The Future Imperfect is the second edition of an ongoing collaboration between Cubitt and the MFA Curating programme at Goldsmiths, University of London. This opportunity allows students to conduct curatorial research within Cubitt Gallery and Studio’s rich archive, which narrates its twenty-six-year exhibition and event history.

If the ‘future imperfect’ were to exist in linguistics, it would be a verb tense which fuses the past, present and future. It would bring together the ‘future perfect’, which looks forwards to a situation with a predetermined ending, and the ‘imperfect’, referring to the potentially endless continuation of a past event.

The Future Imperfect presents Cubitt’s archive in this tense. Considering the site of the archive and the archival document, typically, as a static, boxed-away, conception of history, The Future Imperfect looks towards the future of these documents.

During a one-day performance event which took place on Saturday 15th July 2017, curated by Sophie Bownes and Lucy Cowling The public were invited to reactivate documents from within the Cubitt archive, using ‘state-of-the-art’ digital technology. By translating physical documents to digitised imitations, archiving in an age of rapid technological advancement was put to the test. Employees of the ‘Bureau of Transmogrification’ guided visitors through the process of shaping a possible future for Cubitt’s archive.