Cities of the future in the past explores the relationship between photography and the spatial-planning disciplines. In this exhibition Svea Josephy presents twelve cyanotypes, several ambrotypes, AI images, a relief, and two freestanding sculptures. Each visual language speaks to a different aspect of art and photography and its entanglement in the recording of space. Some of these photographs represent a fantasy, an imaginary assemblage of pasts and present cities, specific buildings like Ponte Tower in Hillbrow or the Disa Towers in Vredehoek, others are a fictionized collage of structures that don’t exist. The exhibition uses the registers of architecture and photography for a critical exploration of details of the South African urban landscape and how it is constructed. It focusses on four South African cities as a way of thinking through some of the inheritances of the past, present, and future. It imagines other futures for alternative pasts. What will cities of the future look like when they have been erased or subsumed by other structures, social upheavals, or environmental catastrophe? What will the cities of the future look like when laminated on to the modern heritage of the present?In this exhibition, Josephy presents aspects of my decade-long engagement with speculative photography to consider the pasts and futures of some South African cities.

The exhibition is on display from 2 October to 13 November 2025.