When people speak about the future, the images are often predictable. Gleaming cities. Flying cars. Artificial intelligence. Space travel. Technological progress imagined through a distinctly Western lens.
It is a future that has been repeated in science fiction, cinema and museums for decades, often overlooking the ways in which communities in the Global South have long imagined, adapted to and shaped their own futures.
The Johannesburg Contemporary Art Foundation (JCAF) has spent the past five years challenging these kinds of assumptions. Since its launch in 2020, the institution has positioned itself as more than just an exhibition space.
It exists as a place where contemporary art, research, education and technology intersect, using art as a way of thinking through some of the world’s most pressing questions from the perspective of the Global South.
Its latest exhibition, Reverse Futures, which runs until 5 Decem-ber 2026, continues the mission with remarkable ambition.
Rather than presenting a singular vision of tomorrow, the exhibition unfolds across three interconnected chapters — Space, Time and Place. Together they ask visitors to reconsider how knowledge is created, whose knowledge is valued and how histories from Africa and the wider Global South can reshape conversations about the future.
It is not an exhibition that reveals itself immediately.
In many ways, it resists easy explanation. You can describe the themes, the artworks and the ideas but understanding Reverse Futures requires moving through it. It demands time, curiosity and a willingness to question assumptions that many visitors might not even realise they carry.
The JCAF says Space explores the cosmos through Indigenous knowledge systems, migration, displacement and perception, presenting outer space not simply as a scientific frontier but as a site of imagination and survival.
Time draws unexpected connections between ancient cave markings and modernist painting, suggesting that histories are never neatly separated from the present and that colonial legacies continue to shape contemporary life.
Place examines how technology, sensory experience and memory create new ways of connecting communities while preserving personal and collective histories.
Individually the themes are compelling. Together they form an exhibition that quietly dismantles the idea that conversations about the future belong to one part of the world.
Instead, Reverse Futures insists that the Global South has always imagined futures of its own.
The nine artworks included in the exhibition embody the idea in different ways. Some are immersive. Others are political. Some rely on technology while others return to ancestral forms of knowledge. Yet all of them share a belief that imagining tomorrow requires looking differently at today and yesterday.
Perhaps the exhibition’s most surprising feature is what is missing.
There are no lengthy wall texts introducing each artwork. No labels announcing titles, dates or materials beside every piece.
Visitors accustomed to conventional museums might initially find the absence unsettling.
Instead, the JCAF offers something increasingly rare: conversation.
Curator and executive director Clive Kellner, together with a team of trained guides, guides visitors through the exhibition, unpacking each artwork within the broader narrative while encouraging dialogue rather than delivering lectures. Visitors are invited to respond, question and interpret instead of simply consuming information.
The approach is deliberate.
Rather than positioning expertise as something fixed on a gallery wall, knowledge becomes something shared between artwork, guide and audience.
It is an approach that feels particularly relevant at a time when more young people are entering galleries with genuine curiosity about African contemporary art. For newcomers, exhibitions can often feel intimidating, filled with unfamiliar language and invisible rules about how one is expected to behave.
By replacing labels with conversation, the JCAF lowers the barriers without simplifying the complexity of the work.
The exhibition, however, never loses its ability to overwhelm.
Walking through the galleries, there are moments when the scale of the ideas makes you feel remarkably small.
Few works embody that feeling more than Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler’s monumental Calculating Empires.
Stretching across an expansive wall, the work traces five centuries of relationships between technology, power, labour, colonialism and systems of control. At first glance, it is almost impossible to absorb. Timelines intersect with diagrams, historical events and technological developments, creating what feels like an endless visual archive.
Its sheer scale is intimidating.
But standing with it for longer changes the experience.
The further your eyes travel across its intricate details, the more connections begin to emerge.
Histories that initially seemed distant suddenly reveal themselves as personal. You begin to locate yourself within the timelines, recognising how technologies, colonial systems and global power structures continue to shape everyday life.
What initially appears overwhelming slowly becomes profoundly human.
Another work that lingers long after viewing is British-Nigerian interdisciplinary artist Yinka Shonibare’s Refugee Astronaut X.
The sculpture presents an astronaut dressed in a spacesuit constructed from Dutch wax fabric, textiles widely associated with African identity despite their complex colonial histories. The figure carries an oversized bag filled with objects collected by Shonibare in Madagascar.
Standing before it, a thought emerged almost instinctively: “It had to be a woman.”
There was something deeply familiar about the image of carrying an impossible amount while remaining composed. Strength disguised as elegance. Survival hidden be-neath grace.
The work leaves space for countless interpretations but the immediate emotional response says something about how successfully the exhibition allows visitors to bring themselves into the artworks rather than prescribing singular meanings.
Throughout Reverse Futures, Africa is never presented as abstraction.
You see it.
You hear it.
Sometimes, you even smell it.
South African artist Georgia Munnik’s Concrete Jasmine offers one of the exhibition’s most intimate encounters through scent.
Composed of sculptural flowerheads, the installation invites viewers to lean in. As they do, the unmistakable smell of jasmine mingles with damp concrete.
For anyone who knows Johannes-burg, the combination feels instantly recognisable. It is the fragrance of a city constantly balancing beauty and hardness, nature and infrastructure, memory and movement.
The work transforms smell into archive, reminding visitors that cities are remembered not only through photographs and buildings but through sensory experiences that often linger the longest.
It is perhaps one of the exhibition’s quietest works, yet among its most emotionally resonant.
What ultimately binds the diverse artworks together is their refusal to separate technology from humanity.
Technology appears throughout the exhibition, not as spectacle but as something deeply entangled with politics, memory, ecology and identity.
The broader conversation led to a simple but important question for Kellner: Why should people make time to experience exhibitions like this?
“Art plays a transformative role in our lives,” he says. “It reflects our society. It reflects the world we’re living in.”
For Kellner, the themes explored by the JCAF are never abstract intellectual exercises. They speak to contemporary life.
“We create themes where we think the topics are very important for people,” he explains. “The environment and how the future affects us all through technology.”
“It can also be uplifting, beautiful and meaningful.”
Perhaps Reverse Futures’ greatest achievement.
Rather than offering definitive answers about where humanity is heading, it creates space for better questions.
Whose futures have been ignored?
Whose knowledge has been dismissed?
What happens when Africa is no longer positioned as catching up with the future but recognised as actively imagining and creating it?
Leaving the JCAF, the questions remain. The exhibition does not ask visitors to abandon familiar narratives altogether. Instead, it asks them to widen them.
In doing so, Reverse Futures reminds us that the future has never belonged to a single geography. It has always been imagined in many languages, through many histories and across many worlds. The JCAF simply gives those futures the room they have long deserved.