The Brooklyn Rail

Video art has a bad rep. In contemporary art terms, video art is hard to define, its boundaries too shifty and aesthetic merits ambiguous. At its worst, video is low-brow, lacking in production value, emotional force, and narrative depth. At its best, the form produces works playing alongside or against other mediums to visually challenging and conceptually layered effects. In worse instances (and more frequently), it plays like ambient TV in museums and galleries as in shopping malls or at home while you clean—sometimes to no fault of the video artists themselves.

It is with this trepidation over the indeterminacy of the form at large that, when I enter the New Museum to see New Humans: Memories of the Future and its newly commissioned video works, I discovered, quite surprisingly, that they predominantly all take the more conservative form of single-channel video in high-definition colored pixels. Dispersed throughout the massive exhibition featuring over seven hundreds of objects across three floors, the videos, most of which were given the proper treatment of a full wall projection in a dimly lit room with seats, felt like necessary reprieves in the grand experience of the show.

In the first exhibition room, titled “Reproductive Futures” on the second floor, Lucy Beech’s Out of Body (2025) glows against the main wall in a space which also features paintings from Wangechi Mutu and Salvador Dalí, and Tamara Henderson’s sculpture of a giant scrap-metal and mud humanoid body. Even amid the constant clatter of footsteps, doors, and the mechanized pumping of Jenna Sutela’s synthetic-milk installation in the corner, the lone bench facing the projection invited contemplation on Beech’s images of fluids passing through human and animal bodies as well as industrial and scientific facilities. These include human bloodflow, urine, wastewater at different stages of treatment in the sewage system, and viscous compounds in what looks like an underground salt mine laboratory. By taking us physically to sites of management of these “wastes” and lingering on the sounds and sights of their infrastructures, Beech invites us to consider the equalizing factor of waste matters and the enormous efforts humans in modern times have made to mask this basic truth.

Another inconvenient truth of the current technological moment unfolds in Hito Steyerl’s new film, Mechanical Kurds (2025). Taking its title from the eighteenth-century gadget—a chess-playing machine that appeared to be playing strong games autonomously but was in fact controlled by magnets manipulated by a chess master hidden underneath—Mechanical Kurds highlights the often-ignored humans powering AI development, including refugees in Iraqi Kurdistan. Contracted by foreign companies to train self-driving cars and drones in distinguishing between various objects and humans, these individuals—appearing through voice-over as interviewees, with one showing its face via Zoom—work for pennies without being informed of the end goal of their labor and sometimes to their direct destruction. Steyerl experiments with generative-AI footage to uncanny effect, producing images of human bodies flying above a golf buggy or morphing street scenes from Germany to China. The pink and yellow scaffolds framing the screening and each of the benches in the screening room, which mirror the machine’s vision, further dismantle the geospatial separation of museum and refugee camp, New York and Erbil, and reinforce the scale of dehumanization that affects and connects all of humanity.

Camille Henrot’s film In the Veins (2026) turns to another domain too often excluded from futurist discourse: care. Spanning scenes of ecological preservation, parenting routines, and New York City bracing for the dawn of a new year, Henrot traces—sometimes literally, via line-drawn animation that reveals a second layer of video beneath—an inter-species mesh of dependencies. A child’s voice, halting and searching as it learns to read, forms the spine of the film’s narration. An AI-generated voice slips in periodically to assist or correct the child’s pronunciation, producing a duet that is by turns tender and slightly disquieting. The effect is a speculative glimpse into a future of child-rearing where technological intervention becomes not an intrusion but a collaborator. I could easily see another scenario where Henrot’s film is screened on a smaller screen, in a brighter room populated with more objects, and the film would have easily been passed over, its tender juxtaposition of animals and human babies glossed over for smooth ambience. It’s a reminder that, for essayistic videos, the difference between profundity and wallpaper often comes down to the room you give it to breathe.

If attentive installation can elevate a quiet work, its absence can flatten one—such was the case for Alice Wang’s The Sky Is Not Real (2026). Expanding on her ongoing “Pyramids and Parabolas” film series, Wang offers the most introspective video of the show: comprised mostly of a static shot of a dark, star-strewn galaxy over which Wang’s unaffected yet decidedly intimate voice-over drifts between astronomical phenomena, earthly life, and personal memory. In the museum’s too-bright room, the film’s fragile atmosphere evaporates. The captions remained legible, but the seduction of Wang’s voice and the celestial soundscape barely registered. Only later when viewed alone in darkness did the work cohere for me—as an invitation to consider what can be perceived only when illumination, literal and metaphorical, falls away.

Despite a mismatch between The Sky Is Not Real and its display conditions, collectively, these four videos still form a quiet countercurrent within the larger sweep of New Humans: Memories of the Future. Amid more spectacular gestures elsewhere in the show, these videos concern themselves with the hidden systems and unglamorous labors that will structure our shared future. Far from the ambient, semi-ignored video art that flickers at the edges of many exhibitions, these works insist on duration, attention, and vulnerability. They invite us not simply to watch but also to dwell—inside the circulations that sustain us, the violence we outsource, the fragile ecosystems of relations, and the dim spaces where we lose and find ourselves.