What does it mean to expand a museum of contemporary art by 60,000 square feet in an era when cultural institutions are shaped by concentrated resources, selective access, and shrinking space for risk? To take all this in, and yet continue. For the artistic director Massimiliano Gioni, the expansion of the New Museum has become the setting for an unusually dense experiment in exhibition-making.
“New Humans: Memories of the Future” assembles more than 700 objects—artworks, scientific images, archival materials, and speculative diagrams—to trace how technological ambition has repeatedly reshaped the idea of the human. We spoke with Gioni about the politics of reproduction today, and what it means to curate a museum beyond niches.
Massimiliano Gioni: I hope people spend a whole day in the exhibition.
Max MacLaren: I definitely had to give myself a lot of time to experience it. You claim to reimagine the museum as a space of circulation and research. How did you conceive of this idea, and how does it conflict with other conceptions of the museum’s function?
MG: There is this mythical idea that the museum should be a space of calm contemplation. In a hyper-connected world, I find that slightly kitsch. It’s essential to this exhibition that there is a variety of materials interacting with one another.[1] There are masterpieces—such as Dalí’s Geopoliticus or Giacometti’s Diego Assis—were borrowed at great effort and complexity, but then there is a vast amount of material in the exhibition that is either in the public domain or which can be acquired and reprinted endlessly. For example, the Albert Robida illustrations are reprints of a book where we cut out the pages and framed them.[2] So it’s valueless in a sense, and there are many levels to that. I don’t even think of these exhibitions as art shows in a way; I think of them as visual culture. They contain objects of very different status. The variety of objects allows me to build exhibitions where each element becomes an interpretative tool for the others and for subjects, topics, and themes that extend outside the museum. I think you can achieve this because the exhibition is non-hierarchical and it’s non-prescriptive.
Exhibition view: New Humans: Memories of the Future, 2026. New Museum, New York. Courtesy New Museum. Photo: Dario Lasagni
MM: If these objects with varying statuses are supposed to escape hierarchical relationships, how did you understand value when developing the exhibition?
MG: The challenge is whether people look at Francis Bacon in the same way they look at a French scientific invention. Can they look afresh at it without thinking of him as the great master of existentialism in the post-war era, but as being on the same level as everybody else in that room? I also need the images to exist on their own without feeling framed in a way that will kill their polysemic complexity. It’s a challenge even to ourselves as museum professionals, to think of making exhibitions differently and to make exhibitions in ways that also learn from the subject itself. The subject here is reproduction in a sense, so why be shy about integrating things that are not “important"? I think artists, like all of us, don’t learn just through exposure to the masterpiece; actually, paradoxically, we learn less and less through exposure to the “masterpiece” and more through its reproductions.
MM: Do you see this focus on reproduction as, in a way, democratizing access to art by turning away from the notion of a “masterpiece”?
MG: I don’t know if it’s democratizing access to art, which of course I would be very happy and sympathetic about. For me, discovering contemporary art had a lot to do with books and magazines because I was not in Milan; I was in the provinces. I think the exhibition reflects that. The Man Rays we show are not vintage prints; they are acquired from the Man Ray Trust for a few hundred dollars, and you print them on your own. Even Max Ernst, I could have gotten the original collages, but then I also think, why not just show the book? In a way, this decision works toward de-fetishizing the art object and de-sacralizing the idea of the masterpiece. I find that idea tied to commercial and ideological systems that can be exclusionary, so challenging that it may be a step towards democratization.
Exhibition view: New Humans: Memories of the Future, 2026. New Museum, New York. Courtesy New Museum. Photo: Dario Lasagni
MM: While this decision is reassessing what can qualify as belonging in the museum, the exhibition still expects a certain level of sustained attention from visitors—even if it is not expressed as contemplation. How do you expect people to access and navigate this kind of experience?
MG: I want to speak to people in a way that is aspirational. I don’t want to water down the content, because I have this mythological audience in mind, which also, paradoxically, might not be the one that actually comes. I can’t point to actual statistics, but I know from conversations with colleagues that most visitors to a museum like MoMA have university degrees. At the New Museum, we have, almost involuntarily, more of a niche public. I’m not saying that I consider these things when I’m planning the exhibition. The subject, in a way, concerns everyone, because our lives are so colonized by images, and this is what the exhibition is dealing with. Still, I think—and I’m brutally generalizing—in American museums, there is often a tendency to speak to the “broadest audience”. I don’t know if the “broadest audience” even exists, and then we create a fantasy of the proper language to speak to them. I find that patronizing.
MM: Does the attention you are asking for still depend on time, education, or cultural privilege?
MG: That plays into questions around accessibility that I think are urgent in the US, and I don’t know if they’re fully addressed. Yet, I remember myself as a lower-middle-class teenager in Italy going to art places, and the excitement was to be in a place where I didn’t fully understand what was being said. I don’t know if it works for everybody, but I was confronted with a language that was different and difficult. Did I feel excluded by it? No. I think there is a potential in the unknown that generates a desire for knowing, and that’s reflected in many of my exhibitions. Visitors should want to look into something like the Robida. I want the viewer to undergo an experience of confusion and doubt that I think is pedagogical. Does that still imagine a specific type of reader or a specific type of viewer? Inevitably. But then I don’t think that making the easy exhibition is necessarily better. I don’t know if that contributes to accessibility, because you could also argue that there is so much text in the exhibition that it becomes an obstacle. Yet, ideally, “New Humans” should function for the viewer in a way that allows them to approach it regardless of their knowledge. Then, almost in concentric circles, if you are a professional, if you are a student, and so on, you’ll find enough to keep you excited and busy.
MM: In working to accomplish this, the exhibition produces a dense environment of images, texts, and objects that don’t unfold linearly. Do you see this as a response to the logic of distracted perception cultivated by digital environments of image consumption?
MG: I am mimicking that experience, but paradoxically, I’m doing it in such a way that it holds your attention and distracts you from the industry of image consumption. The exhibition should become an experience with images that have a complexity that differs from the images you may experience for most of your day.
Exhibition view: New Humans: Memories of the Future, 2026. New Museum, New York. Courtesy New Museum. Photo: Dario Lasagni
MM: Is it a critique of those environments?
MG: Maybe I’m complicit with ideas that, on paper, I would be against, but I cannot, in all honesty, make an exhibition that has a definite critique because that would prevent me from doing a lot of interesting things that I want to try. I can’t preemptively censor myself in the name of a specific position that I might subscribe to. Ultimately, it’s not about my critique; it’s more about whether the visitors can emerge from the exhibition to then go outside and look at images differently. This is a bombardment of images, but, first of all, it’s a bombardment from which I think you can come out more critically equipped. And second, I do believe that everything in there has an intensity that demands attention and demands a rethinking of your relationship to images. I want you to decide whether it’s a criticism or not—whether we are complicit or not.
MM: How much is your resistance to explicit critique imposed by the character and scale of the New Museum as your exhibition site?
MG: There is no resistance to explicit critique on my part, and I really can say what I like in my exhibitions without any pushback on the part of the New Museum. Again, while my perspective is ultimately what organizes the exhibition, the exhibition is not about me or my ideas or my beliefs. I personally think there is nothing worse than being hit on the head by an exhibition that tries to convince you that the curator’s perspective is worth embracing, almost dogmatically. Even though I think “New Humans” is pretty clear in its politics—particularly when it comes to the conflation of technology and totalitarian ideologies—I am not making an exhibition to put forward a prescriptive attitude toward technology. My job is not to bend artworks and images but rather to open them up so they can be connected with other artworks, other images, and other ideas, which will, hopefully, end up feeding the imagination of the viewers. Essentially, the difference is between believing that art and exhibition-making should provide a single clear message—which I strongly disagree with—and the belief that art and museums should preserve a space for complexity and critical thinking. I believe this space of critical thinking is predicated on an understanding of art and images as intrinsically polysemic and complex entities that should not be over-simplified by the ambitions of the curator or by their political or critical agenda.
MM: How have you constructed these spaces for inquiry while avoiding a conclusive thesis or argument?
MG: For visitors, it is primarily about the position of the artist and the artwork. I wanted to construct the exhibition as a historical survey of various positions that have emerged throughout our entanglements with technology. I try to not exclusively capture dreams or exclusively fears, but to navigate the diverse manifestations of these feelings. People visiting the museum can then place themselves in relation to the objects without feeling confined by a normative position. These exhibitions require a lot of effort to not let my taste get in the way. I’m not showing things only because I like them. Obviously, I wouldn’t show a poster of Mussolini or Lenin if I were judging those objects aesthetically. In order to make an exhibition with this perspective, you need a variety of objects, and you need—in Latin, you would say a forma mentis—an approach that allows you to accept certain objects because they are part of a narrative, not even an argument. They enrich and illuminate each other by their presence.
Exhibition view: New Humans: Memories of the Future, 2026. New Museum, New York. Courtesy New Museum. Photo: Dario Lasagni
MM: Can you give me an example of this interaction?
MG: In a way, Simon Denny and Jeremy Deller in the “Mechanical Ballets” gallery are the most politically explicit in their room, but sometimes the explicit can kill the argument, because a critique that is so clear might become inoffensive. I wanted them in that room because they expand the narrative, but also, when an artwork is so blatantly political, it can risk being dismissed by anybody who has a different view. It’s the trouble with any ideological work. But I thought that, because you have the Deller and the Denny, you understand that the Frank Gilbreth photographs are still talking to you today. Those photographs cannot be consigned to a historical moment because they are placed in a spatial dialogue with recent works that approach the workplace with similar interests but from different angles. This dialogue allows me to speak about contemporary subjects without being monodimensional.
MM: One related historical tension the exhibition suggests is one you refer to as a “symmetry” between early 20th-century works and contemporary practices. What does that relation between past and present imply for you?
MG: I didn’t want to set up that comparison in a way that felt normative, like saying, “Oh, those were the great artists, and we use them as a paragon for the contemporary artists.” But I also didn’t want to have this kind of consolatory narrative like a “we start from the good old days” type of thing. The artworks are cultural symptoms that visualize crisis. The suggestion is: today’s crisis is similar to that one. That’s why I step on the accelerator of many troubling materials. It’s an exhibition for the opening of an institution where we’re talking about fascism and eugenics. The comparison becomes troublesome because, basically, that comparison is a warning about these technological moments of upheaval. While we survived them, it’s a warning that we’ve been here before, and we have experienced the intimate connection between technology and fascism. I read a review today that claims it’s too nostalgic, but I was not trying to glorify views from the past. Actually, there is a catalog of terrible ideas—racism, notions of inferiority, and superiority—many of which actually became reality. And, obviously, all the conversations around superiority and inferiority that were happening in the 1920s and 30s are also happening today.
MM: The exhibition places those myths of superiority in relation to a dialectic of humanism that develops through and against technological and animal forms. How are you addressing the instability of these categories?
MG: I decided to break away, for a section of the exhibition, from technology understood as utensils or prosthetics, and think more about biotechnologies and biopolitics. That’s why there is a chapter on the third floor dealing explicitly with the dialectic of human and animal. And within that dialectic, more explicitly, also a questioning of the centrality of the white Western subject. It starts off from “New Images of Man” because the original exhibition at MoMA is made in the wake, essentially, of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the obvious realization that that declaration was far from being universal because, you know, it was 1948. Even visually, I thought, it’s not just an exhibition of puppets, it’s going to be an exhibition of metamorphic creatures that, at that point, are maybe viewed as subhuman with all the implications of that assumption, because who is deciding whether they are inferior or not?
Exhibition view: New Humans: Memories of the Future, 2026. New Museum, New York. Courtesy New Museum. Photo: Dario Lasagni
MM: That “white Western subject” has historically been defined through its technological capacities and its distance from colonial ideas of animality. Is this narrative being challenged in the exhibition?
MG: That’s why Christopher Kulendran Thomas’ piece, The Finesse, is particularly important on its floor because it’s discussing colonial histories and histories of exploitation, but he’s also doing it through technology. One risk of that floor was that you start fetishizing this kind of non-Western-human as a romantic idea of coexistence with nature. Then, in a piece like Kulendran Thomas’ or Julian Creuzet’s ZUMBI ZUMBI ETERNO, you have artists who are playing with those topics, but who are doing it through very sophisticated technological means. What I think is a detachment from the Enlightenment idea of the subject is that this subject imagined himself as a machine and the machine as a body, etc., but [The Enlightenment] presumed that the subject was in control, and now there is the possibility that we are not in control.
Julien Creuzet, ZUMBI ZUMBI ETERNO, 2023. Video, color, sound; 10:27 min. Courtesy the artist and Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York
MM: Is there a way in which these works in the exhibition are trying to give us a sense of control over our relationship to technology?
MG: It is a caveat, but this exhibition is not about technology; it’s about the stories we tell about technologies to create and understand them. The wish for the exhibition is to have you go through it in a way that you walk out more critically equipped to address such stories. Sometimes I’d think: if you look at all these cavalcades of inventions and ideas, weren’t many people worried about the radio and the telegraph? You can point to [Marcel] Proust writing about the telephone, etc., etc…I don’t know if it’s ultimately a consolatory, conservative position to have that condones technological development, but I don’t think it is. It’s more about how do I live with it? I saw the internet being born, and we all thought it was both exciting and the end of the world. I do realize that’s maybe a narrow-minded argument, but it’s also what consoles me a little.
MM: In part, this consolation is derived from the symmetry you describe, which recognizes that many hopes and anxieties we experience today are not unique. At the same time, the inventions you present in the exhibition reveal that social change has continuously occurred through the arrival of new technologies. How does the exhibition relate to the modern myth of progress?
MG: While the exhibition is not necessarily optimistic about scientific progress—you could claim that it’s the exact opposite—it still subscribes, maybe involuntarily, to a vision of the future as more. There are very few examples of utopian thinking, maybe none, that depart from an idea of growth and accumulation, and not even progress, but more. I thought that would have been the main criticism of the exhibition. There are—in the [Arata] Isozaki piece Re-ruined Hiroshima, for example—references to radical architecture of the 1960s by Archigram and Super Studio, but even those are not completely different models, ethically and politically. That might be a problem, but I would have needed another section or, even, another museum. We could have an entire exhibition containing unrealized fantasies of disconnecting, delinking, de-production, and deceleration.
MM: Does the exhibition attempt to make any suggestions for the future?
MG: I’ve tried to go so deep as to suggest that, essentially, the question many works in there are asking is how to make new life. This is, obviously, probably a delusional, maybe very male, fantasy. As Hal Foster writes in the catalog, the “X-Men”[3] think of themselves as engineers of the human soul, like maybe avant-garde artists and dictators probably thought of themselves. I’m not imagining myself as one of these engineers. I’m not aware of exactly where we are, except the experience we all make every day, which is obviously existentially confusing. Again, the meager consolation is we’ve been through it, so we will likely survive it, but the problem is at what cost? Ultimately, the exhibition should be pedagogical in the sense that it helps you learn from these historical ideas, these memories, and use them to reckon with our current existential conditions and crises.
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- Footnotes
[1] In the exhibition’s “Prosthetic Gods” gallery there are collages by Hannah Höch, sculptures by Hans Bellmer, and Berenice Olmedo, photos of French inventions taken by “unknown photographers”, and a prosthesis made for WW1 veterans by Anna Coleman Ladd.
[2] Albert Robida is a relatively minor French illustrator and writer from the late 19th century. He wrote and illustrated stories that imagined future visions, some of which came true to varying degrees.
[3]Foster refers to Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Mark Zuckerberg.
Cover Image:
Salvador Dalí, Geopoliticus Child Watching the Birth of the New Man, 1943. Oil on canvas, 18 × 20 1/2 in (45.72 × 52 cm). The Dalí Museum, St. Petersburg, FL. Gift of A. Reynolds & Eleanor Morse, 2000.
