Artifacts from an Ancient Future

History in Fragments is a group exhibition that brings together artists whose practices engage ceramics as material, concept, and historical witness. The exhibition examines clay as one of humanity’s oldest recording media—a substance that has survived across millennia in fragments, bearing testimony to time, rupture, and continuity. Positioned between archaeology and contemporary practice, ceramics are approached not as decorative objects, but as carriers of memory and evidence of lived histories.

Within this framework, Artifacts from an Ancient Future (2022) consists of three terracotta works shaped in the form of gallon bottles. The pieces evoke utilitarian vessels while simultaneously displacing them in time, suggesting objects excavated from a future yet to arrive. Their fragmented, weathered presence aligns with the exhibition’s central concern: history as something constructed through remnants rather than complete narratives.

Clay functions here as both material and metaphor. Long associated with preservation and fragility, terracotta becomes a medium through which time is compressed and reimagined. The bottle form—associated with containment, transport, and survival—appears emptied of immediate function and instead charged with speculative and historical weight. These works operate as quiet markers of displacement, circulation, and endurance, resonating with broader questions of migration, resource, and continuity.

History in Fragments foregrounds fragmentation as a method for understanding history—not as a linear account, but as an accumulation of partial gestures, broken objects, and dispersed voices. Within this context, Artifacts from an Ancient Future participates in a shared inquiry into how ceramics can record histories beyond utility, serving as speculative evidence of collective experience shaped by loss, transformation, and survival.

Artists: Manal AlDowayan, Joël Andrianomearisoa, Gabriela Bettini, Luis Úrculo, Julia Llerena, Edison Peñafiel, and Timo Nasseri.