After six years of dormancy, the Sapporo International Art Festival (SIAF) returns to Japan. Artists including Amy Karle (image: Echoes From the Valley of Existence, 2024), Quayola, Xin Liu, and Superflux contribute to a futurity-themed flagship exhibition alongside trio Tega Brain, Julian Oliver, and Bengt Sjölén. Pioneering inventor-performers Maywa Denki and MIT Media Lab Tangible Media Group instigator Hiroshi Ishii are standouts amongst a deep roster of Japanese artists and designers.

Presented across digital screens and prints spanning the façade of the South West Wing of Bush House, “The Quiet Enchanting” opens at King’s College London. In the outdoor show design studio Superflux provoke passersby with—tower blocks enveloped in foliage, wildlife and humans side-by-siide—speculative imagery of a rewilded Borough of Westminster. Informed by interviews with local residents, the renderings romanticize “pre-modern poetics, pagan folklore, and animist societies.”

“To Your Eternity,” the fourth edition of the Future of Today Biennial, opens at the Today Art Museum in Beijing. Taking its name from an eponymous Japanese manga series about an immortal amorphous being, curator Xin Wang tasks multigenerational artists including Morehshin Allahyari, Ani Liu, Isamu Noguchi, Agnieszka Polska, and Astria Suparak with schematizing bold futures “on longer throughlines in historical conditionings of our current technological and existential crisis.”

Theta’s World (2023, image), an experimental videogame created by Lawrence Lek in the X Virtual incubator program, launches online. Commissioned by Beijing’s X Museum, the self-described simulation artist and sinofuturist is true to form here, presenting an imagined smart city—SimBeijing—that can be navigated in-browser. Between the floating architectural forms, urban geometries, and scattered text fragments, the experience presents “whispering stories that shift and morph with every journey undertaken.”

“Fetishizing the Future,” a survey of visions of tomorrow ranging from aerospace to space colonies, opens at the Zeppelin Museum in Friedrichshafen, Germany. Included are projects by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Tomás Saraceno (image: Launches at White Sands, 2016), Jacolby Satterwhite, and Timur Si-Qin. More than 80 aviation history artifacts complement the artworks, chronicling humanity’s enduring desire for “speed, freedom, peace, immortality, and sustainability.”

An excavation of the legacy of sci-fi author Octavia E. Butler, American Artist’s solo exhibition “Shaper of God” opens at REDCAT in downtown Los Angeles. Both spent their formative years in the Pasadena region, which the artist translates into ruminations on “technology, race, surveillance, identity, and place” that map Southern California sites inspired by Butler’s novels and life: To Acorn (1984) (2022), for example, is a sculpture resembling the city bus stops that Butler would have waited at.

Alice Bucknell’s dark eco-fiction Swamp City (2021), in which the American artist and writer imagines the Florida Everglades as a near-future luxury retreat, takes over HOXTON 253, London. For this UK premiere, the gallery space is transformed into the offices of The Evergreen Group, the mock real-estate vendor behind Swamp City, complete with property listings, promotional pamphlets, 3D printed models, and slick prints “to lure in its millennial clientele and investors.”

Hailing from the future, Mapping Festival “2051” returns to Geneva with “deviant art and electronics.” Over the course of ten days, works by Frederik de Wilde, Anne Horel, Jonghong Park, 1024 Architecture, Cie Ultra and others are exhibited and performed across the city. Robert Seidel, for example, is set to project his light work Tempest onto lake Geneva’s iconic water fountain while onshore, Ted Häring’s totemic sound sculpture ANTNA (image) imitates the “disturbing majesty” of cellular 4G/5G antennas.

The culmination of years of research and an on-site residency, DISNOVATION.ORG’s “Post Growth” exhibition opens at iMAL in Brussels. Presenting a series of objects, videos, and a living Solar Farm realized with Baruch Gottlieb, Clémence Seurat, Julien Maudet, and Pauline Briand, the French artist collective invites viewers to challenge dominant narratives about progress and, instead, consider a speculative economic model based on the Sun.