Time: 10:00–17:30, Grand Stair for VR experience (online registration required)

Time: 15:30-16:00, Moving Image Lounge for in-person conversation

In Prometheus the Fire-Bringer (2023), the final instalment of his Prometheus Trilogy (2019–2023), Meiro Koizumi reimagines the titular Greek myth through a poetic virtual reality experience designed for four users at a time. A child narrates the story of Prometheus, who faced eternal punishment for stealing fire from the gods to give to humanity. As humanity undergoes a transformative biotechnological procedure, the VR users’ physical boundaries appear to dissolve, leading to a profound sense of interconnectedness with other people, technology, and nature. Koizumi’s immersive artwork invites us to reconsider our relationship with technology (Prometheus’s fire) and its potential to foster empathy and connection in a rapidly evolving world.

The conversation with Meiro Koizumi will be moderated by Ulanda Blair, Curator, Moving Image, M+. The conversation will take place in English.

Time: 11:00–12:30, House 1

Subash Thebe Limbu’s films explore ideas of indigeneity empowerment and sovereignty. In a framework he has termed Adivasi Futurism, the artist reimagines a context of resistance in a science fiction-like space through forms of speculative storytelling. Two films by the artist are featured in this programme.

The post-screening conversation with Subash Thebe Limbu will be moderated by Chanel Kong, Curator, Moving Image, M+. The conversation will take place in English.

Screening credits

Ladhamba Tayem; Future Continuous

2023 | Digital | Colour | Sound | 14 min. 56 sec.

Limbu’s film connects two people from the same Indigenous community along the space-time continuum to radically reimagine the potential for resistance and change. Filmed and set in the Himalayas, the film follows a conversation between Kangsore, an eighteenth-century Yakthung warrior fighting the Gorkha colonial army, and a Yakthung astronaut and time traveller from the distant future. Between remembrances of the continuous struggle for Indigenous peoples and the evident potential of a different future, Ladhamba Tayem; Future Continuous converges timelines and narratives to ask viewers to consider their own role in shaping the world in which we live.

Ningwasum

2021 | Digital | Colour | Sound | 44 min. 26 sec.

In Ningwasum (approximately translated as ‘memory’ from the Yakthung language), time travellers Miksam and Mingsoma arrive from a future Yakthung Nation to their community in the present world. Surfacing issues of climate change, displacement, and forms of oppression, Ningwasum weaves folk culture and time travel protocol in one unifying narrative to assert an Indigenous perspective and agency in determining their own future.

Time: 14:00–15:00 | House 1

Monira Al Qadiri’s new lecture performance weaves together spoken poetry, music, soundscapes, and film, including Diver (2018), Holy Quarter (2020), Crude Eye (2022), and the Asian premiere of Oh Body of Mine (2025). She conjures magical realist visions, reimagining industrial miniatures transfigured into shimmering metropolises, synchronised swimmers in pearlescent suits—whose movements echo both petroleum slicks and vanishing pearling songs—and vast desert landscapes etched with fossils and meteorite craters. Through these layered spectacles, Al Qadiri channels childlike wonder and ancestral memories to confront the Gulf’s petrochemical modernity—its environmental toxicity and the gradual erasure of cultural memory—proposing a poetic reckoning with loss and transformation.

The performance lecture will conclude with a Q&A with Eunice Tsang, Associate Curator, Moving Image, M+. The conversation will take place in English.

Screening credits

Diver
2018 | Digital | Colour | Sound | 4 min. 12 sec.

For centuries, the coastal communities of the Arabian Gulf sustained themselves through pearling economies until petroleum oil was discovered in the region during the twentieth century. This discovery profoundly altered both ecological systems and cultural traditions of these communities. Diver presents the mesmerising movements of synchronised swimmers wearing dichroic body suits, a material that references the colourful sheen of both pearls and oil. The choreography is set to a traditional pearl-diving song that pays homage to the artist’s grandfather, who worked as a singer on a pearling boat.

Holy Quarter
2020 | Digital | Colour | Sound | 18 min. 48 sec.

Filmed in Oman’s ancient desert landscape that contains one of the world’s largest meteorite craters, this work reimagines British explorer Harry St. John Philby’s 1930s search for a lost city. Through these primordial terrains, marked by cosmic collisions and fossils, Holy Quarter explores contemporary tensions between tradition and technological progress, reframing the desert as a site of contested futures.

Crude Eye
2022 | Digital | Colour | Sound | 10 min. 7 sec.

This film guides us through a miniature recreation of a Kuwaiti oil refinery, modeled after structures from the artist's childhood. In her imagination, the scaled-down industrial landscape is a fantastical metropolis 'filled with beings and phantoms from another world'. It becomes a site that examines petrochemical infrastructure. The precise model asserts a documentary approach, while its poetic interventions balances childhood nostalgia with the toxic environmental destruction that the refinery represents.

Oh Body of Mine

2025 | Digital | Colour | Sound | 10 min.

Filmed in the ship-breaking yards of Chittagong, Bangladesh, this film documents the fate of decommissioned oil tankers—manually dismantled after being beached. A spoken adaptation of Rimbaud’s poem ‘The Drunken Boat’ (1871) accompanies the imagery, its allegory of voyage inverted: the ship’s arrival marks not triumph, but dismemberment. The footage exposes the hidden costs of global commerce, where environmental and labor exploitation are outsourced to the Global South. The film underscores a cyclical reckoning: every tanker’s epic begins and ends with bodies—of water, of ships, of people—strained to the breaking point.

Time: 16:00–17:40, House 1

Screening credits

Nova
2019 | Digital | Colour | Sound | 97 min. 13 sec.

Cao Fei’s science fiction film Nova explores a future where the physical and metaphysical aspects of humanity are separated by technology. In a secret mission, humans are transformed into a huge medium that digitally intercepts and collects messages. The story unfolds through a father’s experiment on his son, whose soul is catapulted into a digital world to oscillate inescapably between past and future, dream and reality. The film highlights the artist’s ongoing interest and interdisciplinary research into time and space. It emerges from the ruins of both past and present, critically reflecting on humanity’s sacrifices in the name of progress.

The film will be introduced by Silke Schmickl, CHANEL Senior Curator, Head of Moving Image, M+. The conversation will take place in English.

This roundtable brings together Cao Fei, Meiro Koizumi, Monira Al Qadiri, and Subash Thebe Limbu, the four artists participating in Avant-Garde Now: Time Travellers. The discussion will navigate the connections and divergences in their practices and cultural contexts, exploring how each artist uses speculative histories and futures to envision change and inspire new ways of thinking about the world.

This talk will be moderated by Silke Schmickl, CHANEL Senior Curator, Head of Moving Image, M+. The talk will be held in English.