Every child is a mirror of death

In the works presented in the exhibition, the artists refer to futurological research, proposing perspectives informed by nature, technology, politics, information sciences, as well as social and cultural constructs.

• Artists
  Agata Lankamer, Wiktor Gałka, Inside Job (Ula Lucińska i Michał Knychaus), Andrzej Staniek, Mia Milgrom, Jennetta Petch i Szymon Kula
   
• Curator: Łukasz Kropiowski
   

Exhibition concept

These are the most exciting and momentous years in all of history. We cannot say with confidence what life will be like after the Singularity. 

Ray Kurzweil

For progress there is no cure...

John von Neumann

In one of their “futuristic” crime novels, the Strugatsky brothers recount the story of Tojvo Glumov, a counter-intelligence officer within the Department of Extraordinary Events. Fearless and resolute, Glumov dedicates his skills to tracking agents of an alien super-civilization. These enigmatic figures have supposedly reached Earth to subtly influence human history, though their ultimate motives remain shrouded in mystery. His investigation eventually leads him to the Institute for Metapsychological Research – popularly known as the “Institute of Oddballs” – where he discovers that these alleged visitors are not extraterrestrial at all. Instead, they represent a new, peaceful branch of human evolution itself. With unwavering conviction – and a hint of xenophobia – Glumow pledges to oppose the “ludens”, whose physical and intellectual prowess far exceeds that of their human predecessors. However, his resolve is shaken when he discovers that he, too, harbours the genetic potential to ascend to this higher evolutionary plane. Terror takes hold as he realizes he is unwilling to surrender his humanity, even in exchange for the immortality and hyper-intelligence that define this superior form of existence.

The sentiment expressed by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky feels increasingly poignant as we listen to futurologists who contend that we are “the last generation of the old civilization and the first of the new.” We are acutely aware of both the extraordinary opportunities unfolding before humanity and the existential threats that accompany them. As our scientific and technological civilization attains a level of power unprecedented in history, it simultaneously reveals a profound fragility and a haunting susceptibility to self-destruction. The prospect of humanity bioengineering its way beyond the constraints of its own nature is as captivating as it is terrifying. Ultimately, Ulrich Beck’s assertion that uncertainty defines the modern age has never felt more accurate.

Today’s citizen of Beck’s “risk society” finds themselves caught between two extremes: the utopian, techno-futurist visions of longevity, superintelligence, and boundless prosperity, and the eco-dystopian pessimism that foresees an impending planetary catastrophe. This spectrum of hope and dread has reached an unprecedented peak. While biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey enthusiastically claims that the first person to live to a thousand years has already been born, the reality remains grim elsewhere. In January 2026, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock to a chilling 85 seconds to midnight – the closest humanity has ever come to civilizational collapse since the clock's inception in 1947.

Many optimistic scientists place their faith in technological convergence, believing that the merging of previously distinct fields – computer science, cybernetics, biotechnology, nanotechnology, cognitive science, and genetics – will trigger exponential trends leading to a wholesale transformation of society. Ray Kurzweil, a leading proponent of this theory, argues that we have entered the final phase of this metamorphosis: “the transition from biological entities to transcendent beings” . By expanding the neocortex through nano-engineering and integrating it with artificial intelligence, we may soon possess computing power millions of times greater than our own. Such an expansion of consciousness would be so fundamental that its ultimate consequences remain nearly impossible to fathom. Techno-futurists argue that as intelligence expands, we will witness a commensurate rise in empathy, freedom, and the rule of law. They further predict that advances in 3D printing will enable objects to be manufactured with atomic precision, radically lowering costs and potentially eradicating poverty. Coupled with the development of virtual reality, this could lead to the decentralisation of production and greater aesthetic individualisation, shifting consumer habits from a culture of ownership to one of access. Finally, breakthroughs in materials science promise to maximise solar energy efficiency, providing a virtually inexhaustible and zero-emission source of power. Meanwhile, advances in tissue engineering will pave the way for cellular agriculture – the laboratory production of plant and animal products – which promises to eliminate global hunger and animal suffering. There is also the burgeoning prospect of electronic immortality and liberation from the physical body in favour of a post-biological existence within a digital reality; indeed, the concept of mind uploading is being given serious consideration. Looking further ahead, a new era of intellectual development is anticipated, in which human intelligence “will spread throughout the universe, transforming ordinary matter into 'computronium', i.e. matter organised to achieve the highest possible computational density” .

Unfortunately, the number of sceptics regarding the future is at least matched by the number of prophets envisioning a radiant tomorrow. René Girard tempers this optimism, noting that “violence has been unleashed on a global scale, leading to what apocalyptic texts predicted: the blurring of the distinction between natural and man-made disasters (...) global warming and rising sea levels are no longer mere metaphors today”. Nick Bostrom, Director of the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, echoes this pessimistic sentiment with his ‘vulnerable world’ hypothesis. In his view, attaining a specific level of technological advancement – one that empowers almost anyone to deploy weapons of mass destruction and turns civilisational infrastructure into a tool for terror – makes existential risk a tangible possibility. In such a climate, the resurgence of great-power politics, militarism, and fundamentalism provides little room for optimism. Bostrom reluctantly suggests that the only way to stabilise this threatened world may be through “extreme, continuous, and ubiquitous surveillance combined with the capacity for rapid intervention”. The implementation of such a security model would, inevitably, render dreams of freedom and the rule of law obsolete. We need not peer far into the future to see that Foucault’s panopticon – a prison where the guard sees everyone while remaining invisible himself – has been reborn in a far more efficient digital guise. This is a reality we navigate daily as internet users and owners of ‘smart’ devices who constantly surrender our data. Furthermore, much research casts doubt on the notion that exponential intellectual growth will foster community-building empathy. Instead, information chaos – a deluge of fake news, unverifiable reports designed for manipulation, and algorithms that trap users in ideological bubbles – is leading to the infantilisation of public discourse, widespread disinformation, and a total breakdown in the credibility of the infosphere. Media-shaped perspectives are increasingly grounded in ideological dogmas rather than genuine experience or knowledge. This trend frequently gives rise to anti-democratic populism, fanaticism, and even flagrantly anti-scientific conspiracy theories that now go so far as to challenge the Copernican revolution itself. Similarly, the prospects for alternative food and energy sources are being called into question. In their aptly titled book, The Collapse of Western Civilisation, Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway predict that resistance to political and economic change, coupled with “market fundamentalism”, will effectively stifle progress in these sectors. Rather than a vision of prosperity, they foresee an Anthropocene 'twilight era'—a period of climate catastrophe where flooding and desertification trigger mass migration and widespread famine. Furthermore, grim forecasts suggest that advancements in nanomedicine and artificial intelligence will usher in an “era of the elderly and the unemployed”. Most unsettling are the voices prophesying the 'grey goo' scenario, in which the uncontrolled self-replication of nanomachines transforms all carbon-based matter into copies of themselves, ultimately reducing the planet’s biomass to a sea of self-replicating nano-mud. 

We find ourselves, therefore, within a broad spectrum of possibilities – suspended somewhere between the promise of computronium and the horror of grey goo. The common thread running through both optimistic and apocalyptic visions of the future is the conviction that radical change is imminent. Max Tegmark, a cosmologist and artificial intelligence researcher, begins his predictions regarding human development with fundamental questions about what it means to be human and what distinguishes us from machines or other forms of life. He argues that, regardless of our current answers, ongoing technological progress will soon fundamentally transform them. Within the context of this thesis, it is evident that even the most encouraging predictions often trigger a form of futurological anxiety. Indeed, one might argue that the more wildly optimistic the scenario, the deeper the unease it provokes. Visions of superintelligence, the trans-physical nature of cyborg entities blending biology with technology, the promise of eternal cybernetic paradises, and philosophical shifts that strip humanity of its ‘uniqueness’ all contribute to a condition that could be termed ‘Glumow’s syndrome’. Much like the agent from the Department of Extraordinary Events, we begin to fear the disintegration of ‘human nature’ and the possibility that our lives will cease to be recognisably human. Yet, is this phobia justified? Katherine Hayles contends that ‘we have always been posthumans’. Remarkably, forty years ago – the same year Glumow’s story was published – Donna Haraway famously declared that we are already cyborgs. We now perceive our biological nature, cultural identity, and relationships with non-human beings in a new light. According to the author, we have liberated ourselves from the constraints of binary thinking, suggesting that constant transgression may be inherent to the very essence of humanity. “Every child is a mirror of death” – the words of Jean-Paul Sartre that provide the title for this exhibition – is not an expression of defeatism. Rather, it conveys the inevitability of change and the fragility of established orders, both of which are subject to the accelerating reconfigurations driven by successive generations. Alvin Toffler, ever confident in the success of the civilisational project, reminds us: ‘it is precisely in decay and disintegration that one can find signs of birth and life”.

We know the future origins of the post-human, yet even the boldest futurologists hesitate to define ‘who’ they will be. Likewise, the artists in this exhibition do not attempt to explain or 'illustrate' the future, nor do they seek to prescribe a specific path for humanity. Reflecting Timothy Morton’s notion that ‘art is a thought that cannot be thought clearly in the present’, the works presented here shy away from coherent narratives, offering fragments and clues instead of panoramic certainties. Nonetheless, they serve as manifestations of the predictions, anxieties, and expectations born from the tangible signs of progress – whether those signs inspire optimism or dread. These multi-perspective approaches weave together science, technology, nature, information theory, and socio-cultural constructs. Irrespective of how the cognitive perspective of each work is calibrated, the artists eschew 'taming' the new in favour of forms that evoke an aesthetic “singularity” – unsettlingly hybrid and resistant to simple classification. In this, they mirror the conviction of the Strugatsky brothers, who scathingly critiqued sanitised scenarios of change, likening them to a wild forest paved over into a “tarmac car park”. In their view, there is only one certainty regarding the future: ‘it bears no resemblance whatsoever to any of our imaginings of it’, and the coming world ‘will, above all, be alien to us”.

Łukasz Kropiowski

1. ^ Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, The Waves Extinguish the Wind.
2. ^ R. Kurzweil, The Singularity is Nearer: When We Merge with AI, New York, 2024, Viking, p. 21.
3. ^Ibidem, pp. 18-19.
4. ^R. Girard, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre, Michigan State University Press, 2010,p. 17.
5. ^Sam Harris, Making Sense: Conversations on Consciousness, Morality, and the Future of Humanity,  Bantam Press, UK, 2020, p. 409.
6. ^M. Tegmark, Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, Allen Lane, London 2017. 
7. ^A. Toffler, The Third Wave, Bantam Books, London 1980,  p. 27.
8. ^A. and B. Strugatsky, at: Noon Universe, Chicago Review Press, 2023, pp. 843-4.