At the New Museum, a new exhibition asks an old question: what happens when labor is stripped of dignity and handed to something else?
“New Humans: Memories of the Future,” the inaugural exhibition in the museum’s renovated building, unfolds across four floors and 273 works. Its argument is broad but pointed. From Mesopotamian myth to early 20th-century modernism to contemporary AI, the show traces a recurring pattern in which human effort is displaced, mechanized, and then made to bear the cost of progress.
The exhibition’s conceptual frame begins far earlier than the industrial age. In the Mesopotamian creation myth, the Anunnaki and the Igigi divide labor by lot, with the Igigi assigned the exhausting work of digging the channel that would become the Euphrates river. After millennia of complaint and rebellion, the god Ea proposes a solution that is as chilling as it is familiar: create humanity to absorb the burden. The myth’s logic of substitution echoes through the exhibition, where workers, machines, and the bodies that sustain them remain in uneasy relation.
That tension is clearest in “Mechanical Ballets,” a section named for Oskar Schlemmer’s *Das mechanische Ballett* (1923) and *Das triadische Ballett* (1922). Schlemmer’s rigid, geometric costumes turn dancers into figures of constraint, reflecting the pressures of post-World War I Germany, when artists were confronting both industrial acceleration and the psychic damage of war. Nearby, John Heartfield and George Grosz’s 1920 sculpture *The Middle-Class Philistine Heartfield Gone Wild (Mechanical Tatlin Sculpture)* presents a tailor’s dummy transformed into a grotesque hybrid: revolver, dentures, rod, and lightbulb assembled into a body that looks both damaged and newly useful.
The exhibition also turns to Karel Čapek, the Czech playwright who coined the word “robot” from robota, meaning “forced labor.” In *R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots)*, artificial humans are engineered to be efficient, intelligent, and soulless — until they rebel and wipe out most of humanity. That story gives the show a durable modern shape: the fantasy of perfect labor always carries the possibility of revolt.
Hito Steyerl’s 2025 video work *Mechanical Kurds* brings the argument into the present, examining the hidden labor behind Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, the crowdsourcing marketplace used for microtasks such as image-labeling for AI training. In that context, the exhibition’s title feels less speculative than diagnostic. “New Humans” suggests that the future of work may be less about invention than repetition — a long history of bodies, whether human or machine, made to carry someone else’s load.
