On March 21st, 2026, New Museum unveils New Humans: Memories of the Future, a sweeping exhibition inaugurating its expanded building. Spanning the entire SANAA-designed structure and OMA’s new extension, the show positions New Museum NYC at the forefront of a global conversation about the future of humanity—and what it means to be human in an age defined by radical technological acceleration.
Bringing together more than 200 international artists, writers, architects, scientists, and filmmakers, New Humans traces a diagonal history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The exhibition explores moments when dramatic shifts—industrialization, mechanized warfare, automation, artificial intelligence—reshaped not only society but our very conception of the human body and mind.
New Humans: art across time
At its core, New Humans: Memories of the Future challenges the myth of linear progress. Instead, the exhibition stages a dynamic dialogue between past and present, revealing recurring cycles of fear, utopia, rupture, and reinvention. Early avant-garde visions of the “New Man” and “New Woman” appear alongside contemporary imaginings of cyborgs, bioengineered bodies, and post-human entities.
Twentieth-century masters such as Salvador Dalí, Francis Bacon, Hannah Höch, El Lissitzky, and H.R. Giger are presented in conversation with contemporary voices including Wangechi Mutu, Hito Steyerl, Anicka Yi, Pierre Huyghe, Sophia Al-Maria, and Jamian Juliano-Villani.
More than fifteen new commissions debut in the exhibition, underscoring its commitment to forward-looking experimentation. These works respond directly to contemporary anxieties around AI, misinformation, medical technology, and ecological transformation.
The future of humanity: bodies, machines, and mutations
A central thread running through the show is the evolving image of the body. From medical diagrams and early anatomical photography to AI-generated imagery and machine-assisted drawing, the exhibition highlights how science and technology have fundamentally altered representations of human life.
Mechanical beings by artists such as Lee Bul and Lynn Hershman Leeson share space with iconic cultural figures like Carlo Rambaldi’s E.T. and Giger’s biomechanical visions from Alien. These juxtapositions underscore how fantasy, cinema, and fine art collectively shape our expectations of the future of humanity.
The exhibition also explores postcolonial, feminist, and transhuman perspectives, presenting fractured, hybrid, and evolving bodies as sites of resistance as much as innovation. Works by artists such as Tau Lewis, Julien Creuzet, and Portia Zvavahera propose speculative worlds where human identity is constantly renegotiated in relation to nature, technology, and myth.
A museum as laboratory
Curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Gary Carrion-Murayari, Vivian Crockett, and Madeline Weisburg, New Humans: Memories of the Future transforms New Museum NYC into a living laboratory of ideas. Scientific models, architectural fantasies, experimental films, and immersive installations converge to form what might be described as a collective act of creative prognostication.
DOKU Heaven – God Mode, 2024. Video, color, sound; 16:48 min loop.
Courtesy of LUYANG and SOCIÉTÉ, Berlin
Das triadische Ballett [The Triadic Ballet], 1922 (restaged 1970). 35mm film transferred to video, color, sound; 29 min.
Courtesy of BAVARIA MEDIA GMBH
Mechanical Kurds, 2025. Single-screen video installation, color, sound; 13:00 min.
Courtesy of HITO STEYERL and ANDREW KREPS, New York. Commissioned by the
JEU DE PAUME, Paris, and NEW MUSEUM, New York
