Perhaps more than ever, in a world climate dominated by uncertainty, unpredictability and change, predicting the future might seem like a futile attempt, even a frustrating one. Not for this group of artists, however.
Within the historical walls of Spazju Kreattiv in Valletta, a new exhibition titled A Few Rules for Predicting the Future, curated by Maren Richter, pursues this premise with imaginative possibility.
Rather than attempting to forecast what’s ahead of us, this collective show proposes a vision of a future time grounded in interdependence and care, placed at the threshold between lived reality and speculative thought.
An invitation to explore the future
The concept for this exhibition stemmed from an essay with the same name written by Octavia E. Butler, an American science fiction and speculative fiction writer. Her Afrofuturist thinking framed change not as disruption, but as an inevitable condition of life.
The essay, while written a quarter-century ago, still resonates today and underscores her understanding of time as elastic and history as recursive. This insipred curator Maren Richter to adopt a stance of curiosity about the future for this exhibition without offering a roadmap for one single future.
“We’re inviting audiences into a shared space of exploration – implying that we are all still learning and that imagining or building other futures requires not just critique, but practice and collective effort,” says the curator.
“The notion of rehearsing, testing, recalibrating, and remaining open to revision permeate the project, as the participating artists generate meaning from the gaps, blind spots, and fractures of the present,” she adds. “Working from within conditions of collapse, the artworks treat the present itself as already speculative shaped by forces such as war, colonialism, capitalism, extraction, and surveillance that have rendered linear progress untenable.”
Rooted in personal experience
A diverse group of artists spanning a broad range of nationalities and artistic disciplines bring their own lived experiences to the exhibition, treating futurity not as a distant horizon but as something personal.
“The concept is articulated in memory (Sophia Bulgakova, Ukraine) and insomnia (Firas Shehadeh, Palestine), in play (Nyamakop, South Africa), in care and violence (Simona Andrioletti, Italy), and in infrastructures both visible and hidden (One Belt. Many Roads),” says Maren.
“Rather than resolving contradictions, the exhibition holds space for tension (Ponks Collective, Malta) and for dystopian imaginaries that open onto new forms of agency (Gabi Dao, Canada). Futures are articulated obliquely through acts of listening, remembering, mourning, hacking, storytelling, and reconfiguration.”
Throughout the exhibition, visitors are invited to interact with game structures and systems, to explore patterns of power, bias, and consequence, moving from passive spectators to active participants and navigating environments that reflect their own realities.
“These game-like frameworks serve as both tools of critique and ways of showing how choice, control, and limitations operate in constructed worlds that feel strangely familiar. Taken together, the works in A Few Rules for Predicting the Future propose futurity as an ongoing negotiation rather than a destination,” the curator adds.
“Rejecting the fantasy of prediction, the exhibition foregrounds practices that attend to the present as a site of struggle, imagination, and responsibility. In doing so, it insists that the future is something continually shaped through how we remember, relate, resist, and reimagine together.”
Photography by Elisa Von Brockdorff
This project is commissioned by Spazju Kreattiv and supported by the Embassy of the Netherlands in Malta and Federal Ministry of Housing, Arts, Culture, Media and Sport, Republic of Austria. It is on display at Spazju A until Sunday 10th May 2026.
