Thinking about the future of art is not the same as thinking about the future. While thinking about the future involves reflecting on the systems, structures, and conditions that make it possible, thinking about the future of art is an exercise in language – just as it has been to attest to its end throughout history. As curator Chus Martínez states in her book The Complex Answer, “The future of art will be, for it is cynical to claim that art will have no future.”

However, to think about the future of art and not reflect on what awaits us is to become sterile to the speculative experience it involves. In this sense, observing its movements is to dive into an exploration of the challenges of the present, with singular perspectives on the concerns that afflict us, while windows of observation for other times open along the way.

Here, I highlight six trends in contemporary art that are emerging in the biennale circuit, institutions, and galleries around the world. The various media, discussions, and sensory proposals within this circuit are traversed by a global context of geopolitical tensions, climate crises, new technologies, and an emerging generation that confronts rigid worldviews while dealing with its own contradictions.

It is worth noting, in this context, the relevance of the Brazilian scene as a window for experimenting with these issues – perceived, for example, in Adriano Pedrosa’s presence as the first Latin American curator of the Venice Biennale, and more recently with the Wametisé program: ideas for an Amazofuturism, at ARCOmadrid 2025, curated by the Brazilian Denilson Baniwa and the Colombian María Wills, along with other actions.

Textile art

The year 2025 promises a renewed interest in the practices of artists who find in textile art a way to explore traditional technologies. Whether as a means to honor indigenous traditions or subvert their use by proposing new configurations, artists such as Naine Terena (Carmo Jhonson Projects), Claudia Alarcón (Galeria Cecília Projects), Randolpho Lamonier (Portas Vilaseca and Verve Gallery), and Sonia Gomes (Mendes Woods DM) point to diverse processes within the same language.

By stitching together collective memories and personal experiences, textile art dissolves boundaries between the scholarly and the naive, challenging colonial understandings of the production by ethnic groups and self-taught artists. On the other hand, it sparks a debate about gender distinctions that, throughout history, have kept practices deemed feminine on the margins.

Today, these investigations also examine the mass production conditions of thousands of pieces and decorative objects by large companies, often involving the use of labor akin to slavery. Problematizing the human precariousness carried out within cultural, social, and economic spheres, these practices question the conditions of textile materials in the capitalist production machine while celebrating knowledge that fights to avoid being erased.

Non-figurative

Seeking to differentiate themselves from the canons of abstraction, a new generation of artists rejects the categorization of their practices: they evade figuration and move toward materialities and visualities that aim to rescue traditions threatened by colonial violence. In doing so, they project reparative horizons through the use of non-traditional materials, sourced from nature or ritualistic elements.

Artists such as Laís Amaral (Mendes Woods DM), Gilson Plano (Galeria Quadra), Ana Cláudia Almeida (Galeria Quadra), Julien Creuzet (Mendes Woods DM), and Tegene Kunbi (Primo Marella Gallery) cross boundaries between painting, sculpture, installation, and performance, creating poetics where subjective experience guides the path of their material experiments.

While the deviation from representation fosters the exercise of fluid identities, difficult to capture by identity agendas, the affiliation with abstraction is rejected as a sharp critique of European modernist canons (especially in the Brazilian context, where modernism is equated with the international modernist avant-garde), inviting us to an encounter orchestrated by matter and composition.

Queer ecologies

Deviant life systems have been oppressed throughout history – and this is not limited to the human experience. Queer ecology is a field of study that proposes a rupture between nature and culture, using an approach that investigates how binary and normative paradigms have historically shaped the understanding of nature.

This perspective seeks to uncover existences that escape rigid categorizations, addressing, for example, same-sex relationships found in various species, the interaction between the kingdoms of fungi and plants, ecological crossings between nature and ancestral and scientific technologies, among others.

Artists such as Castiel Vitorino Brasileiro (Mendes Woods DM), Zé Carlos Garcia (Portas Vilaseca and Triângulo), Dan Lie (Barbara Wien Gallery), Kira Xonorika, and Seba Calfuqueo (Galeria Marilia Razuk) displace the human from the center of agency to imagine configurations between species, promoting understandings of worlds that are more fluid and interconnected. By crossing mineral, plant, and animal bodies, metamorphosis becomes, above all, an artistic strategy for developing new understandings of ecologies that encompass the history of life in a broad sense.

Digital art

Forty years have passed since the first publication of The Cyborg Manifesto – Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism at the End of the 20th Century (1985), an emblematic essay by American biologist and philosopher Donna J. Haraway (1944 -) which proposed a reflection on social relations mediated by technology.

Although, looking back, some of Haraway’s considerations about the emancipatory potential of technological advances in the face of Western domination seem excessively optimistic, it is astonishing to note how the relationship between the living being and the machine, the organic and the inorganic, guide our interaction with the world today. More recently, the disputes surrounding the development of artificial intelligences and the constant innovation of creative technologies hint at a rapid new leap in the way we relate to each other.

Names such as Gabriel Massan (Yehudi Hollander-Pappi Gallery), Vitória Cribb, Biarritzzz, Andrew Roberts and the Lu Yang collective create immersive environments, video installations and generative images that propose not only the digital mirage as a sensory disrupter, but also investigate the material and economic conditions that make such scenarios possible. These experiences also destabilize fixed conceptions of identity and gender, since the “avatarization” of bodies is a fundamental principle of these contexts.

The return of performance

If, on the one hand, contemporary experience is marked by the acceleration and digitalization of social interactions, on the other, contemporary art also proposes the return of performance and happening as a strategy for summoning presence. However, this occurs in the context of an internationalized, heated and omnipresent art market, which permeates institutional choices and relationships.

The interaction of traditional media – painting, drawing and sculpture – with face-to-face activations appears in practices such as those of Maxwell Alexandre and the collective A Noiva (Almeida & Dale), Jota Mombaça (Martins&Montero), Luana Vitra (Mitre Galeria) and La Chola Poblete (Travesía Cuatro), who densify their material investigations based on their own bodies and the presence of the public.

The challenge, however, is to emancipate these experiences in museums and galleries, whose symbolic logics operate in the market key of fetishizing the artistic object. The artists’ negotiation of market pressures and the possibility of body poetics opens up space for the development of practices that are inseparable from the relationship between the public, space and lived time.

Site-specific projects

Inspired by decolonial studies and the good living practices of ethnic and racialized groups, initiatives that associate artistic creation with social transformation are gaining relevance by promoting values of aquilombamento and collectivity. Examples such as Sertão Negro (Goiânia, Goiás), by Dalton Paula (Martins&Montero), Terra Afefé (Ibicoara, Bahia), by Rose Afefé (A Gentil Carioca), and Nhà Sàn (Hanoi, Vietnam), by Trần Lương show the commitment of artists to their communities, strengthening the social action that drives a material future.

In addition, these projects update the meaning of site-specific, as they come to be understood as spaces of collective conception, endowed with a social function, but never limited in their potential for inventiveness.

On a smaller scale, but equally important in their respective contexts, it is also worth highlighting artists and collectives who are dedicated to creating spaces for experimentation – often operating between the commercial, institutional and educational – with the aim of broadening the cultural debate and acting on social agendas. This is the case with Massapê Projetos (São Paulo, Brazil), run by artist Mano Penalva (Simões de Assis and Portas Vilaseca), GDA (Artists’ Gallery – São Paulo, Brazil), run by Bruno Baptistelli (Luisa Strina) and Carolina Cordeiro (Galatea), and Ruby Cruel (London, UK), an initiative by Blue Curry.

BONUS: Gen Z

Discussing whether the inclusion of names under the age of thirty is a testament to the quality of the work, the sheer mastery of the codes of contemporary art or merely reflects the voracity of the art market is like debating the order of appearance of the chicken and the egg.

Paradoxes aside, the paradigm shift and the perspectives on life of the new adults of generation Z – digital natives, socially engaged and mentally vulnerable – are being felt in various segments, and it would be impossible not to notice this tremor in the art circuit. Young artists such as Arorá (Galeria Quadra), Talles Lopes (Cerrado Galeria), Arthur Palhano (Portas Vilaseca), River Claure and Nour Jaouda are proposing new notions of the world in research that presents solid defenses and a wide range of developments for the years to come.

Although history and social impact are major issues for this new crop, a digitally molded reality bordering on delirium – in which the distinction between true and false is insufficient – makes their poetics as provocative as they are thought-provoking. However, without giving up the nostalgic charge given to certain more traditional media and techniques – some even claim that this generation is more conservative than its predecessors.

As a member of it, I prefer to believe that this is a new way of articulating past, present and future, in which elements are freely rescued and remixed. It is, however, a somewhat naive generation – and perhaps this is the freshness we need to face our times.