Invention into Existence brings together nearly 20 artists and 30 works—including new commissions—that trace our hopes, dreams, and anxieties about technologies reshaping how we sense, understand, and live in the world. Highlighting emerging and mid-career artists, many making their Pacific Northwest debut, Invention into Existence extends the Henry’s history of exhibitions spanning the arts, humanities, sciences, and technology.

In his major work Black Skin, White Masks (1952), the Martinican anti-colonial revolutionary Frantz Fanon called for the liberatory struggle of “introducing invention into existence”—acts of creation and self-determination not dependent on, nor defined by, the confining forces of history. Inspired by Fanon’s ideas, Invention into Existence shows how artists reorganize relations between technology, selfhood, and the world to envision new futures.

Invention into Existence is organized across three interconnected clusters: systems of knowledge; raced, gendered, and sexed bodies as technological assemblages; and resource extractivism. Many participating artists hail from cultures, communities, and regions impacted by American policymaking, both domestically and abroad. They belong to what U.S. historian Daniel Immerwahr names “the Greater United States:” a diffused America shaped by histories of occupation, expansionism, migration, and transnational exchange. Centering North America-based yet globally influenced artistic perspectives, Invention into Existence invites us to consider the American technoscape through more expansive frameworks.