For The World To Come
3/20/26-4/10/26
An exhibition by Emma Bergman
In For the World to Come, artist Emma Bergman uses the frame of a semi-fictional institution, the Department of Eschatology, to investigate contemporary views of potential apocalypse. The motivating question behind the work is a deceptively simple one: What will become of us? In a gallery that was once a dermatologist’s office, visitors pick up a ringing office phone, press a button to activate a recruitment video, recline in an examination chair for a guided imagination session, and fill out a survey to share their perspectives with the powers that be. Blending humor and despair, For the World to Come is one step toward bringing an artist/organizer mentality—generative, inquisitive, not limited by things as they are—to a wider public.
Emma Bergman (b. 1995) is an interdisciplinary artist and organizer. They recently showed in group exhibitions at Vox Populi in Philadelphia and 21c Museum Hotel in Chicago, and have an upcoming solo show at Specialist Gallery in Seattle. Emma was a Y10 Community Member at NEW INC, an incubator for art and technology affiliated with the New Museum. Emma believes in a future without prisons and attempts to further that vision in their work. Rocko, a film they directed with incarcerated artist James Jones, premiered at DOC NYC in 2023. That same year, Emma had a 6-month residency at Velvetpark Media in Brooklyn, where they began the research that would become For the World to Come.
Emma received the Pritzker Graduate Fellowship to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where they earned their MFA. They hold a BFA in Interarts Performance from the University of Michigan. At Michigan, Emma co-founded the multimedia performance collective Call Your Mom with three collaborators. For 10 years, CYM facilitated workshops on collaboration and performance strategies hosted by the School of Making Thinking, the University of Michigan, and the University of Indiana. Their performance work was shown at Gylleboverket (Gärnäs, Sweden), Centro NAVE (Santiago, Chile), Cucalorus Film Festival (Wilmington, NC), the Sondheim Art Prize Exhibition (Baltimore, MD), and more.