Afrofuturists

An archival portrait meets a motherboard in Abeni Asante’s print Asante Kotoko. The artist’s portfolio identifies the photographed figure as Prempeh II, while its accompanying account turns to Nana Yaa Asantewaa and her resistance to British colonial power. The technological pattern recalls the gold inside electronic devices. Asante connects the struggle over the Asante Golden Stool with contemporary extraction of Ghanaian gold. The future is visible in the circuit, but it is answerable to people and forests whose histories began long before the device.

In Adam and Amina Seid Tahir’s to excavate the sun, light is not a resource waiting above everyone equally. It lies beneath the ground, and people must dig for it together. The premise turns a Nordic winter into a fictional world with its own physical law. Darkness is not simply defeated by the arrival of a hero. Warmth appears through cooperation, shared rhythm and the willingness to approach another person. The Botkyrka Konsthall account of the exhibition describes specially designed tools that visitors could use together to uncover light or build dream worlds. It records research residencies in winter 2024 and autumn 2025, followed by an exhibition from November 2025 to February 2026. Those dates…

Commuters at Berlin's Nollendorfplatz station in July 2025 could encounter a small group of Black queer performers moving through the ordinary rhythm of the platform. They wore clothes that belonged to city life, from drag to business casual. Their actions were quiet gestures of affection and care. The artists did not claim the space by building a stage above the crowd. They stayed within the flow of people coming and going, making a different kind of attention possible in a place designed for speed.

In her San Francisco work, the spacesuit, the city bus and the inherited cloth all become ways to make a Black future visible. An astronaut does not have to leave Earth to show what has been pushed out of view. In Afatasi's BLACK SPACE, two figures wear suits she created while familiar San Francisco bus lines move through the work. The 38 Geary, the Third Street bus and the 22 Fillmore are not incidental municipal details. They connect Black residents to neighborhoods, gatherings and histories that a city can celebrate in theory while displacing in practice. The artwork brings the language of space travel down to the scale of a transit route. Its future begins…

Ajak A. Majok put a question at the centre of a three-year project: What if I was free? The wording sounds simple until the artist starts to move it across forms. She recorded intimate conversations with Black and brown people in Finland. She kept a working diary. She edited writing into a book of poems. She developed a solo dance performance from that book. A question that might have remained a political slogan became a sequence of encounters between speech, page, body and audience. In a conversation for Protopia, Majok describes the project as an attempt to approach an Afrofuturist idea of freedom for Black and brown bodies in the Finnish cities where she has…

The harp begins as a set of strings under the hand. Alice Coltrane made it an instrument for crossing large distances of thought. On Journey in Satchidananda, recorded in 1970 and released the following year, the harp is joined by piano, bass, drums, soprano saxophone, tambura, bells and, on one track, oud. The record does not portray an outer-space landscape. Its title proposes a journey through spiritual knowledge, and its ensemble makes that journey a collective act. Each player brings a different line of sound into an environment Coltrane composed and led.

The sentence is short enough to read from a moving car: “There Are Black People in the Future.” It appeared on a billboard in East Liberty, Pittsburgh, a neighborhood under pressure from redevelopment. Alisha B. Wormsley had been writing those words in sketchbooks and on objects for years. On a large public sign, they became impossible to keep within the private space of an artist's notebook. The statement names an obvious possibility that many images of the future still fail to grant: Black people remain, shape places and have time ahead of them.

The novelist and playwright builds refuge from festivals, machines, memory and the hard work of care. The trees are restless when Cinnamon Jones rides into the night. A dog called Bruja senses trouble. Three small Circus-Bots ride in trailer bins behind the bicycle, their lights and sensors alert despite their low power. A child is somewhere nearby, and Cinnamon has received a fractured signal from a missing friend. In the opening excerpt of Archangels of Funk, Andrea Hairston places an improvised rescue beside an equally improvised technology. The Bots were made from things nobody wanted. Their components form a Chinese dragon, an Anishinaabe Thunderbird and a version of Mami Wata. They are artificial intelligence and…

At the entrance to Rotterdam’s Nieuwe Instituut, a large screen gave a quiet thought public scale. Àsìkò’s 2025 commission The Ori That Speaks follows Ona, a woman seeking her Ori, a Yoruba conception of the inner head and destiny. She passes through stillness, ancestral presence and transformation. A work made for a digital screen could have announced its technical novelty at every turn. The artist instead wanted viewers to feel the weight of breath and the possibility that an inward voice might become audible. His future begins with an act of listening.

Two chairs sit in an imagined room whose past cannot be held inside a single date. Atang Tshikare’s Leifo reworks the form of an eighteenth-century French fauteuil, a chair associated with European domestic status, using South African materials and techniques linked to his family. Wood, grasses, charring and weaving bring another history into the frame. Brass beading suggests constellations and sparks. The chairs were made for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room, but they do more than fit the title of an exhibition. They make a room ask whom it has been built to welcome.

The premise of Jordbundna sounds familiar until its most ordinary assumption becomes the problem. Earth is no longer habitable. An ark will take a selected few away. Max is not among them. The question that pushes Baker Karim’s short film beyond a disaster story is not whether the ship can fly. It is who was permitted to leave. The Swedish public broadcaster’s description of the film gives this much of the story: a dying planet, a small group chosen for interplanetary escape and a man determined to board at any cost. An earlier announcement from the Swedish Film Institute locates the action in Kiruna in 2121 and adds a more disturbing assertion. The selection was…

A phone can make a person present in two places and absent from both. Baloji's short film Zombies takes that familiar experience into the streets, salons and clubs of Kinshasa. Its figures look at screens, carry devices and appear in costumes assembled from a city that is already full of discarded technology. The future in the film does not arrive from a distant spaceship. It grows from objects held in a hand and from the social habits that have formed around them. The film’s press dossier describes a passage between hope and dystopia. A hair salon, futuristic clubbing and a campaign parade for a fictional dictator appear in its synopsis. The film takes mobile technology…

An eviction notice and a clock do not seem to belong in the same artistic argument until one asks who controls the time they measure. A tenant may have days to leave. A developer may describe a neighborhood’s replacement as inevitable progress. An archive may preserve the building but not the people who lived there. In Philadelphia, Camae Ayewa and Rasheedah Phillips have made work that asks what a community might do with its own past and future when the official timetable offers so little room. Their collaboration, Black Quantum Futurism, treats time as something people experience, dispute and make together.

A film made for someone to move with in a living room has a different idea of an audience from a film designed only to be watched. Camille Sapara Barton’s The Grief Portal meets a viewer at the scale of their own body. The 2020 work is a somatic movement film, commissioned when isolation and loss had become common features of public life. It invites participation rather than treating grief as a private image to be observed from a safe distance. Barton’s Afrofuturism begins with that invitation. A future becomes imaginable through what people can feel and practise together now.

A portable radio passes between women in Cauleen Smith's film Sojourner. It carries voices from other times into a present journey through places where people once built lives together. The device is familiar, almost modest, yet it changes the film's scale. A receiver can bring a distant voice into an intimate space; several listeners can hear it at once. Smith uses that shared act of attention to ask what a future might inherit from communities that have already tried to live otherwise.

The filmmaker and visual artist places a Black woman's inner life at the center of speculative technology, then asks how a story changes when its audience must move to see it. The device is not the whole story. In Celia C. Peters's Godspeed, a gifted technophile's invention precipitates a frightening breakdown. That description, published by SFO Museum alongside a still from the project's animated proof of concept, gives the thriller its machinery. It also suggests a more intimate problem. What happens to a person whose competence has organized her life when the technology she made destabilizes her? Peters approaches the future through a character's ability to understand herself. The question begins in the body before…

A dance filmed on a phone can outlive the place where it happened. The image remains, but the people who made the movement, the terms they used for it and the sounds that moved them may be separated by years and platforms. Christelle Oyiri’s film Collective Amnesia: In Memory of Logobi begins from that unsettled survival. It follows a dance that travelled from Abidjan to the suburbs of Paris, where Black French young people made it visible in streets, stations and online. Oyiri does more than retrieve an overlooked style. She asks what a body knows when the public record has misplaced the people who taught it to move.

An old radio can still hold the memory of people gathering to hear it. A bicycle without wheels can still carry a father’s promise. A pair of glasses can turn a face into a different character, even when the lenses have no conventional purpose. Cyrus Kabiru makes art at the point where an object’s former use remains visible but no longer sets the limit of what it can become. The materials come from the streets and workshops of Nairobi and from the other places he visits. The future in his work does not arrive in a sealed box. It is assembled from things whose previous lives have not entirely ended.

A coat can keep out weather. D. Denenge Duyst-Akpem asks it to do more. Her Camo Coat Collection treats a garment as a way to think about visibility, danger, healing and survival in a city. A cape inspired by leaves and by the Yoruba orisa Osanyin can be worn, but it also gives its wearer a part in an invented system of protection. The person inside is neither hidden nor simply displayed. They become an active figure in a question: what would it mean to move through the world equipped for more than the cold?

A small figure in a kind of spacesuit enters an abstract painting. The surrounding marks need not turn into a planet or a recognisable landscape. Daniel Kojo Schrade's Afronaut can stand among fragments of colour and text, occupying a visual field that seemed, at first, to have no room for a character. The arrival changes the field. A figure who refuses to be assigned a stable place can claim the painting as somewhere to define an image on their own terms. Schrade began developing the Afronaut motif in 1999. In his artist statement, he describes the figures as displaced characters who create and control their own image spaces. Their headgear can look like a helmet,…

A relic usually arrives from behind us. It has survived long enough to carry traces of a place, a person or a belief. David Alabo asks what happens when the relic comes from a civilization that has not yet existed. His 2026 exhibition I found us in the future… presents digital environments and bronze sculpture as evidence of possible African diasporic worlds. The objects do not claim to predict what those worlds will be. They invite a stranger to imagine how a future society might interpret the marks we are leaving now.

The future in Delasi’s music arrives by rhythm rather than by rocket. On Voltaic Prodigy, an eight-track beat tape released in September 2024, the Ghanaian producer, singer and rapper takes hip-hop’s drums and jazz harmonies into patterns that resist a settled genre. Saxophone lines drift across programmed beats. Soulful chords make room for abrupt changes of pace. The record’s title suggests electrical potential, and the music behaves like a circuit with several open routes. An artist based in Koforidua is not waiting for someone else to authorize the sound of tomorrow.

In Dennis Osadebe’s 2017 exhibition Remember the Future, people from different professions appeared in spacesuits. Ankara patterns and bold colour entered scenes with flattened planes and a deliberately improbable premise. The suit, one of modern culture’s most familiar images of exploration, did not lift its wearer out of a Nigerian social world. It asked who had been missing from the image of the explorer, and what would change if that absence were corrected without discarding the person’s other histories. Osadebe is a Lagos-born artist who works across painting, sculpture and installation. He lives and works in Lagos. In a 2017 interview with OkayAfrica, he described Afrofuturism as an invitation for a next generation to think…

The Atlantic has been mapped as a route of commerce, conquest and forced transport. Drexciya imagined another geography beneath its surface. In the Detroit duo's story, an underwater people descend from the unborn children of pregnant African women thrown or driven overboard during the Middle Passage. The premise does not undo the atrocity from which it begins. It makes a demand on imagination: if a history tried to erase lives, what kind of world might be built around those lives instead? James Stinson and Gerald Donald made Drexciya as music, myth and visual system. The Toronto Biennial's presentation with Underground Resistance credits the two musicians and the visual artists who helped give the submerged world…

The writer and Milestone cofounder put Black inventors, teenagers and aliens into superhero comics while changing who controlled the stories themselves. Curtis Metcalf invents the tools that make his employer rich. When he asks for a share, he discovers how little of the future he has built belongs to him. That contradiction powers Hardware, the first comic released by Milestone Media in 1993. The hero's technological brilliance is spectacular; his predicament is familiar. Dwayne McDuffie, who wrote the original series with artist Denys Cowan, made a science fiction suit of armor into a way of asking a question about labor and ownership. Who gets to profit from an inventor's mind, and who gets to decide…

The Nile is a familiar line on a map. In Ekow Nimako’s hands it becomes a question about who has been allowed to draw the map at all. For Building Black Civilizations: The Nile 3025 CE, the Ghanaian-Canadian artist made an imagined African landscape from more than one million black LEGO pieces. It runs nearly seven metres, from the region of Lake Victoria toward the Mediterranean. The scale is ambitious, but the premise is larger still: what might a continent look like a thousand years from now if its inhabitants, rather than the histories imposed on them, set the terms of its future?

Elena Smon Wolay wrote a musical story for children and adults about Sun Ra, the bandleader who claimed Saturn as his home. She read and sang alongside an ensemble credited with voices, drums, saxophone, synthesizer, sampler and Mellotron. Her script brought a difficult artistic history into a shared performance. An audience could meet the cosmic claim through a story and the musicians who carried it. Wolay later curated a Sun Ra photo exhibition at Malmö Konsthall and convened a conference on Afrofuturism there. These are different works. One puts a cosmic tale into the hands of performers for children and adults. The other asks visitors to look at the visual record of a musician whose…

On a hill in southern Sweden, an old garden structure acquired a new interior life. Evan Ifekoya made an architectural intervention in a gazebo at Wanås Konst for The Ocean in the Forest II in 2024. The structure, thought by the sculpture park to date from the 1920s, became a space for movement, sound and energy. It was already a place built for a particular way of looking at land. Ifekoya asked what might happen when another way of listening enters it. The work belongs to a practice that rarely gives the visitor a single image of a future. Ifekoya makes sound, film, performance and installations that change the conditions in which people meet. A…

The painting was on the floor. To see Fadlabi's The Onset of Vertigo at Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo in 2020, visitors had to reckon with an image under their feet rather than on the wall ahead. Acrylic paint lay beneath a thick layer of lacquer that allowed people to walk onto it. Above the staircase nearby was Per Krohg's celebrated ceiling mural, painted in 1932. Fadlabi placed his work in conversation with that older picture of an artist's journey, changing the direction of the viewer's gaze and the institution's account of its own history.

A voice recorded in a restaurant in Addis Ababa enters a track made for movement. Kebenesh, who worked chopping onions there, sang a melody that Faizal Mostrixx carried into Onions and Love. Around it he built electronic space and layered rhythm. The encounter does not turn a person’s everyday singing into an anonymous texture. Mostrixx names her and describes wanting to retain something of its Ethiopian setting while bringing in influences from his own Baganda musical world. The track opens his 2023 album Mutations with a question he returns to throughout it: what happens when a sound encountered in one life is given room to move in another?

A mask can be made to face backward, treated as evidence of a culture that has finished making itself. Fanuel Leul asks it to face forward. In Afromask, his 2021 series of 101 digital masks, the Ethiopian artist takes a form long capable of carrying ritual and social meaning and imagines its next transformations in a technological environment. The result is not a request for a traditional object to survive unchanged. Leul has said that masks already change as generations make and remake them. His digital works enter that continuity, replacing the hand-carved surface with a modeled one while keeping alive the question of what a face can hold.

In Gato Preto’s video for Barulho, the two musicians appear as prisoners who become futuristic heroes. The change is theatrical and emphatic: leather, silver, reflective surfaces and a vehicle imagined for a mission to rescue the world’s grooves. The story belongs to the visual language around Tempo, the Düsseldorf duo’s 2017 debut album. Its soundtrack moves among electronic bass, percussion and vocal forms gathered through travel and collaboration. The imagery offers a comic-book transformation, while the music asks a harder question: who gets to decide what African music ought to sound like now?

The spacecraft in George Clinton's world had to do more than look convincing. It had to land on a stage, at a moment in a show when a room full of people was ready to believe that funk could change the scale of their lives. Clinton's P-Funk universe was carried in songs, costumes, characters and stories, but its most famous object was also a piece of practical theatre. Someone had to design it, construct it, finance it, move it and cue its arrival.

Before Afrofuturism became a familiar word, Greg Tate was writing about Black music as though the future were already being made inside it. His sentences could move from a record’s groove to a political argument, from an artist’s costume to a history of cultural ownership, without presenting any one of those things as a footnote to another. Later, he built an ensemble large enough to make some of those arguments audible in real time. Tate’s criticism and his music share a proposition: Black experimental culture cannot be understood by holding it still for inspection. One has to follow the changes its makers produce.

There is a kitchen in the Metropolitan Museum of Art that belongs to a family who never had the chance to live there. A brick hearth recalls a nineteenth-century domestic space. Nearby, a futuristic living room is organized around a five-sided television. The two spaces exist at once. Their imagined occupants are descendants of Seneca Village, the predominantly Black New York community destroyed when the city cleared land for Central Park in 1857. The room does not pretend to recover a lost home intact. It asks what a home might have become if the people who built a neighborhood had been allowed to stay.

On a rooftop above Peckham, an imagined spacecraft became a place for other people’s predictions. Harold Offeh’s Hail the New Prophets was built for a London car park, a structure usually devoted to the practical business of arriving, parking and leaving. He used that elevated, ordinary site to ask for more adventurous uses of the mind. Visitors and contributors were invited to propose futures through words, images, music and performance. The ship was conspicuous, but its destination was never an invented planet. It was the public’s capacity to say what might happen next.

In Helen Ifeagwu’s Clones, the bodies shine. Their silver surfaces can read as precious, manufactured or exposed, depending on where a viewer begins looking. A man’s hand holds the women in the image. Smaller heads in the background watch one another. The painting’s polished realism gives these figures a persuasive physical presence, even as their metallic finish pushes them toward another order of being. Ifeagwu uses that unsettled space between person and object to ask how images teach us to value a body.

Helena Eribenne imagined boarding a time machine in London in 1999, aiming for London in 1974, and arriving instead in Vienna. The year is still 1999, but the city feels older. Her character finds an Afro-textured hair salon and meets another Black woman whose reception in the city differs from her own. The premise grew into a performance she wrote, directed and acted in, When the World Comes to An End, Move to Vienna… Because Everything Happens There 20 Years Later!. Its time-travel joke carries a serious account of who is welcomed, who is marked as foreign and what it can mean to be displaced without ever having left Europe.

In Garden of Eden, the first act of imagination is deceptively simple: change who is allowed into the garden. Ima Iduozee’s 2017 choreography took a foundational European image of innocence, the biblical paradise of Adam and Eve, and asked what happens when two nonwhite bodies occupy it. The answer could not be supplied by changing the cast alone. Every expectation attached to the image, including beauty, purity, gender and the right to be seen as universal, had to be reconsidered. A garden that had seemed timeless revealed the people it had habitually left outside.

Jacque Njeri’s MaaSci collages send Maasai figures beyond the familiar landscapes in which they are usually photographed. Across the series, people in distinctive dress walk on a moon, travel in UFOs and sit near celestial forms that have appeared in earthly terrain. The pictures do not ask whether a real Maasai space programme is under construction. They ask why a viewer might accept the costume and machinery of science fiction as belonging to one part of the world but hesitate when an East African person is placed inside that frame.

In Janelle Monáe's Dirty Computer, a person's memories can be treated as material to delete. Jane 57821 is taken into an institution that classifies difference as an error and presents erasure as repair. Each music video inside the larger film becomes a fragment of a life the system wants to remove. The format is ingenious because it makes a familiar function of pop music, the replayable visual single, into evidence of a contested identity. Monáe explained this design in a 2018 public conversation at the Red Bull Music Academy. The videos are Jane's memories or dreams as they are being erased. That account prevents a lazy description of the work as an album with striking…

In Moko Is Future, a stilt dancer walks through Copenhagen before the city has properly awakened. The streets are almost empty. The dancer is dressed in colour, elevated above the pavement, impossible to mistake for an ordinary passerby. The camera holds the figure vertically, a shape within a shape, while buildings that ordinarily describe a familiar capital become the scenery of another history. The neighbourhood was made by a city with a colonial past. The visitor on stilts comes from an Afro-Caribbean tradition that survived that past. The encounter takes place in the present, yet the work's title insists on the future.

In the middle of Electric Ladyland, Jimi Hendrix set a date in the future and imagined leaving a world at war. “1983… (A Merman I Should Turn to Be)” is a long composition about going toward the sea rather than waiting for human violence to end on land. Its companion passage, “Moon, Turn the Tides… Gently Gently Away,” extends the movement beyond an ordinary song's short arc. The official Hendrix album listing puts these pieces near the center of the 1968 double LP. Hendrix used the space of the album to make a speculative journey feel expansive enough to inhabit.

A traveler from the future arrives to collect fragments of a history that has not been handed to him whole. In The Last Angel of History, the Data Thief moves among sound, science fiction and memory, looking for the code to his own origin. The film’s mystery is less about a secret device than about the conditions under which Black cultural history becomes legible. Music is evidence. An interview is evidence. A science fiction image is evidence too. The traveler gathers them as if an archive could be built while the future waits for its instructions.

In John Jennings's graphic novella Protocol and Response, a figure in a black spacesuit moves through time gathering objects for a room that has not settled in one century. Dr. Zora Nova is a traveler and a collector, but the artifacts she encounters are more than clues in a science-fiction puzzle. A comb, a vessel and a power figure carry histories that press back on the one who handles them. As her memory falters under the strain of time travel, the objects help her recover a relation to the people and places that official history has made hard to reach.

A spaceship can be made without pretending to leave the world behind. In The AfroStar Galactica, John-Paul Zaccarini welcomes an audience aboard a research vessel whose destination is a future shaped by Black study, queer invention and collective attention. The journey belongs to more than one artist. Music, scent, aerial movement and spoken thought share the room. What makes the vessel convincing is not a claim that its passengers have escaped the conditions of ordinary life. It is the invitation to notice those conditions, change who sets the terms, and try another way of being together.

A photograph of a revolutionary can be an endpoint. It can also be a beginning. Josèfa Ntjam takes images of Black people who resisted colonial power and places them among roots, marine forms, microscopic life and invented creatures. The portrait no longer sits alone in the clean space of an archive. It enters an ecosystem where other histories, bodies and kinds of intelligence press against it. An image from the past begins to move through a future it was never expected to reach. Ntjam's work across sculpture, photomontage, film, sound and performance has brought those ecosystems into galleries from France to Stockholm. Her 2024–25 exhibition at Fotografiska Stockholm, Futuristic Ancestry: Warping Matter and Space-time(s), combined…

Jota Mombaça lowered cloth into water and let the water mark it. The material returned carrying sediment, a record made without a photographer's fixed frame. In The Sinking Ship/Prosperity, an exhibition at KADIST in San Francisco, the artist brought such altered fabric into a room with sound, video and a structure that suggested a whale's ribs. The cloth had travelled through a lagoon; other pieces entered three sites around San Francisco Bay. They did not emerge clean. Their stains and weights were part of the work.

The future in Daughters of the Dust does not arrive in a spacecraft. It waits on a beach, while members of the Peazant family decide whether to leave the South Carolina Sea Islands for the mainland. The year is 1902. Their choice is intensely practical: a journey north might mean work, separation, safety, disappointment or some combination none of them can yet predict. But the film refuses the idea that a decision about the future can be made by cutting the past loose. Ancestors, language, images and an unborn child all have a part in what comes next.

A small opening can decide how a whole room is seen. In Keabetswe Seema’s Behold: Mother’s Backroom, the viewer encounters a constructed interior through a peephole in a dark acrylic surface. Sound belongs to the work as well as collage. There is no sweeping view from which every object can be counted at once. The person looking has to align their body with the opening and accept a limited sightline. In the 2026 Shanghai exhibition Beholding Black Mirrors, this device turned an ordinary condition of looking into the subject of the art. Who gets to look through a door? Who built the room beyond it? And whose life has been arranged there for inspection?

The spacecraft is a monument everyone can see. For Icarus 13, Angolan artist Kiluanji Kia Henda recast a monumental structure in Luanda as the vehicle for a fictional mission to the sun. Other city sites acquired new functions in his photographic account of the expedition. A disused building could become an observatory; an event at a stadium could supply the atmosphere of a launch. The mission did not happen. The photographs and model insist that, for the duration of the work, it is worth asking why an Angolan journey into space might seem less credible to a viewer than the familiar space myths of other nations.

The future is rarely silent in Kodwo Eshun’s work. It arrives through a record, a voice, the remembered sound of another film, or the pressure of a story that history has declared unfinished. In his writing on music and in the films he makes with Anjalika Sagar as the Otolith Group, futurity is a method of listening to the present. The future is neither an escape hatch nor a decorative destination. It is a way to hear whose knowledge has been treated as noise, whose inventions have been made to look belated, and which histories might still be assembled differently.

Lauren Halsey's structures ask to be entered, not merely admired from a safe distance. On the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2023, visitors could move through an architectural environment filled with references to the South Central Los Angeles neighborhood where she grew up and continues to work. Ancient Egyptian forms met storefront signs, neighborhood language and the visual habits of a city that residents keep making their own. The work did not present Los Angeles as a theme imported into a New York museum. It proposed that a community's everyday marks could determine the terms of monumental architecture.

The Black Ark stood in the yard of Lee “Scratch” Perry's Kingston home. Its name suggested a vessel; its equipment made a place where recorded music could be taken apart and sent somewhere new. Perry made rhythm tracks, songs and dubs there with singers and players whose performances remained essential to the result. Then he made a second composition at the mixing desk. A voice could appear for a moment and disappear, a snare could leave an echo after the drum itself had gone, and a familiar song could return as an unfamiliar landscape.

For the speculative poet, myth and science meet in the space of a line, a voice and a listener. Linda D. Addison enters a Carnegie Hall Afrofuturism conversation with a poem about Mami Wata. The speaker moves between galaxies and a person in distress, offering a scale at once cosmic and intimate. The festival's published transcript records how quickly the voice crosses from neurons to old gods, from distance to touch. A figure with an African spiritual history appears in a future-facing gathering, but she is neither a relic nor a technological upgrade. She speaks as someone who can reach a hurting person across registers of time and place.

Petroleum wax does not arrive in an art gallery without a past. It comes from oil, from bodies transformed under geological pressure, from extraction and from an industry that has enriched some places while damaging others. Linda Lamignan chooses it because those histories are not separate from their own. Their mother comes from Nigeria’s Delta State; their father from Stavanger, Norway’s oil capital. In Lamignan’s hands, the material can melt, hold pigment, harden into a shape or make a vessel for another object. It refuses to remain a mute sign of either wealth or harm.

Marie-Lydie Nokouda’s Afrofuturism begins with a practical problem in the Danish theatre: who is allowed to become a playwright, and who is given a stage before anyone can know what that person might write? In 2021, the actor and artistic leader founded Black to Normal and brought eight new dramatic texts to Teater Grob in Copenhagen under the title Afro to the Future. The event did not wait for a future repertoire to appear on its own. It put writers, dramaturgical advisers, directors, performers, visual artists and an audience into a room where a different repertoire could begin to take shape.

The eyes of Mary Sibande’s Sophie are closed. She is made in the artist’s likeness, yet she does not return the gaze of the people looking at her. Around her body, a domestic worker’s blue and white uniform opens into another kind of dress. Its fabric can swell toward a Victorian gown, a cape or a ceremonial costume. The eyes suggest an interior life that the uniform could never fully contain. Sophie appears still, but the garment makes a dream visible. Sibande was born in Barberton and works in Johannesburg. Her mother, grandmother and great-grandmother worked as domestic servants under the conditions created by apartheid and its aftermath. Sibande has spoken about having a choice…

The Indianapolis writer makes Black speculative fiction answer to neighborhoods, institutions and the people who build them. In discussing Pimp My Airship with the Indianapolis Recorder, Maurice Broaddus named streets and neighborhoods familiar to Indianapolis readers: Indiana Avenue, Delaware Street and Haughville. He also pointed to the history of Unigov, the city-county consolidation enacted in 1969 and put into effect in 1970. Broaddus's account of the novel places an airship above a city with a specific political geography. The extraordinary vehicle matters partly because the ground beneath it is not interchangeable.

A river does not explain its history to the person crossing it. It carries sediment, sound and the evidence of movement whether anyone can read them or not. In Mónica de Miranda’s Path to the Stars, the Kwanza River in Angola becomes a passage between anticolonial memory and a future that has yet to be agreed upon. A woman travels with a shadow; soldiers study a chart; a child turns toward space. The film and its companion images let those figures inhabit more than one historical time without leaving the river behind.

In Circuit City, people live in an apartment complex owned by a corporation and search for a way out. Moor Mother, the artist Camae Ayewa, made the 2020 work as a theatrical song cycle in four acts. Its setting is a living room, a place where private life ought to have room to unfold. The ownership structure makes that privacy uncertain. Technology has entered the housing arrangement, and escape requires more than stepping through a door. The residents imagine a machine that could move them through time toward a safer place.

A child walks through a city with a television where his head should be. In Mũchiri Njenga’s short film Kichwateli, the image is at once strange and immediately legible. A screen can receive a signal, show a picture and transmit a message. A child can look, remember and ask questions adults may prefer to leave alone. By joining them in one figure, the Kenyan artist gives the work a protagonist who is both a person and a contested means of communication. The future arrives through the body of someone usually expected to listen rather than speak.

Across a broken continent, a living city and a star-enclosing metropolis, Jemisin makes power visible by changing the rules of the world. The disaster in The Fifth Season reaches Essun on the same day as a smaller, unbearable catastrophe: her husband has killed their son and taken their daughter. Far away, an empire collapses and a rift opens in the continent called the Stillness. The scale of the novel is immense, but Jemisin's own synopsis begins with the pressure of these events on one woman. What happens to a society when the earth itself becomes unstable? What happens to a family when a person capable of moving the earth is feared by those closest to…

Nalo Hopkinson's first novel places a grandmother, a young mother and a child in a Toronto that has been divided against itself. The prosperous outer districts remain connected to power; the inner city is left to people who must find other ways to live. In Brown Girl in the Ring, a heart is needed by a provincial leader outside the abandoned center. Inside it, Ti-Jeanne and her grandmother Gros-Jeanne know herbs, spirits and forms of care the surrounding society treats as marginal. The plot brings those systems into conflict without asking readers to mistake spiritual knowledge for a quaint remainder of the past.

A patterned suit stands before a clothesline of patterned fabrics in Nana Kwadwo’s Re-envisioning. In other frames of the 2022 series, its wearer sits on a plastic chair or raises both hands toward the camera. White eye gear and a pale dish-shaped object unsettle the ordinary domestic setting. Kwadwo told Suboart that he wanted to approach art, technology and fashion through a Black lens, with a vintage feeling that would keep the images natural. The future here is made from objects close to a body, not from a city of anonymous metal.

The eyes follow you. In Nettrice Gaskins' 2010 virtual exhibition Alternate Futures: Afrofuturist Multiverses & Beyond, a wall of eyeballs tracks the visitor's avatar through a simulated space. Elsewhere, a floor tile sends the avatar into a cage. The visitor can leave, but the interruption matters. Gaskins built surveillance and confinement into the apparently free terrain of a digital world. Even an invented future carries the structures of the present unless someone chooses to change them. That early work offers a way into Gaskins' later images made with generative software. The Boston-based artist, teacher and writer has spent years asking who builds a technology, who receives access to it and what forms of imagination it…

The flutist and composer makes speculative places audible through the choices an ensemble makes together. In Nicole Mitchell's Mandorla Awakening II: Emerging Worlds, a future society does not arrive as a single electronic signal. Strings, flute, shakuhachi, percussion and electronic sound all have work to do. Their presence is neither a picturesque inventory nor an argument that one instrument belongs to the past and another to the future. Mitchell's score asks what happens when distinct ways of making sound must coexist. The question belongs to the imaginary world of Mandorla, but it also belongs to the musicians standing together onstage.

The first fact about Head Peace is that Niki “Awandee” Tsappos does not dance it herself. She made the work, shaped its choreographic world and led its creative team, but its two bodies onstage belong to Kelly Bigirindavyi and Claudio “Comics” Fernandes. The distinction matters for a choreographer whose name is widely known through her own dancing. In this piece, she gives an audience her vision through someone else's movement. It is an act of trust that sits at the heart of the work.

The constellations on a wall can look like a map of eternal facts. Someone first chose their outlines, gave them names and made those names familiar enough to seem natural. Nolan Oswald Dennis’s Black Liberation Zodiac puts another set of figures in that sky. Raised fists, panthers, rifles and farming tools enter its diagrammatic language. The work does not ask visitors to forget the actual stars. It asks them to notice the stories through which the stars have been organised, and whose struggle might become visible if another history guided the drawing.

Nona Hendryx has spent decades refusing to separate a song from the conditions that let it become visible and audible. In Labelle, a change of sound arrived with a change of stage image. Space-age clothing did not merely advertise the music; it let three distinct performers inhabit a new idea of what a Black women's vocal group could be. Later, Hendryx took a similar curiosity into recording technology, education and immersive art. The instruments changed, but the question persisted: who gets to design the future, and who has access to the tools?

At Röda Sten Konsthall in Gothenburg, Nontokozo Tshabalala’s performance iNkululeko began with an invitation to freedom. The gallery described a journey between the present and the future, with experimental sound design by Samar Jabri. Songs of struggle met vibrations, humming and sounds of possible things to come. The work did not treat the future as a distant setting that an audience could only observe. It asked people to move toward it together. That invitation makes sense within Tshabalala’s practice. The South African-born artist, designer and poet has called herself an Afrofuturist and made work in Sweden that uses image, sound, writing and public participation to ask how Black people can occupy space on their own…

The desks are there. A blackboard carries a lesson. Flags hang where a class might look toward a teacher. Yet Nyame Oulynji Brown's Classroom in Nevérÿon does not belong to a school district or a remembered childhood. It is a speculative learning space installed at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco. Brown made paintings on blackboards and placed real and invented objects around them. The result asks what Black history might look like if the classroom were allowed to teach from a future nobody has fixed in advance.

Lauren Olamina begins Parable of the Sower behind a wall. Her California neighborhood has some shelter from the violence and scarcity outside, but the wall is neither a solution nor a guarantee. Lauren keeps noticing what its protection requires her neighbors to ignore. When the enclosure fails, she does not discover a ready-made community waiting beyond it. She has to make one with other people while moving through a country whose institutions have become increasingly unable or unwilling to protect them. Octavia E. Butler published the novel in 1993. Its imagined future has since become a favorite occasion for saying that she predicted the present. The compliment is understandable and too small. Butler did not…

In Odera Igbokwe’s The Ori, The Connector, a blue-toned figure in a high red collar raises one hand before their chest. Circular forms hang in the painted blue field above the figure’s head. The pose is still, yet the colour around it looks restless. The 2019 painting belongs to a body of work called Dance of the Summoner. Its title joins an idea of inner orientation to an act of relation. How might a person of the African diaspora make a home among histories that have been separated? Igbokwe gives that question a body, a gesture and a space whose depth is less certain than its presence.

At the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, visitors could enter a lounge belonging to an organization that does not exist. Olalekan Jeyifous called the installation ACE/AAP, an imaginary point in a network of African and diasporic travel complexes. The African Conservation Effort, or ACE, had applied Indigenous knowledge to ecological repair, renewable energy and transport. Its All-Africa Protoports, or AAPs, connected ports on the continent with cities across the Atlantic. The room invited viewers to inhabit the institution’s world for a moment rather than observe a distant city in a drawing.

Noah draws comics because another world is easier to enter on a page than in the life around him. In Olivia Wenzel’s Mais in Deutschland und anderen Galaxien, the Black German character moves through family conflict and the afterlife of East Germany while inventing a story that can carry him beyond the conditions he has inherited. His comic does not make those conditions disappear. It gives them another scale. A quarrel with his mother can turn into a journey toward the moon, and a childhood in a country where he feels unwanted can open onto more than one galaxy.

One of the pleasures of Osborne Macharia’s photographs is that age does not set the boundary of possibility. His imagined elders are neither background witnesses nor reassuring symbols of a vanished tradition. They dress, organize, travel and command attention. In Magadi, a group of older women becomes a community that has changed its own course, leaving behind a harmful practice and using fashion to help younger girls. In NYANYE, retired women with distinguished careers form a league of extravagant grannies. These are stories written for the camera, not documentary claims about actual organizations. Their fiction makes space for lives that fashion and popular science fiction often forget to imagine.

The title ATLiens names two positions at once. The first three letters point to Atlanta; the rest place its makers outside what the rap industry thought it knew. On the 1996 album, André Benjamin and Antwan Patton, known as André 3000 and Big Boi, did not leave the South behind to enter the future. They made their hometown the place from which a different future could be spoken. Their alien identity emerged from being heard as outsiders in a genre whose powerful gatekeepers often treated New York and Los Angeles as its natural centres.

Before a listener heard Parliament's Funkentelechy Vs. the Placebo Syndrome, they could meet a conflict on paper. Inside the 1977 record sleeve, Overton Loyd drew a comic about Starchild and Sir Nose D'Voidoffunk. The latter refuses to dance; the former tries to move him with the Bop Gun and a Flash Light. A record that already had characters in its lyrics gained a second way to tell their story. Loyd's drawings gave the listener bodies and gestures to carry into the music.

A man crosses a damaged city with a bicycle he calls the White Horse. The vehicle matters because it once belonged to his ordinary life. In Owo Anietie’s War Hero series, the bicycle becomes the thread a viewer can follow through separation, danger and supernatural intervention. Tanks appear, soldiers close in, and green butterflies gather near the man before the story turns. The work is digitally made, yet its emotional center is a remembered family object. Anietie uses speculative form to revisit the Nigerian civil war without treating that war as a decorative backdrop for action.

His alternate New Orleans and Cairo ask what changes when Black and African worlds direct the machinery of speculative fiction. Creeper wants a place aboard the Midnight Robber. She has survived on the streets of an alternate New Orleans, and an airship promises movement beyond the ground that has held her. In P. Djèlí Clark's The Black God's Drums, the ship is more than a splendid machine overhead. It offers a route through a world in which the American Civil War has not followed familiar lines, Haiti matters as a source of scientific and political power, and an African orisha speaks inside the girl's mind. Flight cannot lift her away from history. It gives her…

Red fabric moves in the air of a gallery. A voice comes from farther into the room, and the light changes as a visitor walks toward it. Paul Maheke called his 2019 Marseille exhibition OOLOI, after the third-gender beings in Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis novels. He did not make a portrait of one of Butler’s alien characters for the wall. He made a space in which presence could be sensed before it could be neatly identified. A figure from speculative fiction became a method for changing how a room might be seen, heard and entered.

**In Of One Blood, a hidden African civilization turns a journey of discovery back upon the American scientist who believes he is making it.** Reuel Briggs begins in a cold Boston room with books and experimental equipment. He is a medical student, trained to ask what a body can reveal. He is also a man who has concealed his Black ancestry in a society that punishes its disclosure. Pauline Hopkins opens Of One Blood with those facts in uneasy proximity. The instruments of science stand near a life organized by secrecy. When Reuel later travels toward ancient Ethiopian sites, the journey seems to promise new knowledge of a distant place. It instead brings him into…

His illustrations for Funkadelic gave the music a population, a language and a visual politics. The record sleeve became a world one could enter before the needle touched vinyl. The face on the cover of Funkadelic's Cosmic Slop is not content to remain a face. George Clinton, recalling Pedro Bell's 1973 design, described a screaming head nested inside a woman's Afro, vampire fangs, a map on one nipple, a stereo dial on another, and a strange yellow bug that carried Bell's signature. The details resist a clean hierarchy. A viewer moves from a mouth to hair, from a body to an instrument panel, from a map to an insect. The cover seems to propose that…

Philipp Khabo Köpsell’s Fanfare for the Colonized begins among the broken materials of empire. Marble, maps, ink and a ruler are the instruments through which people far from a conference table were made to live with decisions taken upon it. The poem does not leave the past sealed in a museum. Its sounds move between the language of official conquest and the land, labour and lives that language attempted to hide. In Köpsell’s work, the future first requires an argument with the words that made the past appear orderly.

A visitor to The House We Dreamed begins in a virtual garden with five doors. Each leads to a question: how will people eat, play, dream, pray or love in the future? Beyond the doors is the life of an imagined family in Abuja in 2063, assembled through panoramic city views, animated collage, woven images and performed voices. Pierre-Christophe Gam’s installation does not offer a single forecast of Nigeria’s capital. It gives the viewer a structure for entering a future shaped by dreams gathered from African communities.

A letter can look like a small and obedient thing. It sits in an alphabet, accepts a place in a word and carries the meaning someone else gives it. Rammellzee saw a different possibility. His drawn characters swell, curve and seem to brace themselves against containment. The marks can suggest vehicles, armor or strange living forms. A familiar sign becomes difficult to read in the usual way, and the difficulty is the point. He wanted language to move beyond the forms by which power had trained people to recognize and control it.

The spacecraft lifts from Kinshasa. Its destination is Europa, the icy moon of Jupiter. For the astronaut Elie, the journey promises a place where life might be planted anew. Yet in Rashiyah Elanga's film Another dream under the Troposphere, departure does not deliver a clean beginning. Other astronauts follow her and ask her to return to Earth, where the community she has left still needs a future. On Europa, an unreturned love deepens her sense of estrangement. Space opens the story, but it cannot settle the question of where a person belongs.

In Despair, Hope and Healing: Three Movements for Climate Justice, Rebekah Ubuntu stands before moving images of sea and space and sings. The stage image has the theatrical shine of science fiction, but its point of departure is not escape from Earth. Ubuntu uses the scale of oceans and galaxies to ask who has been permitted to imagine belonging to them. The performer’s silver costume refers to Black women astronauts, especially Mae Jemison, whose image opened a possibility that Ubuntu had rarely seen represented. The future in this work begins with a correction to the visible past.

Across an ocean, a generation ship and a changing body, Solomon writes the future as a question of who must bear the past. At the opening of The Deep, Yetu is in danger because she remembers. Her people, the wajinru, live underwater, but nearly all their history is held in the mind of one historian. The publisher's generous excerpt begins after Yetu has wandered into water where sharks could find her. Her mother, Amaba, has brought her back. It is a scene of care that becomes a dispute over duty. Amaba wants Yetu ready for the annual Remembrance, when the wajinru briefly receive their past before returning it to her. Yetu is physically exhausted, late…

In Some of Us Aren’t Really From Here, Rosel Jackson Stern painted beings who seemed to ask for more than recognition. Their 2022 Stockholm exhibition proposed that stories fractured by displacement might find another form through portraiture. The figures were not offered as illustrations of a known family history. Stern described them as beings who made themselves known through the process of painting. That distinction gives the work its tension. A portrait usually promises access to a subject. These paintings, by the artist’s account, began with an openness to what could not yet be named.

The surface of a superhero suit can carry a history. For Ruth E. Carter, the texture of Black Panther's costume was an opportunity to make an invented country legible before a character said a word. She wanted the suit to belong to Wakanda, a technologically advanced African nation imagined outside colonial rule, rather than appear to have arrived from a generic superhero wardrobe. Its raised triangular pattern does the work of world building at the scale of a garment. It gives a nearly black form something to reveal when light moves across it.

Samuel Fosso’s Black Pope enters the visual tradition of modern papal portraiture and changes its expected sitter. In the series, the photographer clothes himself in papal regalia and stages a Black man within an office more often pictured, in recent centuries, through European faces. The Princeton University Art Museum’s account of the series describes convincing papal robes that make the imagined occupant of the office appear institutionally legible. The garments give Fosso the visual grammar of authority while the person wearing them exposes the racial limits of what viewers have been taught to picture in that office.

Fifty-five figures stand together in Sandra Mujinga’s Skin to Skin. They are tall, made from heavy textile, and similar enough to suggest that one form has been repeated. Their number changes the room. Four such figures might appear to be a group a visitor has come to inspect. Fifty-five become a population, and the lone visitor has to find a place among them. Mujinga described that reversal in a 2025 interview about the installation. The figures do not acquire faces or a declared species. They gain power through arrangement, scale and the viewer’s inability to see all of them at once.

For Sandro Masai, a painting need not begin when a brush meets a quiet canvas. It can begin when a body starts to move, a musician answers that movement and a public space becomes part of the work. In Dance for Oshun, Masai sings, dances and paints within the same performance. The resulting image carries the record of an event, but the event is not merely a demonstration of how the image was made. It is the art. Masai describes himself as an Afro-Brazilian multimedia artist who works with Afrofuturism, decolonisation, ancestry, spirituality and empathy. He has lived in Denmark since 2007 and has built a practice around performance, participation and interactive installation. Across those…

A graphic designer begins to lose her ability to see colour. In another writer’s hands, that premise might set up a story about a single gift taken away. Sharon Dodua Otoo’s Synchronicity asks a less comfortable question: what happens when a change in perception threatens the work that keeps someone housed, while also making another way of perceiving possible? Its protagonist, Charlie Mensah, cannot experience the change as a tidy metaphor. She has a child, a profession and a life in Berlin. The world around her demands reliable colour vision before it will make room for her uncertainty.

The writer and editor made an anthology into an argument, then kept widening the room for Black speculative art. Sheree Renée Thomas went looking for a book she wanted to read and could not find it. Black writers were making science fiction, fantasy and other speculative work, but their stories were difficult to see together. She knew Octavia E. Butler and Samuel R. Delany; she also knew that the field was larger than the few names a mainstream reader was likely to encounter. In a 2009 interview about Dark Matter, she described that absence as a reader's problem before it became an editor's project. The book she assembled answered by changing what could be found…

An astronaut returns to Earth from Afrofutura and looks back at 2016 as a place in history. That is the premise of Simone Dede Ayivi's First Black Woman in Space. Onstage, the Berlin theatre maker turned the present into a past that could be examined from a future in which Black women had already made space for themselves. The move changes the usual direction of a history lesson. Rather than asking whether today's institutions will eventually include them, the performance begins from the possibility that Black women are making tomorrow and asks what the world of 2016 failed to recognise.

The future in Cosmic Latte is not a backdrop painted behind the dancers. It is a proposition they have to move through. Sonya Lindfors set the 2018 performance in a time after racism, homophobia, transphobia and ecological crisis have been resolved. In a later interview with Institut finlandais, the Helsinki choreographer described the question that followed: what dance would people make there, and what songs would they sing? Lindfors put those questions to performers working with sound, light and a shared room. Zodiak’s programme imagined a brown artist on a brown stage, then imagined that same arrangement a millennium later, when its social meaning had changed. What remained was feeling. The scenario refuses a familiar…

Sun Ra made a proposition that could be heard before it was explained. Put a large ensemble onstage, let the brass and reeds move between disciplined arrangement and open sound, bring in a keyboard timbre that seems to come from another room, then ask the musicians to sing, dance or play percussion as the piece changes shape. The audience has arrived for a concert, but the familiar contract of a concert is under revision. No single instrument owns the future of the music. It is being negotiated in public.

Sutton E. Griggs opened his 1899 novel Imperium in Imperio with an impossible political secret. A Black government had been organized within the United States, with officials, laws and an immense membership, while the country's white authorities failed to see it. The premise is startling because the society it imagines is not located on another planet. It exists beneath the view of people who claim to know and govern the nation around them. The hidden government gives Griggs a speculative device for a question that could not be settled by an ordinary political speech. What might Black Americans build if they pooled knowledge, property and allegiance outside the institutions that denied them equal standing? The…

His comics move Black characters through flight, immortality and changing visual styles without surrendering their lives to an old genre's limits. Tim Fielder describes Matty’s Rocket as a story told across three moments of Matty Watty’s life, from a Mississippi childhood to an older woman’s recollection. His official project page presents an alternate history of spaceflight shaped by Jim Crow, while his 2018 interview places Matty in France as an adult. The period settings have a design purpose beyond providing costumes for pulp adventure. Fielder says the visual language shifts with its decades. A remembered 1920s scene can look and read differently from the 1968 conversation in which the older Matty tells her story. The…

In New Orleans, Vince Fraser built a portal large enough to enter. His 2025 installation Ancestral Odyssey at the New Orleans African American Museum surrounds visitors with moving images and sound, drawing on the ceremonial traditions of the city’s Black Masking Indians. The technology is conspicuous, yet the installation’s subject is older than the screen. Hand-beaded suits, procession, performance and inherited stories become part of a digital environment that asks what it means to meet an ancestor in a medium made for the present.

In Viwe Mfaku’s Qula Olympics, an isiXhosa practice of stick fighting enters a speculative arena. The boys in the imagined rite meet a master robot, and a local form of learning becomes an event that could belong to a future world. The premise is vivid enough to register at once, but it carries a careful question. If a tradition continues to change with the people who practice it, what might it become when technology enters its frame? Mfaku does not treat the answer as a loss of authenticity. His image proposes continuity through invention.

In 1900, W. E. B. Du Bois helped assemble an exhibition in Paris that asked visitors to look at Black American life through evidence. Charts showed education, work, property and the changes since emancipation. Photographs showed people whose faces and clothes contradicted racist caricature. Twenty years later, his story “The Comet” removed nearly everyone from New York and left a Black bank messenger to discover what might happen when the social order vanished with them. One project examined the present through measurements; the other used catastrophe to test whether the future would become more just.

In Wanuri Kahiu’s Pumzi, the most disruptive object is small enough to fit inside a hand. Asha, a curator in a sealed East African community, receives soil that may still sustain life. A seed begins to grow. The discovery is not welcome news to the authorities who govern her world. It threatens a system that has made survival depend on managed scarcity and obedience. Asha’s decision to carry the seed beyond the settlement gives the short film its forward motion, but the story’s force comes from the question beneath the plot: what happens when a person trusts evidence of life over an institution’s account of what is possible?

The Chicago writer and filmmaker has carried Afrofuturism from a book into a dance film, a fictional planetary system and a planetarium dome. Each form asks an audience to take part in imagining what comes next. The Adler Planetarium’s description of Niyah and the Multiverse places a Chicago preteen opposite her older self, an astrophysicist. The encounter gives scientific speculation an emotional form: one possible future stands before the person who might live it. The encounter does not prove that the child will become a scientist. It makes that life imaginable, visible and open to inquiry.

On Return of the Astro-Goth, a figure appears to travel outward. The album's title joins astronomy to a style associated with darkness, theatricality and the uncanny. Yugen Blakrok's next record, Anima Mysterium, turns toward a different unknown. She has described its setting as a shadow world where what cannot be seen matters as much as what can. The two albums trace a movement from a cosmic horizon to an interior one. The future, in her work, does not simply arrive from beyond Earth. It also emerges from the parts of a person, a city or a history that ordinary daylight fails to show.

A mother stands on a city street in the shape of a spacecraft. Zak Ové’s The Mothership Connection rises in coloured steel, crowned by a large Mende helmet mask whose translucent form catches light. The sculpture has the silhouette of a launch vehicle, but the artist has given it a history that cannot be launched away. Architectural details refer to buildings associated with Western power; masks and symbols recall African and diasporic traditions. The vessel is meant to carry people through an imagined future while making visible the labour and cultures that conventional monuments leave outside their stories.