site for these projections and counterprojections. Male Surrealists like André Breton often rendered women as anonymous vessels, oscillating between muse and monster, between the idealized and the techno-sexualized. In the same period, female artists subverted these constructions, reclaiming the body as a site of psychic and formal autonomy. From the Surrealist drawings and anagrammatic poems of Unica Zürn, Kiki Kogelnik’s fragmented, X-rayed bodies and Liliana Maresca’s assertive self-portraits, to more recent works by Jamian Juliano-Villani, women artists have turned technology into a tool for resistance and self-reinvention, expanding the possibilities of feminine self-representation. Yet what emerges is not a linear emancipation but a recursive loop—one in which surveillance, labor and desire continue to structure the image of woman even as she appears newly autonomous. The interfaces and media may evolve, but the underlying systems of projection and control persist, now embedded within the very technologies that simultaneously promise self-definition and impose new codes of representation of their own.

Yet the promise of techno-symbiosis and collaboration was never without tension, haunted by the enduring threat of machine substitution—an anxiety humanity has carried from the early industrial revolution to today’s A.I. turn. Works such as Jeremy Deller’s Motorola WT4000 Wearable Terminal (2013)—a disembodied arm fitted with a tracking device used in warehouse labor—expose the violence of technologized productivity, where the body is reduced to a monitored unit within systems of extraction and control. The same logic finds a chilling amplification in Simon Denny’s Amazon worker cage (2019), a sculptural realization of a corporate patent for enclosing human workers within algorithmically controlled environments.

Ancestral technologies and liberatory animism

On the next floor, the show turns our attention back to ancestral technologies, where animism and Indigenous epistemologies emerge as alternative systems for understanding and inhabiting the present and confronting the complexity of the future. In a moment marked by the erosion of Western modernity’s linear narratives, these practices reassert forms of knowledge rooted in relationality, where hybridity is not an exception but an accepted condition—shaped through histories of colonial rupture, diasporic displacement and cultural recomposition.

Across works by Jaider Esbell, Santiago Yahuarcani, Pol Taburet, Tau Lewis and Julien Creuzet, this expanded field takes shape through a constellation of beings and speculative worlds that resist anthropocentric hierarchies. Echoing the creolized identities theorized by Oswald de Andrade and Édouard Glissant, the human becomes a porous, shifting entity, continuously negotiated across species, cosmologies and technologies.

Jaider Esbell’s visions, grounded in Macuxi cosmology, and Santiago Yahuarcani’s, anchored in Uitoto mythopoiesis, both function as a form of “artivism.” Painting becomes a site of knowledge transmission and resistance, populated by spirits, animals and ancestral presences that collapse distinctions between the microscopic and the cosmic. Nearby, Ovartaci’s phantasmagoric figures are in states of perpetual metamorphosis, undoing binaries between gender, species and reality itself while finding in creative imagination a form of resistance to societal constriction.

What theorist Mel Chen described as “animacies” becomes tangible: the hierarchies that once separated the living from the nonliving dissolve, giving way to a vision of existence as fundamentally relational, where human, nonhuman and technological life co-constitute one another in an ongoing process of transformation. As the exhibition catalog notes, ancient history around the world is populated by examples of animate beings produced through extraordinary means. Gradually, as divine power and alchemy were displaced by scientific advancement, the animation of inert matter lost none of its power to inspire human creativity—culminating, today, in A.I., which threatens to assimilate both human labor and imagination into the hardware and software logic of machines.

The manipulation of the postwar human

Yet the show also reminds us how, well before today’s crises, postwar and post-nuclear humanity had already confronted the biopolitical implications of technology. This reckoning profoundly altered any stable way of conceiving or representing the human. In its wake, the human collapsed back into what Giorgio Agamben would define as “bare life”—stripped of political and social meaning, reduced to a biological condition not far removed from the animal. It is precisely this threshold that artists across generations attempt to render visible through monstrous, unstable bodies that refuse clear categorization. From Jacqueline de Jong’s chaotic compositions of colliding, ambiguously speciated figures to Miriam Cahn’s pulsating beings—simultaneously human and animal, radiating both pleasure and pain—the body emerges as a site where violence is inscribed and identities are undone.

This lineage continues in contemporary practices, where the confusion between human and animal serves both as a critique of the current model of civilization and as a subversive imaginative strategy. Jana Euler’s grotesque, contorted figures—at once erotic, abject and absurd—destabilize the coherence of the body itself, while Cato Ouyang’s sculptural forms trace how violence reshapes subjectivity, turning humans into beasts and exposing the fragility of any fixed identity. In these works, the monstrous is not an exception but a condition: a mirror held up to systems that continuously produce hierarchies of life, determining who is protected and who can be discarded.

Within this collapse, another possibility opens: as Deleuze and Guattari suggest in their notion of “becoming-animal,” this return is not only regressive but also potentially liberatory—a way of escaping rigid humanist frameworks and re-entering a field of radical interconnection, an alternative horizon for rethinking what a human might still become. As a portable altar-shaped canvas of a toolbox by Frieda Toranzo Jaeger suggests, we already possess the tools—technological and cognitive—to rethink the systems that orient our actions before they carry us toward destruction.

The show traces this rupture back to its earliest manifestation: the aftermath of World War I, when technological warfare reconfigured not only the battlefield but the human body itself. Machine guns, poison gas and mechanized combat returned home in the form of prosthetic bodies—bionic veterans embodying a tragic synthesis of the organic and the artificial. While the Futurists celebrated engineered hybrids, Dada and New Objectivity exposed the resulting alienation, giving form to bodies no longer whole but assembled and reprogrammed—from Hannah Höch’s corporeal taxonomies to Harun Farocki’s machinic visions, in which the technologies of war continue to shape perception even in peacetime. A more playful optimism surfaces in Berenice Olmedo’s medical prosthetics and Cao Fei’s Creature in Oz (2022), a transhumanist, ludic reshaping of new dimensions of bodily expression.

Technology’s instrumentalization extended beyond the individual into the collective. Under fascism, mass reproduction became a tool for constructing the “new man,” dissolving the individual into the body politic—from El Lissitzky and Xanti Schawinsky’s photomontages of crowds forming a leader’s face to Blumenfeld’s grotesque dictators and Ernst’s convulsive L’Ange du foyer. In Cyprien Gaillard’s reactivation of Ernst’s figure, the modern monster is reproposed not as a holographic deepfake but as the possibility of an eternal return of the ideology of the “ideal new human.” From alchemical fantasies to Wilder Penfield’s cortical homunculus—deformed, proportioned not by anatomy but by neural intensity—the desire to recreate life repeatedly yields uncanny doubles. Yuri Ancarani’s Da Vinci (2012) stages this most surgically: a robot performs with hypnotic precision, its arms oscillating between care and control, healing and violation.

The exhibition continues its oscillation across times and positions. On the last floor, it returns to MoMA’s 1959 landmark exhibition “New Images of Man,” evoking—through a dense, salon-style hanging across geographies—the moment of rupture that made any return to a unified representation of the human impossible. In the wake of war, decolonization and the looming threat of nuclear annihilation, the human figure could no longer hold; it fractured, convulsed and dissolved. What unfolds is not a unified vision but a field of dissonant images—figures reduced to larval states, beasts, ghosts or fragments—each bearing witness to a world in which the very category of the human has been irrevocably destabilized.

From Alberto Giacometti’s attenuated, spectral figures suspended between presence and disappearance, to Asger Jorn’s violently gestural bodies and Alina Szapocznikow’s fragmented, prosthetic anatomies, the human emerges as something unstable and continuously remorphing. Francis Bacon’s screaming figures and Jean Dubuffet’s raw, anti-humanist forms further strip the body of coherence, while Paula Rego’s unsettling psychological narratives and Maria Lassnig’s “body awareness” paintings turn inward, registering the human as a site of psychological and corporeal distortion. What remains, with any possibility of unity shattered, is a condition defined by fragility and instability—yet animated by a relentless capacity for adaptation that now compels us toward more fluid definitions.

This chapter also furthers the show’s global perspective, reminding us how this crisis of representation extends beyond the Western canon. In postcolonial contexts, artists such as Ibrahim El-Salahi, Malangatana Valente Ngwenya and Skunder Boghossian similarly dismantle the illusion of a universal human, reconstituting it through creaturely forms shaped by histories of violence, identitarian resistance and cultural memory—bodies merged with ancestral myth, local language and a reattunement to the landscape, becoming sites for both mourning and regeneration.

In the next room, the nightmare of post-atomic disaster is evoked and amplified through works by Japanese artists emerging in the aftermath of Hiroshima. Tatsuo Ikeda’s biomorphic, often grotesque forms imagine life emerging from nuclear sludge—mutant, unstable yet stubbornly resilient—while Natsuyuki Nakanishi’s Map of Human (1959) traces a fragile reconstruction of the body through cellular structures oscillating between wound and repair. Together they map a world in which destruction and regeneration are inseparable. Within this charged atmosphere, Wang Shui’s translucent, altar-like screens emerge as luminous and permeable surfaces—symbolic presences that absorb and refract the surrounding imagery. Across their shimmering planes, the figure of the serpent—sliding between states, shedding its skin—becomes both a guiding and healing presence, suggesting the possibilities of metamorphosis and cyclical renewal. Survival after catastrophe, the room suggests, lies not in resisting change but in learning to become otherwise—as Pierre Huyghe’s video quietly confirms.

The future is already here

As the exhibition moves into its final sections, the human appears less as a fixed subject than as a morphing entity continuously reprogrammed through external infrastructures of labor, desire and control. Early projections of the future city oscillate between utopian promise and dystopian collapse: from Albert Robida’s hauntingly prescient metropolitan disasters and Hugh Ferriss’s monumental skylines—both echoing Fritz Lang’s Metropolis—to Arata Isozaki’s Electric Labyrinth and Constant Nieuwenhuys’s nomadic New Babylon, which recast the city as a mutable, programmable system. Hariton Pushwagner’s Soft City exposed its latent machinery of control, while Bodys Isek Kingelez’s Afrofuturist constructions and Sophia Al-Maria’s Gulf Futurism proposed alternative urbanisms shaped by postcolonial and extractive realities. Monira Al Qadiri’s petro-cultural monuments punctuate the space with symbols of enduring monumentality, while Anicka Yi’s airborne aerobes reimagine the city as an atmospheric, multilevel ecology. What once belonged to speculative fiction now reads as diagnosis: the future city has materialized as a networked and automated environment where the boundaries between human, machine and system have collapsed entirely.

In the exhibition’s climax, “Hall of Robots,” an army of humanoid machines suggests that the utopia or dystopia of cyborgs is already today’s everyday reality. The show’s very starting point, Karel Čapek’s 1920 play Rossum’s Universal Robots—the first work to introduce the concept of the robot—becomes strikingly prescient. “Now, 100 years later, we see we are dealing with similar fears of machines taking over or hopes that they could make our life better,” Gioni said. Teresa Burga’s pioneering biopolitical investigations crystallize this condition, revealing how society has long been translating the body into averages and statistical profiles, reducing subjectivity to data standardized within a system of control. And naturally, an early model of E.T. could not be left out of the mix.

The optimism once carried by Nam June Paik and Atsuko Tanaka’s pioneering fusions of body, media and electricity—which imagined a creative, emotional collaboration with robotic “aliens”—feels distant today. As robots circulate in streets and assist in daily activities, widespread resistance has emerged, often violent, particularly in the U.S. In 2024, China installed 295,000 new industrial robots—more than every other country combined. A recent survey found that Americans are far more concerned about A.I.’s encroachment on their daily lives than people in other wealthy nations. Against this, other artists offer counter-imaginaries: Cannupa Hanska Luger reclaims the technological through ancestral knowledge, turning the robot into an archetypically resonant totem, while Meriem Bennani’s kinetic assemblages oscillate between humor and unease, exposing the absurdity embedded in systems of circulation and automation.

What the show ultimately leaves us with is a question rather than a conclusion: whether the machines and environments built in our image yet exceeding it will liberate or further entrap us—and whether, in confronting them, we might begin to recognize the limits and possibilities of what it means to be human at this stage of our civilization. “We were the first New York institution making exhibitions that directly dealt with the pressing issues of our time,” Gioni added. “We have always been at the forefront of artistic trends and cultural issues. This show continues with this idea of exhibition as a tool to understand the world outside the museum.”