Curated by Clive Kellner at the Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation, ‘Reverse Futures’ proposes that the future is not merely invented, but conjured from the histories, values, and knowledge systems that shape how societies dream and interpret the world.
Brendon Bell-Roberts
30 July 2026
Each era envisions the future through the lens of its most transformative technologies. The nineteenth century dreamed in steam and industry, the twentieth century gazed toward nuclear power and space, and today, artificial intelligence, planetary computation, and algorithmic governance shape our visions of tomorrow. These stories promise progress through innovation, casting technology as an unstoppable force propelling humanity forward. Yet, they seldom admit that every technological future is rooted in specific histories, political economies, and power structures. Before we ask what the future holds, we must first ask: who gets to imagine it?
This question beats at the core of ‘Reverse Futures’, the final chapter in the Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation’s ‘Worldmaking’ trilogy. Though the exhibition seems to circle the techno-future, it quickly upends expectations. Rather than indulging in fantasies of artificial intelligence or digital utopias, curator Clive Kellner assembles artists who reveal the unseen assumptions beneath contemporary futurism. Here, technology becomes not the endpoint, but the springboard for a richer journey into knowledge, history, and imagination.
This shift distinguishes ‘Reverse Futures’ from typical technology exhibitions. Rather than asking what new technologies might achieve, it interrogates why technological innovation has become our dominant language for picturing the future. The exhibition argues that the true challenge lies not in what technology can accomplish, but in the narrow intellectual frameworks through which we define progress.
No work establishes this argument more forcefully than Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler’s Calculating Empires. Stretching across an entire wall, the monumental diagram traces more than five centuries of relationships between systems of calculation, empire, labour, extraction, communication and computation. Rather than celebrating technological achievement, Crawford and Joler dismantle the myth that technology develops independently of politics. Artificial intelligence emerges not as a revolutionary rupture but as the latest manifestation of much older systems through which power has been organised and exercised.
The work commands attention not only for its vast scale, but for its fearless refusal of technological inevitability. It exposes how the legacies of empire, colonial conquest, and industrial capitalism are stitched into the fabric of today’s computational systems. Every technological advance, it shows, is freighted with hidden assumptions about ownership, labour, surveillance, and control. Progress, it insists, is never impartial.
Placed at the exhibition’s threshold, Calculating Empires establishes the tone for all that follows. It demands that every subsequent work be viewed through this historical lens, reminding us that the future cannot be separated from the infrastructures that mould it.
As Crawford and Joler expose the architecture of technological power, Yinka Shonibare shifts our gaze to one of its deepest human consequences: displacement.
For centuries, dreams of the future have been entwined with fantasies of exploration and expansion. Space travel stands as the ultimate symbol of this urge. Yet in Shonibare’s Refugee Astronaut X, the heroic astronaut is reimagined as something entirely different. This traveller is not a conqueror or a pioneer. He is a refugee.
The contrast is vivid. Wrapped in Shonibare’s iconic Dutch wax fabric, a textile rich with histories of colonial trade, migration, and cultural fusion, the astronaut bears not instruments of conquest, but the bare necessities for survival. The sculpture quietly unspools the optimism that so often clings to technological progress. Shonibare hints that even if humanity journeys to distant planets, it will bring with it old inequalities, environmental disasters, and political failures, and that technology alone cannot promise a brighter future.
The work also lays bare the contradictions woven into the very language of exploration. Colonial expansion, too, was justified by tales of discovery and civilisation. By transforming the astronaut into a refugee, Shonibare shows that journeys through space are now inseparable from migration, climate upheaval, and global instability. The future, instead of offering escape from history, is forever bound to it.
While Shonibare interrogates movement through space as a political act, Etel Adnan turns to the cosmos as a realm for contemplation.
Painted late in her life amid the global solitude of the COVID-19 pandemic, Satellites 27 rejects the spectacle of conventional astronomical imagery. Instead, glowing celestial forms float in a pictorial space that feels at once intimate and infinite. The painting offers no technological vision of the universe; rather, it beckons us to experience the cosmos as a domain for reflection, memory, and poetic imagination.
For Adnan, landscape was never just scenery, but a way of thinking. Mountains, seas, and planets became vessels for exploring exile, belonging, and existence. That sensibility pulses through this painting. Her imagined celestial bodies are charged with the emotional weight of lived experience rather than scientific certainty. Space itself becomes a landscape of displacement and longing. With Crawford, Joler, and Shonibare, Adnan enacts a subtle yet decisive shift in the exhibition. If the earlier works reveal technology’s entanglement with power, Adnan reminds us that imagination cannot be confined to technological ambition. The future relies not only on invention, but on our ability to reflect, contemplate, and see differently.
Together, these three artists unravel a core belief of contemporary futurism: that technology alone shapes the future. Crawford and Joler show that technological systems are born from histories of power. Shonibare reveals that these histories accompany us, even into imagined worlds beyond Earth. Adnan reminds us that knowledge begins not with calculation, but with perception.
At this point, ‘Reverse Futures’ has already shifted the conversation from innovation to imagination.
Now, an even more fundamental question emerges.
If technology does not shape the future, then what does?
This question sits at the intellectual heart of ‘Reverse Futures’. When technology is dethroned as the main language of progress, a new question rises: what do we count as knowledge?
For much of modernity, knowledge has been seen as objective, measurable, and universal. Scientific discovery, empirical observation, and technological innovation have become the main frameworks for explaining the world and picturing its future. These traditions have yielded remarkable advances, but have also sidelined other ways of knowing—those rooted in spirituality, oral tradition, lived experience, and Indigenous cosmologies. Instead of dismissing scientific knowledge, Reverse Futures asks what becomes possible when it enters into dialogue with other intellectual traditions, rather than standing above them.
Kamil Adam Hassim’s Event Horizon signals this shift with striking clarity. Visitors step into a darkened space designed to evoke the sensation of standing beneath a moonless Karoo sky. Sight falters as the body gradually adapts to the darkness. The installation weaves together sound, light, and scientific data, but is equally shaped by |Xam cosmology and Indigenous interpretations of the night sky. Invisible muons—subatomic particles streaming through our bodies—become both scientific marvel and philosophical metaphor, linking visitors to cosmic processes beyond ordinary perception.
What makes Event Horizon so compelling is its refusal to privilege one explanatory system over another. Physics and Indigenous cosmology are not presented as competing truths but as different ways of understanding humanity’s relationship to the universe. Rather than collapsing these traditions into a single narrative, Hassim allows them to coexist, suggesting that complexity is not something to be resolved but embraced. Knowledge becomes plural, relational and embodied rather than singular and absolute.
This proposition resonates throughout the exhibition. If the future is to be imagined differently, Reverse Futures suggests, it cannot emerge from the continued dominance of one epistemological framework alone. Expanding the future first requires expanding what we recognise as knowledge.
Ernest Mancoba’s Untitled (1971) quietly deepens this argument. At first glance, the painting appears almost modest beside the exhibition’s larger installations, yet its restraint gives it extraordinary presence. Mancoba’s abstraction refuses fixed interpretation. Figures seem to emerge before dissolving again into fields of gesture and colour, creating an image that is constantly in the process of becoming rather than arriving.
Event Horizon captivates because it refuses to privilege one way of knowing over another. Physics and Indigenous cosmology are not adversaries here, but parallel routes to understanding humanity’s place in the cosmos. Rather than fusing these traditions into a single narrative, Hassim allows them to coexist, suggesting that complexity is something to be welcomed, not resolved. In this vision, knowledge is plural, relational, and lived.
This idea reverberates throughout the exhibition. If we are to imagine the future differently, ‘Reverse Futures’ insists, we must move beyond the dominance of any single way of knowing. To broaden the future, we must first broaden what we accept as knowledge. At first, the painting appears almost modest beside the exhibition’s grander installations, yet its restraint lends it a quiet power. Mancoba’s abstraction resists fixed meaning. Figures seem to surface, only to dissolve again into fields of gesture and colour, forming an image that is always becoming, never simply arriving.
Mancoba’s significance in twentieth-century art reaches far beyond formal innovation. Living much of his life in exile, he defied colonial expectations that African artists should create recognisably “African” imagery, as well as modernist beliefs that abstraction was the domain of European art. His work shows that abstraction can spring from African philosophical traditions, where the spiritual, material, and communal are inseparable.
Within ‘Reverse Futures’, Mancoba’s painting becomes a meditation on continuity. It suggests that knowledge is not always forged through accumulation or invention. Sometimes, it survives through inheritance—understandings handed down across generations, weathering displacement and rupture. In an exhibition preoccupied with the future, Mancoba reminds us that continuity itself can be a radical gesture.
As Hassim expands cosmology and Mancoba expands abstraction, Cave_bureau turns to expand the landscape itself.
Their reconstruction of the Shimoni Slave Caves refuses to let history stay confined to archives or museums. Here, history is experienced bodily. Combining laser-scanning technology with traditional kagome weaving, the installation revives a fragment of the Kenyan cave system where enslaved Africans were once held before crossing the Indian Ocean. Visitors move through a space where architecture becomes memory, and memory becomes a place you inhabit.
The installation animates Cave_bureau’s concept of “reverse futurism,” lending the exhibition its title. Rather than seeing progress as a straight line away from the past, reverse futurism insists that the legacies of colonialism, extraction, and environmental harm still shape our present. Looking back becomes an essential act of imagining differently. The future cannot simply vault over the structures inherited from history, for those structures remain woven into our landscapes, institutions, and systems of power.
This may be Kellner’s most profound curatorial insight: history is not merely the backdrop for the exhibition, but its very operating condition. Artificial intelligence, digital infrastructures, and planetary technologies all arise from worlds already shaped by empire, labour, and extraction. To imagine the future responsibly, we must first recognise the historical bedrock beneath every technological system.
Together, Hassim, Mancoba, and Cave_bureau dismantle one of modernity’s most persistent beliefs: that knowledge advances by replacing what came before, each new system making the old obsolete. ‘Reverse Futures’ offers a more generous vision. Scientific inquiry, spiritual philosophy, abstraction, and historical memory are not steps in a linear progression, but interconnected ways of understanding the world.
By this stage, technology has receded from the spotlight. In its place, a richer sense of knowledge emerges—one that is lived as much as learned, inherited as much as discovered.
If the future hinges on expanding what we recognise as knowledge, then the exhibition’s final works pose an equally vital question: how is that knowledge carried forward?
If the first works ask who imagines the future, and the second group expands what counts as knowledge, the final constellation of artists turns to another essential question: how is knowledge sustained? Rather than ending with ever more speculative visions of technology, ‘Reverse Futures’ becomes more attuned to the everyday practices through which societies remember, adapt, and endure. Smell, ecology, and oral tradition emerge not as nostalgic alternatives to technology, but as sophisticated systems for interpreting and passing knowledge across generations.
Georgia Munnik’s Concrete Jasmine introduces this shift with gentle subtlety. Rather than asking visitors to look, the work invites them to breathe. The familiar scent of jasmine mingles with the damp, mineral tang of rain-soaked concrete, conjuring the atmosphere of Johannesburg after a storm. What seems fleeting at first becomes the work’s central insight: memory often journeys through the senses before it is captured by language or institutions.
This is a quietly radical idea. Museums have long privileged objects, images, and documents as the chief guardians of knowledge. Munnik, however, suggests that cities are remembered through atmosphere as much as architecture, through scent as much as sight. Her installation transforms scent into an archive, proposing that knowledge resides as much in embodied experience as in collections and libraries.
The work also broadens the exhibition’s sense of ecology. Nature is not separate from urban life, but woven into it. Rain, vegetation, concrete, and human memory all coexist in a shared sensory world. The future envisioned here is neither entirely technological nor purely natural, but springs from their entanglement.
Paula Gaetano Adi explores this relationship from a different perspective. Her robotic sculpture Guanaquerx challenges many of the assumptions that shape debates about artificial intelligence and automation. Instead of picturing robotics as tools of efficiency, control, or productivity, Gaetano Adi draws on Andean cosmologies that see humans, animals, and landscapes as co-participants in a shared ecological system. Here, the machine itself matters less than the worldview that shapes it. Guanaquerx asks what technology could become if it were designed to exist within ecosystems rather than to dominate them. The focus moves from technological prowess to technological ethics. Innovation is measured not by autonomy or computational power, but by reciprocity, care, and coexistence.
In this way, Gaetano Adi distils the exhibition’s central argument. Throughout ‘Reverse Futures’, technology is never portrayed as inherently liberating or inherently destructive. Its meaning is shaped by the knowledge systems that inform it. Different ways of knowing do not merely produce different interpretations of technology—they give rise to entirely different technologies.
This focus on relationships over systems finds its fullest expression in Traci Kwaai’s Fisher Child. Collaborating with fishing communities, Kwaai weaves oral history, attentive listening, and lived experience into a conversation with digital media, creating an installation in which technology serves to preserve community knowledge rather than replace it.
Listening forms the heart of this work. Knowledge is not extracted, sorted, or optimised—it is shared. Stories flow across generations, carrying environmental wisdom, cultural memory, and practical know-how that cannot be captured by databases or algorithms. The installation gently reminds us that some of humanity’s most enduring knowledge systems have always depended on conversation, not computation.
It feels fitting that ‘Reverse Futures’ ends on this note. Throughout, it feels fitting that ‘Reverse Futures’ concludes on this note. Throughout the exhibition, the scale steadily contracts. Crawford and Joler begin with centuries of technological empire; Shonibare charts planetary migration; Adnan expands the imagination to the cosmos. From there, the exhibition becomes ever more intimate. Cosmology gives way to embodied experience, landscapes transform into archives, scent becomes memory, and finally, listening becomes a way of world-making. The journey moves not from complexity to simplicity, but from abstraction to relationship.g a new vision of technological progress, but in proposing a new understanding of progress itself. Instead of equating advancement with innovation alone, ‘Reverse Futures’ suggests that societies move forward by broadening the kinds of knowledge they value. Scientific inquiry, Indigenous cosmologies, spiritual philosophy, ecological observation, sensory experience, and oral tradition are not rivals, but complementary ways of making sense of the world.
This is what distinguishes Kellner’s exhibition from much of today’s discourse on artificial intelligence and the future. Too often, we are told that better machines will inevitably create better societies. ‘Reverse Futures’ flips that notion. It contends that the future will be shaped less by technological sophistication than by the breadth of our intellectual imagination.
The exhibition leaves visitors with a question that stretches far beyond the world of art. The real challenge is not whether humanity possesses the technological means to create new futures, but whether we are willing to recognise that those futures may already reside within knowledge systems long overlooked, marginalised, or dismissed.
Ultimately, ‘Reverse Futures’ is not an exhibition about technology, but about the conditions that allow knowledge to flourish. Its greatest achievement is to reveal that the future will not be transformed by more powerful machines alone, but by a deeper appreciation of the many ways human societies have always made sense of the world. It invites us to imagine a future that is not only more innovative, but also more attentive, more plural, and, above all, more generous.
The exhibition is on view December 5, 2026 Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation (JCAF) in Johannesburg.
