ARABOFUTURS invites visitors to enter the dreamlike worlds of science fiction and the new Arab imaginaries. This contemporary art exhibition serves as an introduction to a fantastic, dynamic laboratory of hypotheses currently unfolding across all creative domains.
Here, videographers, visual artists, photographers, and performers renew perspectives, redefine identities, and aim to offer emancipating counter-narratives. Globalization, modernity, ecology, migration, gender, and decolonization are among their key subjects. Eighteen artists present new, plural, committed, and life-affirming possibilities, or dystopian visions that reveal the contradictions of our world.
Their works function as both tools for reflection and invitations to shift one’s gaze towards alternative futures. They create a space where those who are often invisible in our present can see themselves and imagine a future in which they are legitimate. In this way, artists craft new emancipatory futures that challenge and liberate our imaginations from dominant, anthropocentric discourses. These works offer space not only to marginalized individuals but also to the living and even the non-living around us. The goal is to create a world where these elements can reclaim their place, highlighting the fragility of human dominance.
These “Voyage(s) to Tomorrow,” as titled by Tawfik al-Hakim’s 1957 play, provide both food for thought and contemplation. They invite us to envision futures with and through the Arab world, for humanity and the living world as a whole.
The exhibition features works by Zahrah Al Ghamdi, Sophia Al Maria, Fatima Al Qadiri, Mounir Ayache, Meriem Bennani, Hicham Berrada, Neïla Czermak Ichti, Souraya Haddad Credoz, Ayham Jabr, Tarek Lakhrissi, Søren Lind, Sara Sadik, Gaby Sahhar, Larissa Sansour, Hala Schoukair, Skyseeef, Aïcha Snoussi, and Ayman Zedani.
Curators : Élodie Bouffard – Nawel Dehina
Press release from Institut du Monde Arabe (IMA)
Image: Skyseeef. From Culture is the waves of the future series. 2022. Photography ©Skyseeef
