New Museum Presents New Humans: From Museum to Screen  

“What does it mean to be human amid exponential technological change? On the occasion of the inaugural exhibition of the expanded New Museum, New Humans: Memories of the Future, the New Museum and Metrograph present a series of screenings that extend the exhibition’s central questions into the world of cinema, pairing artists featured in New Humans with films that expand the exhibition’s themes. From the ways technology shapes human life today to speculative futures and reimagined cities, post-human life forms, artificial intelligence, and the ancient and enduring fantasy of creating new life, the program examines humanity’s evolving relationship to technology—and what is at stake in how we respond to it. Throughout the run of the exhibition, each screening at Metrograph—beginning in April with Shengze Zhu’s Present. Perfect (2019) and René Laloux’s Fantastic Planet (1973)—will be introduced by an artist from New Humans, creating a shared space between art and cinema for imagining new ways of being human.”  —Thalia Stefaniuk, series co-curator and New Museum Curatorial Assistant

The New Museum’s inaugural exhibition New Humans: Memories of the Future runs from March through August 2026

Present.Perfect preceded by clip from “Being Human,” (2019) by Christopher Kulendran Thomas (10 min) on Saturday, April 25th

Fantastic Planet preceded by clip from “The Finesse,” (2022) by Christopher Kulendran Thomas (10 min) on Sunday, April 26th

About the artist:

Christopher Kulendran Thomas is a diasporic Tamil artist whose family left Sri Lanka amidst escalating violence between the armed forces of the Sinhalese-majority state and militant groups in Tamil-majority regions. Due to discriminatory state policies, Tamil insurgents began demanding autonomy from Sri Lanka in the 1970s; since the defeat of the insurgency in 2009, however, its radical imaginations have been suppressed from official memory. Kulendran Thomas’s practice reinvigorates these imaginations and refuses historical erasure.