The New Museum's latest exhibition explores the evolving definition of humanity through the lens of technological advancement and ancestral wisdom. The show juxtaposes the anxieties of modern machine labor—exemplified by Simon Denny’s Amazon worker cage—with Indigenous epistemologies and animist traditions that offer alternative ways of inhabiting the world. By featuring artists like Jaider Esbell and Santiago Yahuarcani, the exhibition highlights how hybridity and relationality can resist the rigid hierarchies of Western modernity.
This curation matters because it bridges the gap between historical postwar anxieties and contemporary fears surrounding Artificial Intelligence. By framing the human body as a porous entity constantly negotiated across species and technologies, the museum challenges visitors to reconsider the biopolitical implications of productivity and extraction. The inclusion of diverse cosmologies suggests that solving the conundrums of a technologized future may require looking back at ancestral knowledge and 'artivism' to reclaim agency from algorithmic control.