Our age of technology is dominated by ideas of endless growth and non-stop progress. This programme brings together artists and thinkers challenging sci-fi traditions and finding inspiration from overlooked ideas from the past. The featured artists propose radical ways of living and suggest new ways of shaping social relationships. They look to cultural heritage, non-human perspectives and socially engaged approaches to technology. They use tools such as speculative fiction, to reclaim and reshape concepts of the future.
Join us as we dip into the past to question the present, recovering and reimagining visions of our world that have often been left out of mainstream culture.
This event is organised by Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational in partnership with Hyundai Motor, supported by Amos Rex.
11.00–11.15: Welcome and Introduction – Dr. Val Ravaglia
11.15–11.45: Film Screening – Naomi Rincón Gallardo, Dung Kinship (2024)
Dung Kinship (2024) invites viewers on a digestive, psychedelic trip, through a narrative world fed by waste.
We meet a cast of characters including fly-women, mushroom children, a beetle and the Patron of Ecstasy. We are transported from the ground above to the underworld dwelling of the Matron of Filth and S***, a cavernous grotto in which dung kinfolk transform rotting and dying matter into life-giving, fertile soil.
Dung Kinship is a metaphor for transformation and rejuvenation in the face of eco-social collapse. It reflects on the importance of even the tiniest lifeforms, within cosmological global structures.
11.45–13.30: Session 1
This session explores the question of distribution within our contemporary world: of time, wealth, resources and the promise of a future. It brings together a lecture-performance by Sonya Dyer and presentation from Gary Zhexi Zhang, speculating on how distributive models might be used as tools to dream up new, sustainable realities.
Their presentations are followed by a conversation and Q&A, moderated by experimental writer and theorist, Amy Ireland.
11.45–12.05: Gary Zhexi Zhang
In this presentation, Gary Zhexi Zhang inverts William Gibson’s famous phrase, suggesting "the future has been distributed – it’s just not quite here yet".
Focussing on China as a political and material phenomenon, Zhang asks: where is the future distributed? He explores China’s status as an ‘outsider hegemon’ and an ‘upstream reality’: a nation operating across different topologies of time, in which multiple material timelines are playing out at once.
This talk presents time as neither universal nor linear. It explores how historical imagination is produced in uneven ways, creating a world that is simultaneous but always fragmented and speculative.
12.05–12.25: Sonya Dyer
Sonya Dyer presents a lecture-performance, building upon her current research into growing older when the future that we were promised is not what lies ahead of us.
With metrics suggesting the world is heading towards polycrisis - with multiple calamities (environmental, economic, societal) occurring simultaneously - Sonya explores the space between the ‘post scarcity’ dream of Star Trek and the projected reality to interrogate her previous desire to live to be 100 years old.
Drawing upon speculative fiction and personal narrative, this lecture performance confronts the contradictions and challenges of fearing a future that is already a reality for many people in the Global South.
12.25–12.40: Break
12.40–13.25: In-conversation moderated by Amy Ireland
13.30-14.45: Lunch Break
14.45–15.00: Introduction – Katrina Nzegwu
15.00–15.35: Film Screening – Ayoung Kim, Delivery Dancer’s Arc: 0° Receiver (2024)
Delivery Dancer’s Arc: 0° Receiver is the second film in Ayoung Kim’s Delivery Dancer trilogy, extending the narrative universe of Delivery Dancer’s Sphere (2022).
Moving between multiple worlds and temporalities, from a techno-futuristic Korea to a desert-like landscape, the work illuminates the complicated relationship between tradition and modernity. It foregrounds alternative cosmologies, philosophies and time systems, that are gradually vanishing in the face of Western modernisation.
Originally a three-channel video installation, the work is exceptionally presented as a wide single-channel screening for this occasion. Delivery Dancer’s Sphere is currently on view at Tate Modern, as part of the display A Year in Art: 2050.
15.35–17.45: Session 2
This session explores how the future might be re-figured by looking back to cultural mythologies and social histories. Screenings and presentations from Morehshin Allahyari and Larissa Sansour explore the warping of time, the fabrication of national identities, and the ability of myths to intervene in history. Playing with the boundaries of historical fact and speculative fiction, both Allahyari and Sansour collapse the past and future within their work, to pass critical judgement on the present.
These presentations are followed by a conversation and Q&A, moderated by scholar of contemporary visual culture, Dr. Kareem Estefan.
15.35–15.55: Larissa Sansour
Larissa Sansour reflects on her use of futurism and speculative fiction to navigate Palestinian identity, memory and historical rupture. She focusses on how past, present and future remain entangled—especially in a context where access to history, land and narrative is continuously contested.
Drawing on works such as A Space Exodus, Nation Estate, In the Future They Ate from the Finest Porcelain, In Vitro, and her most recent film A Sunken Tale of Losses Delayed, Larissa discusses her use of fiction to engage with questions that documentary alone cannot hold.
15.55–16.10: Break
16.10–16.30: Morehshin Allahyari
In this presentation, Morehshin Allahyari speaks to the significance of re-figuration in her work: the act of re-reading the past, in order to reimagine decolonial futures.
Drawing upon key projects She Who Sees the Unknown and Speculations on Capture, alongside her current film-in-progress, Morehshin centres circular time as a de- and anti-colonial methodology. She explores how embracing multiple, or plural futures is a tool for challenging the Western vision and use of technologies, to continue systemic violences. She invites us to consider the meaning of making work about the future, in a current moment when, for many, the notion of a future hangs in the balance.
16.30–17.15: In-conversation moderated by Dr. Kareem Estefan
17.15–17.35: Closing Remarks – Irene Campolmi
In her closing remarks, Irene Campolmi reconceptualises the future not as a distant horizon or a time yet to come, but an unexperienced dimension of time-space which coexists with us, now in the present we live. She reflects on the artists' and thinkers' contributions to alternative, decolonial futures, and considers how both individuals and collectives can have agency to navigate the futures that come into being.
Ayoung Kim
Ayoung Kim weaves reality anew through a tapestry of hybrid fictions. Her work integrates geopolitics, biopolitics, mythology, technology, techno-precarity and speculative temporalities. Her practice incorporates discourses on optical and post-optical media, performativity, game simulation and the narrativity of fiction. Kim’s works have been presented at MoMA PS1, New York (2025); Performa Biennial, New York (2025); M+, Hong Kong (2025, 2024); Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2025); and Tate Modern, London (2025), among others.
Gary Zhexi Zhang
Gary Zhexi Zhang explores connections between cosmology, technology and economy. His projects explore how geopolitical imagination is shaped and mediated. He recently edited a book about finance and time, Catastrophe Time! (Strange Attractor Press, 2023). In 2026, Zhang leads a programme at TBA21-Academy researching West Mediterranean climate futures, in partnership with the Basque Centre for Climate Change. He is currently writing a book about technoculture in a multipolar world.
Larissa Sansour
Larissa Sansour is a Palestinian-Danish artist, working predominantly in film. Central to her work is the push and pull between fiction and reality. She uses speculative narratives and science fiction methods to peer into the future. In 2019, she represented Denmark at the 58th Venice Biennale. Recent exhibitions include at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen; Amos Rex, Helsinki; and Göteborgs Konsthall, Gothenburg. Sansour’s first feature film, An Incomplete Drowning, will premiere in 2026.
Morehshin Allahyari (مورهشین اللهیاری)
Morehshin Allahyari (مورهشین اللهیاری) is an Iranian-Kurdish artist based in the San Francisco Bay Area, and an assistant professor of Digital Media Art at Stanford University. She uses 3D simulation, video, code, sculpture and digital fabrication as tools to re-figure myth and history. Through archival practices and storytelling, her work weaves together complex counternarratives in opposition to the lasting influence of Western technological colonialism in the context of MENA (Middle East and North Africa).
Naomi Rincón Gallardo
Naomi Rincón Gallardo is a research, visual and video artist, living and working between Mexico City and Oaxaca. Her work addresses the creation of counter-worlds in neocolonial settings, from a decolonial, cuir (rather than queer), and feminist perspective. Her practice entangles forms of speculative fiction, music videos, experimental sound, theatrical games, vernacular festivities and Mesoamerican cosmologies. She holds a PhD degree in Practice from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.
Dr. Sonya Dyer
Dr. Sonya Dyer is an artist working primarily in moving image and sculpture. Her practice explores where the centre is located in fictional narratives of the future. She explores how subjectivities and alliances are formed across cultures and temporalities, creating radical futures through unexpected connections. Recent work includes hybrida composita (2024), commissioned by The Box, Plymouth; and Portals (2024) a digital collaboration with writer Rivers Soloman for LAS Foundation, Berlin.
Convenors
Amy Ireland
Amy Ireland is an Australian writer and theorist. Her work focuses on gender and technology, and questions of human and machine agency in modernity. She is a member of the techno-materialist, trans-feminist collective Laboria Cuboniks, whose Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation (2018) has been translated into 18 languages. With Maya B. Kronic, she is the author of Cute Accelerationism (2024). Amy works as an editor for the UK Publisher, Urbanomic.
Irene Campolmi
Irene Campolmi is a curator, art historian, and researcher working at the intersection of art, science, and technology through a decolonial and ethical lens. She is the Curator for Art, Technology & Society at Amos Rex, and Co-founder of Yonder Art•Science at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen. Over the past 15 years, she has curated internationally exploring scientific and technological questions through interdisciplinary collaborations. Most recently, she was Senior Curator at MAPS in Denmark.
Dr. Kareem Estefan
Dr. Kareem Estefan is a writer and assistant professor of film and screen studies at the University of Cambridge. His essays on contemporary art, cinema and cultural activism, mostly focusing on the SWANA region, have appeared in Feminist Media Histories, Film Comment, Frieze, Third Text and World Records, and in books including Cinemas of Global Solidarity and Producing Palestine. He is currently completing a book, Portals to Palestine, on witnessing and worldmaking in contemporary Palestinian moving-image art.
Katrina Nzegwu
Katrina Nzegwu is Assistant Curator, International Art at Tate Modern. She has worked across exhibitions, site-specific sculptural commissions and live performance, with a focus on community-based praxis. She has written for platforms and places including Elephant, The London Magazine, Burlington Contemporary and emergent, and is part of the creative collective When They Meet.
Dr. Val Ravaglia
Dr. Val Ravaglia is Curator, Displays and International Art at Tate Modern. They assisted on the complete rehang of Tate Modern's Collection Displays in 2015-2016 and have curated countless display rooms since 2012. They co-curated the exhibition A Year in Art: Australia 1992 (2021-23), and curated Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet (2024-25). They are currently working on the exhibition Julio Le Parc: Light, Colour, Action, opening on the 11 June 2026.
This event will be BSL interpreted.
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