Future Conditional is a two-channel video installation by Anna Knappe and Amir Jan that examines how migration governance shapes the most intimate dimensions of family life: time, care, expectation, and the imagination of the future. Developed as part of the I-CLAIM research project and commissioned by Centrala Space, the work focuses on families whose lives in Finland are structured by conditional forms of belonging — residence permits, employment contracts, family reunification procedures, and shifting migration categories.
At the centre of the installation are Afghan parents navigating legal uncertainty while sustaining the everyday routines of family life. Their futures are repeatedly deferred, reviewed, and renegotiated through administrative processes that render stability provisional. Within this context, the hope invested in their children’s lives becomes a critical orientation point: the future is imagined not as a personal trajectory, but as something transferred, protected, and postponed across generations.
The two-channel structure of Future Conditional creates a dialogue between parents’ future-oriented reflections and their children’s present-tense thoughts. Across parallel screens, adults articulate aspirations, anxieties, and moral responsibilities shaped by precarious legal status, while children speak from within the immediacy of daily life — school, play, domestic routines, and small acts of anticipation. Moving between public outdoor spaces and private interiors, the installation traces how migration policy enters the home, reorganising temporal rhythms and emotional relationships.
Rather than presenting migration as a singular event or crisis, the work attends to its durational effects. It foregrounds waiting, repetition, and the management of uncertainty as lived conditions, particularly for families whose legal recognition remains incomplete. In doing so, Future Conditional reveals how state-imposed categories do not simply regulate movement but actively shape how futures are imagined, narrated, and emotionally sustained.
The installation is situated within the broader framework of I-CLAIM, an international research project investigating the living and working conditions of irregularised migrant households across Europe through an intersectional lens. The project examines how legal precarity intersects with labour, gender, care, and family structures, producing long-term social and emotional consequences. In Finland, the research highlights how temporary protection regimes and conditional residency create ongoing instability, particularly for families raising children under uncertain legal horizons.
Knappe and Jan’s work does not illustrate this research but translates its insights into an affective and relational form. By centring children’s voices alongside those of their parents, Future Conditional shifts attention from policy outcomes to lived temporalities, asking how futures are collectively negotiated under conditions where continuity cannot be assumed. The installation invites viewers to reflect on what it means to plan, hope, and care when the future itself remains conditional.
About the artists:
Anna Knappe & Amir Jan
Anna Knappe (Finland) and Amir Jan (Afghanistan) are a Helsinki-based artist duo who have collaborated since 2010. They produce cinematic works, media installations and photographic works that combine methods from visual anthropology with poetic and speculative strategies. Their research-oriented practice is grounded in long-term collaboration with Afghan diaspora communities.
Across essay films and installations, their work returns to the word Mohajer, used by Afghans to name migrancy beyond the limits of official refugee and migrant categories. They address migrancy as an ongoing condition rather than a transitional phase, and consider how camps and border regimes shape the material and psychological terms of everyday life. They construct layered narratives where testimony, place and mediated images remain in tension, making visible what documentation cannot fully carry.
Their work has been presented in international exhibitions and screenings across Europe, Canada, Bangladesh and India.
2.-6.3.2026
Mon-Th 7:45-20:00; Fr 7:45-18:00
University of Helsinki
Lobby of Porthania building
Yliopistonkatu 3
00100 Helsinki
Exhibition Opening and artists talk:
Monday March 2nd at 16.30-18.00
Helsinki University Main Building Foyer
Fabianinkatu 33