Exhibition: Adapt to Survive: Notes from the Future

This group exhibition brings together artworks by seven international artists – Andreas Angelidakis, Julian Charrière, Youmna Chlala, Rainer Ganahl, Marguerite Humeau, Ann Lislegaard and Bedwyr Williams – that address how our world might look and feel in the future.

Engaging with the idea that adaptation is necessary for survival, the artists in this exhibition present films, sculpture and text-based works that reflect on new and hybrid forms of architecture, technology, biology and language.

In his ‘digital matte painting’, Bedwyr Williams offers glimpses into ordinary lives led within an imaginary metropolis in rural north Wales; Youmna Chlala evokes a future city where environmental changes have brought about new ways of living; and in an animated film screened in the Hayward Gallery Foyer, Andreas Angelidakis makes a case for a radical, flexible gallery of the future, capable of moving through the city at will.

Elsewhere in this exhibition, Julian Charrière considers the long-term geological impact of our over-reliance on consumer electronics; Rainer Ganahl imagines what Berlin would look like if China was the dominant global power; and Ann Lislegaard and Marguerite Humeau draw on science fiction and ancient myth, respectively, to create unsettling meditations on time travel, contemporary surveillance, and the shape of the world to come.