New Humans: Memories of the Future
New Museum
March 21–August, 2026
New York
Video art has a bad rep. In contemporary art terms, video art is hard to define, its boundaries too shifty and aesthetic merits ambiguous. At its worst, video is low-brow, lacking in production value, emotional force, and narrative depth. At its best, the form produces works playing alongside or against other mediums to visually challenging and conceptually layered effects. In worse instances (and more frequently), it plays like ambient TV in museums and galleries as in shopping malls or at home while you clean—sometimes to no fault of the video artists themselves.
It is with this trepidation over the indeterminacy of the form at large that, when I enter the New Museum to see New Humans: Memories of the Future and its newly commissioned video works, I discovered, quite surprisingly, that they predominantly all take the more conservative form of single-channel video in high-definition colored pixels. Dispersed throughout the massive exhibition featuring over seven hundreds of objects across three floors, the videos, most of which were given the proper treatment of a full wall projection in a dimly lit room with seats, felt like necessary reprieves in the grand experience of the show.
In the first exhibition room, titled “Reproductive Futures” on the second floor, Lucy Beech’s Out of Body (2025) glows against the main wall in a space which also features paintings from Wangechi Mutu and Salvador Dalí, and Tamara Henderson’s sculpture of a giant scrap-metal and mud humanoid body. Even amid the constant clatter of footsteps, doors, and the mechanized pumping of Jenna Sutela’s synthetic-milk installation in the corner, the lone bench facing the projection invited contemplation on Beech’s images of fluids passing through human and animal bodies as well as industrial and scientific facilities. These include human bloodflow, urine, wastewater at different stages of treatment in the sewage system, and viscous compounds in what looks like an underground salt mine laboratory. By taking us physically to sites of management of these “wastes” and lingering on the sounds and sights of their infrastructures, Beech invites us to consider the equalizing factor of waste matters and the enormous efforts humans in modern times have made to mask this basic truth.
Another inconvenient truth of the current technological moment unfolds in Hito Steyerl’s new film, Mechanical Kurds (2025). Taking its title from the eighteenth-century gadget—a chess-playing machine that appeared to be playing strong games autonomously but was in fact controlled by magnets manipulated by a chess master hidden underneath—Mechanical Kurds highlights the often-ignored humans powering AI development, including refugees in Iraqi Kurdistan. Contracted by foreign companies to train self-driving cars and drones in distinguishing between various objects and humans, these individuals—appearing through voice-over as interviewees, with one showing its face via Zoom—work for pennies without being informed of the end goal of their labor and sometimes to their direct destruction. Steyerl experiments with generative-AI footage to uncanny effect, producing images of human bodies flying above a golf buggy or morphing street scenes from Germany to China. The pink and yellow scaffolds framing the screening and each of the benches in the screening room, which mirror the machine’s vision, further dismantle the geospatial separation of museum and refugee camp, New York and Erbil, and reinforce the scale of dehumanization that affects and connects all of humanity.