DUSSELDORF.- From Beirut to Dhaka, via Los Angeles and Berlin, to Brasilia and Naples: In the exhibition Forthcoming. Speculations in Urban Space at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein- Westfalen, nine contemporary artists respond to upheavals in the urban space. Film installations, videos, photographs, and books explore the themes of loss and destruction, memory and reconstruction, visions and ideas. The focus here is on the city as a site of questions about the future, where new possibilities for communal life are constantly being negotiated. The “forthcoming” becomes a moment of speculation about decay, renewal, and traces of the past in what is only just emerging.

At the center of the exhibition is the expansive video installation Sweet Talk Commissions Beirut (Solidere: 1994–1997), 2019, by the Lebanese American artist Walid Raad. Acquired by the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in 2021, the work is being shown in the museum for the first time across an impressive width of fifteen meters. Seven other contemporary artistic perspectives can be seen in the two adjoining rooms. Works by Anusha Alamgir, Hannah Darabi, Guerreiro do Divino Amor, Hedda Roman, Hito Steyerl, Liam Young, and Tobias Zielony juxtapose metropolises of the Global South with those of the West. Fictional cities also play a role, blurring the line between utopia and dystopia. Forward-looking speculations on the transformations promoted by climate protection, artificial intelligence, and globalization are juxtaposed with critical views of the historical development of urban projects that have emerged from the modernist promise of progress.

The title Forthcoming is taken from the homonymous book published in 2000 by the Lebanese writer and filmmaker Jalal Toufic (b. 1962). His explanations of the effects of catastrophes on culture as non-linear events in time play a central role in Walid Raad’s entire oeuvre. The term “forthcoming” speculatively reflects on a subsequent moment of decay and regeneration in which the past is always present. Toufic’s books and a selection of further reading invite visitors to delve deeper into the themes of the exhibition.

With Anusha Alamgir, Hannah Darabi, Guerreiro do Divino Amor, Walid Raad, Hedda Ro- man, Hito Steyerl, Liam Young, Tobias Zielony

Curators: Catherine Frèrejean, Doris Krystof, Victor Zaiden