Joanna Grochowska’s latest exhibition, TRANSHUMANISM, currently on view at The Untitled Space Gallery in New York, extends her ongoing conceptual project Opening the Future, which first surfaced in Munich in 2021.
In this newest iteration, Grochowska continues her excavation into the posthuman condition, where flesh meets code and identity becomes increasingly unfixed. Her work doesn’t just illustrate the future—it destabilizes the present.
At its core, TRANSHUMANISM is a confrontation. It asks us to look directly at the digitally reconstructed body and see not alienation, but potential. Through hybridized photography, performance, and speculative theory, Grochowska constructs images that oscillate between the uncanny and the sublime. Figures are elongated, spliced, genderless—neither cyborg nor human, but entities in flux. They seem to exist in the liminal space between the organic and the synthetic, inviting questions about the desirability, even the ethics, of transcendence.
Grochowska’s visual grammar is informed by the philosophical musings of Klaus Schwab, Ray Kurzweil, and the techno-utopian provocations of Elon Musk. But more importantly, it dialogues with art history—most explicitly with Jeffrey Deitch’s seminal 1992 show Post Human. Where Deitch identified a cultural threshold, Grochowska pushes further, positing that we have already crossed into an era where technological evolution is not speculative, but embodied. In this sense, her images are not fantasies—they are diagnoses.
What makes Grochowska’s work resonate beyond the sleek allure of digital aesthetics is her insistence on morphology as resistance. Her commitment to the concept of morphological freedom—the right to alter one’s body and mind—reverberates with the urgency of contemporary political movements. Her figures do not only represent speculative futures; they signal a refusal of biological determinism and gender normativity, reclaiming self-design as a radical, liberatory act.
There’s a quiet provocation embedded in this exhibition: what if the body is no longer a boundary, but a draft? Grochowska offers no clear answers, but instead creates a visual landscape in which questions proliferate. The viewer becomes implicated—not just as a spectator of transformation, but as a subject who may soon confront these decisions in their own flesh.
