Wesley Meuris (born in 1977, lives and works in Anvers) is a sculptor, drawer, graphic artist and publisher, but it is the exhibition itself (its formats, knowledge, and institutions) which lies at the heart of his practice: his work has now turned to a group of projects with an increasingly significant fictional dimension, which seek to explore the material and conceptual conditions of the exhibition. Despite the glacial forms of his installations, his work is tensioned throughout by a form of sardonic humor: his exhibitions and books are pastiches of institutions, artists’ catalogues, and archives. His work thus reveals affinities to the “eccentric conceptualism” of artists like Marcel Broodthaers, as Florence Ostende suggests, or Guillaume Bijl. The nightmarish organization of objects and information (libraries, data centers, archives, museums, internet sites, encyclopedias, etc.) and its underlying rationalization projects are exposed by Meuris with a powerful irony.

A new project created specifically for the monumental architecture of the Salle des Pas Perdus of the Palais de Justice (courthouse) of Poitiers, built by Eleanor of Aquitaine in the 12^th century, the Museum of the Futures is a museum dedicated to the popularization of images of the future.

It is divided into three sections. The first deals with the history of the images and methods of apprehending the future, from Antiquity to the present day. It is based on a rigorous system of classification. The second section offers an immediate immersion in different possible, plausible, preferable or desirable futures through the presentation of images, videos and facsimiles. Finally, in the center of the space, a large empty structure offers viewers a presentation of the future in the form of a spatial and physical experience: the future is perceived there as distant, impossible to attain, something existing beyond a threshold which cannot easily be crossed.

The Museum of the Futures is of course entirely fictional. And although the institutional apparatus does indeed exist – physically in the form of title cards, wall texts, accompanying documents, exhibition furniture, and communication media with their generic vocabulary, and conceptually in the form of multiple ways of classifying knowledge – the museum is in itself an invention of the artist Wesley Meuris, in collaboration with Jill Gasparina.