Graphic design for "Looking Back at the Future" exhibition, Magazin III, Jaffa.

Curator: Karmit Galili, 2024.

The events of October 7th and the terrible war that broke out in their aftermath threw us into abysses of fear and despair, undermining any attempt to think about a better future or a future at all. We struggle to imagine a future that is not painted in the colors of war—internal as well as external; the disaster, which is still changing the face of the country and its people, interferes with our ability to entertain any vision of a common society based on freedom and equality.

In a country founded on a utopian vision and built in a continuous present of wars, occupation, and terrorism, it has never been easy to imagine a future that does not involve all of these. But the current crisis has introduced an urgent and vital need to imagine a different future, so that it would not be the ongoing disaster that determines our view of the future.

The group exhibition Looking Back at the Future turns to “former futures” created here in the last decade, in an attempt to reconstruct the ability to imagine a future, based on the rationale that if we cannot imagine the future, we will not be able to realize it. The four projects in the exhibition were created years ago, but they present a future that is still far from being realized, now perhaps even more so than when they were created. Albeit far from realization, they provide space for the imagination, not out of a need to wallow in the past, but in order to expand the horizon, and thereby open a door to any imaginary future and not only the ones described in them.