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 includes presentations from artists and writers Larissa Sansour, Sonya Dyer and Gary Zhexi Zhang; conversations moderated by theorists Dr. Kareem Estefan and Amy Ireland; and screenings of works by Ayoung Kim and Naomi Rincón Gallardo.
Full programme to be announced soon.
This event is organised by Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational in partnership with Hyundai Motor.
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.
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.
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.
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.
All Tate Modern entrances are step-free. You can enter via the Turbine Hall and into the Natalie Bell Building on Holland Street, or into the Blavatnik Building on Sumner street.
There are lifts to every floor of the Blavatnik and Natalie Bell buildings. Alternatively you can take the stairs.
- Fully accessible toilets are located on every floor on the concourses.
- A quiet room is available to use in the Natalie Bell Building on Level 4.
- Ear defenders can be borrowed from the Ticket desks.
To help plan your visit to Tate Modern, have a look at our visual story. It includes photographs and information about what you can expect from a visit to the gallery.
For more information before your visit:
- Email hello@tate.org.uk
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