New Exhibition: Future Conditional by Anna Knappe & Amir Jan

We are pleased to present Future Conditional, a two-channel video installation by Anna Knappe and Amir Jan, commissioned by Centrala Space (Birmingham, UK) and developed as part of the I-CLAIM research project.

Future Conditional examines the everyday lives of migrant families whose futures in Finland are made conditional by residence permits, employment contracts, family ties, and shifting migration categories. The work focuses on Afghan parents navigating uncertainty, whose present is shaped by the hope that their children’s future will be continuous, safe, and stable — even when their own legal status remains fragile or narrowly defined.

The installation consists of two parallel video channels that place parents’ future-oriented wishes in dialogue with their children’s present-tense thoughts. Moving between public outdoor spaces and domestic interiors, the work traces a temporal tension within family life: adults articulate their own aspirations through their children, while children imagine the future from within the immediacy of everyday experience.

By foregrounding intergenerational perspectives, Future Conditional explores how migration policy, legal precarity, and social expectations become embedded in intimate relationships. The work asks how ideas of the future are produced, deferred, or constrained — and what it means to grow up under conditions where continuity cannot be taken for granted.

The exhibition forms part of I-CLAIM, an international research project investigating the living and working conditions of irregularised migrant households across Europe, and the long-term social effects of migration governance on families and children.