In an era when humanity is facing new challenges posed by big data, bioengineering and climate change, Whitechapel Gallery has invited ten groups of artists, architects and other cultural practitioners to explore the potential of collaboration and offer their visions of the future.

Is This Tomorrow? features experimental propositions responding to issues we face in the 21st century from natural resources and migration to technology and spirituality. Their experiential projects take the form of environments, models, structures and systems, incorporating artworks, objects, film and graphics. They imagine scenarios in which queer desire, house music and fracking meet on a mountainside; grief and microbes generate new possibilities for housing; or machines dispense objects and emotions to support our place in the technological world of tomorrow.

Inviting visitors to travel through a sculpture formed from security barriers, peer into a model museum for the world’s most famous artwork, empathise with animals by entering structures built for them, or consider how a machine could equip us for the future, the ten intriguing and provocative projects pose the question – is this tomorrow? Working together in ten interdisciplinary pairs or groups commissioned by Whitechapel Gallery, each project reveals the expansive potential of collaboration.

The exhibition features 6a architects, Adjaye Associates, APPARATA, Rachel Armstrong, Rana Begum, Tatiana Bilbao Estudio, Cao Fei, Mariana Castillo Deball, Cécile B. Evans, Simon Fujiwara, Andrés Jaque / Office of Political Innovation, Kapwani Kiwanga, David Kohn Architects, mono office, Farshid Moussavi Architecture, Hardeep Pandhal, Amalia Pica, Jacolby Satterwhite, Zineb Sedira and Marina Tabassum Architects.

Is This Tomorrow? takes as its model Whitechapel Gallery’s landmark exhibition This Is Tomorrow (1956), which featured 37 British architects, painters and sculptors – including Richard Hamilton, Eduardo Paolozzi and Alison and Peter Smithson – working collaboratively in small groups.

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