After Nature

“After Nature” is made possible by the Leadership Council of the New Museum.

Major support provided by David Teiger.

Unfolding as a visual novel, “After Nature” depicts a future landscape of wilderness and ruins. It is a story of abandonment, regression, and rapture—an epic of humanity coming apart under the pressure of obscure forces and not-so-distant environmental disasters.

This exhibition brings together an international and multigenerational group of contemporary artists, filmmakers, writers, and outsiders, many of whom are showing in a New York museum for the first time.

Part dystopian fantasy, part ethnographic museum of a lost civilization that eerily resembles our own, “After Nature” brings together artists and artworks that possess a strange, prophetic intensity. Departing from the fictional documentaries of filmmaker Werner Herzog, the exhibition is an anthology of visions and epiphanies—a hallucinated panorama of a world on the verge of disappearance.

The exhibition includes work by Allora and Calzadilla, Paweł Althamer, Micol Assaël, Fikret Atay, Roger Ballen, Huma Bhabha, Maurizio Cattelan, William Christenberry, Roberto Cuoghi, Bill Daniel, Berlinde De Bruyckere, Nathalie Djurberg, Reverend Howard Finster, Nancy Graves, Werner Herzog, Robert Kusmirowski, Zoe Leonard, Klara Liden, Erik van Lieshout, Diego Perrone, Thomas Schütte, Dana Schutz, Tino Sehgal, August Strindberg, Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, and Artur Żmijewski.

Organized by Massimiliano Gioni, Director of Special Exhibitions, the show spans three floors and includes over ninety works.