Madeline Weisburg – författare

A timely exploration of artists’ enduring preoccupation with what it means to be human in the face of sweeping technological changeNew Humans traces a diagonal history of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries through the work of more than 150 artists, writers, scientists, architects, and filmmakers, highlighting key moments when dramatic technological and social changes spurred new conceptions of humanity and new visions for its possible futures.The book – and its accompanying exhibition that will inaugurate the New Museum’s expanded building designed by OMA/Rem Koolhaas and Shohei Shigematsu – connects the age of automatons to the burgeoning era of generative AI and brings together a cavalcade of humans becoming machines and machines becoming human.Features new and recent works by: Sophia Al-Maria, Lucy Beech, Cyprien Gaillard, Pierre Huyghe, Tau Lewis, Daria Martin, Wangechi Mutu, Precious Okoyomon, Berenice Olmedo, Philippe Parreno, Hito Steyerl, Jamian Juliano-Villani, and Anicka Yi in the context of works by twentieth-century artists and cultural figures including Francis Bacon, Constant Nieuwenhuys, Salvador Dalí, Ibrahim El-Salahi, H.R. Giger, Kiki Kogelnik, Hannah Höch, Tatsuo Ikeda, Gyula Kosice, El Lissitzky, Lennart Nilsson, Eduardo Paolozzi, Carlo Rambaldi, Germaine Richier, and Elsa von Freytag-LoringhovenEssays by: Aaron Betsky, Gary Carrion-Murayari, Erin Christovale, Meghan Forbes, Hal Foster, Sophie Lewis, Eric Michaud, Katy Siegel, McKenzie Wark, and Gary Zhexi ZhangFeaturing a flipbook built into the book’s cover

Art as anthropology: uncovering and upending regimes of visibilityOver the past decade, Canadian-born, Paris-based artist Kapwani Kiwanga (born 1978) has created complex installations, sculptures, performance lectures and films that consider marginalized histories and colonial economies. Drawing from her training in anthropology and the social sciences, Kiwanga’s ethereal environments bring attention to the backstories of systems of authority and their embodied effects.Accompanying the exhibition at the New Museum, this catalog provides one of the most complete overviews of Kiwanga's work in sculpture and installation. Inspired by the early 18th-century New York legal codes known as “lantern laws”—ordinances that required all Black, Indigenous or mixed-race individuals over 14 to carry lanterns or lit candles after dark if not accompanied by a white person—her new commission for the New Museum weaves together different layers of opacity and transparency through the use of large-scale curtains and mirrored surfaces, playing with natural light and darkness.