The New Museum has reopened with 'New Humans: Memories of the Future,' a massive survey featuring over 150 contributors including Hito Steyerl, Precious Okoyomon, and H.R. Giger. Spanning 13 sections across the museum's new 5,500 square-meter extension, the exhibition traces the intersection of art, technology, and the human body from the early 20th century to the present. It juxtaposes interwar European works, such as Hannah Höch’s photomontages and Bauhaus ballets, with contemporary installations like Simon Denny’s sculpture of an Amazon worker's cage.
While the exhibition is praised for its scale and historical breadth, it faces criticism for failing to distinguish between the victims of technological control and its architects. By utilizing 'New Materialism' frameworks that flatten human experience into a collective 'we,' the curation arguably overlooks the political realities of labor and disability. The show succeeds as a spectacle of the 'post-human' but misses an opportunity to critically address how industrial and digital systems continue to subordinate specific bodies to the machinery of capital.