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 Ghanaian-Moroccan artist works across software, sculpture and storytelling. According to the Lancaster Museum of Art and History, his exhibition blends folklore and speculative history to create artifacts of futures past. It is a useful paradox. A museum visitor encounters something with the density and apparent endurance of an archaeological find, yet the story behind it points forward. Alabo does not sever the future from the past. He tests how memory changes when it is given an unfamiliar date.
In a first-person ArtX interview, Alabo described his father as Ghanaian and his mother as Moroccan. He had grown up across several continents, absorbing desert landscapes, saturated colour and different built environments. Those references enter his work without making every image a map of one heritage or a token from a culture. Alabo is interested in what happens when environments meet in the imagination, and when digital tools make a space that can look familiar before the viewer can locate it.
His understanding of Afrofuturism centers technological invention as well as cultural authorship. In that ArtX conversation, he described it as a movement of people pushing African art and culture through innovation. Earlier, in an OkayAfrica interview, he described his own Afrofuturism as a fusion of African-centered elements and surrealism that makes both recognizable and strange worlds. The terms help explain why a bronze object and a digital environment belong in the same exhibition. One suggests endurance; the other can be revised at the speed of software. Both ask who is authorized to design a world.
The landscape as a question
Alabo’s earlier digital landscapes often place recognizable elements in combinations that do not obey a single physical geography. A desert may seem to meet a cosmic field; a horizon may look architectural and geological at once. Such images are not illustrations of an existing country. Their effect lies in the suspension between recognition and uncertainty. A viewer may see the influence of North African terrain or West African colour, yet cannot reduce the picture to a travel memory. Alabo constructs places that appear to have histories beyond the edges of the screen.
That quality distinguishes his work from a vision of the future built only from shiny technology. The spaces are strange because their histories feel layered, not because a machine has been placed in the center. In Alabo’s digital practice, software can invent topography, but the resulting world still asks about land, settlement and belonging. The question is whether an unfamiliar place can be approached with curiosity rather than a demand that it reveal a simple origin. His images reward the kind of looking that admits what it does not yet know.
The artist’s own account of making emphasizes experimentation. He told ArtX that he taught himself his tools and had recently become absorbed in three-dimensional computer-generated work. Failure was part of the learning process. That practical detail matters to the finished images. A speculative world is not produced by an effortless leap from idea to screen. It has to be modeled, lit, revised and judged. The ability to make a landscape convincing emerges from repeated encounters with the limits of a medium.
Alabo also described creative work as a way of coping with restlessness and of making room for introspection. That does not mean a viewer should treat each landscape as a literal diagram of the artist’s inner life. It suggests why solitude and scale recur in his account of his practice. A vast invented environment can give a small human question more space: what is it like to be alone with one’s thoughts, and what kind of world might become visible there? The pictures do not provide an answer, but they slow the demand for one.
In a first-person interview, Alabo described the formal device behind many of his digital pictures: a human head gives way to a sphere, a planet or a big cat. Removing the face, he said, makes other parts of a composition take precedence. It also alters how a viewer meets the solitary figure. Recognition no longer arrives through expression; scale, posture and surrounding space have to do more of the work. That formal decision links his images of isolation to his fascination with astronomy. A distant planet can become part of a body, while a person appears small within the landscape that contains them.
Three futures rather than one
At ART X Lagos in 2021, Alabo and Adéọlá Ọlágúnjú took part in Future Africa, a special project examining possible directions for the continent. Alabo’s contribution, reported as One Africa Three Futures, used three-dimensional and virtual-reality tools to make divergent futures encounterable. The plural is crucial. A single image of “Africa’s future” would flatten a continent into one destiny and leave viewers arguing only about whether it was bright or bleak. Three futures allow conditions, choices and consequences to differ.
A report on the project describes one scene in which fire consumes much of the world while Africa remains a point of light inside an animal skeleton. The combination refuses the neat divisions of ordinary forecast graphics. A skeletal frame suggests death or memory; light suggests survival; fire suggests a crisis that has not politely stopped at the continent’s edge. The scene is not an economic projection disguised as art. It is an image built to make the viewer feel the instability of any easy claim about what will survive.
Virtual reality changes the viewer’s relation to this proposition. A future is not merely printed on a wall at a safe distance. The medium can put a person inside a constructed environment and make orientation part of the experience. That does not make the imagined scene a fact. It gives the viewer another way to test a question: if a world were arranged this way, where would I stand? Alabo’s use of immersive technology is meaningful because the project contains several alternatives. The audience can compare worlds rather than submit to one monumental answer.
The shift in scale from a digital print to a surrounding environment also changes the kind of uncertainty the work can hold. A still image allows a viewer to study its composition from one position. An immersive scene asks the viewer to choose where to turn and how long to remain with a detail. Neither mode is inherently more truthful. Each controls attention differently. In One Africa Three Futures, the medium makes comparison a physical activity: looking around one possible world before considering another. That experience can make the word “future” feel less like a fixed destination and more like a set of conditions whose meaning depends on the position from which they are seen.
The fair’s broader curatorial theme, as ART X Lagos described it, concerned resisting clichés about the continent and imagining collective possibilities from archival and present experience. Alabo’s work took part in that conversation without claiming to speak for every African life. His contribution uses invention to disturb the assumption that the continent’s future is already written by outside observers. The work’s plurality leaves space for disagreement. A viewer may find one possibility seductive and another alarming, but none can claim to be the only road.
An artifact ahead of its maker
The Lancaster exhibition changes the grammar of that question. I found us in the future… does not simply present a landscape to enter. It imagines what a future civilization might leave behind. The museum describes relics of future pasts, made through digital environments and bronze sculpture. Bronze has a long record as a material through which societies memorialize figures, deeds and beliefs. In this setting, it can make an imagined history seem to have acquired age and weight. Software can then surround it with a place that has never been built.
Alabo’s 2018 digital work BIRTH appeared within the Lancaster presentation eight years after its making. Across the exhibition, digital environments and bronze sculptures invite visitors to read objects as traces of possible societies. What would a future object tell its discoverer about us? Which parts of a culture become official history when one object survives? Alabo uses imagined civilizations to expose the partial nature of an account reconstructed from remains. The dated image also gives the exhibition a second kind of time: its own earlier work returns within a newer argument about what art can leave behind.
An earlier named image reveals a different, precisely arranged method. Lust, a 2019 digital art print reproduced in Alabo’s interview with Contemporary And, sets a checkerboard floor beneath a curved reflective structure. A metallic humanlike figure stands within that structure; two round forms flank it, one white and one resembling an eye. Above, a red organic shape interrupts the open blue sky. The ground’s strict squares hold the objects in a readable relation, while the mirrored curve makes the central figure’s position less secure. Is the figure entering a portal, appearing as a reflection or occupying an architecture that can only exist inside the image? The print does not resolve the question. It makes the viewer move between the legible grid, the ambiguous reflective surface and the improbable object overhead.
In the same first-person interview, Alabo describes screens as contemporary “black mirrors” and connects his Afro-Surrealism to speculation about Black freedom. Lust lets that idea remain visual. Its reflective form does not just decorate an invented landscape; it changes how the body at the center can be located. By contrast, the 2026 Lancaster presentation asks visitors to encounter physical sculpture as a possible remnant and to read digital environments as the world around it. Lust composes uncertainty within one bounded frame. The museum exhibition extends the uncertainty into the room and into an imagined chronology. The two works use different media and different scales, yet both interrupt the confidence with which an observer might claim to know what an unfamiliar form represents.
Alabo’s work also circulates through design and commercial commissions. In a first-person conversation with Contemporary And, he discusses his collaboration with fashion label Daily Paper as an exchange with people who share his vision for African cultural futures. Such work carries his visual language into widely distributed formats, but it has a distinct purpose from a museum exhibition. A garment and an installation do not make the same claim simply because one artist shaped them. The collaboration shows how an imagined world can move between an artwork and a public-facing design.
Alabo’s Lancaster exhibition joins digital environments and bronze sculpture in a conversation about mythology, memory and imagined future societies. A digital tool does not have to announce a break from inherited stories; it can carry them into a new encounter. Bronze does not have to lock an imagined society into the distant past; it can make a future culture feel capable of leaving traces. Alabo keeps these media in conversation instead of assigning technology to the future and metal to history.
More than a spectacular horizon
Afrofuturist images are sometimes consumed quickly for their surface: the impossible setting, the glowing form, the promise of an escape from the ordinary. Alabo’s strongest questions begin after that first glance. In One Africa Three Futures, the viewer has to consider why several outcomes are possible and what forces might distinguish them. In I found us in the future…, the viewer has to imagine what a society remembers about itself when only fragments remain. The visual spectacle opens a problem about time, interpretation and choice.
This is also where the artist’s Moroccan and Ghanaian family history matters without becoming an explanatory key for every shape. Alabo’s sense of place was formed across more than one country. His art does not require a viewer to identify a single authentic source before its speculative landscapes become legible. The mixed inheritance can be understood as one condition of an imagination accustomed to translation. A digital environment lets influences share a space that no map would describe exactly.
Krull’s Futuristic Dreams editorial offers a related question from a different place. Its fashion and portrait images ask how Congo’s present might have developed through other histories. Alabo’s landscapes and future relics are less tied to a photographed person and more to invented terrain. Both show how a styled image can ask a viewer to reconsider what seemed inevitable. The comparison is useful because it lets two distinct practices remain distinct: one starts from bodies and conversation, the other from worlds and objects.
Alabo has said he wants people to make time for reflection and find comfort in their own company. That wish can sound quiet beside the size of his virtual landscapes or the speculative ambition of his exhibitions. Yet quiet attention may be exactly what those worlds require. A future imagined only as a spectacle is easily replaced by the next image. A future considered as a question may stay with the viewer, changing how they read an object or a place after leaving the exhibition.
The phrase I found us in the future… is hopeful, but its pronoun is demanding. Who is included in “us”? Who gets to leave the relic, and who later has the authority to explain it? Alabo gives those questions no final institutional voice. He builds artifacts and environments that make interpretation possible, then lets viewers experience the uncertainty of interpretation itself. The relic comes from a future that has not happened. The work asks whether we can shape that future while we still have time to choose what we leave behind.