‘Myths of the New Future’ opens at The Common Guild

From May 17th to July 12th, 2025, The Common Guild in Glasgow hosts Myths of the New Future, a group exhibition featuring five artists whose practices confront the psychological turbulence of the present. The show, staged within the evocative setting of The Common Guild, explores how contemporary urban life—haunted by ecological crisis, digital saturation, and political breakdown—shapes human emotion and imagination.

Anchored in J.G. Ballard’s dystopian foresight, Myths of the New Future presents works by Jesse Darling, Dora Budor, Agnieszka Kurant, Taysir Batniji, and P. Staff. Each artist brings a singular voice to the shared question: how do we live in a world unraveling in real time?

Dora Budor contributes immersive installations that destabilize architectural and institutional norms. Her works expose the invisible systems that govern space and perception, turning familiar interiors into unsettling psychological terrains. At The Common Guild, Budor’s interventions blur boundaries—between body and building, fiction and documentary—demanding close, uncomfortable attention.

Taysir Batniji draws from personal and geopolitical memory to reflect on displacement, impermanence, and home. In his poetic, multidisciplinary approach, Batniji incorporates photography, video, and found objects, offering a quiet counterpoint to the chaos of the global stage. His presence at The Common Guild deepens the show’s emotional register, grounding the future in lived history.

The exhibition also includes Jesse Darling’s broken-yet-beautiful sculptures that reinterpret societal collapse through the lens of care and critique. Agnieszka Kurant explores artificial intelligence and the economics of unpredictability, while P. Staff creates visceral environments addressing the biopolitics of queer and trans bodies.

At The Common Guild, Myths of the New Future is less a survey than an emotional map—a place to linger in uncertainty rather than escape it. By uniting the visionary practices of Taysir Batniji, Dora Budor, and others, the exhibition asks not what the future holds, but whether it can still be imagined at all.