THE NEW HUMAN: Knock, Knock, Is Anyone Home?

Curator: Joa Ljungberg

THE NEW HUMAN is a film and video-based exhibition project that artistically explores aspects of our current human condition, while also presenting imagined scenarios of our future. How do we perceive and understand ourselves as humans? How do we live, socialize, organize and control each other? And what kind of future awaits us?

The project’s first chapter was subtitled You and I in Global Wonderland and dealt with how we evaluate, understand (misunderstand) and treat each other in a world characterized by intensified globalization and migration. Now, in the second chapter, we instead turn our focus to the rapid technological progress and the ways it is changing and reshaping our very existence.

Knock, Knock, Is Anyone Home? aims at examining humanity at a time when the boundaries between man and machine are fading. While global capitalism has become more natural to us than nature itself, new technologies have developed with the capacity to infiltrate our bodies and turn us into cyborgs. The digital revolution has fundamentally changed the way we relate to the world and to each other, and there is no longer a clear dividing line between actual reality and virtual reality. Some even say that we might soon enter an era in which technology will be so complex, intelligent, and self-reproductive that we humans can no longer control it.

Knock, Knock, Is Anyone Home? is an exhibition that oscillates between the hysterically absurd and deeply serious. As humans we seem to be skirting the borderline between final disaster and the formation of something new. The question arises whether it is even going to be feasible to be “human” in the long run. Or if we—consciously or unconsciously—will develop into a new kind of being, better suited to life in the high-tech and high-speed world that is our own creation.

“I hope that this exhibition will fascinate and inspire, but most of all I hope it will raise questions about what kind of future we are heading towards, and what it really means to be alive and to be human,” says Joa Ljungberg, curator of the exhibition.

Contributing artists: Ed Atkins, Harun Farocki, Kerstin Hamilton, Helen Marten, Daria Martin, Ursula Mayer, Mika Rottenberg, SUPERFLEX and Ryan Trecartin.

THE NEW HUMAN is produced by Moderna Museet Malmö. The project has been made possible through a close collaboration with the Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf.