Participants were asked the questions…
If museum objects act as a bridge to past worlds, can they act as a bridge to imagine worlds thousands of years in the future?
How does our encounter with these future worlds affect our understanding of living in our world, and our relationships with museum collections?
The experiment took place as a series of online participatory workshops that created images of future museum objects, now curated in this online exhibition. It applied critical speculative research methods previously used to create the ‘Objects of the Misanthropocene’ and ‘Fossils from Another World’ exhibitions, and formed part of the Getty Museum Guest Scholars programme (September 22-December 12, 2025).
Participants from the Getty community were asked to select a contemporary museum object and transform it into a particular future world using generative AI. This object was fabricated as a future ‘archaeological’ discovery, following the effects of a disaster (asteroid strike, wildfires, pandemics, earthquake, tsunami, floods, climate crisis, extreme heat, drought, intensification of storms, landslides, ecocidal collapse, cumulative gradual decline, etc.) that creates the rupture with the past world from which this future world emerges.
The process was guided by an Exhibit Proposal Form that asked:
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What museum object is selected?
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What type of future world is inhabited by the exhibit?
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What sources describe this future world?
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How has your object been transformed into this future world?
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What would we/they be in these future worlds?
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What is the link between our present and this future world?
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How is this exhibit interpreted by diverse curatorial voices?
Each participant created their own museum object in a future world and developed curatorial labels for their exhibits in dialogue with the IMoB exhibition team.
The credibility of this approach relies on the integrity of the proposed future worlds, and the believability of the reality of the time travelling exhibits to our contemporary audience (to help with understanding, we have where possible used location and time indicators consistent with contemporary museum practice in 0002035 CE) . Speculative time-travel in museums gives our intergenerational obligations the same kind of urgency as our obligations to our contemporary world.
The application of this approach in this exhibition enables an exploration of the potential for the survival of humans, the future of sentient life, the more-than-human matters of survival, and the profane and the sacred practices of those who came before and after us. These worlds are not made exclusively for or by humans, nor made real just by us, it is more important than what just-humans make of it.
By offering a more-than-human perspective of spatial and temporal scales as a reference, we are able question human exceptionalism in order to amplify otherwise muted registers, and make visible more diverse agencies in co-created future worlds. These questions are addressed across an abyss of time in which inevitable misunderstandings occur in the translation between distant worlds. The lack of certainty results from unavoidable gaps in knowledge that can only be filled by speculations on the reality of those worlds. This is necessary to present an understanding of other worlds that people can believe in.
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‘All that you touch, you change.
All that you change, changes you.
The only lasting truth is change’
(Butler 1993 75)
Butler, Octavia. E. 1993. Parable of the Sower.
Click here for additional MOiTFW Project details
Contributors to the Exhibition
Rachel Ama Asaa Engmann, Merry Chow, Megan Daniels, Abby Duckor, Susanne Gäensicke, Cecilie Gravesen, Suzanne Hudson, Kexin Jiang, Ariel Xiaozhou Li, Sabine Neumann, Colleen O’Shea, Ana Pastor Perez, Rosie Phillips, David Pope, Robert Price, Dean Sully, Su Yin, Audrey Meng-Ting Yu, Claire Qianyu Zhou.
The curatorial expertise needed to bring the online exhibition together was provided by Merry Chow and Ariel Xiaozhou Li
Acknowledgements
The IMoB curatorial team gratefully acknowledge the support of The J. Paul Getty Trust. This exhibition was made possible by Dean Sully’s participation in Getty Scholars Programme arranged through The J. Paul Getty Trust Office of Scholars, Interns, and Professionals (OSIP). It formed part of a Getty Museum Guest Scholarship hosted by Antiquities Conservation, Susanne Gäensicke, September 22-December 12, 2025.
Suggested Citation:
Sully, Dean., Li, Xiaozhou., Chow, Merry., 0002026. Museum Objects in This Future World Exhibition from the Illegal Museum of Beyond. https://www.illegalmuseumofbeyond.co.uk
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