Out of time, into history, and towards a speculative future: Reverse Futures at JCAF
By David Mann
Visitor looking at the installation Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power since 1500 (2023) by Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler, in the Reverse Futures exhibition. © Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler. Photo: Graham De Lacy.
There are moments in Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler’s 24 metre infographic installation where it feels as if you’re viewing the world through deep time. All of the intersecting, simultaneous layers of history are laid bare, dragging the sum total of historical human triumph and tragedy into the present, and giving us a view of the future. The work, titled Calculating Empires, is something of a philosophical spine running through the Joburg Contemporary Art Foundation’s latest exhibition, Reverse Futures.
The entangled timelines of coloniality, technology, and human movement are at the heart of Reverse Futures. Rather than disentangling them, the exhibition embraces their generative intersections, allowing for a non-linear reading of history, one that draws a plausible line between humans and cyborgs, or allows you to view processes of industrialisation and automation alongside political systems, or the rise of empires. Engaging with all of Calculating Empires in one visit is an impossible task, but it is the unique composition and presentation of this information, more than the particulars, that allows for an essential refiguring of temporal and narrative structures.
Emerging from this sea of data and time is Refugee Astronaut X, Yinka Shonibare’s sculpture that’s travelled here across the Indian Ocean from its home in Madagascar. The figure is bright and burdened, clad in red moon boots, a Dutch wax print suit with yellow details and a green oxygen tank, and a space-black helmet on its head. The figure lunges forward, a rope net bag containing various personal effects – a black and white photograph, a woven basket, a small suitcase, a blanket, a metal pot, and a musical instrument. A three-legged stool sticks out of the bottom of the net, as if urging the figure to drop to the floor and rest.
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 Future exhibition. Photo: Graham De Lacy.
Most texts on Shonibare’s Refugee Astronaut frame the sculpture series as a warning by the artist: Carry on the way we have been, and this is the future we’ll soon have to face, constantly fleeing something – climate crisis, war, each other. Grim.
But ‘Refugee Astronaut’ is a wonderfully generative title, an almost-oxymoron gesturing towards two different narrative possibilities. This is a person fleeing their old world, their home, their context, in search of another. Or, as the space-age Vitruvian man patch on the spacesuit suggests, this is a person on a mission, an expedition, towards new frontiers. Migration, displacement, invasion, immigration; these are and always have been humanity’s constant states. Shonibare’s sculpture accepts that ours is a species in flux, – it is a condition that’s essential to who we are – though the wax print suit, the personal effects, and the title all remind us that migration is a choice for some, a forced condition for others. So, it’s Homi K. Bhabha’s notion of the burdened condition that rings true: We carry our context, our concerns, our great hopes, predicaments, and heavy histories with us wherever we go, and this weight marks us, defines us. This is the politics of procession; it is something we cannot shed. We carry our histories into our futures.
The other pioneering sculpture in the space is a robotic guanaco, resting here after an arduous journey across the Andes Mountains. Made by the Argentine artist Paula Gaetano Adi, Guanaquerx is a kinetic sculpture fashioned from contemporary technology, cane, and textiles. And it really did cross the Andes, retracing José de San Martín’s 1817 Crossing of the Andes, an important campaign towards securing independence across parts of South America. The robot did not make this journey alone, though; it had the help of human beings, and that’s one of the main points Gaetano Adi makes with the work. Technology and Automated/Artificial Intelligence are not to be feared or oppressed by humanity, she says. Rather, there should be a mode of co-existence.
Paula Gaetano Adi, Guanaquerx (2024), in the Reverse Future exhibition. © Paula Gaetano Adi. Photo: Graham De Lacy.
To this end, a video projection on the wall shows a documentary-style film of the Guanaquerx robot in action, as well as it being repaired, carried, and cared for by the humans on the journey. A museum-style vitrine runs from one side of the space to the other, and houses various physical materials – rock samples, horseshoes, photographs and schematics – and literature about the area and the journey. Finally, a manifesto entitled the ‘Pluriversal Laws of Robotics’ adorns a corner wall. Here, we learn of the governing ideologies of the ‘Revolutionary Army of Artificial Liberation’ – of which this little guanaco is a member – which basically says that robots can’t hurt humans or the earth, and humans shouldn’t hurt them either.
Exhibited here on its pile of rocks, which are borrowed from the Highveld in this instance and not the Andes, the robot continues to ‘live’, chirping, swishing its flag-bearing tail, darting the eyes of its camera-mounted head, and reminding us all that it’s still there. The whole work, this being the sculpture, the film, the manifesto, the archival materials, and the resultant lore around this hybrid human-robot journey, is a wonderful exercise in speculative storytelling. Here, Gaetano Adi merges ancestral knowledge and mythology with research, robotics, and the kind of organic worldbuilding that takes place through collaboration – be it collaboration between people, between technology and mythology, humans and robots, or simply time and human experimentation – towards the project of making sense of our collective future.
Two abstract paintings feature in the exhibition, namely Etel Adnan’s Satellites 27 and Ernest Mancoba’s Untitled. Both are quite small oil paintings that, despite being well-lit and signalled, are swallowed by the space itself, and become the less engaging works in the show. Adnan’s competes with the symphony of information that is Calculating Empires, while Mancoba’s is nestled between two architectural wonders by Cave_bureau and Wolff Architects. In an exhibition featuring an underwater VR experience, a 1:1 model of an historic cave, an interactive work made to mimic the conditions of a moonless Karoo night, and a chatty mountain-climbing robot, can painting hold its own? It depends on how you view the two paintings. In the overall context of the show, they feel too quiet, too quaint – like two little artworks that wandered into the wrong exhibition, and nobody’s had the heart to ask them to leave.
Ernest Mancoba, Untitled (1971). Oil on linen. Private Collection. © Ferlov Mancoba. Foundation / Galerie Mikael Andersen. Photo: Graham De Lacy.
Individually, however, they are singularly engaging works. Untitled, with its warm tones and sharp, gestural bursts of blue and green, is an essential part of Mancoba’s career-long argument against African art as a primitive form. African Abstraction, it seems to say, is yet another mode of expression from the continent that allows the world to have a more human face, and a more curious approach to where we all come from. Satellites 27 uses pleasing colours – lively pinks, yellows, oranges, and a mossy green – and simple geometric forms. Against the hard pragmatic edge of Calculating Empires, Adnan’s small painting gives one permission to stop making sense, to resist the essential human compulsion to find legibility and clear meaning in whatever is presented to us. And so, the narrative becomes a co-authored and evolving one.
“It could be viewed as a deconstructed sunset,” says the JCAF guide before pausing to glance at the painting again – a scene she’s likely viewed at least a hundred times already – and offering a new interpretation. “Now I’m seeing it as more of a war scene.” We look with her and see it too, the military green looming large against the desert-landscape taupe, a hot yellow sun beating down on it all.
Etel Adnan, Satellites 27 (2020), in the Reverse Future exhibition. © 2020 Etel Adnan | DALRO. Photo: Graham DeLacy.
A departure from JCAF’s usual approach of populating their shows with pre-existing works by mid- to late-career artists, Reverse Futures features newly commissioned works by two younger artists, namely Georgia Munnik and Kamil Adam Hassim.
Event Horizon is Hassim’s contribution. It’s an immersive work that requires viewers to step through a series of curtained chambers, each one with its own atmosphere, designed to have a certain somatic effect, or condition the viewer’s senses towards the final chamber, which contains a projected rainbow, jittering this way and that, and lots of artificial smoke.
Event Horizon (2026) by Kamil Adam Hassim, in the Reverse Futures exhibition. © Kamil Adam Hassim. Photo: Graham De Lacy.
Time and space are very much Hassim’s areas of interest, present through his collaborations with engineers and scientists, and his research at spaces like the South African Large Telescope. In Event Horizon, named after the point of no return in a black hole, he is said to be drawing on indigenous knowledge systems and cosmologies, like Polynesian wayfaring, and |Xam philosophy. He uses defunct astronomical lenses to create a ‘cosmic detector’ – the jittery rainbow in the last chamber – which registers muon particles moving through space and the body.
In his recent Knowledge Talk podcast with Ashraf Jamal, Hassim explains his position as an artist as involving “building technologies and using art as a tool for social change, even in the context of just myself and my own community, art as a way of looking through these histories, examining these different cosmotechnics… ”.
While the conceptual interests driving Event Horizon, and his general practice, are fascinating, the material translation of this particular work doesn’t do enough to represent these interests, nor communicate them creatively and accessibly. As a work designed to impact you on an experiential, corporeal level, it is a success, but to what end? When there is no edification, no human connection to, or dialogue with, the quite broad and complex ways of making sense of the world that Hassim is interested in communicating, we are left only with a sensory experience, albeit a pleasantly relaxing one.
Georgia Munnik, Concrete Jasmine (2026) and The Strangling Fruit(2026), in the Reverse Futures exhibition. © Georgia Munnik. PhotoGraham De Lacy.
Munnik was asked to create a scent that could represent Johannesburg. An artist who works with place, narrative, and memory with an olfactory methodology, she’s well-positioned to make such a work. Concrete Jasmine is the scent she comes up with, given material form through her Strangling Fruit sculptures – resin-cast coffee filters dotted with various pigments. The task for Cape Town-based Munnik was essentially a mnemonic one: how to call upon the sensory memories of her Johannesburg childhood in order to create a scent that speaks at once to the past and future of this rapidly changing, young city? Jasmine and concrete, beauty and industrialisation, flowers blooming through this relentless urban project.
Chatter in the room reveals a crowd of sceptics. “But Johannesburg smells nothing like this,” they say, incredulous. “Has she ever been to Braamfontein on a Friday night?” I disagree. I like how Concrete Jasmine refuses a predictable reading of Johannesburg, because Johannesburg is, after all, a wildly unpredictable place. Instead, the work is a statement disguised as a scent, pulled from a memory, that resonates with the enduring reality of Johannesburg – a city existing always on the edge of great collapse, and great possibility. Joburg is not all jasmine and wet concrete, but it is a place of extraordinary hope, and jarring despair, open-heartedness and harsh realities. Perhaps Munnik means none of this, but the joy of this particular work is its allowance for multiple readings and projections. Like Johannesburg, it invites myriad narratives, and refuses them all at once.
I’ll end with the two other immersive works in the show, Traci Kwaai’s Fisher Child, and Cave_bureau’s Shimoni Slave Cave. The Cave_bureau work is what it says it is – a 1:1 scaled section of the Shimoni Caves of the Enslaved, used as a holding chamber for enslaved people during the East African slave trade in the 19th century. The Nairobi-based collective of artists, architects, and researchers that make up Cave_bureau have fabricated, together with Chair for Biohybrid Architecture, Royal Danish Academy, a life-sized section of these caves out of hand-woven rattan that allows viewers to step into the cave, out of time, and into history. A 3D-printed model on a plinth off to the side shows us all where exactly we are in relation to the greater cave system.
Reverse Futures exhibition showing Cave_bureau’s installation Shimoni Slave Cave (2022–2023) with accompanying video and model, and Ernest Mancoba, Untitled (1971) at right; in the background, Georgia Munnik, Concrete Jasmine (2026) and The Strangling Fruit (2026), and Paula Gaetano Adi, Guanaquerx (2024). Photo: Graham De Lacy.
But what of the future? The 3D renderings and laser scanning processes used in the making of this work certainly project a vision of the future of art-making – one that is truly interdisciplinary and has curiosity, play, and edification as some of its core impulses. Importantly, Shimoni Slave Cave is also a work that, while addressing the historical and contemporary effects of colonialism, employs an almost forensic approach to the past, surfacing ancient, often-times invisibilised knowledge systems to better study the present.
‘Reverse Futures’ is also an exhibition title borrowed from Cave_bureau, who use the term ‘reverse futurism’ to examine the past in speculative ways. “For the future to exist we need to undo the mistakes of the past,” they say.
In a similar vein, Kwaai’s Fisher Child uses archival photographs and interviews with some of the original fishers and displaced inhabitants of Kalk Bay, Cape Town. The work uses VR to tell the story of Kalk Bay. Put on the headset, reappear on the ocean floor, tug on one of the many fishing lines surrounding you, and hear a different oral history. The genius of this work lies in its neat blending of sophisticated technology – Kwaai worked with creative technologist Kyle Marais to create this community-based immersive media project – and simple storytelling. Owing to time, I can only hear one of Fisher Child’s oral histories.
Traci KwaaiFisher Child (2025). VR Installation. © and courtesy of Traci Kwaai in collaboration with Kyle Marais and Lo-Def Film Factory.
As I sit and listen, an orca circles above, and kelp forests ripple in the current. I keep my eyes trained on a long table, surrounded by faceless people, sharing in one another’s stories, and surfacing the narratives of “ancestors buried in the rocky soil of Kalk Bay, or lost at sea.”
Like Calculating Empires, and so many of the works in this final instalment of JCAF’s ‘Worldmaking’ exhibition series, there is a sense of stepping into the deep time of this particular world. You are hearing a forgotten story being told by a living person, mediated through new technology on the other side of the country, and suddenly, your understanding of the world expands ever so slightly, reaching into the past and hinting at an idea of the future.
