Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation’s Reverse Futures is a thoughtful and ambitious exhibition that closes its Worldmaking trilogy by asking what a fair, humane future could look like when imagined from the Global South. Running from 26 June to 5 December 2026, it brings together art, research, and Indigenous knowledge to challenge dominant Western ideas of the future.
Exhibition focus
The exhibition shifts attention away from utopian or dystopian sci-fi framing and instead treats the future as something rooted in the present, shaped by colonial histories, migration, ecological pressure, and community knowledge. It is structured around three interconnected themes: space, time, and place. Together, these sections position technology not as a neutral force, but as something that must be understood through memory, power, and lived experience.
Curatorial idea
Clive Kellner, JCAF’s executive director and curator, frames the exhibition as a search for better worlds that are not built on extraction and domination, but on community care, environmental awareness, and historical learning. The title draws on the idea of “reverse futurism,” a term associated with Nairobi-based practice Cave_bureau, which argues that the future requires undoing colonial mistakes in the present. This makes the exhibition less about prediction and more about repair, reflection, and remaking.
Featured artists
The exhibition includes works by Etel Adnan, Cave_bureau, Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler, Paula Gaetano Adi, Kamil Adam Hassim, Traci Kwaai, Ernest Mancoba, Georgia Munnik, and Yinka Shonibare. Special projects by Rebecca Potterton and Wolff Architects expand the show’s interdisciplinary range. The selection signals a strong mix of artistic, architectural, and speculative practices across South Africa, Africa, and the wider Global South.
JCAF describes the exhibition as immersive and intentionally slow-moving, with artworks that invite viewers into encounters involving underwater storytelling, an African astronaut, cave histories, the smell of Johannesburg, and a robot re-enacting liberation history in the Andes. The foundation says viewing is by appointment only, and entrance is free. That combination makes the show accessible while still preserving a sense of focused, museum-like reflection.
Cover Image: Yinka Shonibare, Refugee Astronaut X (2024), and in the background, Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power since 1500 (2023) by Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler, in the Reverse Futures exhibition. Photo Graham De Lacy.
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