Origin Story 2.0: Curated by Satyajit Dave

ORIGIN STORIES: From Civilisational Memory to Technological Futures 

Origin Stories traces the evolution of human creativity from the earliest gestures of civilization to contemporary art, digital culture, and speculative futures. Rather than treating origins as a single event lost in antiquity, the exhibition approaches origins as what philosopher Paul Ricoeur described as a “continuum of meaning,” a persistent narrative structure through which societies interpret themselves. Origins become dialogic rather than chronological, a shifting interplay between material memory, cultural inheritance, and technological imagination.

The exhibition is structured across interlinked chapters that reflect what Aby Warburg called a “pathosformel,” a recurring emotional and cultural imprint that survives across time and geography. Craft, tools, numismatics, and early systems of measurement and governance are presented as foundational technologies that shaped social organisation long before the rise of modernity. Contemporary artworks reactivate these inheritances and recode them for the present, resonating with Homi Bhabha’s notion of “reiteration,” in which the past returns in altered and disruptive forms within contemporary culture.

Through this layering of historical and speculative lenses, Origin Stories becomes a conversation between hand and machine, archive and algorithm, memory and imagination, in the spirit of Donna Haraway’s insistence that origins must be read through both biological and technological genealogies.

• Craft as Technology, Technology as Origin

• Tools, Machines and The Human Leap

• Value, Order and the Invention of Systems

• Myth, Memory and the Fabric of Identity

• Revision, Recovery and the Contemporary Archive

• Digital Origins: Code, Algorithms and Posthuman Tools

• Futures: Speculation, Mutation and the Next Origin Stories

By bringing ancient craft into dialogue with speculative technology, the exhibition presents a long and interconnected arc of human creativity. Every act of creation becomes the beginning of another world.

The exhibition closes with the idea that origins are cyclical and relational.

Craft leads to technology, and technology redirects us back to craft.

Memory feeds innovation, and innovation reshapes memory.

-Satyajit Dave