Walter de Maria’s New York Earth Room Is an Unchanging Link to Nature in an Ever-changing City.

Walter De Maria, The New York Earth Room, 1977. © The Estate of Walter De Maria. Photo-John Cliett, Courtesy Dia Art Foundation

text by Isabella Bernabeo

I buzz myself in and start to walk up a narrow, rickety old staircase inside an old New York City building located at 141 Wooster Street. A pungent smell greets me as soon as I hit the second floor and turn to enter the exhibit. That’s when I see it. Mounds of dirt thrown inside an apartment’s meant-to-be living room. It’s an unusual sight, and it causes me to think, what am I supposed to make of this?  

Built in 1977, The New York Earth Room has been hidden behind a Soho door for nearly half a century. Walter de Maria installed the piece on the second story of German art dealer Heiner Friedrich’s gallery and apartment building, where it still lies to this day. 

The exhibition contains a white room filled with 250 cubic yards of unsterilized dirt, 22 inches deep, across 3,600 square feet. Originally, the exhibit was intended to last only three months, but it remained on display indefinitely. 

The New York Earth Room wouldn’t be what it is if it were placed in a small town in the middle of the rural Midwest. It’s the fact that it is installed in such a fast-paced city that makes the experience special, especially in the middle of Soho, where materialism and consumerism are practically the only things on visitors’ minds.  

This artwork forces its visitors to slow down and take in their surroundings. The dirt is slow and unwavering, offering a relaxing getaway from the bustle of activity outside. Yet, it is also quite surprising and provocative to witness so much dirt thrown inside a room, where it is so quiet that all one can hear is their own breath.   

The space is not just for tourists. New Yorkers who love hiking and camping also find meaning here. The piece provides locals with an escape from the city’s constant chaos. It is very much a sanctuary space. Spaces like this are hard to find without taking the Metro-North upstate.

As such, it fits perfectly in the city’s melting pot. It proves that anyone can belong. 

Maria himself never commented on the meaning of this piece, wanting each person to create their own connection. However, it’s notable that the Earth Room was installed only a few years after the United States Environmental Protection Agency was formed. And just a few years prior to that, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was released. This was a time when environmental awareness was exponentially on the rise. I’d like to think that this piece has been preserved to represent humanity’s obligation to care for our own Earth.  

This context adds to the artwork’s significance. However, this wasn’t Maria’s first or even second Earth Room installation.

Maria had actually built the first Earth Room in Munich, Germany, in 1968, and the second one was made in Darmstadt, Germany, in 1974, both of which were temporary exhibits that were dismantled after a few months. 

Maria died in 2013, and since then, Bill Dilworth has been the face of The New York Earth Room through the Dia Art Foundation, founded in 1974 by Friedrich. Dilworth cares for and maintains the exhibit by constantly watering, raking, and weeding the dirt, and even cleaning mold off the walls. 

Visitors can see The Earth Room Wednesday through Sunday between the hours of 12:00-3:00 pm and 3:30-6:00 pm for free. People can ring the bell to be buzzed into the apartment and make their way to the second floor for viewing. Photography is not permitted.

A New Era of Dance at Southbank Centre Begins with KUNSTY

Bold Tendencies, 2024 - Bullyache Rehearsal © Dan John Lloyd

text by Lara Monro

From the dark, psychologically charged paintings of Francis Bacon and Jenny Saville’s visceral reworkings of the body, to the rise of the Young British Artists in the 1990s, the UK has long fostered artists who trouble expectations and stretch the limits of form. Contemporary dance evolved within this same cultural impulse. 

Emerging in the mid-20th century and influenced by American modernism and European Expressionism, choreographers rejected the rigid hierarchies of ballet in favor of movement grounded in emotion, collaboration, and lived experience. The establishment of institutions like the London Contemporary Dance School and London Contemporary Dance Theatre in the 1960s helped this shift take hold, while companies such as Rambert opened space for contemporary choreography within previously classical structures. By the early 2000s, the UK dance landscape had grown increasingly international, hybrid, and experimental. Wayne McGregor’s appointment as Resident Choreographer of The Royal Ballet, for example, was a symbolic moment that signaled the avant-garde entering the mainstream.

Today, this spirit of experimentation is (slowly but surely) being reflected in the programming of public cultural institutions. The launch of KUNSTY, a new festival series at the Southbank Centre, foregrounds this commitment, championing artists who are reshaping what performance looks and feels like in the UK.

Rather than centering traditional staged dance, KUNSTY platforms independent British and international artists working at the intersections of dance, live art, cabaret, and club culture. The work showcased is playful, political, and deeply communal, embracing forms of performance in which audiences are not only spectators, but co-participants. Autre spoke with Aaron Wright, Southbank Centre’s Head of Dance, about the motivations behind the festival, the risks it welcomes, and the kinds of encounters he hopes it invites. 

Having joined the Southbank Centre only two years ago, Wright describes the launch of KUNSTY as part of a broader effort to nurture a new generation of UK artists while sustaining the institution’s evolving international program.

Cabrolé! © Jon Archdeacon

“I’ve focused on reigniting a program of international performance for our larger spaces,” he explains. “Now that it’s finding its feet, I wanted to make sure we were also supporting a new generation of British artists who might one day scale up to create larger shows here. The Southbank Centre is an engine of creativity. We have to nurture the next generation, particularly artists working in multidisciplinary ways.”

The festival’s playful title, drawn from the German kunst (art), signals a desire to attract audiences who are open to the unexpected: those drawn to work that is “a bit unusual, a bit queer, a bit arty.”

“I hope it gets people talking about the endless possibilities of performance,” Wright says. “In the UK, we often make theater in quite a conventional way. I want audiences to recognize the sheer creativity of many artists working on the fringes.”

This is clear in the festival’s programming. Cabrolé! curated the KUNSTY Cabaret Lounge in the Queen Elizabeth Hall foyer, gathering twelve of London’s most exciting cabaret performers to stage late-night, high-intensity sets. While Glasgow-based queer performance collective and club night Wet Mess blurs boundaries between performer and audience entirely, dissolving the line between stage and dance floor, and inviting those present to move as part of the work. 

“Many of the performances in KUNSTY are incredibly live,” Wright notes. “They feed off the presence of the audience rather than asking them to sit passively behind a fourth wall.”

A man hugs himself. We see him from behind with a jacket that says "CRAZY ABOUT DISCO NIGHTS" on the back.

Adam Russell-Jones, Release the Hounds, 2025 © Mayra Wallraff

Meanwhile, artists such as Adam Russell Jones and Courtney May Robertson return to the UK with work shaped by their experiences within Europe’s more overtly avant-garde dance ecologies. And in a major highlight, Australian artist Justin Shoulder presents a stunning hybrid performance that combines drag, mask work, puppetry, and club ritual.

“This is the civic role of international programming,” Wright says. “To introduce audiences to work that could never have been made here.”

The festival also underscores dance’s capacity to address urgent social questions. Sung Im Her’s 1 Degree Celsius merges choreography and atmospheric data to consider the climate crisis, while Tink & Abra Flaherty’s Gen X Gen Z explores parenthood, identity, and generational exchange.

KUNSTY ultimately expands what can be seen, and who can be seen, on the UK stage. It nurtures the conditions in which diverse identities, bodies, and narratives are not only visible but central to how performance is imagined. In doing so, it reinforces the UK as a place where boundary-pushing art continues to thrive, and where movement remains a vital language for thinking, feeling, and being together.

Sung Im Her, 1 Degree Celsius, 2025 © Asian Cultural Center (ACC)

KUNSTY takes place across the Southbank Centre from Wednesday, November 5 to Saturday, November 8, with performances and late-night events unfolding throughout the Queen Elizabeth Hall and foyer spaces.

Reborn with Dario Vitale: Versace's SS26 Collection Preview

The harshness of Medusa’s gaze transforms into a smile. Vitale blends Gianni’s bold use of color and desire for imagery with today’s rationality.

text by Alper Kurtul
photographs by Alec Charlip

Versace’s Spring/Summer 2026 preview took place in New York at the Tea Room of the Prince George Ballroom, located within the historic Prince George Hotel complex between Madison and Fifth Avenue. This century-old structure, with its Beaux Arts-inspired elegance, has been transformed into an event venue, and it is said that the women’s tea room, which opens onto the ballroom, and other former common areas have been restored and adapted for contemporary use. 

The first thing felt upon entering the hall was the reality of a changing of the guard. Donatella Versace’s departure from creative management after nearly thirty years and the arrival of Dario Vitale, who worked for many years at Miu Miu building products and images, signified not just a change in name but a shift in perspective. The news that this transition was confirmed in March and that Vitale took over in April marked a turning point in terms of the brand’s future and potential strategic directions. Every detail seen while walking around the room signaled the tone of this new era. 

Vitale’s background in the Prada school is evident in the rational structure and material discipline characteristic of Mrs. Prada. However, here, instead of harsh minimalism, an exuberance that winks at Gianni’s legacy has been chosen. The door opened by the Versace Embodied project had already paved the way for this direction. A line starting with a bronze relief of Medusa merges with the present through black-and-white portraits documenting the youth of Southern Italy, Collier Schorr’s intimate drawings, and Eileen Myles’ search for raw expression. Vitale’s softened use of Medusa in the preview gains a joy that flirts with pop art. This narrative becomes a manifesto on how the house’s codes have been updated. 

 
 

The silhouette language rises above a powerful and controlled nostalgia. It returns with high-waisted pants, prominent shoulders, pleated fabrics, and layered stylization, reminiscent of Miami in the ’80s and ’90s. Suits that look like they jumped out of Don Johnson’s Miami Vice screen but fit today’s urban body stand out. Printed denim and silk pieces adorned with Marilyn Monroe portraits and Warhol-inspired Pop prints take center stage. This is both a direct reference to Gianni Versace’s 1991 Spring/Summer collection and a contemporary echo of the brand’s longstanding dialogue with photography, prints, and identity politics. On the accessories side, gold-toned surfaces and Greek key motifs create a vibrant exchange between antiquity and pop culture, while each silk blend fabric used on the prints is finished by hand. This craftsmanship is particularly evident in the undergarments, where hand-applied paint transitions and micro print transfers on the fabric layers make each piece unique. The human face motifs, inspired by archival portraits, are not printed but hand-painted directly onto the fabric, giving every garment a slightly different expression that feels intimate and alive, as if each carried the touch of its maker (except for Marilyn Monroe, some of the faces that may seem like celebrities actually belong to random people, which subtly forces the viewer to look closer and question what feels familiar). The mannequins used in the exhibition are original models from the Gianni Versace era, handmade in the Milan workshop in the 1980s. These mannequins perfectly reflect the Italian tailoring standards of the period and Gianni’s sense of form. With their handcrafted surfaces, the garments’ lines are displayed as if on a sculpture rather than a mechanical display; the warmth of the human body is preserved in the way the clothes are presented. Thus, the material of the past is transported to today’s stage, and the weight of craftsmanship combines with the energy of modern colors and forms to become a narrative of dynamic confidence.

In footwear, the first hints of the Onitsuka Tiger collaboration are visible as the signature move of the new era. Tai Chi-inspired, low-profile models and a loafer interpretation offer a taste of tailoring, where Japanese production precision meets Italian leather. This collaboration was a separate headline in the news flow of Vitale’s debut season and looks set to become a key file for sneaker enthusiasts in the coming season. The emphasis on Versace partnering with a sports shoe brand for the first time in the sneaker field clearly opens the brand’s door to the street. 

Versace is reestablishing the relationship between myth and the body. The sculptural coldness of the gods gives way to a warmth closer to the human scale. The harshness of Medusa’s gaze transforms into a smile. Vitale blends Gianni’s bold colors and love of imagery with today’s clear sense of rationality. The styling feels fluid, mixing tailored pieces with soft layers that add movement and depth. Each look carries the energy of spontaneity, turning maximalism into something quietly human. This approach strengthens the brand’s relationship with the city and manages to remain wearable even in a hub of intensity like New York. The preview proves that grandeur can be conveyed not through ostentation but through measured assertiveness. Therefore, the expression of rebirth encompasses not only the new creative director but also the brand’s return to itself to find a fresh direction.

Bergen Assembly: We Are All Passers But Not Everything Vanishes

A Review of Across, with, nearby – The Fifth Bergen Assembly, Norway 

Bergen Assembly Open Office, outdoor view. Photo: Abrakadabra Studio


text by Maja Ćirić

I land in Bergen, greeted by rain (of course) and trolls—oversized, 3D, half-folklore, half-welcome committee. They stand at the airport like a soft portal, opening into a city where myth and weather slip into each other. Some places pray for rain. Bergen—Europe’s wettest city—prays for it to stop. But weather, like time, is arbitrary. “You can wear the watch, or you can live the time.”1

Looking in from the street, I’m drawn like a moth to the low, electric hum of a neon sign: The Bergen Assembly. A glowing threshold. Inside, discarded garments from Haukeland Hospital hang from the ceiling in Before Incineration (2025), an installation by the architecture collective Al Borde, working with reuse and spatial constraints—suspended like ghosts who never left, part of the Bergen Assembly Traces.

 

Audience gathers amidst Al Borde’s Before Incineration, 2025, an installation at the Bergen Assembly Open Office as part of across, with, nearby, Bergen Assembly 2025. Photo: Akrakadabra Studio

 

It’s the opening weekend of not quite an exhibition, not quite a symposium. Something that slips through cracks, porous, shape-shifting. Part visual, part discursive, part performance—and part something unnamed, lingering in the mist between buildings.

Here, the city listens. The fjord leans in. The landscape itself becomes venue, vibrating gently as the three-joint conveners—Adania Shibli, the Bergen School of Architecture (BAS), and Ravi Agarwal—together with many tracers, stir the waters at this planetary edge.

To convene is not to curate. It’s to call in what lingers—traces, flickers, the almost-visible. It allows things to collide, drift, dissolve—not to lose meaning, but to hold it differently. It’s a deliberate mixture of form, thought, feeling, and rupture. Not chaos, but intimacy. Not neatness, but density. It speaks across borders, across bodies—a soft unfastening of structure, and a firm refusal of silence.

Joar Nango and Ken Are Bongo, Post-Capitalist Architecture-TV ‘270° Version’, 2024, installation view at the Bergen School of Architecture as part of across, with, nearby, Bergen Assembly 2025. Photo: Thor Brødreskift

It moves horizontally more like a 270° view stretched across 13 screens—Post-Capitalist Architecture TV: 270° (2024) by Joar Nango and Ken Are Bongo—disrupting the fixed gaze of perspectivalism and introducing the constantly shifting, place-responsive worldview of the Sámi, a nomadic Indigenous people whose perspective refuses to stand still. Stolen Horizon III (2023) by Prabhakar Pachpute doesn’t just span the wall; it digs. Mining becomes a metaphor: not only an industrial act but an excavation of layered cultural and ecological memory, like the Roman warship unearthed in Serbia’s Kostolac coal mine, the painting reveals what lies beneath. The exhibition at BAS, too, reaches wide and deep. It unfolds like echoes overlapping—somewhere between light and dark, like Susan Philipsz’s Slow Fresh Found (2021), submerged frequencies resonating through the silo chambers of the Bergen School of Architecture. Like Meet the Locals: Underwater, Jana Winderen’s sound performance — creatures beneath the surface emitting sound, barely audible yet deeply present. Like a negotiation between hands — shaping clay, tracing keys, trimming hair — Koki Tanaka’s videos unfold in the in-between. 

It presents like the Palestinian mujaawarah2 — the ancient rhythm of gathering, of passing through, of sharing not only space but also violent structure, like the Nakba3, for a moment in time. After all, let us not forget that the Oslo Accords—those fragile, trembling agreements between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization—were signed in the quiet of Norway in 1993, when the world briefly held its breath, believing that maybe, just maybe, the weight of history could soften, and something like peace could begin to bloom between two long-wounded nations.

Lapdiang Artimai Syiem, Laitïam, 2023, installation view at Nonneseter as part of across, with, nearby, Bergen Assembly 2025. Photo: Thor Brødreskift

Yet, the Communist Museum of Palestine is an ongoing attempt to unfasten planetary life from the sustained violence and erasure that is the Nakba—not as event but as structure, not only of Palestine, but of the world. Here, the Nakba surfaces as a planetary wound, encoded across timelines, geographies, and peoples — each struggle activating another. Through its دال-صفر (d-0) project, the Museum conjures mujaawarah, a proximity practice, invoked by many, but perhaps most hauntingly by Munir Fasheh4, Harvard-trained, and stitched into the pedagogy of his seamstress mother, who knew mathematics schools dare not teach. He saw what schools miss—knowledge is not education. And so Bergen Assembly leans into this unlearning and re-knowing—not alone, but together, inside the close—redrawing the communal without asking permission. 

In the stone belly of the Tower Base, Bergen’s oldest building, two other mothers hold space from different eras and origins. Lapdiang Artimei Syiem’s Indigenous Khasi mourning of a male fawn in a video reenactment of the U Sier Lapalang folk tale  — set within a landscape, trembling, alive — flickers against the permanently placed bronze hush of a WWII memorial, mother and child locked in stillness. They don’t mirror, they murmur. Two bondings, grief as grounding, placed not to resolve but to hum across the grain of time. Story slips through—not as history, but as presence—where architectures remember without speaking, and temporalities touch without fusing.

AgriForum’s Acts of Re/Collection at Bergen Kunsthall as part of across, with, nearby, Bergen Assembly 2025, exhibition view. Photo: Akrakadabra Studio

Stranges Stiftelse, founded in 1609 as a poorhouse for women, is an architecture of exclusion—narrow rooms tucked along galleries, reached by steep wooden stairs, each one overlooking the communal hall like a quiet witness. What does it mean, spatially, to be poor and alone? Bergen Assembly doesn’t just enter these spaces—it listens to them. Archives for Social Change gathers here, not as display, but as companionship: five independent archives holding the quieted, the refused, the tender revolutions of those who organized, resisted, and cared. Skeivt Arkiv (Norway), the Dalit Archive and Feminist Memory Project from Nepal Picture Library, the Grindmill Songs Project of rural India, and Stiftelse’s own historical papers lean into each other—histories not aligned but in relation, held together by the will to remember what power tried to forget. In five tiny former bedrooms, five imagined lives of women unfold — drawn from the archives, rewritten with care by selected writers who listened closely to what history left unsaid. A delicate matchmaking that resonates in all directions and remains punctual. 

At Bergen Kunsthall, founded in 1838, the walls pulse with gestures of resistance, memory, and collective becoming. The space unfolds like a palimpsest of movement—across borders, histories, and urgencies—centering experiments in anti-colonial thought and radical togetherness.

Bergen Kunsthall, installation view showing Vikrant Bhise’s Memory, Resistance, and Consciousness, 2023; as part of across, with, nearby, Bergen Assembly 2025. Photo: Abrakadabra Studio

Entering frontally, you are immediately met with Memory, Resistance and Consciousness (2023) by Vikrant Bhise — a painting rooted in the uncompromising legacy of the Dalit Panthers, the revolutionary Indian collective that fought fiercely against caste apartheid, gendered violence, and class oppression. The canvas doesn’t just hang — it insists. A call, a cry, a continuum.

To the left, under a luminous shamiana—the ceremonial canopy transformed into a porous site of gathering—the AgriForum comes alive. Convened by Agarwal, hosted by FICA5 and artist Sanchayan Ghosh, this space shelters a living, breathing archive: Acts of Re/Collection — multidisciplinary, agrarian, artistic. It murmurs of seed, soil, root, spirit — an ecology of shared memory and speculative farming futures. The shamiana is less an object and more an embrace — an architecture of hospitality and insurgent pedagogy.

Organizing for Social Change at Stranges Stiftelse as part of across, with, nearby, Bergen Assembly 2025. Photo: Abrakadabra Studio

At the end of the space — the black box — five films from The Directors (2022) by Marcus Coates, artist and amateur naturalist, unfold with quiet intensity. Each is a collaboration with an individual — Mark, Lucy, Anthony, Marcus, Stephan — who has lived through episodes of psychosis. Through Coates’ reenactment and shared authorship, they reclaim their narratives on their own terms. The screen becomes a threshold — trembling with vulnerability, lucidity, and quiet courage. Here, video is a terrain of radical empathy; a gentle, yet powerful, gesture toward dissolving the stigma still tethered to mental health.

On the right wing, history ricochets, as convened by Adania Shibli. A retrospective of Gruppe 66’s6 three seminal exhibitions held at the Bergen Kunsthalle is shared rather than displayed. This Scandinavian, situationist-leaning collective unfolds through contemporary reinterpretations of their co-ritus (collective + rite) method from the late 1960s and 1970s — a choreographic practice of resistance, ritual, and rupture born as a response to institutional complacency. Here, the past is not archived; it is re-embodied, re-spoken in new tongues by today’s artists.

Gruppe 66 at Bergen Kunsthall as part of across, with, nearby, Bergen Assembly 2025, installation view. Photo: Akrakadabra Studio

Just as water carries the memories of others, EPOS—the literary boat, a floating library serving coastal communities in Western Norway from the 1960s until 2020—hosts an art program, Water as a Linker and a Separator, embarking on a multi-stop journey through the Hardanger Fjord. We, the opening weekend crowd, boarded EPOS towards Salhus. Greeted by sound: a performance, a tidal offering. An offering to the sea by Elin Már Øyen Vister and collaborators, held at the shoreline where the boat had anchored. So archetypal it felt like it could move the tide itself. From there, we drifted inland to the Textile Industry Museum, once a knitting factory, still holding the breath of labor long after the machines fell silent in 1989. Inside, among worn looms and the lingering echoes of a working-class neighborhood of wooden Nordic houses, disruption did not appear as rupture, but as something more familiar — a condition. It drifted across borders, nested in nearby trouble, stretched between closeness and distance.

What the Bergen Assembly conveners seemed to offer was not a tangled complicity, but something gentler: a kind of relief. Like the twisting machine we encountered on the museum floor—its metal arms plying colorful threads together, not to confuse, but to hold. To bind. There is a quiet force in that gesture, in the re-threading of what has frayed.

Jakkai Siributr, There’s no Place, 2020–ongoing, installation view at the Textile Industry Museum Salhus as part of across, with, nearby, Bergen Assembly 2025. Photo: Thor Brødreskift

Jakkai Siributr’s There’s No Place (2020–ongoing) picks up this thread with aching precision. His textile banners—suspended like breath from the ceiling—began in a refugee camp on the Thailand–Myanmar border. There, members of the stateless Shan community were invited to stitch their life stories, one thread at a time. Through embroidery, memory passed from hand to hand. Siributr resists fixed authorship; instead, the work becomes a space—porous, open, collective—where narrative is not imposed but invited, and where histories are not merely preserved, but reimagined and remade.

From Lakota Indian poems to the Norwegian literary act of naming the industrial meat complex, the undertaking of the Bergen Assembly feels less like an exhibition and more like a search — for a word, a wound, a world still forming. Art for those who aren’t truly invested, yet still addressed. For the half-interested, the distracted, the ones who stumble into it accidentally. Maybe especially for them — because they carry the weight of the big pockets, the silent majorities, the soft architecture of society. 

If this assembly of relations weren’t rooted in Bergen, I doubt it would hum with the same resonance. Here, the land presses in—not as a distant backdrop, but as presence. The damp air, the weight of the sky, the quiet rhythm of water folding into stone. Everything feels shaped by something older, heavier. Isidora Sekulić’s letters from Norway in 1914 captured it simply: “So much of nature in this country—by its beauty, its terror, and its power—is superior to man, that all the importance and interest of Norway’s past seem to be more the will of geology and geography than the fate of a people.”

It’s true here. In Bergen, the past doesn’t live in monuments or myths, but in the earth’s sheer force—in cliffs, fjords, moss, and cloud. The works don’t just occupy this place; they are held by it, folded into a terrain that remembers more than we do. Maybe that’s the point: resonance isn’t always about meaning. Sometimes it’s about atmosphere—about being in the right kind of weather to feel it.

Had this been placed further west—closer to the art world’s centers of gravity—it might have slipped into commodification or the tidy boxes of identity politics. The focus would shift from fragile, shifting relations to something more legible, more fixed. But here, the rhythm is slower, softer, less utilitarian. There’s no pressure to explain everything. It’s a place where work can take its time—where ambiguity isn’t a problem to solve, but a space to inhabit. And that difference in tempo changes everything: how the pieces unfold, how they breathe, how they hold you.

We were listening to a panel at the famous Amundsen Bar at the Grand Hotel Terminus, one of Bergen Assembly’s venues. Someone mentioned it was once the place from which an explorer was bid farewell, setting off to find a friend lost on an expedition further north — a journey from which he never returned. It seemed fitting. In a way, the Bergen Assembly had sent us out as explorers too. But unlike that story, we came back — and brought a friend with us. 

We are all just passersby. But even in passing, something stirs: a feeling, a flicker, a thread pulled loose. Impermanence doesn’t absolve us. If anything, it sharpens the need to take responsibility.

To witness. To respond. To stay, if only for a breath. A footprint in wet moss. A glance that clings. A gesture, unfinished but felt. What we touch touches back. Nothing holds. But everything leaves an imprint. And Bergen Assembly, in its passing, left traces—soft, deliberate, awake. It remembered to take responsibility.

Jakkai Siributr, There’s no Place, 2020–ongoing, installation view at the Textile Industry Museum Salhus as part of across, with, nearby, Bergen Assembly 2025. Photo: Thor Brødreskift

Bergen Assembly is on view through November 9 @ Halfdan Kjerulfs Gate 4, 5017 Bergen

1 At one of the panels, Rene Gabri quoted a wise man from Jerusalem. ↩

2 Mujaawarah is a group of people who want and decide to be together, with no authority within the group and no authority from outside ↩

3 The Nakba, which means “catastrophe” in Arabic, refers to the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Before the Nakba, Palestine was a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural society. ↩

4 Munir Fasheh is a learning theorist and practitioner, who taught mathematics and physics. Based in Ramallah, Fasheh founded the Tamer Institute for Community Education during the first Intifada as a center for developing learning environments outside of schooling in Palestine. ↩

5 The Foundation of Indian Contemporary Art. ↩

6 Gruppe 66, which directly intervened in the cultural status quo; Konkret Analyse, blending abstraction with gesture; and Common Life/Samliv, a fusion of art and learning, taboos and togetherness. ↩

"Embrace" by Klára Hosnedlová @ Hamburger Bahnhof


text by Arlo Kremen

Embrace is the largest installation of the Czech-born artist Klára Hosnedlová. The installation was produced as the culmination of the annual CHANEL Commission at Hamburger Bahnhof—the old train hall turned art institution. Her resulting work has a remarkable all-at-once effect, where disparate facets of existence overlap: tactile, industrial, sound, history, architecture, scale, the land, and heritage are all interwoven in her piece, compelling visitors to sit patiently in Hosnedlová’s singular world.

The artist transforms the exhibition hall’s original floors with grey stone tiles. The plane of grey is interrupted by gashes of sand, dirt, and water—natural material invades the clinical space of art reception. Industrial speakers sourced from Berlin clubs, some of which no longer exist, pile onto some of the intruding earth beds. While some speakers amplify the audio cycle for the show, others lie entirely inert as empty vessels.

The show’s soundtrack was developed by Berlin- and Brussels-based composer and artist Billy Bultheel. The track cycles through a women’s choir, Lada, who sing in Moravian micro-dialects, instrumental sections, church bells, and the voice of Czech rapper Yzomandias. Much of the work originates in memories and histories of where Hosnedlová grew up, the Moravian town of Uherské Hradiště, where the inorganic structures of central-east European communist industrial architecture and the region’s rich cultural landscape came into contact. The eight steel walls bordering the show hold sand-covered reliefs that similarly evoke memories. Both referring to Moravia’s history, they also call on the socialist wall friezes common in public buildings. With the fossils embodying both prehistoric and communist histories, they turn to Hosnedlová’s childhood in the immediate aftermath of Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution, her birth taking place just a year after and three years before the formation of the modern Czech Republic in 1993. But they simultaneously represent her childhood hobby of collecting fossils, believing them to be remnants of another world.

Embrace, 2025
Klára Hosnedlová
Installation view
Courtesy Artist, Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, White Cube / Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Zdeněk Porcal – Studio Flusser

These reliefs also bear the work of glass-making artisans whose practice has been informed by generations of glass-makers, joining the separate referents of the reliefs through their regionality and as a historic artisan medium. Like claws, the hand-cast glass protrudes from the reliefs, mimicking, too, the carbonization of a prehistoric relic. Nine pieces of colored glass in total, whose material contrasts with the rigid structure of the reliefs, balancing fragility and durability.

The embroideries embedded in the reliefs act as portals to the past, depicting scenes from unseen staged performances that were photographed at brutalist structures in Berlin. These slow, intimate moments transport the viewer into a still past. Some depicted scenes emphasize physical touch. One embroidery shows a man with a lighter flaming right by his ambomen; his skin, brightened by the fire, evokes the sensation of a flame near the skin—its primal warmth. Another shows someone fiddling with a lit match, meditating on the feeling of an enclosing fire, a moment before movement. These gentle images are blown up within the immensity of the reliefs, both in size and in their references to ancient life and architecture, considering these ephemeral interactions with the body and natural phenomena like fire as contained within the vastness of history, politics, and culture.

 

Embrace, 2025
Klára Hosnedlová
Installation view
Courtesy Artist, Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, White Cube / Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Zdeněk Porcal – Studio Flusser

 

Some reliefs, displaced from the steel walls, are fixed to the hemp and flax tapestries hanging in the middle of the hall. Six in total, they hang from the ceiling and culminate in clumped tendrils, which cover the floor around the tapestry. Each is made from spun flax and hemp and dyed in an earthy tone from plant-based dyes. Such works also return to Bohemia, for the region has a long, pre-industrial tradition of flax and hemp cultivation that largely ended after the Second World War, when global industrialization and the legacies of colonial trade displaced regional textile production across Europe. For these works, Hosnedlová worked with the last flax and hemp processors in that region of modern-day Czech Republic. These fixtures, both blocking the viewer out and trapping the viewer in, disassemble traditional notions of inside and outside, inculcating the viewer into a landscape.

The show accomplishes an evocation. Through Embrace, a feeling of loss and slippage permeates, but its subject is not turning to pure nothingness. What is decaying—whether it be the cultural traditions and history of Moravia due to colonial capitalism or the regional sonic topography of language and music felt passing through the dusty, beaten, and partially defective speakers—it is going somewhere. Whether in memory-soaked imaginative environments like the one Hosnedlová crafts, or as a relic for new generations to uncover, the artist demonstrates her trust that the Moravia of her childhood will not disappear—it will carbonize under the earth for someone else to uncover and cherish as a key to another world.

Embrace is on view through April 1, 2026 @ Hamburger Bahnhof, Invalidenstraße 50, Berlin.

Designing Motherhood Is a Spotlight on the Designs That Shape Women's Health

DialPak Contraceptive Dispenser, ca. 2001
Invented by David P. Wagner in 1964
Photo: Erik Gould

Fisher-Price Nursery Monitor, 1983
Photo: Erik Gould

text by Hank Manning

Everyone is born, but the tools that facilitate (or prevent) this process are generally neglected by museums, the very institutions meant to chronicle the human experience. Our male-dominated society has placed more value on the female form—one of the more common sights at most art museums—than the wellbeing of women. Designing Motherhood: Things That Make and Break Our Births, at the Museum of Arts and Design, inverts this to consider how objects, from IUDs to forceps to cradles, have supported, and at times threatened, the wellbeing of mothers and their children. It highlights, furthermore, how disparity of access to these tools has reinforced racial and economic inequality.

The exhibition occupies the museum’s entire fourth floor. Walking clockwise from the elevators around the perimeter, the objects generally follow the timeline of motherhood, from conception to postpartum. Immediately apparent is the sheer multitude of items designed for each stage. 

These inventions have provided some women with the freedom to delay, prevent, or end a pregnancy. A schematic banner shows dozens of patents issued for contraceptives. Older band and ring designs have gradually shrunk and evolved into T-shaped inserts. Tools to procure abortions have also shrunk, from a foot-pump connected to two jars circa 1960 to Mifepristone tablets, in an unassuming white box, today.

Installation view. Photo: Jenna Bascom

Designs for commercial products consider both style and utility. The wooden Tripp Trapp chair features a minimalist form in the shape of an italicized L. The Resus-A-Cradle, created by a midwife, with the appearance of a mummy’s sarcophagus, positions a newborn’s body for easy breathing. Some stroller innovations have sought ease of use, like the six-pound aluminum-framed “Umbrella” stroller, while others, in hot pink and baby blue, sell as eye candy. 

Installation view. Photo: Jenna Bascom

In the center of the exhibition, mannequins adorn clothes for “temporary bodies.” Corsets and girdles, popular from the 15th century onwards, reshaped pregnant women’s bodies to conform to beauty standards without concern for comfort or safety. The Page Boy skirt defied norms, in a society that still considered pregnancy something to hide, upon its 1938 release by allowing wearers to freely adjust for and reveal the curves of their growing waists. Since the 1960s, elastic clothing, like the velvet unitard Bumpsuit, has become popular. Today, pregnant women hold a wide variety of jobs: a US Army maternity uniform, with a camouflage green shirt and pants, looks hardly different from any other military outfit, except for its looser midsection. These outfits, always visible in our peripheral vision, suggest a model of progress for the other sections: designs should make mothers’ lives more comfortable and accessible. 

Deborah Willis
I Made Space for a Good Man, 2009
Lithograph

Photographs evoke mothers’ attitudes towards their rites of passage. Intimate stills show tender love as well as fatigue experienced caring for newborns. In three self-portraits titled I Made Space for a Good Man, Deborah Willis reclaims a spiteful comment that she took up the space of a “good man” by working as a professor while pregnant, declaring that she made space in her body for a “good man,” her son and fellow artist Hank Willis Thomas. 

Birth control pills, cesarean sections, baby formula, and many other innovations have saved countless lives, but access remains unequal. Over time, the universal experience of birth has become less natural and more varied. A National Call for Birth Justice and Accountability, on display, decries that the US suffers the highest rate of maternal death of any developed nation, with women of color disproportionately falling victim at a ratio of nearly 4:1 as compared to white mothers. Relatedly, medical bills reveal that childbirth in the US costs more on average than any other country. Barriers are not only economic but also political. In fourteen languages, green posters featuring the face of the Statue of Liberty describe abortions as “legal, safe, and available.”

By focusing on the designs that shape reproductive health, we recognize them as central to our shared human story.

Designing Motherhood: Things That Make and Break Our Births is on view through March 15 at the Museum of Arts and Design, 2 Columbus Circle, New York

Autre Magazine Celebrates Its Fall/Winter 2025 "Work In Progress" At Cahier Central In Paris

Last week, on the occasion of Art Basel Paris, Autre Magazine hosted an intimate in-store event at Cahier Central, the independent art bookstore and cultural hub tucked away in the Marais. The evening brought together artists, editors, designers, and friends of the magazine to celebrate the intersection of print culture and contemporary art. Visitors browsed Cahier Central’s carefully curated shelves while flipping through Autre’s latest issue, WORK IN PROGRESS, which explores the unfinished, the experimental, and the evolving nature of creative practice. The event embodied the shared ethos of both Autre and Cahier Central—a commitment to slowing down, engaging deeply, and preserving a tactile relationship with ideas in an increasingly digital world. photographs by Oliver Kupper

Autre Magazine FW2025 "Work In Progress" Issue Launch At Sir Devonshire Square Hotel In London

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

Masterpieces Everywhere: Read Our Interview of Clément Delépine In Anticipation of Art Basel Paris →

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.

A Disappearing Act: "Global Fascisms" @ Haus der Kulturen der Welt

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

Gabriel Orozco Recontextualizes Albert Einstein's "Why Socialism?" Through the Lens of Contemporary Art & Politics @ Kurimanzutto New York

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

Sixties Surreal Reconceives Postwar Social Upheavals @ Whitney Museum of Art in New York

text by Caia Cupolo

photography by Matthew Carasella

Women walking by Peter Saul's Saigon painting

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 showing Camel VI, Camel VII and Camel VIII by Nancy Graves

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 showing Claes Oldenburg's Soft Toilet sculpture and Alex Hay's Paper Bag sculpture

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: A Short Film By Nigerian Filmmaker CeoJay

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

Inhuman Failures: Kennedy + Swan's "The Red Queen Effect" @ Schering Stiftung

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 Series Of Cinematic Vignettes For the FW 2025 Collection

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' I AM MANY Implicates Us All in the Making of History

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

From Giza to Memphis: Christelle Oyiri's "Dead God Flow" @ CANK Berlin

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’s Renderings of Sunday: Between Irony and Affection

 
 

text by Emma Grimes

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.

Read an Interview of Jenny Fax Creative Director, Jen-Fang Shueh →

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

Dario Vitale's Dualisms In The Domestic Setting Of Versace's Spring Summer 2026 Collection at Pinacoteca Ambrosiana

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.