Recalling installations by the Korean American media artist Nam June Paik and the monolithic ziggurats of pre-hispanic Latin America, New World (2020) frames a vision of post-apocalyptic architecture, in which the audio-visual equipment heaped up in the 20th century is upcycled into massive totems for new religious rituals.

Part of Xia Han’s larger video work The Gift (2019), this edition continues the artist’s fascination with climate change and the respective fates of animals, humans and machines. Through the narrative convention of a story within a story, Han presents a senior robot telling the tale of humanity to his young ward, a story ending in mass migration, with camps stretching out to the horizon.