A Tomorrow: Monsters and Relics from Asia and Africa
A Tomorrow: Monsters and Relics from Asia and Africa
When: March 31 - June 13, 2026
Where: Stirek Gallery
Viewing Hours:
- Open Monday through Saturday, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.
- Open on performance evenings in Detrick Hall and Ray Theater
- Closed Sundays
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What does the future look like? How has it been imagined in art and media, and what cultures have influenced these depictions?
In A Tomorrow, three artists explore how fragments of Gods, relics, and regalia from non-Western cultures — specifically Asia and Africa — have been appropriated to construct visions of the future. In science-fiction filmmaking, interior design, video games, and similar “future-oriented” aesthetics, Asian and African cultures make cameo appearances. In these forms, they may be diverted from their rightful frameworks in order to construct a sense of “worldliness” or fashionability.
Artists Astria Suparak, Sameer Farooq, and Morehshin Allahyari offer an alternative vision by examining, deconstructing and re-ordering the layering of Asian and African forms in western visions of the future. Artforms like video essays, collage, 3D simulation and other mediums becoming canvases for exploring and course-correcting the cultural processes that associate Asia and Africa with exoticized or otherworldly tomorrows.
Astria Suparak
On the Neon Horizon is a short video essay that challenges the world-building tactics of (white-centric) science fiction — specifically gratuitous signage in Asian languages — to consider its utopian potential and dystopian applications.
Suparak will also be producing new works (a large vinyl print, sculptures) of pyramids as they appear in several science fiction films, inspired by cultures in Asia and Africa. These architectures are often speculated to be the work of “aliens” rather than appropriately credited to the communities who engineered them.
Sameer Farooq
The Gandhara Series (2023) are collages Farooq creates by collaging, overlaying and physically moving images of select cultural objects in museums on a scanner. A schist Buddha head meets Khanpur oranges growing on the road to Taxila and the turkey sandwich the conservator ate for lunch. Facilitating these visual encounters and cross-pollinations, Farooq aims to restore the Gandharan cultural objects to their way of being in the world that preceded museological interest.
Morehshin Allahyari
She Who Sees The Unknown (2017-2021) is a research-based project by Morehshin Allahyari that uses 3D simulation, sculpture, archiving, and storytelling to re-figure monstrous female/queer figures of Islamicate origin. The traditions and myths associated with them are used to explore the catastrophes of colonialism, patriarchism and environmental degradation in relation to the Middle East.