The FORART Lecture 2026

In this lecture, Juliane Rebentisch (Hochscule für bildende Künste Hamburg / Princeton University) will discuss imaginaries of the future in a time of ecological crisis.

How can we imagine the future in a time of crisis? What if the future no longer appears as a placeholder for the unforeseen? From an ecological perspective, the future today does not appear as an open space of possibilities, but rather as a space stripped of its broad horizons, colonized by the present. The lecture will shed light on the challenges this poses for both utopian and dystopian imagination and will discuss some of the humanist and posthumanist endgames of our time.

Against this backdrop, I want to advocate for a conception of the future that is neither utopian nor dystopian but instead reformulates the project Jacques Derrida coined as “hauntology” in the 1990s. For the concept offers a way to think through the multifaceted interconnections of past, present, and future in a way that can be made productive to understand our relation towards those not yet born, human and non-human, and productively confront the structural uncanniness of our own time, a time out of joint indeed.

Juliane Rebentisch is a professor of philosophy at Hochschule für bildende Künste, Hamburg, a regular visiting professor at Princeton’s German Department, and a permanent fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. From 2015-2018 she was President of the German Society of Aesthetics. In 2017, she was awarded the Lessing Prize of the City of Hamburg.