It’s typical to think about museums as repositories for history and art, but a residency at the Arab American National Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, has enabled a pair of artists to reimagine them as a cultural crossroads where one might access both the past and the future. In a new exhibition, resident artists Dahlia Elsayed and Andrew Haik Demirjian present “artifacts” from an imaginary SWANA-inspired (Southwest Asian North African) city of the future, borne out of their hopeful vision.
Their installation, titled Souvenirs From the Future, is the centerpiece of a gallery showcasing two years of the museum’s Cultivate and Grow Artist Residency Program, which touched off in 2020 with an immersive installation by Yasmine Nasser Diaz. Diaz’s world included a bedroom scene that tells the story of two contemporary teenage sisters; Elsayed and Demirjian present the city of “Mustaqbaaaahpolis” (“future-breath-city”), a metropolis built on the interchange of ideas, aesthetics, and knowledge in a system free from “extraction, time scarcity, and exploitation,” according to the artists.
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