the brand-new museum exhibits early visions of new human beings
Proposing an upsetting vision of humankind, New Human beings: Memories of the Future takes control of the New Museum’s recently finished growth. The museum’s Artistic Director Massimiliano Gioni curates the program by gathering more than a century of artists’ actions to moments when technology and society reframed the meaning of being human. Throughout 4 floors of the OMA-designed building, earlier visions of the future exist along with present-day concerns that stay unresolved.
For Gioni, this minute of modification feels symbolic, and he tells designboom throughout an interview ahead of the opening: ‘We are living in a minute in which some modifications worldwide of technology are concerning an existential questioning.‘ He points to the experience of being asked by a maker to show one’s own humanity, an uncanny turnaround that has actually now become familiar.
He suggests that, within that uncertainty, people turn toward myth. He discusses: ‘We come to a place where science and innovation are so mysterious they appear magical,‘ Within this frame, artists run as storytellers who help make sense of the moving and unsure world around us. In many cases they envision paradises– in others, they visualize something darker.
Klára Hosnedlová, Shelter. image © designboom monstrous and progressive humanity on display screen New People: Memories of the Future opens along with the New Museum’s physical growth, a context that forms Massimiliano Gioni’s outlook. Opening a new building today carries a different set of expectations than it did in 2007, and he describes the job as’ a vote of self-confidence in the future,’even while acknowledging a sense of doubt. Even the architecture by OMA reinforces that direction, with a kind like an arrow pointing forward. Meanwhile, the curatorial approach reverses to history’s efforts at picturing what lies ahead.
This backward glance becomes an approach. Structured through what Gioni calls a ‘bifocal lens,’ the exhibition puts archaeology next to prediction. It traces positive futures that when felt possible along with those menacing worlds that eventually ended up being truths with frightening repercussions. Some artworks remember visions connected to progress and growth, while others render humanity’s most monstrous minutes.
Entirely, they recommend that the concept of paradise stays unclear, shaped through completing concepts of what a future may require. In this sense, ‘New People’ evokes both ambition and consolation, and invites visitors to consider how earlier creativities of mankind inform what follows.
Massimiliano Gioni ahead of the New Museum opening. image © designboom Dialogue with Massimiliano Gioni designboom(DB ): The program explores minutes when technological or social shifts changed how people imagined the future of mankind. What made this the right moment to revisit that concept?
Massimiliano Gioni (MG): It’s a couple of factors to consider. One is that we are residing in a moment in which some modifications on the planet of innovation are pertaining to, I don’t understand if it’s an existential hazard, but definitely to an existential questioning.
In my catalog essay I use the examples of computers asking you to prove you’re not a robot. No longer do we just question if we are speaking with a machine or a person– we have really come to a point in which a machine is asking you to show that you’re an individual. In these moments of existential doubt, I think we pull back in the space of myth. We concern a location where science and technology are so mystical they appear magical.
Therefore we enter once again into the space of misconception. Artists, as the makers of misconceptions, are probably the ones to start from to find out and understand the stories that we tell each other to comprehend such changes. So there is that, which let’s call the historical minute. And secondly, there is a more private or personal minute, which is the opening of the New Museum.
New Humans: Memories of the Future, 2026, exhibition view. New Museum, New York City. image © designboom MG(continued): To open a building today in 2026 is a really different proposal than when we opened in 2007. Concepts around expansion and novelty were various eighteen years back. Today, maybe in the wake of COVID, concepts of growth and expansion are definitely various. They come with different expectations, obligations, insecurity, and questioning.
So we thought, we are opening a new building that is in some way a vote of confidence in the future. It implies we still think there is somewhere to go. And we open also with a structure that is somewhat futuristic in its evocation. The structure is actually shaped like an arrow pointing forward. So it seemed in some way unavoidable to look back at different ideas of the future, a few of them that have shown up, some of them that arrived with terrible consequences. Through questioning those futures, I think we maybe see a way forward.
The show is developed on a proportion or a bifocal lens. It’s split between archaeology and prophecy. By doing so, it takes a look at some future pasts from which we can get a warning. The show is also full of awful concepts connected to ‘brand-new men’ and ‘exceptional men.’ On one end, that acts as a caution of futures we don’t want to occupy ever again. On the other, it likewise acts as an alleviation in the sense that, if we have endured previous minutes of change, we will ideally survive this one as well.
New Human Beings: Memories of the Future, 2026, exhibit view. New Museum, New York City. image © designboom DB: Our editorial theme this season is Paradise, Applied, with utopia being a frustration for things as they are, and an eternal desire to make them much better. We’re interested in paradise less as an abstract ideal and more as
something that can shape genuine thinking and action. In your view, how does this exhibition engage with that kind of utopian thinking?
MG: That’s an excellent question, to which I don’t have a full answer. On one hand, it’s quite about ‘utopias’ in nearly the actual sense of a non-place or a different place. The fourth flooring is everything about cities of the creativity. Paradises are also firstly cities– they’re a topos, it’s a location.
I was considering the program and reading the book Is There Any World to Come? by anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. He asks at this minute in time if it even makes sense to imagine a world to come. He obtains from Bruno Latour a very fascinating difference about 2 types of utopias. One is the ‘Plus Ultra’ utopia– of which there is a lot in this show– which calls for more innovation, more things, enhanced access to resources or concepts or technology.
New Human Beings: Memories of the Future, 2026, exhibition view. New Museum, New York City. photo © Dario Lasagni
MG
(
continued): The opposite way of thinking is an ideal future that is not produced through constant abundance and growth, but more as a practice of coexistence, as a scaled-down economy of reduction rather than boost. The idea of the ‘future as more’ might not necessarily be the response. The response might be a ‘future of less.’ Take Native wisdom, for example. We have a gorgeous commission by Santiago Yahuarcani, who’s actually an Indigenous artist from the Amazon.
I likewise do not wish to be classic in the idea that always less will be the future. They are probably both possibilities. But yes, I believe one criticism might be that the show thinks of innovation as development and development, and maybe the future does not always have to pass that method. However again, I’m not evaluating these futures and giving them words of efficiency or sanity.
There are a great deal of futuristic concepts that, thank goodness, stopped working, or concepts that sadly happened. The concept of a ‘new guy,’ especially, was associated likewise with extremely frightening ideas that came true, of ‘inferior’ races, of racism and so on.