the new museum exhibits early visions of young people
Proposing a disturbing vision of humanity, New Humans: Memories of the Future takes on the New Museum‘small recently completed expansion. Artistic Director of the Museum Massimiliano Gioni curates the show by bringing together over a century of artists’ responses to moments when technology and society have reshaped what it means to be human. On its four floors OWN-Designed building, past visions of the future are presented alongside today’s questions that remain unresolved.
For Gioni, this moment of change is symbolic and says the designboom during a interview ahead of the opening: ‘We live in a time when some changes in the world of technology come to an existential question.It points to the experience of being asked by a machine to prove your humanity, an unusual twist that has now become famous.
He suggests that, amid this uncertainty, people turn to myth. It explains: ‘We are reaching a place where science and technology are so mysterious they seem magical,Within this context, artists act as storytellers who help us make sense of the changing and uncertain world around us. In some cases they imagine utopias — in others they envision something darker.
Klára Hosnedlová, Refuge. image © designboom
monstrous and progressive humanity on display
New Humans: Memories of the Future opens parallel to New Museumof physical expansion, a framing framework Massimiliano Gionihis perspective. Opening a new building today has different expectations than it did in 2007, and he describes the project as a “vote of confidence in the future,” even as he acknowledges a sense of hesitation. Even the architecture from OWN reinforces this direction, with an arrow-like shape pointing forward. Meanwhile, the curatorial approach returns to history’s attempts to imagine what lies ahead.
This backward glance becomes a method. Structured through what Gioni calls a “bifocal lens,” the exhibition places archeology alongside prophecy. It traces hopeful futures that once seemed possible alongside these menacing worlds that eventually became reality with terrifying consequences. Some artworks evoke visions associated with progress and expansion, while others depict humanity’s most monstrous moments.
Together, they suggest that the concept of utopia remains unstable, shaped through competing ideas about what a future might entail. In this sense, New Humans is both aspirational and comforting, and invites visitors to consider how humanity’s past imaginings inform what comes next.
Massimiliano Gioni ahead of the opening of the New Museum. image © designboom
Dialogue with Massimiliano Gioni
designboom (DB): The show explores moments when technological or social changes changed the way people imagined the future of humanity. What made this the right time to revisit this idea?
Massimiliano Gioni (MG): These are some thoughts. One is that we live in a time where some changes are coming in the world of technology, I don’t know if it’s an existential threat, but definitely an existential challenge.
In my catalog essay I use examples of computers asking you to prove you are not a robot. We’re no longer just wondering if we’re talking to a machine or a person – we’ve actually reached a point where a machine asks you to prove you’re a person. In these moments of existential doubt, I think we retreat into the realm of myth. We are reaching a place where science and technology are so mysterious they seem magical.
And so we enter the realm of myth again. Artists, as mythmakers, are probably the ones who need to start to learn and understand the stories we tell each other to make sense of such changes. So there is what we can call a historical moment. And secondly, there is a more private or personal moment, which is the opening of the New Museum.
New Humans: Memories of the Future, 2026, exhibition view. New Museum, New York. image © designboom
MG (continued): Opening a building today in 2026 is a very different proposition than when we opened in 2007. The ideas around expansion and innovation were different eighteen years ago. Today, perhaps in the wake of COVID, ideas about growth and expansion are certainly different. They come with different expectations, responsibilities, self-doubt and self-doubt.
So we thought, we are opening a new building which is in a way a vote of confidence in the future. It means we still believe there is somewhere to go. And we also open with a building that is somewhat futuristic in its appeal. The structure is literally shaped like an arrow pointing forward. So it seemed somewhat inevitable that we would look back at different ideas about the future, some of which arrived, some of which arrived with dire consequences. Through interrogating these future deadlines, I think we might see a way forward.
The representation is based on a symmetry or bifocal lens. It is divided between archeology and prophecy. In doing so, it looks at certain future pasts from which we can take a warning. The show is also full of terrible ideas associated with “young men” and “senior men.” On the one hand, this serves as a warning about the future we don’t want to inhabit again. On the other hand, it also serves as a comfort in the sense that if we have survived previous moments of change, hopefully we will survive this one too.
New Humans: Memories of the Future, 2026, exhibition view. New Museum, New York. image © designboom
DB: Our editorial theme this season is Utopia, Applied, with utopia being a dissatisfaction with the way things are and an eternal desire to make them better. We are interested in utopia less as an abstract ideal and more as something that can shape real thought and action.
How do you think this exhibition relates to this kind of utopian thinking?
MG: This is a very good question, to which I do not have a complete answer. On the one hand, it is very much about “utopias” in the almost literal sense of a non-place or a different place. The fourth floor is all about fantasy cities. Utopias are also first and foremost cities — they are place, they are place.
I was thinking about the show and reading the book Is There Any World to Come? by anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. He asks now whether it makes sense to imagine a world to come. Borrowing from Bruno Latour is a very interesting distinction between two kinds of utopias. One is the “Plus Ultra” utopia — of which there is a lot in this show — that requires more technology, more stuff, improved access to resources or ideas or technology.
New Humans: Memories of the Future, 2026, exhibition view. New Museum, New York. photo © Dario Lasagni
MG (continued): The opposite way of thinking is an ideal future that is not created through continued abundance and growth, but more as a practice of coexistence, a reduced economy of reduction rather than growth. The idea of ”the future the more” may not necessarily be the answer. The answer could be a “future of the few”. Take indigenous wisdom for example. We have a beautiful order from Santiago Yahuarcaniwho is actually an indigenous artist from the Amazon.
I also don’t want to be nostalgic for the idea that the future will necessarily be less. It’s probably both possibilities. But yeah, I think one criticism could be that the show imagines technology as progress and advancement, and maybe the future doesn’t necessarily have to go that way. But again, I don’t rate these futures and give them words of efficacy or logic.
There are many futuristic ideas that, thank God, failed or ideas that unfortunately came to fruition. The idea of a “new man”, in particular, was also associated with very scary ideas that came true, about “inferior” races, about racism, etc.
