Sometime in January, Karmit Galili realised that in order to picture any kind of future, she’d have to look back at how people had imagined the future once. The Israel-Gaza war that began on October 7 had been raging for over three months by that point and the curator based in Tel Aviv felt that future prospects had only grown more grim.

“Reality was such that you couldn’t think forward. It was very hard to imagine things that used to be part of our thoughts and hopes and actions and plans,” says Galili, director and curator of Magasin III Jaffa (a satellite Tel Aviv location of the Swedish Magasin III Museum for Contemporary Art), who spoke with STIR about the exhibition. “This is what I do, I look for art.”

The idea behind the exhibition isn’t to look and say, ‘Oh what fun it was here once, but rather to say that we have tools—of political imagination and artistic expression—and we can use them to go back and look forward, out of hope, for the values that are important to us, for the future we’d like to see here. – Karmit Galili

What she found were four different visions for a regional future—across film, photography, sound and performance art—created by local artists between 2014 and 2017. They’re now gathered as a sort of retro-futuristic time capsule, in an exhibition titled Looking Back at the Future, which opened on June 20 and is on view until November 8, 2024.

“The idea behind the exhibition isn’t to look and say, ‘Oh what fun it was here once,’” explains Galili, “but rather to say that we have tools—of political imagination and artistic expression—and we can use them to go back and look forward, out of hope, for the values that are important to us, for the future we’d like to see here.”

That desire hangs above the art gallery door in the form of an LED sign bearing the words: Voice of the Next State. This is an aspiration and the title of an ongoing performance piece by artists Omer Krieger and Hillel Roman, staged during the exhibition’s opening and exhibited as an 11-minute video of the performance’s past nine iterations across five Israeli cities and Berlin. Krieger and Roman have been producing these performances with a portable broadcasting station since 2014, inviting peace and social activists to public places to share visions for a future that emphasises joint Jewish-Arab life. Speakers have included peace activists Maoz Inon and Sally Abed, Palestinian-Israeli Knesset member Ayman Odeh and former Knesset member and Palestinian-Israeli politician, Sami Abu Shehadeh. They always welcome the public to participate.

“In making the 2024 video now, in this difficult year, the mission was to create an anti-depressant. Hillel was talking about this as a prayer. Eventually, it came out as MDMA,” Krieger shared with STIR. “We hope many more people look forward to a better, more just future, of living together and do something about it.”

After passing under the Voice of the Next State sign, viewers see The Unmarked ID (2017) by multidisciplinary artist Hamody (Mohammad) Gannam based in Haifa. This identification document is an alternative to current national ID cards in Israel (which may include religious or ethnic origin) and is also highly individual, based on personal bacterial profiles produced with microscopic photography. In Gannam’s future, the biomorphic swoops and swirls of each profile will be like fingerprints and will also be clear of any differentiations of identity that have historically set people apart.

Nearby is a screening of the film Guava (2014), by Tel Aviv-based visual artist Thalia Hoffman. The setting: 2048, on a road connecting Tel Aviv and Beirut. A Jewish woman and a Muslim man walk together towards Beirut at a time when borders are open, on a historic path that was blocked during the years of the state of Israel. It’s unclear what happened to lead the couple to this point, as we overhear bits of their conversation in Hebrew and Arabic. “Remembering won’t help us get there,” he says to her. To which she responds, “Lying won’t help you forget.”

Speculative Tourism, ongoing since 2017, is a collaborative project by Tel Aviv-based designer and educator Mushon Zer-Aviv and media artist and game designer Shalev Moran based in Copenhagen. Unlike regular audio tours that recount historical events, these site-specific audio tours describe what will happen in a specific place in the future (and can only be heard in that location). Zer-Aviv and Moran began the project in Jerusalem in 2017 (notably, the 50th anniversary of the 1967 Six-Day War) and have since created tours in eight cities worldwide by hosting workshops where they invite a range of writers to pen future histories. Magasin III Jaffa will host one of these workshops that is open to the public, to create another tour.

The Jerusalem tour, recreated here as a specially commissioned map, was written by voices representing a broad spectrum of Israeli society such as right-wing author Emily Amrusi and left-wing journalist Meron Rapoport. Amrusi’s contribution—both serious and laced with dark humour—is titled Damn Redemption  and describes a future after the messiah has already come and life is rendered pointless, a sort of ‘be careful what you wish for’ situation. Another, more lighthearted stop on the tour, written by filmmaker and game designer Boaz Lavie, forecasts a Zuckerberg family vacation, nearly a century after the founding of Facebook, now Meta. “In the year 2086, the extended Zuckerberg family lands in Jerusalem for a last visit before they leave Earth. With them comes great-grandfather Mark Zuckerberg, now 102. At the entrance of the King David Hotel, where they stay, a local tour guide is waiting. It’s a morning they’ll never forget.”

The gallery is currently a place of refuge, where anything feels possible. “It helps me. And I see that it helps the people who come visit,” Galili says. “Then going back outside is like going back into the abyss.” Exiting hurls visitors back into a tempestuous present tense of war and tragedy.

“Life only happens in the present,” says the male traveller in Guava, his words echoing in the gallery. “The future is in our heads.”

 ‘Looking Back at the Future’ will be on view at Magasin III Jaffa, Tel Aviv until November 8, 2024.

 (Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position of STIR or its editors.)