Alice Temple and Eva Yelmani
Eva Yelmani
Rowena Alice
Derek Ridgers
Canty
Bibi Abdulkadir
Albert Cocker and Eva Yelmani
Betsy Johnson
Jermaine Francis and Marie-Louise von Haselberg
Amanda Demme and Summer Bowie
Dax Reedy and Betsy Johnson
On the occasion of Frieze Week London, AUTRE celebrated its FW25 “Work In Progress” issue with a private cocktail reception at the brand new Sir Devonshire Square Hotel housed in an old spice and silk warehouse in East London. We invited a fresh wave of talent who represent our WORK IN PROGRESS theme, challenging old systems and inventing exciting new ones. photographs by Oliver Kupper
Clément Delépine
Director, Art Basel Paris
Photography by Inès Manai for Art Basel. Courtesy of Art Basel.
For those of us who are insatiable art enthusiasts, arranging one’s art fair agenda is an art unto itself. It not only requires a close study of all that is on offer throughout the week and the precise timing of transport in between, but a realistic expectation of energetic reserves and proper meal planning. With that in mind, it’s difficult to imagine how one might ever go about organizing an annual program of this magnitude. Art Basel Paris Director Clément Delépine is a master architect of the art fair if there ever were one. Having cut his teeth as co-director of Paris Internationale starting in 2016, he has spent the past decade refining this rarefied practice that is a perplexing combination of curation, commerce, civic diplomacy, and social design. Aside from the 206 exhibitors at the Grand Palais, this year’s fair includes 67 events comprising performances, talks, satellite exhibitions, and guided tours in collaboration with 9 official institutional partners within the City of Light. As the drone of chatter about the declining global economy beats like a rolling snare drum, attracting a broad and diverse audience while striking the right balance of education, entertainment, and alimentation seems an impossible feat. And yet, Art Basel Paris is once again one of the most anticipated events of the art world calendar. Read more.
View of ‘Global Fascisms.’ Image by Matthias Völzke
text by Arlo Kremen
At Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Global Fascisms is a mudslide. A terrific force leaking from a small alcove on the main floor downstairs, littering its debris across two gallery spaces and the hall that adjoins them. Quite literally too expansive to cleanly contain, artworks fill any available nook and cranny with just enough room and privacy to distinguish one series or individual work from another. With all wall text relegated to an optional booklet, the exhibition leans into this eclecticism—nameless, authorless, materialless works sharing spaces with no beginning or end, as though they are merely artifacts of the fascistic social conditions to which each work refers.
In this regard, Mithu Sen’s piece Unlynching: You never one piece (2017–) acts as a microcosm of the show’s sense of anonymity. Sen displays a variety of objects on a white wall behind glass with years penciled in next to broken mirror shards, bronze tools, and other ephemera. The piece refers to the violent uproars that have continued each year since the British partition of India in 1947, instilling ethnonationalism into the borders of an ethnically diverse people to enforce concepts of a pure national ethnicity. Sen’s objects were found in sites of ethnic conflicts, each speaking to the ever-present ripples of violent terror British colonialism left in its wake.
Mithu Sen
Unlynching: You never one piece, 2017—
Found objects and pencil
Courtesy of the artist
It is crucial to mention, if not already assumed, that the show’s definition of fascism is quite loose and does not fix the ideology to governmental institutions alone. HKW displays works concerning many facets of fascism and artist responses to fascism across time, from literal governmental suppression to symptoms of fascism on the internet, as well as in religious and subcultural contexts. Underscoring its breadth, the show traverses space and time with an aim: to locate the look and sound of fascism.
Walking through the show, a sense of desperation palpates. And rightly so. It feels as though there is no end to the pockets of fascism deserving of a rigorous aesthetic investigation, and yet, the show has a deadly, bleeding gash. A lapse so severe, it has impregnated every inch of the exhibition. An unfortunate predictability of a German institution, the Gazan genocide lingers as a specter. Palestine has one representative in the show from the Jerusalem-based painter Sliman Mansour, but the occupied Palestinian people are also mentioned in one work by Israeli artist Roee Rosen titled The Gaza War Tattoos (2024–2025).
Roee Rosen
Night Skies with Full Moon, 2024
Photograph
Courtesy of the artist
Rosen’s series shows a set of tattoos in reference to the ongoing “war” in Gaza. It features different tattoos recalling the deaths of Gazans and their means, such as the “mosquito” military procedure that uses human shields, and another tattoo, The Dreadful Dreidel, detailing the different titles the IDF uses to describe its military violence against Palestinians. Without question, Rosen is concerned with Israeli violence against Palestinians and is in active protest against its historic military campaign, and yet, why choose an Israeli artist over a Palestinian? The Gaza War Tattoos is one of the first works in the largest display space of the show, while Mansour’s prints are tucked away in a far less populated section, by both people and artworks. A bizarre decision for sure to prioritize an Israeli artist’s discussion of Israeli militarism over Palestinians, and yet, this has been a familiar rhetoric among not-quite-anti-zionist liberals and zionist progressives, if such a thing can even exist, who, over the voices of Palestinians and their political accomplices, use the image of anti-war protests in Israel as evidence that a morally sound Israel of the future is possible. What should be the prioritized subjectivity vanishes in an institutional disappearing act.
Sliman Mansour
Camel of Hardship, 1973
Print on paper
58 cm x 37.5 cm
Courtesy of Zawyeh Gallery
Mansour’s prints all predate the ongoing genocide, with the latest being from 2021, Olive Picking. Mansour’s work engages in the history of Palestinian resilience in the face of displacement, representing the lives of Palestinians, not under war or direct abuse, but in their perseverance to live their daily lives. Whether it be a woman picking olives, as in Olive Picking, or the variegated activities of a village scene overlaid in The Village Awakens (1987), he demonstrates life under occupation. This is particularly notable in Camel of Hardship (1973), where a Palestinian man schleps Jerusalem on his back, but in each careful portrait, his treatment of line and color radiates with hopeful futurity. Mansour’s work is wonderful and a worthy contour to a show concerning fascism; however, his placement in the show feels like a quota fulfillment—or a solution to institutional censorship.
Daniel Hernández-Salazar
The Traveler, 2013
Photograph on wallpaper
440 cm x 660 cm
Courtesy of the artist
Blown up to the size of the wall, the photo The Traveler (2013) by Daniel Hernández-Salazar captures a recurring motif of an angel whose wings are digitally edited, unearthed shoulder blades of unidentified victims of the Guatemalan civil war. The angel sets his hands around the shape of his open mouth with the words “SI HUBO GENOCIDIO” (IF THERE WAS GENOCIDE) in large typeface at the top of the image. In 2013, former president of Guatemala Efraín Ríos Montt was sentenced to eighty years in prison for genocide and crimes against humanity. During the trial, Hernández-Salazar imprinted this motif on the back of public buses in Guatemala City as pro-Montt revisionists attempted to silence archivists and activists dedicated to his sentencing.
The placement of The Traveler is perpendicular to Mansour’s prints. The relationship between the works cannot be a coincidence—a work concerning the censorship of activists and the need to acknowledge and provide justice for the victims of genocide sits beside paintings about a people and land undergoing genocide and censorship. Assuming that HKW stipulated the absence of Palestinian art about the concurrent genocide and Israeli occupation because of Germany’s broad definition of antisemitism, this move by the curators is an ingenious maneuver—managing both to amplify Palestine through subtext, all while embedding HKW into the systems of fascism that the show aims to illustrate.
The absence of a Palestinian artist’s perspective on the genocide feels even more pointed given that the recurring medium of the show is video—the very medium by which this genocide has been broadcast on social media. The journalistic work of Korean filmmaker Yoonsuk Jung, commissioned by HKW for this show, is showcased in STEAL (2025). Created after the attempted imposition of martial law in South Korea, Yoonsuk Jung covers the eternal relationship between democracy, authoritarianism, and spectacle using footage from parliament assemblies, news outlets, and his own original shots. The artist works with the very media the Gazan genocide has been displayed to the West—and yet, Gaza appears only in the form of a tattoo.
Global Fascisms is on view through December 17th, 2025 @ Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, John-Foster-Dulles-Allee 10 10557, Berlin
Installation View Why Socialism? by Albert Einstein curated by Gabriel Orozco, kurimanzutto New York, 2025. Photo: Zach Hyman.
text by Poppy Baring
Albert Einstein’s 1949 essay, “Why Socialism?” is as relevant now as it was almost seventy-five years ago. Featuring numerous artists’ responses to the essay, artist and curator Gabriel Orozco opens the show with a refined version of the text, presented as a collage of modest photocopies. Themes that are still eerily close to those that swell in today’s discourse are included, such as “private capital tends to be concentrated in few hands,” “legislative bodies are selected by political parties largely financed by private capitalists,” “production is carried on for profit not for use,” and “an exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student who is trained to worship acquisitive success.”
Installation View Why Socialism? by Albert Einstein curated by Gabriel Orozco, kurimanzutto New York, 2025. Photo: Zach Hyman
These brief summaries of Albert Einstein’s contestations of capitalism are still echoed in media today. In a recent interview with comedian Marc Maron, Barack Obama spoke about how our culture is geared toward consumption, material goods, and fame. The author Scott Galloways, when speaking with Piers Morgan, notes that innovation has somehow excused depravity, citing Elon Musk as a clear example. Geoffrey Hinton, one of the pioneers of modern AI and winner of the 2024 Nobel prize, warned audiences of the danger of digital beings created by companies motivated by short-term profits. The answer to these issues suggested by Einstein in “Why Socialism?” is a socialist economy and an educational system orientated towards social goals.
Installation View Why Socialism? by Albert Einstein curated by Gabriel Orozco, kurimanzutto New York, 2025. Photo: Zach Hyman.
While visitors are left with political thoughts ruminating, they enter the almost all black-and-white main room of the exhibition and approach large grayscale flags of United Nations members, made by Wilfredo Prieto in a piece called “Apolitico.” Their loss of color strips away any signs of allegiance or patriotism and presents these flags as interchangeable. Other works, such as Ariel Schlesinger’s “Burnt Newspapers,” show the fragility of historical records, which is brought up again in the final and most shocking part of the exhibition, “The Pegasus Stories” by Forensic Architecture.
This video on digital violence reveals the terrifying real-life experiences of international human rights defenders, journalists, lawyers, and activists whose devices were infected and monitored by corporations using Pegasus, a destructive software developed by the Israeli cyber-weapons manufacturer NSO Group. Initially developed as just one part of Israel’s mass surveillance of Palestinians, Pegasus is now being used to target individuals across forty-five countries. In the passage for visitors to read before watching the film, they explain the American government’s public rejections of the software, as contrasted with its private acquisition of some of its tools from the NSO group’s U.S affiliate, epitomizing American hypocrisy and depravity at its finest.
This exhibition exposes visitors to an array of artists’ responses to Einstein’s essay. The stories reported in the final film are enough to leave you speechless, and overall, this display provides a dark and scary reflection of our current reality, which indeed supplies an answer to the question being posed.
Installation View Why Socialism? by Albert Einstein curated by Gabriel Orozco, kurimanzutto New York, 2025. Photo: Zach Hyman.
Featured artists include Ariel Schlesinger, Forensic Architecture, Minerva Cuevas, Petrit Halilaj, Robert Longo, Roman Ondak, Wilfredo Prieto, Zoe Leonard, and special guests.
Why Socialism? By Albert Einstein is on view through October 18 at Kurimanzutto 516 W 20th St, New York
Installation view of Sixties Surreal (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, September 24, 2025–Jan 19, 2026). Peter Saul, Saigon, 1967. Photograph by Matthew Carasella
When you step off the elevator onto the 5th floor at the Whitney Museum, you enter a scene of three life-size camels against a bright orange-red wall. This feels almost misplaced as a leading work in the exhibition, but it’s only at the end when viewers find their way to a didactic that describes the illogical nature of camels—from four stomachs to a dislocating jaw—but they still exist. Reality is strange.
Sixties Surreal, currently on view at the Whitney Museum of Art, is a compelling argument that Surrealism was far from dead in the era of Pop Art. An argument that takes form in the shape of sculptures made from “junk,” otherworldly paintings, and haunting photographs. The curatorial team brilliantly positioned this collection not as a nostalgic look back, but as a critical examination of how the classic movement, built on Freudian theory, mutated into a politically-charged, media-saturated, and truly American force during the decade of cultural upheaval.
The exhibition’s core power lies in its unflinching focus on the era’s social and political injustices. This is exemplified in Noah Purifoy’s “Untitled (66 Signs of Neon),” made following the Watts Rebellion. Purifoy walked the streets of litter and so-called junk, where he aimed to give new life to these found objects. Taking the objects out of a negative context to put into his art brings a new, empowering meaning and reclaiming of the events. The rubble that made its way into the piece has a darkness that emulates a haunting past, but is put into a new environment surrounded by stamped symbols and words. Surrealism emerged as the ultimate tool for protesting the unspoken contracts of the era.
Installation view of Sixties Surreal (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, September 24, 2025–Jan 19, 2026). Nancy Graves, Camel VI, Camel VII and Camel VIII, 1968–1969. Photograph by Matthew Carasella
This strain of Surrealism is deeply intertwined with the proliferation of television. The medium didn’t just report the news of upheaval to the American public; it delivered the chaotic images of war and protest directly into their living rooms, fusing reality with performance. The curatorial choice to present the exhibit in highly contrasted environments—sudden walls of hot pink interrupting stark, institutional grey—serves the subject matter well. It forces a jarring, non-linear experience that mimics the sensory overload and fractured perception delivered by the blinking, often distorting, television screen. The consistent use of small, scattered screens looping avant-garde animated shorts throughout the galleries is a clever tactic, effectively tying the artwork to the rise of mass media and demonstrating how artists were already diagnosing the medium that would eventually dominate culture.
The consumerist boom could not be left out when discussing the post-World War II era. Martha Rosler’s “Kitchen I, or Hot Meat” was a piece that stood out in its portrayal of this phenomenon. Female body parts appear on appliances, leaving the greater message that women’s bodies were readily commodified and contorted to fit within their economically prescribed domestic roles. Rosler reminds us that the human body was not meant to fit onto an appliance, so women should not be forced to conform to any specific role.
On a similar note of early feminism, Martha Edelheit’s “Flesh Wall with Table” is a breathtaking, large-scale repudiation of the male gaze. Edelhait depicts almost two dozen naked women lounging across the canvas. She did not use any models, opting instead to focus purely on her perception. The women vary greatly in position, shape, and skin tone, most having non-flesh-colored skin, like shades of green and blue. As a female artist, there was a particular pride in painting female nudes, especially so many for such a large piece, when you consider how much of the canon is filled with nude women rendered by men. Lastly, near the center of the work, lies a white rectangle wherein a woman is painting. This is Edelheit including herself in the work, further empowering herself in the building of a utopia where women can relax.
Installation view of Sixties Surreal (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, September 24, 2025–Jan 19, 2026). From left to right: Karl Wirsum, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, 1968; Claes Oldenburg, Soft Toilet, 1966; Alex Hay, Paper Bag, 1968; Lee Lozano, No Title, 1964. Photograph by Matthew Carasella
While the show occasionally leans into the obvious tropes of the era, its central thesis holds firm: Surrealism became the ultimate protest art of the 1960s. It provides a necessary historical correction, proving that the decade’s artistic legacy is not merely defined by Abstract Expressionism’s final bow or Pop Art’s slick surfaces, but by the messy, urgent, and deeply subconscious cries of the artists who tried to make sense of a world where domestic dreams were exposed by televised violence. It’s an essential, if disquieting, tour.
Sixties Surreal is on view through January 19, 2026 @ Whitney Museum of Art in New York 99 Gansevoort St, New York.
Ibadan Raised, NYC Made is an immersive short film by CEOJAY, blending the filmmaker’s cultural roots in the city of Ibadan, Nigeria with the ambition of New York City. This soulful elegy takes us on a journey into the Yoruba culture, from the talking drums to the traditional attire. Described by CEOJAY as “a love letter to home,” the film is a display of identity and cultural pride. text by Lola Titilayo
Kennedy + Swan
The Red Queen Effect, 2025
Photograph
text by Arlo Kremen
images by Kennedy + Swan
The Schering Stiftung is both non-profit and gallery. Its mission: to bring artists in to make work that engages the cross-section of art, technology, and education. This is particularly true for its residency program at BIFOLD, the Berlin Institute for the Foundations of Learning and Data, titled Art of Entanglement, where selected artists become entrenched in the discourses of data management and machine learning. The residency culminates with a show at UNI_VERSUM at TU Berlin, which went up for collaborating artists Kennedy + Swan this past May. This show, THE NEVERENDING CURE, was adapted for its new display at the Schering Stiftung Project Space, now titled The Red Queen Effect.
The Red Queen Effect has two parts: Lung Portraits, lightboxes shining through chemical-treated ink on glass, and the titular work, a four-channel video installation. In the first, twelve lightboxes hang from a wall, forming a circle that climbs nearly to the top of its fixed support. Each work mimics bacterial landscapes of different lungs, albeit in a highly colorized fashion, from the perspective of a health professional’s microscope slide. Laser cuts in the glass identify potential health risks, such as cysts or melanoma, even identifying a rare subtype of breast cancer in one painting.
Kennedy + Swan
Lung Portraits, 2025
Ink on glass in a lightbox
60 x 60 cm
The artist duo merely painted these works, leaving the diagnoses to an AI model built on the study of lung tissue scans to recognize regional cancers and other cellular defects. In response to the AI model’s given diagnoses, the artists cut into the glass to write the identified issues and marked areas in the colorscape that the model had defined as problematic. This work proves rather didactic, for it poses an experiment to prove that current medical AI models have a crucial failing. They are quicker to misdiagnose than admit confusion or uncertainty, a remarkable tool for the kind of risk assessment required to treat anything from cysts in the lungs to micropapillary breast carcinoma.
The four-part video installation bears an architectural exoskeleton, holding each screen in white-tile structures, emblematic of the lab in which ALICE works. ALICE is the name of a new AI-based medical practice boasting an ambitious promise similar to that of Elizabeth Holmes’s Theranos, that with suitable samples, ALICE can identify all current and potential health risks. The installation stages a pilot run, inviting volunteers to apply for the first clinical trials. Through a series of rotating videos and images, twenty-two volunteers speak. Animated through red watercolor, each represents the variegated facets of the public debate around AI’s role in medicine. Activists, technocrats, transhumanists, skeptics, rebels, a twelve-year-old girl, and many more positionalities make up the volunteer base.
Kennedy + Swan
The Red Queen Effect, 2025
Video stills in a grid
The most common reason for applying among the participants is the general distrust of doctors, reflecting the frequent sentiment of distrust among people, positing AI as a non-human, transcendent entity. However, through the visualization of the laboratory, ALICE’s code, and the AI’s visualization as a doll-like baby, the human gesture is present. There is nothing transcendent or neutral about AI—it is of the human imagination, learning from human data and human language. Kennedy + Swan refuse to dislodge AI models from the pre-existing social systems that begot them, which are the very same systems from which many of the volunteers are trying to escape.
The Red Queen Effect is presented by Schering Stiftung and is on view through December 12 @ Schering Stiftung, Unter den Linden 32-34, 10117 Berlin.
LEMAIRE presents NINE FRAMES, a film exploring the “interplay of clothing and cinema.” The film unfolds across nine vignettes, each exploring a distinct emotion or gesture through silhouettes from the Fall/Winter 2025 collection.
The cast features actors from the LEMAIRE community—Doona Bae (Cloud Atlas, Broker), Erwan Kepoa Falé (Atlantique), Julie Anne Stanzak (a longtime performer with Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch), Jussi Vatanen (The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki), Mame Binta Sané (Les Misérables), and Viktoria Miroshnichenko (Beanpole)—brought together by the individuality of their creative paths.
They move through the garments and settings with quiet assurance, engaging the camera with ease and subtlety.Shot on 35mm, the film emphasizes the tonal and textural qualities of analogue imagery.
Extended takes create a feeling of real-time observation, allowing emotion, space, and duration to develop without interruption, and fostering a sense of closeness between viewer and subject. LEMAIRE’s clothing functions as a cinematic instrument, amplifying character and gesture with understated narrative depth.
Structured as a series of fragments, Nine Frames encourages a non-linear experience in which meaning is assembled by the viewer. A printed book and physical installations at the Elzevir, Hannam, and Ebisu stores extend the film into tangible form, offering a continuation of its atmosphere beyond the screen.
Hank Willis Thomas
Roots (After Bearden), 2023
screenprint and UV print on retroreflective vinyl, mounted on Dibond
97.625 × 122 × 3 inches (framed)
text by Hank Manning
Truth is black and white–or is it? In I AM MANY at Jack Shainman Gallery, Hank Willis Thomas invites us to consider how perspective changes our understanding of art, nationhood, oppression, solidarity, and the relationship between the past and present.
In direct reference to the 1,300 identical “I AM A MAN” signs carried during the Black sanitation workers strike of 1968, I AM MANY proposes itself as an antipode to the famed rallying cry. It was this demonstration where Dr. Martin Luther King delivered his speech, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop.”
As guests enter, the words “LOVE OVER RULES” blink in neon blue. To the left, one black and one white arm stretch towards the heavens, their hands grasped. This marble sculpture is titled Loving Day, in honor of Richard and Mildred Loving, the aptly surnamed couple whose legal battles enshrined the right to interracial marriage in America.
Hank Willis Thomas
Community, 2024
Polished stainless steel
33.25 × 33.5 × 11.8125 inches
Upstairs, hands continue to feature prominently in the exhibition’s bronze and stainless steel statues. Hands impart the toll of one’s work, reach out for help, link together, call for action, but also violently apprehend. Hands direct actions from the aesthetic–grooming hair–to the existential–resisting or abetting violence.
Hank Willis Thomas
America (gray), 2025
mixed media including decommissioned US prison uniforms
68 x 159 x 1.25 inches
Each piece of Thomas’s visual art demands a second viewing: from a closer distance or a different angle, with more light or more context. Upon first glance, a wall work made partially from decommissioned prison uniforms spells out “AMERICA,” but as we approach, the letters become a dizzying maze. “EVERYTHING” on a lenticular print actually consists of innumerable small “NOTHING”s. Op art prints shift as we walk from left to right, challenging our understanding of the black-white dichotomy. In each of these works, our first impressions are betrayed by unexpected paradoxical interpretations.
Hank Willis Thomas
Until Ex parte Endo, 2024
UV print on retroreflective vinyl, mounted on Dibond, decommissioned US flag
78.5 x 57.5 x 9 inches (framed and assembled)
With written instructions, the exhibition invites us to use a camera flash to uncover the palimpsestic nature of the work, revealing images that are often lost to history. Under an American flag and an old portrait of the US Capitol building, light reveals children of varied races pledging allegiance. Numerous faces of protestors, those who came together to fight and build our current world, appear etched into UV-printed retroreflective vinyl. In the final room upstairs, prints of the pamphlet “Black Survival Guide, or How to Live Through a Police Riot” hang. When illuminated, they unveil photographs of protesters, armed police, and smashed windows. One multiple mixed-media quilt is described as “reminiscent of a QR code,” emblematic of the way that the incarcerated are treated like “faceless numbers on a spreadsheet.”
The late King’s presence and guidance are felt throughout the exhibition. But it is not his face hidden within the works. Rather, we see the thousands of people who listened to him declare, “I Have a Dream” at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Thomas forces us to reconsider not just how we understand our world today, but how we read history, from the slave trade to the Civil Rights movement to our present day. It is the story of not just a man, or any person, but many. The exhibition’s continuous and multifaceted interactivity nudges us: we too are part of the story and must move, shed light, think critically, and use our voices.
Hank Willis Thomas: I AM MANY is on view until November 1 at Jack Shainman Gallery, 46 Lafayette Street, New York
Christelle Oyiri
Hauntology of an OG, 2025
Video still
Courtesy of the artist, the LAS Art Foundation, Amant, and the Pinault Collection
text by Arlo Kremen
photography by Jacopo La Forgia
images by Christelle Oyiri and Neva Wireko
For Berlin Art Week, artist Christelle Oyiri teamed up with CEL, a freshly formed Black, female art collective, and Las Foundations to bring Berlin her first installation in the city at CANK in Neukölln, a retired 1950s mall turned event space. The exhibition shows alongside an event series by CEL called “Foundations.” One such event transformed the space into a nightclub of sorts, bringing several DJs to perform with Oyiri, who performs under the stage name Crystalmess, to headline. Unfortunately, Oyiri could not make it due to flight issues beyond her control, but its impact on the installation site remained palpable.
The installation sees CANK’s spacious second floor emptied. On one side, CEL projects a short film of their own; the other hosts two films of Oyiri’s, Hyperfate (2022) and Hauntology of an OG (2025). Between the two ends, darkness fills in the gap, with green and blue overhead fluorescents bleeding in and out to choral-like, electronic waves. Obscure darkness swells, not just with light, but also with something else, a numinous effect common to nightlife—a world in which, ideally, freedom is sovereign and individuals can collect into a symbiotic ecosystem, where, as Oyiri put it in an interview, music produces “unspoken connections.”
Christelle Oyiri
Dead God Flow, 2025
Courtesy of the artist, the LAS Art Foundation, Amant, and the Pinault Collection
Born and raised in the Paris region to Ivorian and Guadeloupean parents, Christelle Oyiri brings much of herself to her art practice. As an artist who occupies the nightlife world, she demonstrates great care for the poetics and politics of music and musicians, especially those of rap and rappers, the subject of her two films in Dead God Flow, where music brings her to look upon herself and her history in relation to these figures in Hyperfate and to adventure to Memphis, Tennessee, to look up close at one of southern rap’s capitals in Hauntology of an OG.
Hyperfate studies systems of power and surveillance within rap culture. Oyiri traces the culture’s relationship with death, noting how a rapper’s trajectory can significantly affect the probability of their death. The figure of the rapper, a sign of wealth and success, often becomes a target of envy and ridicule, particularly for rappers who come from gang-affiliated backgrounds. Such a dynamic only becomes exacerbated by constant self-surveillance online. It is through her reflection that Oyiri posits that the rap industry became so bloodied, thinking of rappers like Tupac, XXXTENTACION, Pop Smoke, and Takeoff as figures drawn to their premature deaths as prophecy, which is horrifically par for the course of their trade, dying by the same hand that gave them glory.
Oyiri ties in her own biography into the narrative, discussing her older brother’s path to winning the European championship inThai boxing and sharing footage of her childhood apartment building. Her filmed documentary footage, whether in Paris or driving around Pop Smoke’s neighborhood, Canarsie, Brooklyn, cuts between rappers’ IG lives and stories, images and videos of her and her family, and a supernova, grouping personal narrative with the historical to sublimate it. The question of prophetic deaths and material realities of racial capitalism becomes enlarged, cosmic questions with existentially urgent consequences.
Developed alongside photographer Veva Wireko in Memphis, Tennessee, and narrated by poet-rapper Darius Phatmak Clayton, Hauntology of an OG positions Memphis as a reference to ancient Egypt, with one pyramid serving as a parallel to the other. Oyiri understands the pyramid as a symbol of “death, continuity, and hierarchy,” looping the pyramid on the Mississippi River into a symbolic lineage that speaks directly to the contexts in which Memphis rap emerged—namely, the end of the futurity expressed by Martin Luther King Jr. after his death in 1968. Giving his last speech in Memphis, Oyiri sees the city’s rap culture as somewhat of an elegy to this snuffed-out dream. A since-past desire for an alternative future tormented by the vitriolic racism Black Americans endure, particularly in the poor, Bible Belt city of Memphis, where this past April, Clayborn Temple, a Black church community center and the historic organizing point for King Jr., was intentionally burned down.
Christelle Oyiri
Hauntology of an OG, 2025
Courtesy of the artist, the LAS Art Foundation, Amant, and the Pinault Collection
The pyramid’s construction was completed in 1991 and was intended to serve as an entertainment venue for concerts and sports. However, today, the structure is a shopping center, housing the Bass Pro Shop megastore, among other commercial enterprises. Rather than a theological monument to a deceased pharaoh, Memphis’s pyramid memorializes and upholds the economic episteme that produced it, liberal capitalism; thus, Memphis rap produces a different monument, a sonic architecture dedicated to histories of struggle. The show’s title, Dead God Flow, refers to Nietzsche’s “God is Dead” concept, where Oyiri witnesses Nietzsche’s epistemic utterance in Memphis’s rappers, hearing in their flows a call for a new future.
Dead God Flow is presented by LAS Art Foundation and is on view through October 19 @ CANK, Karl-Marx-Straße 95, Berlin-Neukölln
Theo Bardsley
A Face Mask And Leftovers For Breakfast, 2025
Oil in canvas
44 × 32 in
Courtesy of Court Tree Collective
Theo Bardsley
Hair Of The Dog, 2025
Oil on canvas
44 × 32 in
Courtesy of Court Tree Collective
Theo Bardsley
The Flower Seller, 2025
Oil on canvas
44 × 32 in
Courtesy of Court Tree Collective
Theo Bardsley
The Sunday Bather, 2025
Oil on canvas
44 × 32 in
Courtesy of Court Tree Collective
At Court Tree Collective, a family-run gallery devoted to emerging artists, the London-based painter Theo Bardsley is on view with Two Sides of Sunday, a series of new works in azure blues, forest greens, and autumnal browns. His paintings capture the many ways people spend a Sunday—binge-watching Netflix, bathing, fighting a hangover—with a gaze that floats between affection and irony.
In Hair Of The Dog, a dapper, lonely man nurses his hangover in a stylish pub. Two pints of Guinness rest on the table, one full, one empty and nudged to the side. The outline of the drained glass looks as if it could have been drawn in chalk, the paint appearing coarse and granular.
In another work, The Late Rise and The Early Smoker, Bardsley employs the same technique on an ashtray. Behind a sleeping woman tangled in a blanket, a man smokes. On the table beside him sits an ashtray, rendered only in outline. His work stops just shy of completion, as if these tableaus are a faint memory from a dream.
Theo Bardsley
The Late Rise and The Early Smoker, 2025
Oil on canvas
44 × 32 in
Courtesy of Court Tree Collective
Both these scenes and his other works carry a distinct melancholy. Even when the figures aren’t physically alone on the canvas—and many are—there is distance and isolation even in shared moments. Everyone in Bardsley’s world appears preoccupied and never fully present, like the incomplete renderings of the pint and ashtray.
Like his Naive art predecessors, Bardsley flattens space and eschews practical details. The smoker’s hand, for instance, is an oblong blob that’s legible as a hand only by its placement. The smoke drifts out of the man’s mouth in cloudy, gray-white flecks. Each is a small, deliberate stroke. There’s a tension between these static, almost tangible bits of smoke and the movement they imply. Bardsley makes such a fleeting moment feel graspable.
In A Face Mask and Leftovers for Breakfast, a figure in a red robe and green face mask sits lost in thought. On the table before them sits a takeout box, a moka pot, and an orange Penguin Classics edition of Pride and Prejudice. Behind the figure, an open window frames leafy trees, and beside it hangs a solemn portrait. Bardsley seems to wink at artistic conventions—the idealized landscape, the serious portrait—while guiding our gaze instead toward a figure in a face mask eating from a box of leftovers. His humor lies in this elevation of the mundane and his self-aware pleasure in painting it.
His works are titled with a blunt literalness, as if to dissuade anyone from searching for deeper meaning. In one work, the title itself is a joke. A brunette woman is draped across a velvety red bed, her head resting in the crook of her elbow with a remote control at her side. The painting is called Are You Still Watching, referencing Netflix’s familiar notification to viewers who’ve been watching a show for hours.
Theo Bardlsey
Are You Still Watching, 2025
Oil on canvas
32 × 44 in
Courtesy of Court Tree Collective
Rather than painting picturesque landscapes or serious portraiture, of which he references within his own paintings, Bardsley paints the quotidianness of domestic, modern life with both a solemn melancholy and a deadpan seriousness that’s impossible not to find humorous. And he’s laughing too.
Two Sides of Sunday is on view through October 11 at Court Tree Collective, 51 35th Street, New York.
Courtesy of Jasmin Avner
text by Kim Shveka
In this SS26 collection, ten models exist together in a small office space, engaging in mundane actions, terrestrial to their own little planet, all marooned in their own thoughts. We are invited in as foreigners to the scene, drifting among the models yet sensing an unmistakable barrier between us and them. The experience is filled with dissonances, but the biggest anomaly is the clothing, which portrays a colorful childhood within the somber, 9-to-5, depressing atmosphere. This is the tableau of Taiwanese designer Jen-Fang Shueh’s fashion brand, Jenny Fax. Surrounded by smoke and the sound of Taiwanese lullabies, I met Jen for an interview. Read more
Versace staged its Spring Summer 2026 collection inside Milan’s Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, the city’s oldest art museum and a 17th-century palazzo that once served as a private residence. The setting felt less like a show venue and more like a home—intimate and lived-in.
Across two floors of historic salons, set designer Andrea Faraguna transformed the museum into a dream of domestic life. Masterpieces as backdrop, while each room offered a glimpse into a narrative of a life lived: a dining table crowned with a champagne tower, mirrored corridors humming with reflection, bedrooms scattered with yellowing papers and magazines. At the center, in the Sala Della Medusa, a marble bust of the mythic figure presided—a reminder of Versace’s enduring emblem and the tension between beauty, danger, and power.
This mise-en-scène captured Dario Vitale’s evolving vision for the House: the dialogue between modernity and heritage, sensuality and intellect, generosity and restraint.
The atmosphere was shaped by a soundscape from Terraforma, the Milan-based collective known for bending sound and space into one. Voices drifted through the rooms; the hiss of radio static and the echo of footsteps gave way to a shifting mix of music curated with Car Culture (New York DJ Daniel Fisher, aka Physical Therapy). From Handel to Morricone, Prince to Laurie Anderson, Madonna to the Eurythmics—the playlist pulsed with movement and memory, tracing the same rhythm that runs through Versace itself: emotional, unpredictable, alive.
Michael Rider continues to reinvent a new language for the house of CELINE through a unique tempered elegance that borrows gently from the past and looks deeply to the future, as evidenced in the Summer 2026 presentation during Paris Fashion Week. photographs by Jody Rogac, courtesy of CELINE
On October 1 in the Jardin des Tuileries, Dior presented its 2026 RTW collection by Jonathan Anderson, which brilliantly reimagined the House’s heritage through an empathetic, deeply humanistic lens.
Drawing from the archive, Anderson wove familiar codes into new forms. The bow—an enduring Dior signature—appeared everywhere, reinterpreted in pinch-front coats, draped cotton drill miniskirts, airy lace dresses, and the new Dior Cigale top-handle bag. Shrunken Bar jackets took on sculptural proportions, while rippling capes and voluminous shorts echoed both his June debut and the House’s couture lineage. The result was a study in tension and transformation, offering a spectrum of attitudes and self-expressions.
The show space, conceived by Luca Guadagnino and Stefano Baisi, blurred the line between digital and physical realms. A specially commissioned film by documentary auteur Adam Curtis unfolded across an inverted LED pyramid—Dior’s past flickering in fragments before collapsing into the form of a Dior shoe box. It was a poetic gesture: memory as something preserved, contained, and perpetually open to rediscovery.
photographs by Adrien Dirand
Sasha Gordon
Flame Like Blush, 2024
Oil on linen
60 x 60 1/4 inches
Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York
On an unpleasantly hot and humid September evening, unfazed and well-dressed New Yorkers filed into David Zwirner Gallery, where the latest work from Brooklyn-based artist Sasha Gordon is on view.
Last year, David Zwirner and Matthew Brown announced that they would co-represent Gordon. While still a student at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2019, she showed some work with Brown and began her rise to prominence. Most recently, she had a solo show at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami.
Haze consists of seven paintings that turn inwards, probing Gordon’s complicated relationship with herself. Her hyperrealist self-portraits, often using neon hues, almost seem to glow. And she includes surreal splashes: a chain of tiny, floating rocks tethered to the one she sits on or the straps of her LED-lit tank top floating off into the canvas. The effect sometimes evokes science fiction, as if a UFO might just drift into the next canvas.
Gordon brazenly pushes past the surface of her image, instead foregrounding the cruel and varying personas of her psyche. That these works are on exhibit and available for an audience to view feels incidental to their purpose.
Sasha Gordon
It Was Still Far Away, 2024
Oil on linen
72 1/4 x 96 1/8 inches"
Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York
In It Was Still Far Away, a figure in Gordon’s likeness, wearing a white tank and mesh shorts, sits on a picnic blanket as a neon-orange mushroom cloud bursts behind her. As the bomb explodes, she clips her toenails, headphones on.
On the subway, waiting for a coffee, and before closing our eyes at night, our screens bring every global disaster to our door. And it seems that even our language has fallen behind; words like catastrophe and tragedy imply an anomaly, but what if watching war and famine and genocide unfold has become as quotidian as eating, working, and sleeping?
In Trance, a close-up of Gordon’s distorted face, painted in fluorescent gray, shows her eating a nail clipping. Below, a hand that’s speckled with more nail clippings is held out like an offering. In some ways, this painting of a hard-to-break habit feels more revealing than any of her nudes.
In the following room, the paintings turn increasingly self-lacerating. In Whores in the Attic, three nude women with oblong breasts, sturdy legs, and skin dimpled like the texture of the moon, stand insolently in front of the other Gordon, peeking out from behind a door. One of the antagonists haughtily smokes a cigarette while the other two gaze with scorn.
Sasha Gordon
Whores in the Attic, 2024
Oil on linen
96 1/8 x 78 1/4 inches
Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York
Her thorny relationship with herself turns even more torturous. In Pruning, one of the antagonizing personas is holding another Gordon underwater inside a glass box, her skin illuminated a brilliant green-blue. The underwater Gordon stares straight ahead, directly confronting the viewer, while her knees have cracked the corners of the glass. Some air bubbles, rendered with stunning technical precision, float up to the surface.
In the exhibit’s final painting, Husbandry Heaven, set against a mint-green and grey swirled backdrop, one version of Gordon forces food into the mouth of another, hands bound behind her back. Ashes float down from somewhere, smoke drifts across in swirls, and fragments of other selves are perched on floating rocks. Unlike the former paintings, this one has a distinct tenderness. For all her looks of scorn and ridicule, Gordon never abandons herself, and one is left wondering what love and care for oneself might look like.
Haze is on view through November 1 at David Zwirner Gallery 537 West 20th Street, New York.
Larry Bell with Pacific Red II. Photography by Matthew Millman, San Francisco
For over six decades, Larry Bell has skillfully molded contemporary art in America. Born in Chicago in 1939, Bell moved to the West Coast to study at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, the historic precursor to CalArts.
There, Bell became a member of Los Angeles’s Cool School, a rebellious group of artists, largely represented by Walter Hopps and Irving Blum of Ferus Gallery in the 1950s and ’60s, who brought modern-day avant-garde to the West Coast. Alongside Ed Ruscha and Robert Irwin, Bell is one of the last living members of the School. As a foundational figure in the Light and Space movement, Southern California’s take on Minimalism, which often employed industrial materials and aerospace technology to explore the ways that volume, light and scale play with our sense of perception, Bell made innovative work that experimented with the interconnections of glass and light and their relations to reflection and illusion.
His most notable works involve his creation of semi-transparent cubes made out of vacuum-coated glass to form an immersive experience as the art melts into space. Recently, six of Bell’s cubes have been installed in Madison Square Park, where they will be on view until March 15, 2026. Improvisations in the Park carries on Bell’s legacy, but with a twist. Instead of their typical white cube environment, they have been placed outside to interact with the constantly changing elements, causing a new perception almost every hour.
This idea, related to the flexibility of perception, is also highlighted in Bell’s recent series of collage works, Irresponsible Irridescence, on view now at the Judd Foundation in New York. These collages poured out of Bell after the passing of his wife two years ago, sharing a more emotional side of his work with audiences. They also subtly allude to the close friendship between Bell and the late Donald Judd. It was Bell who convinced Judd to build this now-historic organization in Marfa, Texas, rather than El Rosario, Mexico, impacting American art history forever. Read more.
Tickets are now available for Virgil Abloh: The Codes, the first major European exhibition devoted entirely to the visionary’s multidisciplinary legacy. Running September 30 through October 9, 2025 at the Grand Palais in Paris, the show—curated by Chloe Sultan and Mahfuz Sultan—will showcase hundreds of objects, sketches, prototypes, and personal pieces that trace the “codes” uniting Abloh’s work across fashion, architecture, music, and more. All ticket proceeds benefit the Virgil Abloh Foundation (VAF), continuing Abloh’s mission to empower emerging creatives and drive systemic change in creative industries. photographs by Flo Kohl
“Civilians” is the inaugural music video release from Clark’s latest album, Steep Stims, which drops November 7 on gatefold double vinyl, CD, and streaming with Throttle Records. This new album is the latest in Clark’s long, illustrious, and varied career, which has seen everything from becoming a Warp Records mainstay alongside fellow luminaries Aphex Twin and Squarepusher, to headlining Royal Albert Hall for a reinterpretation of Bach, to composing multiple significant scores. Judging by this initial teaser, which opens with gyrating gelatin as inspiration for the dancers’ movement and devolves into increasingly debaucherous deportment, we can only presume that the rest of the album has a cadre of sinuous surprises in store.
