And I Have Come Upon This Place by Lost Ways

She was born after the fifth failed calendar, when time no longer ran forward but spiraled, folded in dance, dreaming, and delay. Her grandmother, the Archivist, said maps were no longer useful. “We navigate by memory now. And instinct.”

On her thirteenth nameday, she received the Engine Crown: feathered with circuitry, humming with old data. A ceremony followed, part dance, part game, part question with no answer. She chose her future not from a list, but from a story told in symbols stitched into her dreams.

Others came, bearing visions: a quilt of stars, a sculpted echo of another world, masks that shifted as they spoke. She gathered these offerings, burying them beneath the cracked floor of an old transit station.

What bloomed there wasn’t a city, but a sanctuary. A place to pause. To listen.

No one remembered how they arrived. Only that they had come upon this place by lost ways.

This exhibition begins with a detour. And I Have Come Upon This Place by Lost Ways invites us to step off the main road of linear time and follow the braided trails of memory, speculation and myth. Here, the future is a terrain we shape in the present, guided by the ancestral, the intuitive and the unknown. The works assembled in this exhibition do not simply imagine other worlds : they generate them, pulling from the deep wells of cultural memory and the radical possibilities of science fiction.

Science fiction has always been fertile ground for cultural subversion. Ursula K. Le Guin called it a thought experiment, a way of shifting reality just far enough to make the familiar newly strange. Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler have written about speculative fiction as a mirror that refracts rather than reflects, opening up space for alternative social logics. In this spirit, the artists here reimagine worlds untethered from colonial histories, rigid borders and binary categories. They ask: whose future? according to whom? And what might it look like if we let go of the dominant timelines that have so often been excluded, erased or overwritten?

These artists mine ancestral knowledge, cultural memory and digital possibility to chart new maps of identity, place and futurity.

Komi Olafimihan’s portraits are luminous with contradiction. Adorned in ceremonial garments and crowned with mechanical engines, his figures are at once historical and futuristic, sacred and industrial. Set against landscapes that shift from desert ruins to cathedral-like chambers, they hold their ground in a collapsing chronology. Olafimihan’s vision insists that Black identity is not bound to the past, nor assimilated into tech fantasies, but exists powerfully at the confluence of both.

Dreaming becomes a form of resistance in Kite and Alisha B Wormsley’s Cosmologyscape, a public artwork that transforms individual dreams into collective monuments. Through community gatherings, Lakota symbols and Black quilting traditions, they build a space where resting is not a luxury, but a right, and where dreaming is treated not as idle fantasy, but as political imagination. Their work reminds us that speculative vision is not the domain of the privileged, but the inheritance of those long excluded from official futures.

Kira Xonorika conjures a world alive with movement, colour and ceremonial rhythm in Tentacular Divine (Deep Time Dance). Drawing from Guaraní cosmology and Two-Spirit Indigenous Futurism, Xonorika’s work explores how artificial intelligence might serve as a bridge back to somatic and spiritual knowledge, rather than a severance from it. The future here is not a conquest, but a return.

Rah Eleh sharpens satire into critique in Celestial Throne, a two-channel video that mimics the format of a game show while exposing the aesthetics and coded language of online extremism. Through costumed personas that amplify and parody racialized archetypes, Rah dismantles how identity is commodified, weaponized and misunderstood, especially in digital culture.

Adrienne Matheuszik’s Deep Sleep invites viewers into a VR world suspended between planetary ruin and potential rebirth. Participants must choose: escape to another planet, or enter ecological hibernation and let Earth begin again. The work interrogates the colonial logic of space exploration and challenges the fantasy of leaving damage behind. This isn’t a sci-fi narrative of shiny solutions, it is a meditation on accountability, uncertainty and ethical stewardship.

Indigenous Futurologies, a collaboration between Isabella Salas and hexorcismos, critically examines the intersection of ancestral knowledge and machine intelligence, revealing the tensions between algorithmic bias and cultural memory. Drawing from ethically sourced datasets of Mesoamerican masks, their work builds a quiet but forceful confrontation with the colonial legacies embedded in machine learning.

Futures live in the body long before they appear in blueprints. They flicker in gestures, rituals, materials handed down and reassembled. The artists in this exhibition make futures feel textured, unfinished, charged with memory. They remind us that the future is not only something we await. It is something we remember, refigure and build together.

Each piece holds a fragment of time stretched or folded : ceremony rendered in code, dreams archived in stone, grief shaped into movement. Together, they build a shifting terrain where past and future refuse to stay in their assigned places.

These are not forecasts. They are propositions : acts of remembering, acts of refusal, acts of beginning again. In the face of systems that narrow what can be imagined, these works remain wide open. They hold space for contradiction. They invite us to move slowly, to stay with difficult questions, to recognize speculation as a form of care.

Step into these worlds. They’re already changing ours.