EXHIBITION IN MEXICO CITY: EXPERIENCE, EXPECTATION, AND ANACHRONISM
by Adolfo F. Mantilla
In Kantian thought, imagination is defined as the faculty of producing representations of something beyond its immediate existence. Its productive dimension is thus assumed: being unable to create an image entirely unrelated to prior perception, imagination always relies on previously encountered material to recreate it internally. From this perspective, one of the functions of productive imagination is to internally modulate phenomena by drawing analogies with externally perceived entities. In order to produce a coherent experience—interweaving past and future while in the present—imagination helps entangle perceptions across time. It thus makes it possible to implicate, within the same space, what is no longer and what is not yet, by means of what is in the present moment. [1]
To explore how figurations of the future are embedded within poetic dimensions of an anticipatory and political nature, the Galería Metropolitana, in collaboration with the Käte Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies at Heidelberg University and the UNESCO Chair in Future Studies at UAM Cuajimalpa, presented the exhibition “Poetics of Futures: anticipations, speculations and temporalities,” held from January 17 to May 1st 2025. Adopting a perspective that examines how artistic practices can function as systems of anticipation, the exhibition sought to identify various modes of “using the future” and to highlight their poetic and chronopolitical implications.
By tracing connections between modes of representation shaped by diverse motifs and methods for engaging with the future, the exhibition was conceived as a space for reflecting on key questions: What is the future? And what mechanisms does art employ to imagine it? Through the investigation of artistic practices that articulate figurations beyond the present, the exhibition became a platform for exploring poetic mechanisms that link multiple temporal dimensions. Focusing on a particular trait of artistic production—where imagination and the experience of distinct temporalities intertwine—the project was envisioned as a laboratory to uncover different forms of anticipation and identify the kinds of futures imagined within a trans-historical framework.
Already in the early 21st century, cultural activity increasingly revolved around a specific transformation in the role of the image. This shift reflected the growing dominance of visual culture within human experience, prompting the emergence of a distinct epistemological field shaped by visually mediated cultural practices. Within this context, virtuality emerged as an experience that, while not real, feels real—bridging immediate perception and imagination. This condition is intensified by the rise of new technologies and mass visual media. [2]
Another perspective on imagery posits that we understand the world through images, which, due to their incorporeal quality, require a medium in which to be embodied. In this view, media act as carriers or hosts that render images visible—they are media of the image. [3] By identifying various mechanisms for figuration and knowledge of the futures, the exhibition revealed how artists refer to imagined futures by constructing frameworks and models that help formulate the content of the fictions that underlie conscious human anticipation. In this way, the artworks demonstrated how employing the future can offer new perspectives for interpreting the emerging present drawing on what is unknowable at the moment it begins to become knowable. Hence, the task of distinguishing different ways of “using the future” served as a conceptual tool to explore how deliberate mechanisms enable the integration of the “after-now.”
One notable mode in which the exhibition’s themes took shape was through artistic strategies that established an entropic relationship between time, reality, and image. This approach generated a superposition of heterogeneous and discontinuous temporalities that, nonetheless, remained interconnected. This anachronistic quality of artistic production reveals a distinctive dimension of temporality—placing the image once again at the centre of inquiries into time. [4] This was exemplified in the juxtaposition of works by Minerva Cuevas, Estrella Carmona, Federico Cuatlacuatl, Nadia Osornio, Jonathon Keats, and Arturo Miranda Videgaray, alongside selected graphic works from the Academia de Artes de México.
Taken together, the exhibition examined relationships between modes of figuration shaped by diverse motives and methods of envisioning and employing the future. In doing so, it opened a space for reflection on questions that also inform a forthcoming collection of essays, to be published in English by the Käte Hamburger Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies.
By Adolfo F. Mantilla (Academic Coordinator of the Academia de Artes in Mexico City and a former CAPAS fellow)
[1] Immanuel Kant, Antropología en sentido pragmático (1.ª Edición bilingüe alemán–español México) (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica/UAM/UNAM, 2014), pp. 57-78.
[2] Nicholas Mirzoeff, Una introducción a la cultura visual, trad. Paula García Segura (Barcelona: Paidós, 2003).
[3] Hans Belting, Antropología de la imagen, trad. Gonzalo María Vélez Espinoza (Buenos Aires: Katz Editores, 2010).
[4] Georges Didi-Huberman, Ante el tiempo. Historia del arte y anacronismo de las imágenes (Buenos Aires: Adriana Hidalgo, 2005).
