From Beirut to Dhaka, Los Angeles to Berlin, Brasilia to Naples: the exhibition Forthcoming brings together nine contemporary artists at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen to grapple with the upheavals reshaping cities today. Through film installations, videos, photographs, and publications, these artists explore loss and destruction, memory and renewal—alongside bold visions of what cities might become. The exhibition frames the city as a laboratory for future possibilities, a space where new forms of communal life are constantly being reimagined. "Forthcoming" becomes a lens for speculating on decay, regeneration, and the traces of the past embedded in what is still emerging.

The exhibition pivots on a monumental video installation: Sweet Talk Commissions Beirut (Solidere: 1994–1997), 2019, by Lebanese-American artist Walid Raad. Acquired by Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in 2021, the work makes its debut on a striking 15-metre-wide display. Two adjoining galleries showcase seven additional contemporary artistic visions. Cities of the Global South—present in works by Raad, Alamgir, and Do Divino Amor—sit alongside Western metropolises explored by Darabi, Zielony, and Steyerl. Fictional cities (Young, Roman) further complicate the narrative, dissolving boundaries between utopia and dystopia. Forward-looking speculations about transformation driven by climate action, artificial intelligence, and globalization coexist with critical examinations of how urban projects have evolved from modernism's grand promises of progress.

The exhibition's title draws from a 2000 book by Lebanese writer and filmmaker Jalal Toufic (born 1962). Toufic's investigation of how catastrophe reshapes culture—treating these events as non-linear moments in time—profoundly informs Walid Raad's practice. The concept of "forthcoming" invites speculative reflection on a retrospective moment of collapse and renewal, where the past remains perpetually present. Toufic's publications and a curated reading list offer deeper entry points into the exhibition's central themes.

With Anusha Alamgir, Hannah Darabi, Guerreiro do Divino Amor, Walid Raad, Hedda Roman, Hito Steyerl, Liam Young, Tobias Zielony

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