Why Look at Animals? at EMST Athens

Ang Siew Ching, High-Rise Pigs, 2025


text and images by Perry Shimon


At EMST Athens, curator Katerina Gregos has staged an ambitious year-long group exhibition, Why Look at Animals?, that insists on confronting the urgency of human-animal relations in an age of ecological collapse. Bringing together over sixty artists across all four floors of the museum, with an extensive public program and a duration that resists the usual velocities, Gregos opens space for more-than-human perspectives, ecological commitments, and sustained engagement.

Perhaps the most haunting image, from my several visits, came from Ang Siew Ching’s quietly devastating film High-Rise Pigs. In a long shot resembling grainy security footage, two pigs in a vast, automated slaughterhouse attempt to communicate across the brutal architecture confining them. Their enspirited distress is unmistakable, magnified by the mechanical indifference of the setting. The film examines one of the largest pig-killing operations in China, exposing the violence hidden in industrial agriculture’s scale and automation. I first saw it in the basement galleries of EMST, and later at its rooftop screening that paired the film with a BBC4 documentary inspired by John Berger’s titular essay “Why Look at Animals?”

Paris Petridis, Eye Witnesses, 2006-2022

The rooftop crowd, gathered under a balmy night sky with the Acropolis glittering in the background, constituted its own form of public assembly—though one seemingly far removed from what might constitute a public discourse, or agora, today. The juxtaposition underscored a recurring tension: the urgency of animal and ecological suffering often being sequestered within esoteric institutional spaces. Precisely for this reason, a show of this scale and depth feels all the more urgent—insisting that such questions not remain peripheral but be brought into sharper collective view.

Sammy Baloji, Hunting and Collecting, 2015

Sammy Baloji’s Hunting and Collecting confronts visitors early in the exhibition with an archive of disturbing colonial images documenting the hunting and display of animals, often in the name of science. Arranged around a minimal architectural structure recalling natural history dioramas, the images are paired with a massive wall listing foreign NGOs operating in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It is a pointed gesture, implicating museums and nonprofits alike in the colonial and neocolonial abuses that shape human-animal relations. At the center sits a book of abstracted cartography, suggesting how gridded systems of spatial control—once used to seize land and wildlife—continue today in the biopolitical regulation of lives, human and non-human.

Janis Rafa, from We Betrayed the Horses, 2025

Janis Rafa, The Space Between Your Tongue and Teeth, 2023

Power is the explicit subject of Janis Rafa’s multi-channel film and installation on equestrian cultures. Horses—long symbols of strength and nobility—are here subjected to a BDSM-inflected mise-en-scène that renders them debased, humiliated, and instrumentalized. Red lighting, metallic soundscapes, sexualized accoutrements, and statistical neon signage produce a disturbing reckoning with the ways power and libidinal desire entwine in histories of domination. If Rafa’s staging verges on spectacle, it does so to force viewers into confrontation with the brutalities often masked by cultural mythologies of the horse.

Wesley Meuris, Enclosure for Animal (zoology), 2006 - 2021

Wesley Meuris offers a quieter but equally scathing indictment: minimal watercolors of architectural typologies designed to contain absent animals. Their bureaucratic banality is chilling, exposing the violence encoded into the very blueprints of zoos. The work resonates with James Elkins’ recent experimental novel Weak in Comparison to Dreams, in which a microbial ecologist is assigned to assess stereotypical behaviors of caged animals worldwide. Both suggest how rationalized, institutional systems quietly normalize the suffering of captive beings. Meuris’s watercolors also recall the paintings of Gilles Aillaud, the philosopher-painter and close friend of John Berger, whose 2022 Pompidou retrospective broadly surveyed his decades of images of animals suffering in modernist captivity.

Radha D’Souza & Jonas Staal, Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes (CICC), 2021

On the top floor, a reimagined setting of Jonas Staal and Radha D’Souza’s Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes (CICC) anchors the exhibition’s political horizon. Documentation of previous trials accompanies a speculative tribunal that indicts states and corporations for climate crimes, expands legal subjectivity to non-human witnesses, and frames justice as intergenerational responsibility. Rooted in D’Souza’s critique of neoliberal legal systems in What’s Wrong with Rights?, the work demonstrates how law itself must be reimagined if multispecies flourishing is to become possible.

David Claerbout, The Pure Necessity, 2016

Annika Kahrs, Playing to the Birds, 2013

Across its many registers, Why Look at Animals? insists that the treatment of animals today—whether in factory farms, zoos, laboratories, or postcolonial landscapes—will be remembered as one of the most barbarous chapters in human history. Visitors will find their own affinities among the sixty works, but what matters most is that each piece, in its own way, speaks to the ghastly urgencies at stake: the systematic and exploitative abuse of sentient animals and the ecological implications for all life on Earth. In insisting that these realities not be confined to the margins, the exhibition models how institutions can play a vital role in amplifying what is too often silenced or sidelined.

Acropolis view from the roof of EMST

Oussama Tabti, Homo-Carduelis, 2022

Ang Siew Ching, High-Rise Pigs, 2025

Capitalocene Ikebana: The Animist Assemblages of Yuji Agematsu

text and images by Perry Shimon

Fleas, lice,
a horse peeing
near my pillow

— Bashō

There is a friendliness towards the abject, a distinctly Shinto, open and capacious reverence in Yuji Agematsu’s daily practice: meditative walks and the gathering of small bits of detritus to make delicate, ikebana-like assemblages inside cigarette-cellophane vitrines.

New York, Agematsu’s chosen home, has been given the rare privilege of seeing two full years of his unwavering practice on view: one vitrine—or ‘zip,’ as he calls them—from each day of 2023 and 2024, shown respectively at Gavin Brown’s house in Harlem and Donald Judd’s former studio in Soho, where Agematsu worked for twenty-five years doing building maintenance and art handling.

The vitrines of 2024, displayed in the airy Judd Foundation gallery, place the two artists in a fascinating conversation. Judd’s cold, machinic, monolithic forms assert and insist on themselves, while Agematsu’s works embody a fluid becoming: daily meditations on the plural forms encountered during his sensitive perambulations.

Donald Judd Foundation, Soho, August 2025

In Absence (2007; trans. Polity, 2023), Byung-Chul Han contrasts the Western concept of essence—identity, duration, inwardness, permanence—with an Eastern notion of absence, which precedes and “gathers” an ever-changing relationality or becoming. One could see this as a fundamental difference between Judd’s paradigmatic modernist objects and the fleeting, friendly assemblages of Agematsu, however stylized and reductive these contrasts may be.

In Shinto thought, there are eight million kami, or spirits, each worthy of consideration and respect. The number is shorthand for the infinite and ever-growing. When Buddhism arrived in Japan in the 7th century, Buddha was welcomed simply as another kami among the rest. Agematsu’s practice can be read through this animist disposition: a reverence for the infinite pluralities of the world, even in its discarded fragments.

At the risk of overdetermining the work, I experienced it as profoundly ecological, illustrative of a disposition that might serve us well in imagining what Anna Tsing calls “the possibility of life in capitalist ruins.” Agematsu’s practice suggests a clear-eyed willingness to look closely, to re-enchant the detritus of our shortsighted and economically ravaged world.

One of the great challenges of our time is to find a balanced, reciprocal relationship to the earth—and especially to our waste. Agematsu’s careful, sublimative approach offers one model, resonant with political ecology, discard studies, and circular-infrastructure thinking. His work reminds us of the need to reorient our relationship to the abject itself, and to transform our systems toward more stable, regenerative ecologies. Our very survival may depend on it.

Power in Vulnerability: Jenny Saville’s Anatomy of Painting

Drift by Jenny Saville, 2020-2022 © Jenny Saville, Courtesy Gagosian.

text by Poppy Baring

Before you have time to fully enter Jenny Saville’s The Anatomy of Painting retrospective, you are faced with a colossal painting of the artist and her sister towering over you, not in an oppressive way, however. Hyphen, made in 1999, is mesmerizing and bright. Light pinks dominate the huge canvas, presenting two fresh-faced, marble-eyed young girls. The composition makes for an interesting opening piece. With one face facing towards you as you enter, but with the subject's eyes looking away, the other looks up, meeting visitors with huge open eyes. You are instantly aware of the emotion and intimacy, although her eyes meet yours, her head is occupied and nestled, resting in her sister's neck.

With a few more steps, you are opposite Propped. A painting again made with pink, red, and brown tones that add brightness to works that are seemingly conveying dark emotion. This painting shows a woman perched on a stall, wearing only a pair of silk shoes. The work at first feels overpowering. The strength of her body is apparent, and her face, only slightly visible at the very top of the canvas, looks down at the viewer, but there is also vulnerability in the subject. Her fingertips cling to her thighs, and there is a feeling that her balance is not completely secure. Lopped writing from an essay by the French Feminist, Luce Irigaray reads, “if we continue to speak in this sameness - speak as men have spoken for centuries, we will fail each other.” It is clear that the power of these pieces comes from their vulnerability, as (Luce suggests) is true of women. Saville considers this piece to be her most succinct of her early works. Early indeed, Propped was exhibited in her graduate collection at Glasgow School of Art, which led to Charles Saatchi buying her work and commissioning new works for his gallery in London.

Reverse © Jenny Saville. All rights reserved, DACS 2025. Courtesy Gagosian

Anatomy of Painting is presented, for the most part, in chronological order, showcasing the development of her practice. As you leave the first wing of the show, a timeline of Saville’s career explains her time studying in Glasgow and her fascination with artists of the Italian Renaissance. An inspiration that is clear as you enter the next room, which is full of detailed charcoal and pastel drawings that dance around the room. They are rich and intimate studies showing the bones behind her mountains of painting, but they are indeed beautiful works in their own right. In Pieta 1, Saville is responding to Michelangelo’s marble sculpture of The Deposition, made in the 1500s to depict three figures supporting Christ after the crucifixion. As with many of her works, when you begin to walk away from the drawing, feeling you have analyzed all the different figures consuming the canvas, you are brought back, realizing you have missed a hidden element.

In the final section of the show, visitors enter back into a room full of paintings, this time more colourful than the works that welcomed you. The end of the exhibition feels just like that, a full stop to her exploration of portraiture so far. Through these works, she explains, “ I wanted to see if I could make an almost abstract portrait,” and whether you interpret that in these works or not, they are truly mesmerising, with eyes and lips showing enormous emotion that somehow seem more real and important than the viewer's own.

Hyphen by Jenny Saville, 1999 © Jenny Saville, Courtesy Gagosian.

Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting is on view through the 7th of September at The National Portrait Gallery in London, WC2H 0HE

Inside the Fantasies of Grayson Perry’s Delusions of Grandeur

Grayson Perry: Delusions of Grandeur at the Wallace Collection.© Trustees of the Wallace Collection.

text by Poppy Baring

Delusions of Grandeur is the Wallace Collection’s largest exhibition of contemporary art to date and Grayson Perry is fully involved in every aspect of this display. From narrating the audio guides, writing the object labels, curating the exhibition from his favorite pieces in the museum’s collection, to creating a new body of work that responds to that selection, Sir Perry is threaded through this complex exploration of identity and mental health.

Through Shirley Smith, an imaginary artist created by Perry, the English artist uses ceramics, painting, textiles, and even wallpaper to bring visitors through a corridor of his mind. “The Story of My Life” tapestry shown in the second room of his exhibition extends this sentiment to museum visitors. It captures how Perry interacts and how he suspects other people to interact with artwork they see at a museum. The large tapestry includes fragments of paintings from the collection that mainly include female characters scattered throughout the canvas. These figures phase into Netherlandish landscapes that also bop and weave throughout the piece, and overall, this tapestry comments on how viewers relate artworks back to themselves and their lives.

 

Grayson Perry © Richard Ansett, shot exclusively for the Wallace Collection, London

 

The idea for the fictional Shirley Smith was influenced by the artist Madge Hill. Having navigated traumatic experiences in her early life, Hill challenged her trauma into her art and, surprisingly, considering she was an outsider artist who had no formal training, exhibited her work at the Wallace Collection in 1942. Sir Grason Perry, a title which somewhat dilutes his anti-establishment stance, then invented his own ‘outsider artist’. He envisioned Shirley to be obsessed with the Wallace Collection so much so that she saw herself as the heiress of Hertford House, home to the collection.

Complicating the exhibition even more, Perry brings in yet another identity, the Honourable Millicent Wallace, the alter ego of the alter ego (Shirley’s imagined persona). Delusions of Grandeur follows Shirley’s delusions, delving deep into her emotions and her fantasies of wealth and friendship. This exhibition underscores mental illness throughout the three rooms. For example, in the piece titled ‘A tree in a Landscape’, all the characters that are present in the Wallace collection miniature series have been compiled together into a family tree. Each of these miniature portraits has then been given a DSM-5 (the UK’s standard classification of mental illnesses) diagnosis.

Grayson Perry: Delusions of Grandeur at the Wallace Collection.© Trustees of the Wallace Collection.

Perry admits that these imagined characters were created to somewhat distance himself from the creation of the pieces presented, explaining that Shirley’s existence gave him the freedom to play with colors and pattern that you wouldn’t naturally associate with the museum. However, not all of the new work on view is made by Shirley Smith. Some of the works are that of Grayson Perry, some by Shirley, and even some by Shirley as Millicent Wallace. It’s not usual for Perry to rely on a central fantasy figure when creating an exhibition, but the identities present in Delusions of Grandeur leave you doubting who is real and, indeed, where the fantasy begins and ends.

Delusions of Grandeur is on view through October 26th at the Wallace Collection, Hertford House, Manchester Square, London W1U 3BN

Grayson Perry. I Know Who I Am, 2024. Cotton fabric and embroidery appliqué. 234 x 234 cm
92 1/8 x 92 1/8 in © Grayson Perry. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro

Rooted, Relevant, and Evolving: Read an Interview of Curator Rajiv Menon →

 

Suchitra Mattai, Set Free, 2024. Courtesy the artist.

 

With each new generation of immigrants from South Asia making their way to the various corners of the world, so too does their culture and unique interpretation thereof. With the context of comparison, they offer perspectives on their homeland that challenge the idea of authenticity deriving from one’s geographic placement. Thus is the crux of Non-Residency, a group show that comprises sixteen artists of South Asian diasporic identity curated by Rajiv Menon. Bringing the work of non-resident South Asian artists directly to Jaipur is a first for the young gallerist and curator who opened Rajiv Menon Contemporary in Hollywood, California, in his quest to bolster representation of the Indian diaspora within the United States. He refers to these artists as the Non-Resident School, effectively defining a voice of Non-Resident Indian (NRI) taste that is both united and richly diverse by way of its orientation. Read more.

Lumière sur la Place: Reflections from This Year's Les Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles

text and images by Perry Shimon

It was hard to locate the disobedience in this year’s theme of disobedient images at this extremely pleasant festival, in the extremely charming UNESCO city of Arles, in the extremely agreeable Provence region. The works on view this year spanned the familiar preoccupations of affluent liberal audiences: conflicted zones, colonial histories, marginalized identities, and trauma narratives. It evokes a peculiar, perhaps Catholic, sequence of hedonism, sermonizing, and repentance. As though wandering through an artful overabundance in the palimpsestic old city, pausing for long leisurely meals on la place, must be atoned for by encounters with images of intense suffering and historical prejudice. 

The opening week coincides with the Fête du Costume, where locals dressed in 17th-century finery perform elaborate processions around the city, simulating past rites into less-violent echoes of themselves; bullgames replacing bullfights. Such transformations invite broader comparisons. One could make a case for this as a cultural evolution: perhaps the collection and trophy-like display of images, many from formerly colonized and marginalized peoples, is a less violent enactment of the collection and domination of lives, labor, and time. Is this an incremental improvement, a continuum, a contestation, or a symbolic order? The answer may shift depending on one’s vantage.

Adam Ferguson, Église Sainte-Anne

Arles has long been a seat of power: from the Celto-Ligurians, through Roman emperors, to today’s LUMA Foundation with its €150 million Gehry-designed castle and landscaped pleasure ground. The unpopular-with-the-locals architectural folly is a striking distillation of neoliberal values; the imperial and the cultural entangled through architecture, objects, history, and spectacle. Inside, exhibitions with titles like #metime, slide installations from Carsten Höller, and accounts of early industry-led collaborations between tech companies and avant-garde artists sit comfortably together: all an expression of a technocratic, individualistic, neoliberal worldview.

Wael Shawky, I am Hymns of the New Temples, LUMA

Ho Tzu Nyen, Hotel Aporia, LUMA

Also on at LUMA was Wael Shawky’s I Am Hymns of the New Temples, an immersive film installation of cosmological marionette theatre set in Pompeii, which filled La Grande Halle; and a significant retrospective of Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen, offering a broad survey of his technologically situated engagements with Asian history, including a particularly haunting and fascinating work commissioned for the Aichi Triennial—Hotel Aporia—which explores wartime visual cultures and philosophical currents in Japan.

Lumière des Roses, Cloître Saint-Trophime

Some of the highlights of the photo fair this year included selections from Marion and Philippe Jacquier’s Lumière des Roses gallery in Grenoble, whose collection of anonymous, often amateur photography was installed in the cloister of Saint-Trophime. Within the austere, devotional architecture of the cloister, the effect was wondrous; small, strange pictures suggesting unknowable interiorities of past lives lived below the usual interests of history.  

Retratistas do Morro, Croisière

The Retratistas do Morro presentation, subtitled João Mendes and Afonso Pimenta: Reflections from Serra Community, Belo Horizonte (1970–1990), offered selections from a massive archive focused on two key photographers who, over half a century, documented residents of the Serra community—one of Brazil’s largest favelas. The work resists exoticization, intimately contouring the kin and cultures of this supremely syncretic, culturally vibrant era. What emerges is a celebration of quotidian life, a revealing counterpoint to the structural violence imposed upon its subjects. 

Diana Markosian, Father, Espace Monoprix

Diana Markosian’s Father was a complex, exquisite rendering of the Moscow-born artist’s reconnection with her estranged father, building on her earlier Santa Barbara project, which detailed her mother’s abrupt departure from post-Soviet Russia to marry a Californian farmer—taking both children and leaving the father behind in the middle of the night. In Father, the artist enlists her father, now living in Armenia, to participate in a staged reenactment of their reunion. The carefully lit, highly-stylized scenes stand in stark contrast to a vitrine filled with his actual, voluminous, and desperate correspondence: letters scrawled in Armenian to anyone he could think to contact in America, trying to locate his family. All above an open and bustling Monoprix grocery store.

The Louis Stettner presentation in the Espace Van Gogh showcased the underrepresented work of a resolutely twentieth-century photographer. It carried an affirm-the-canon sensibility, offering more-or-less poignant takes on familiar humanist themes and modern alienation, with highlights throughout, particularly a somber series depicting New York train commuters.

Batia Suter, Octahydra, Cryptoportiques

Batia Suter offered a hypnotic meditation on spatial resonance, projecting architectural affinities onto thin, overlapping muslins suspended within a 1st-century BCE Greco-Roman crypt. The work resisted explication, asking instead for a kind of intuitive attentiveness to form. For me it evoked underground server farms, circulating images, and a kind of visual associative learning and recombination characteristic of the age of AI. Nearby at LUMA foundation, the artist Tino Sehgal hung selections from their collection of photographs in a like fashion, determined by a surface-level visual similitude—inviting the question: after like is grouped with like, what remains outside of the data and dictates that determine them so? 

Augustin Rebetez, Primitive Manifesto, Croisière

Augustin Rebetez’s Primitive Manifesto presented an unhinged, accelerationist, Rube Goldberg machine of anarchic play, mental illness, and attention economies, unfolding noisily through the Croisière. The cursed AI images and hyperbolic memes, produced at Trecartinesque velocities, were a humorous and upsetting break from the other more measured and polished official offerings.  

Lisa Sorgini, Église Sainte-Anne

Lisa Sorgini’s sensitive and intimate family portraits shot during the ‘Black Summer’ immediately preceding the COVID lockdowns were a highlight from On Country: Photography From Australia in the Église Sainte-Anne; the beauty and terror of raising a family in troubling times. Letizia Battaglia’s Always In Search Of Life in the Saint-Martin du Méjan Chapel exhibited a powerful survey of the committed photographers' unsparing work, centered on midcentury Palermo; dark clouds of Christian passion and mafia violence tinged with quietly sublime silver linings. 

Letizia Battaglia, Saint-Martin du Méjan Chapel

This Rencontres wasn’t so much disobedient as familiar, and that which was verging on disobedience felt more like a performance to please the structures of power and privileged audiences. The title suggests simply that art is subordinate, should know its place—and if it steps out of line, it can be easily controlled, domesticated, and put back to work in service of its owners. On the whole, though, Rencontres is a marvelous, superabundance of thoughtful and beautiful images in-and-around the official presentations. There are ample opportunities to revel and wonder together in the slow plazas, myriad exhibitions, Mediterranean light, and historically rich surroundings. À la prochaine.

Libraire Du Palais

Le Sauvage

Sophie

Triangle of Rebellion: Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely & Pontus Hulten @ Grand Palais in Paris

NIKI DE SAINT PHALLE, Repainted photo of 'Hon,' 1979, NIKI CHARITABLE ART FOUNDATION, Santee, California. Courtesy of 2025 NIKI CHARITABLE ART FOUNDATION / ADAGP, PARIS


text by Kim Shveka

Artistic couple Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely were bound by a rare creative chemistry that defied rules and norms. They were known as the rebels of the ‘60s art scene who ambitiously pushed back against a world too eager to impose order. When the couple met curator Pontus Hulten, the three formed a rare triangle of trust and mutual vision.

Presented at the Grand Palais, this exhibition traces the rich journey of these two artists through the lens of Hulten, sharing their conception of a disruptive, multidisciplinary art in a profound historical approach.

Presented in ten chapters, blended and forming a complete journey through the intertwined lives of the three protagonists, the exhibition truly feels like a voyage. Swaying through the rooms, one cannot escape being washed by a ray of feelings: joy, frustration, freedom, injustice. The experience is curated with such intention that, if you allow the feelings to linger with you, the deeper truths within the art unravel.

 

View of the exhibition at Grand Palais, in collaboration with Centre Pompidou.

 

The first room of the exhibition tells the story of Impasse Ronsin in Paris, an artists’ colony in the Montparnasse district that was known to be an international melting pot of creativity. In 1956, Saint Phalle and Tinguely both lived and worked there, although each had been married to their previous partners at the time. Both marriages eventually came to an end, and by 1960, Tinguely and Saint Phalle embarked on a love affair that would intertwine their artistic paths. Tinguely had already known Pontus Hulten, an early believer in rebellious visionaries, and so he introduced his new partner. Hulten was immediately captivated by the young artist and encouraged her to pursue her career as an artist. After gaining traction with her Tirs (Shootings), Saint Phalle embarked on a new series depicting female stereotypes through grotesque, disturbing sculptures, establishing her artistic path and vision, which she followed until the end of her career.

Jean Tinguely, impasse Ronsin
Courtesy of Grand Palais, in collaboration with Centre Pompidou

The next rooms hum and clang with the energy of Jean Tinguely’s machines, creations of rusted steel and chaos, many of them still in active form, bursting with sounds of screeching and rattling. Hulten greatly admired Tinguely’s ability to include movement in his works, eventually setting aside his own art to focus on bringing Tinguely’s art center stage. Hulten aimed to offer artists a place in a society marked by liberty of thought and action. He imagined a world where art isn’t hiding in a museum or a studio, but shouted from the streets, quite literally. This took the form of art that refused passivity; it was uncomfortable and rebellious, taken out to the streets of Paris to address the public directly, offering them new art forms that were interactive and dynamic.

 

L’Accouchement Rose, Niki de Saint Phalle, 1964
Courtesy of Grand Palais, in collaboration with Centre Pompidou

 

Scattered like secrets throughout the exhibition are handwritten letters, correspondence between the two artists and Hulten that reveal a high degree of intimacy. Small drawings and sketches crowd the margins: filled with humor, inside jokes, and mostly love. They are love letters, and in reading them, we understand that this isn’t another collaboration between artist and curator. It was a family they formed, held together by a visceral, wild vision and belief in one another. Hulten didn’t just support their work—he adhered to it completely, with a rare kind of loyalty and conviction. Through him, their art found the space it needed and deserved; he created a space for them to grow, to experience, to see themselves without limitations. And through them, he found his true desire and ultimate purpose. From the safety of this nurturing nest, the three were capable of flight.

Niki de Saint Phalle, Pontus Hulten and Jean Tinguely.
Courtesy of Grand Palais, in collaboration with Centre Pompidou

Niki de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely, Pontus Hulten is on view through January 4th, 2026 at Grand Palais, Square Jean Perrin - 17 Avenue du Général Eisenhower 75008 Paris

A World With No Safe Word: Read An Interview of Nicolette Mishkan →

Nicolette Mishkan
Lethe's Harem, 2024-2025
Oil on linen
48 x 60 in121.9 x 152.4 cm

What if death were just a blackout between this life and the next? With its memories wiped clean in a cycle of spiritual cleansing, your soul might carry only faint notions of who you once were, like a SIM card with a brand new hippocampus. Such is the gist of the River Lethe, an underworld tributary from ancient Greek mythology whose waters wash away all remembrance of one’s existence. In Lethe’s Tavern, the fabled Greek river becomes a watering hole where painter Nicolette Mishkan’s ego goes to slosh around, bifurcate, and eventually sing its swan song. Informed equally by Sufi mysticism wherein wine is used to symbolize the intoxicating effects of divine love, she annihilates her sense of individuality by eliminating any distinction between herself and others. Together, these figures revel in the ultimate surrender to their fate, a resplendent transcendence into the unknown where who she once was lies buried without even an epitaph. The following interview took place at Megan Mulrooney on the occasion of the exhibition’s closing and has been edited for length. Read more.

A Deep Dive into a Century of Swimming and Style @ London’s Design Museum

Exhibition Photography © Luke Hayes for the Design Museum

text by Poppy Baring

Walking into this Design Museum exhibition doesn’t feel too dissimilar to walking into an indoor leisure center. After stepping down a wide white staircase and through a small corridor, you approach Splash!, a show investigating a century of swimming and style, together with the social and cultural impacts of the sport. This exhibition was designed, unsurprisingly, with swimming environments in mind. The central plinths, located in each of the rooms, which are divided into Pool, Lido, and Nature, are scale models of the three separate swimming spaces.

In the first room, Pool, these islands are models of the London Aquatic Centre and have been made from Storm Board, a recycled plastic waste that can later be remolded into different shapes. Entering this room, you are greeted by a large, bold lithograph poster that speaks to a poolside chicness that is often associated with the sport. The late 1920s poster was one of the first attempts to ‘brand’ the seaside as fashionable, bold, and modern. Seen next to this is a 1984 poster by David Hockney for the Los Angeles Olympics. A symbol of affluence and leisure, the poster celebrates California life and shows a swimmer immersed in a pool, with a pattern that mimics the one painted on Hockney’s own pool.

Overall, this room features interesting swimming treasures, namely Olympic and Paralympic swimsuits of medal winners past. The costumes and stories of Tom Daley, Yusra Mardini, and Ellie Robinson guide you down the room, where you then meet 1920s and 30s knitted swimsuits and swimwear catalogues. Labels explain the history of wool swimmers, starting in the 1920s, initially with the intention of promoting hygienic clothing, as well as magazines that advertise the “suit that changed bathing to swimming.”

Exhibition Photography © Luke Hayes for the Design Museum

Blue arrows painted on the floor then bring you into room two, Lido, which opens into a show of swimsuits and clothing. Aiming to include an extensive range of themes and topics, from architecture to fashion, politics, and fabric development, the exhibition can feel slightly overwhelming at points and sometimes, because of its broad objectives, fails to dive fully into one topic or another. The rise of mass tourism, sun protection trends, ‘homosexual activity,’ and changing beauty ideals are all discussed before you have had a chance to fully feel like you’ve entered the room. These weighty topics are paired next to swimwear-clad light blue mannequins, which don’t naturally transport you to the beach.

 

Rudi Gernreich, Monokini, around 1964. Jersey, Tricot. Courtesy of Fashion Museum Hasselt.

 

There are, however, a few iconic pieces that are thrilling to see in person. Pamela Anderson’s iconic 1990s red Baywatch swimsuit, seen by roughly 1.1 billion viewers weekly, is one, and a 1964 Monokini by Rudi Gernreich, which was designed in a statement about liberating women from hyper-sexualisation, is another. As visitors continue, swim caps from the 1970s and from Miu Miu’s 2016 collection also stand out, and the line-up of accessories from ‘bathing shoes’ to Speedos brings a sense of charming nostalgia to the show.

The third and final section of Splash! is Nature, which touches on folklore and myths associated with the sea. Century-old tales of Merfolk are addressed before discussing the niche and unexpected contemporary trend of mermaid-core. Finally, a fascinating film about the haenyeo-women of South Korea finishes the exhibition. This film brings visitors underwater with a woman who follows her mother twenty meters below sea level with no help from a breathing apparatus. This historic exploration for seafood and seaweed has been conducted by women for centuries, and is an intense but extraordinary end to a fact-filled summer exhibition.

Exhibition Photography © Luke Hayes for the Design Museum

Splash! A Century of Swimming and Style’ is on view through the 17th of August at the Design Museum, 224-238 Kensington High St, London, W8 6AG

“Under Shadows” With Tamara Kvesitadze and Shunxiang Hu at KORNFELD Galerie Berlin

In Under Shadows, KORNFELD Galerie Berlin unveils not just a duo exhibition, but a reckoning with the unseen forces that shape us. Tamara Kvesitadze and Shunxiang Hu — artists born worlds apart — meet in a shared terrain of exile, resilience, and refusal. The result is haunting and quietly revolutionary.

Kvesitadze, from Georgia, has long used sculpture and painting to explore the female body as a site of memory, fragmentation, and myth. Her work carries the imprint of a nation on the brink — caught between past and present, repression and revolt. Shunxiang Hu, born in China during the One-Child Policy, offers an intimate counterpoint. As a second daughter, she was forced to relinquish her identity to survive. Her portraits, hushed and uncanny, hold this rupture close to the surface. Faces emerge like ghosts — fragile, luminous, searching.

The artists met in Berlin in late 2024, sharing not only a space but a sense of displacement. The dialogue that emerges is profound: two women from vastly different geographies tracing parallel lines through shadow — political, cultural, psychological. Their work does not offer answers. It offers atmosphere. Texture. A choreography of what’s left unsaid.

The shadow in this exhibition is not absence — it is narrative. It holds the things that were never meant to be seen: buried selves, censored memories, forgotten bodies. Kvesitadze’s sculptural forms resist coherence; they are part relic, part dream. Hu’s portraits flicker between presence and erasure, shaped by a history that deemed her existence illegal. And yet, here they are — visible, intentional, luminous.

Under Shadows is not concerned with spectacle. It doesn’t scream. It hums, low and steady. It reminds us that survival often takes the shape of quietness, that transformation can occur beneath the surface, where light barely touches.

In a moment where visibility is commodified, this exhibition argues for the power of what lies beneath — for the right to complexity, ambiguity, and opacity. Kvesitadze and Hu don’t just make art. They reclaim space. They make the shadow speak.

This is not just a show. It is a testimony — to lives lived in margins, and to the radical act of emerging from them.

Under Shadows is on view through August 23 @ KORNFELD Galerie Berlin Fasanenstr. 26 10719 Berlin

AYA TAKANO'S World Comes to Los Angeles →

AYA TAKANO’S “how far how deep we can go" exhibition at Perrotin in LA invites visitors into a mystical world which offers an escape and hope for a brighter existence.

AYA TAKANO 地球上のすべての生物のスピリット  | the spirit of all life on earth, 2025. 130.3 x 162 x 3 cm | 51 5/16 x 63 3/4 x 1 3/16 inches. Oil on canvas. ©2025 AYA TAKANO/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy Perrotin.

text by Poppy Baring

Inspired by all art forms from Expressionism to the erotic art of Japan's Edo period, from manga artists such as Osamu Tezuka to Gustav Klimt, AYA TAKANO has been creating her own intimate fantasy since the age of three. Born in Japan in 1976, the painter, illustrator, and highly recognised Superflat artist welcomes LA residents to her new exhibition titled “how far how deep we can go”.

TAKANO presents otherworldly nymph-like characters that are extraterrestrial and yet still connected to and reflective of our reality. Drawing from the past and thinking to the future, she creates a limitless existence where time, gender, and age are undefined. Through various mediums, the Japanese artist investigates our inherent consciousness, exploring what it means to be marked by the past and connected to all life that occurred before us and will exist after us. Held in LA, home to spiritual seekers as well as recent environmental catastrophe, the exhibition offers a universe where all souls prosper as equals, a space where compassion prevails. In this interview, TAKANO provides insight into her worldview and her day-to-day life, asking visitors to look inwards and reconnect with the “radiance of all life.” Read More.

Simin Jalilian Solo Exhibiiton at 68projects by Kornfeld in Berlin

Simin Jalilian, Installation view, 68projects by KORNFELD, 2025, Photo: Andrea Katheder

At 68projects by KORNFELD, Simin Jalilian’s solo exhibition is less a show and more a visceral confrontation. Marking her debut presentation of new paintings in Berlin, the Hamburg-based Iranian artist delivers works that are both urgent and introspective — a searing combination of the biographical and the political, filtered through a painterly language that resists containment.

Jalilian’s brushstrokes do not seek perfection; they pulse with immediacy. Her canvases feel alive, caught in a moment of transformation, where figures and emotions blur into a current of expressionist intensity. The visual tension is palpable: one moment teeters on the brink of despair, another radiates fleeting transcendence.

In Please Don’t Deport, the artist places herself at the heart of a haunting tableau — a deportation scene at an airport. “That’s me,” she says, directly implicating her own fears and the shadow of displacement that haunts many immigrants. Jalilian moved from Tehran to Germany in 2016, and her work speaks directly from that liminal space between belonging and exclusion. The painting is not a plea for pity but a fierce assertion of freedom — artistic, personal, and existential.

Her painting Refugees evokes another fragile threshold: a child being passed across a divide between land and sea. The moment is suspended in light, but not safety. Danger looms, and the ambiguity of survival is never resolved. In Integration, the political becomes intimate. A casual act — opening a beer bottle — becomes a coded ritual of assimilation. The moment is undercut by blood-red fractures beneath the figures, revealing how easily identity and land can break open.

Despite their rootedness in realism, Jalilian’s paintings reject photographic precision. She conjures bodies and landscapes from memory and emotion, not from reference material. The result is work that feels fiercely personal and painterly, drawing on the legacy of German Neo-Expressionism but evolving it with a distinctly female and diasporic urgency. Her mentors may include Werner Büttner, but her voice is unmistakably her own.

In The Wow Effect, even cinema-goers are caught between rapture and blindness — a metaphor for our digital age, perhaps, but also for the dissonance between spectacle and truth. Jalilian’s paintings offer no easy conclusions. Instead, they demand we remain present — alive to instability, beauty, and the enduring human will to remain free.

On view until August 23

Simin Jalilian, Installation view, 68projects by KORNFELD, 2025, Photo: Andrea Katheder

Atlas Loved: Slava Mogutin's Photographic Curation of Queer Romance @ The Bureau of General Services—Queer Division in New York

“What is ‘My Romantic Ideal’? If there were just one, I’d have been able to stop making images searching around the borders of yearning, imagining, and lusting, many years ago. These are some recent attempts at mapping those.” – Robert Flynt

Robert Flynt. Untitled (NPCG; NYC 41), 2023 Unique inkjet photograph on found atlas page (additional image on verso) 11 x 16 inches 

text by Summer Bowie

Like Lee Oscar Lawrie’s sedulously brawny statue of Atlas lunging interminably under the weight of the world in Rockefeller Center, Slava Mogutin has taken on the ambitious charge of defining Queer romance in all of its variegated multitudes. Drawing from the work of twenty-eight artists, his curation coalesces into a comprehensive cohort across the generational and gender spectrums with searingly vulnerable takes on romanticism. Such an endeavor seems only natural considering Mogutin’s personal history of putting himself on the line for the sake of his community. Working in a plurality of media, he has always questioned and prodded the boundaries of sexual freedom, from his early Queer activism and writings for the political weekly newspaper Novy Vzglyad to making the first attempt to register for a same-sex marriage in Russian history with his then-partner, Robert Filippini. As the first Russian citizen to be granted exile in the United States for reasons of homophobic persecution, his commitment through legal and artistic means to broaden our understanding of love and its ultimate liberation remains steadfastly on the frontlines. 

In Mogutin’s “Stone Face (Brian), NYC” (2015), we see an outstretched arm holding almost identical copies of a photograph containing a man’s face partially buried in rocks. More than just a nod to David Wojnarowicz’s “Untitled (Face in Dirt),” we see lower Manhattan’s skyline at sunset on the horizon. Where Wojnarowicz quietly mourns the violent isolation of ultimate abjection, Mogutin’s figure is rendered in print and then literally held by another man in the city of his exile—a photo taken almost a quarter century after Wojnarowicz’s untimely death from AIDS at just thirty-seven years of age. In Stanley Stellar’s “Cherry Grove Kiss, Fire Island” (1990), the man’s entire face emerges from the sand in anticipation of an impassioned kiss. Where Mogutin trades dirt for pebbles, Stellar trades it for sand, making the burial feel elective and impermanent. Made at a time when the AIDS crisis was still looming large, it effectively sublimates the unthinkable trauma of carrying such an insidious burden into not only erotic, but manifestly romantic pleasure.

Slava Mogutin
Stone Face (Brian), NYC, 2015 Offset print, 20 x 27.5 inches Edition of 10 

Stanley Stellar
Cherry Grove Kiss, 1990
Archival analog tinted silver gelatin print
15 x 15 inches, 16 x 20 inches frame
Artist Proof 

Held both literally and figuratively by the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, My Romantic Ideal implores us to define romanticism on our own terms, knowing that in the process of queering the heteronormative parameters, we normalize our queerness. He is glitching the hegemonic system, à la Legacy Russell, with an unabashed proposal to reexamine our assumed notions of tenderness, intimacy, and beauty. These images represent a disparate yet equally valid selection of possibilities for romantic encounters, both with others and with self. They are safe spaces that are not safe for work, and at times, I can’t help but blush at the thought of sharing them. Some of them are too risqué even for the press kit, like Quil Lemons’s “Untitled (Penetration)”—which is reason enough to see the show in person if you live in New York. Others, like Carter Peabody’s “Bastian Floating,” lean into dreamy ecosexual escapism with an Adonis-like figure floating in sea grass-lined, turquoise waters. “I have only known shame when it comes to love” says Peabody, “For me, romanticism is freedom from heteronormative oppression. The bodies floating in my pieces are unattached to the strict norms of our world and free to feel, explore, and play with the sensuality of the sunlight and water surrounding them. There is an innocence and wonder that takes hold when we become our inner child in search of love, and the judgement of our subconscious just melts away.” Here, romance is imbued in everything surrounding the act of love, rather than in the act itself.

 

Carter Peabody
Bastian Floating, 2025
C-print on Metallic Paper
23.5 x 31.5 inches
Edition 1/12 

 

Benjamin Fredrickson’s “Self-Portrait with Lillies” features the artist sitting nude in a brutalist wooden chair, peering out of a floor-to-ceiling window that reveals a verdant forest. He props his feet on the identical chair facing him with an enormous vase of lilies placed tightly between his legs. If we deign to inquire, we cannot help but notice that he is gently indulging himself with just the tips of his fingers. This sensual, autoerotic moment feels utterly unimpeachable. 

Benjamin Fredrickson
Self-Portrait with Lillies, 2019
Chromogenic print
15x19 inches image, 16x20 inches sheet
Edition of 3+2APs 

Bruce LaBruce’s “Hunk with Sneaker” might be having an autoerotic moment of his own. Then again, he might just be testing that theory about guys with big feet. Berlin-based American photographer Matt Lambert presents us with two new pieces from his forthcoming book If You Can Reach My Heart You Can Keep It. Luridly graphic in content, these images leave us only to imagine what kind of tantric infrared technology he is patenting in his dark room/dungeon. Pierced and penetrating, his figures find themselves interlocked in full coitus with mysteriously luminescent erogenous zones. Berlin-based Spanish photographer Gerardo Vizmanos says, “I have a complicated relationship with the term ‘Romanticism’—I see it as both something we enjoy and something that restricts us … which is why I focus on love and desire instead. They offer a more radical, utopian force—one I strive to capture in my photography.” His dancer performs a preposterously blasé hamstring stretch, his entire body giving rise to the kinds of questions often inspired by an ample-when-flaccid endowment.

Bruce LaBruce
Hunk with Sneaker, 2008
Digital C-print
11 x 14 inches
Edition of 1/5 

Gerardo Vizmanos
Dancer, 2024
Archival Pigment Print
8 x 10 inches
Edition of 7 

Matt Lambert
Warm Amour, Paris, 2017
Thermal Imaging C-print
20 x 24 inches
Edition 1/5 

Of course, no collection of photography on the subject of Queer romance would be complete without the work of Paul Mpagi Sepuya. His intimate studio portraits meditate on the vulnerable interplay of sensuality and performativity between artist and subject—that ineffable power dynamic inherent in every nude portrait since time immemorial. In all of these artists, we see an earnest motion to decouple our fantasies with any notions of shame or fear—to let them not only be conspicuous but copyrighted in our names. 

 
 

My Romantic Ideal is on view through August 31 @ The Bureau of General Services—Queer Division 208 West 13th Street Room 210, New York

A Democratic Eye On London: Dennis Morris @ the Photographers’ Gallery

 

Dennis Morris, Johnny Rotten, backstage at the Marquee club, London, 1977 © Dennis Morris.

 


text by Poppy Baring


Known mainly for his celebrity portraits and coverage of stars like Bob Marley, Oasis, the Sex Pistols, and other early punk and reggae icons, Dennis Morris’s new solo exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery in London also features his lesser known reportage work. Music + Life is a three-floor presentation of Morris’s life documenting everything from the pride and resilience of post-war Black British culture to the rarefied inner sanctum of the music industry. 

These pictures don’t have an angle they’re attempting to make plain. Instead, they provide us with a rare and personal glimpse into the lives of mega music stars in their youth. They are candid images taken between friends. Morris thereby reveals naturally occurring gems of moments that are refreshing, intoxicating, and remarkably at ease. His approach was nothing more than knocking on a door; the door would open, and he would go from there. 

 

Dennis Morris, Oasis Backstage in Tokyo, 1994 © Dennis Morris.

 

Starting at the age of eight, and landing his first cover on London’s Daily Mirror at just eleven years old, it is clear that Morris had a strong passion for photography early on, as well as the determination to take it places. His remarkable career started when St. Mark’s church in Dalston, where he sang in the choir, started a camera club. Influenced heavily by reportage photography, which was a favored style at the time, Morris began photographing his environment in East London. In 1973, this progressed into skipping school so that he could take photos of Bob Marley as he entered sound check. Almost straight after, when Morris was just fourteen, Marley asked him to join and document the Catch a Fire tour. Young Dennis Morris accepted and, as they did for several artists, his photographs became key to the marketing and making of Marley’s career.

Dennis Morris, The Abyssinians, outtake from the photo shoot for the album Arise, 1977 © Dennis Morris.

While these authentic photographs of famous musicians provide a behind-the-scenes look into the lives of stars past, his exploration into London’s Hackney in the 1970s surveys another fascinating world. Although areas like Dalston and Hackney are now sought-after places to live, the pictures taken in his early career show just how much London has changed in the last fifty years. Morris explains his approach, saying in his interview, “If I’m in the studio, it’s like I’m on the street; if I’m on the street, it’s like I’m in the studio.” Overall, this creates a nice balance to the exhibition—one which raises East London to stardom and renders celebrity as rather quotidian.

Music + Life is on view through September 28 at the Photographers’ Gallery, 16-18 Ramillies Street, London, W1F7LW

Dennis Morris, Untitled, 1970s © Dennis Morris.

Bogotá Rising: Notes on Resilience, Conviviality, and Experimental Art

San Felipe neighborhood skies

text & images by Perry Shimon

Colombia’s art scene is in the midst of a dynamic resurgence. After a prolonged lockdown that temporarily stalled the country’s cultural momentum, activity is ramping up again in anticipation of the fall season, anchored by Bogotá’s ARTBO fair, and two biennials in Bogotá and Medellín. Despite longstanding infrastructural and political challenges, the country has maintained a vibrant landscape of artist-run spaces, project-based initiatives, and strong public engagement.

In this mountain-wreathed brick city with a breathtaking theater of clouds, I had the great pleasure of seeing and meeting much of Bogotá’s cultural ecosystem. In May of this year, I attended a curatorial intensive organized by Mahazabin Haque (All About Curating, Berlin) and The Art Dome (Miami / Bogotá), which brought together artists, curators, and researchers, with warmth and conviviality, for a tightly packed itinerary of visits across studios, institutions, collections, archives, and impromptu social spaces. What emerged was a portrait of a cultural landscape with unique presence, community, improvisation, and resilience.

Telecom Building, student graduate show

One of the most memorable visits was to the dilapidated Telecom Tower—a relic of privatization now reimagined as a vertical commons. After organizing a group exhibition in the building in 2024, Linda Pongutá, William Contreras Alfonso, and Maria Leguízamo went on to occupy several floors, establishing studios, residencies, site-specific exhibitions, and performances. They also began developing an initiative to create a rotating museum showcasing works by the building’s members. During our visit, one floor hosted a student show, several artists graciously welcomed us into their studios, and independent publisher David Medina was at work on a new book project. In the elevator, the partisan resistance anthem Bella Ciao played on loop.

Gloria Sebastián Fierro Castro

Artist and teacher Ana María Montenegro gave a tour, describing a conceptual performance in which she was visiting each of Bogotá’s eighty notaries to have officially notarized a simple and rather philosophical promise: that she would be someone different tomorrow than she was today. Artist Juan Betancurth, who administers the artist residency program, gave an impromptu tour of his studio where he sculpturally assembles found objects into disquieting meditations on power, desire, and art. Nearby, Gloria Sebastián Fierro Castro showed us their haunting textile and tar works, drawn from a family archive that traces their transition from rural life to running a gas station—a stark emblem of modernization in a sepia-toned desert landscape.

Curator Nicolás Gómez Echeverri at Museo de Arte Miguel Urrutia

The archive loomed large in other ways. At the Museo de Arte Miguel Urrutia, curator Nicolás Gómez Echeverri walked us through a collection tour that will soon be dismantled and rethought under his guidance. The planned rehanging will confront the colonial scaffolding of the existing display, seeking ways to integrate Colombia’s extensive institutional holdings into a narrative that accounts for omissions and regionalism. Among the exceptional paintings of Fídolo Alfonso González Camargo, Obregón, and Cárdenas Arroyo, was a series of anonymous 18th-century convent funerary portraits: powerful images with uncertain authorship, quietly haunting and unsettling the canon.

Hadra Waheed’s Hum in Doris Salcedo’s counter-monument

At Fragmentos, artist Doris Salcedo’s “counter-monument” to Colombia’s armed conflict, we walked across a geographic-feeling topography of thirty-seven tons of hand-hammered metal tiles made from weapons turned in after the FARC peace agreement. In the adjacent courtyard, a deteriorating colonial ruin serves as the setting for Hum, a multi-channel sound installation by Canadian artist Hadra Waheed, which gathers protest songs from across the world into a reflective, almost devotional field. 

Juan Cortés Studio Visit

Memory was also the subject of a project we encountered in the studio of Juan Cortés, who shared a recent collaboration initiated by the Colombian president: a digital map of “houses of memory”—community archives, cultural centers, and alternative institutions preserving regional histories. The ambitious and exemplary project is part oral history, part visual archive, part social cartography, and a model for a new possible infrastructure for collective memory.

María Adelaida Samper giving a tour of Gabriel Zea’s Mystic Capital at the Al Romero gallery

Elsewhere, in San Felipe, Gabriel Zea’s Mystic Capital, at the Al Romero House Gallery, staged capitalism as a religion. Tarot-inspired AI works illustrated symbolic systems of belief in the market, as well as its impoverished aims and overdetermined meanings. An accompanying video installation collaged cartoonish bull and bear imagery into frenetic and tumultuous booms and busts. Zea’s collective, Aliens, curated the show with María Adelaida Samper. It both estranged the givenness of our cosmologically proportioned faith in markets and situated it in a longue durée continuum of numerology, mysticism, superstition, power, and grave consequences.

Tienda de Esperanza, San Felipe

Chuco Candela in Lavamoa Tumba

Tienda culture emerged as one of the more poetic and socially alive throughlines of the trip. These ubiquitous corner stores often moonlight as salons, exhibition spaces, and places of convivial gathering. Artist Chuco Candela’s intervention at Tienda de Esperanza turned an already beloved Macarena landmark into an exhibition space for his and his friends’ often meme-themed ceramics. Later, in San Felipe, his second location hosted a massive street party with fireworks for its opening. He later invited us to visit his most recent exhibition in his ongoing Lavamoa Tumba project—enormous, sprawling group shows in condemned buildings, this edition featuring 150 artists, and overflowing with energy, humor, and street-rooted practices.

Trepesitos fashion show at Odeon

After a fashion show by Trepesitos at the majestic theater-turned-exhibition space and artful community center Odeón, we ended the night in a tienda playing bolirana, a barroom sport that fuses pre-Columbian tradition with contemporary nightlife, popular with both Reggaeton and contemporary artists. It is perhaps to bowling what ping pong is to tennis and invites loud and playful sociality. Odeón’s Tatiana Rais and Juan Sebastián Peláez, formerly of the Miami Gallery and Carne Collective, began sharing insights about Colombia’s commitment to public art funding and the system of rotating independent art professionals who administer allocations for artist projects and spaces. While there is not a strong enough local market to support the many practicing artists, this type of public funding supports the scene to some extent and underwrites less commercially oriented works. 

María Morán at Cooperates

Charlie Mai exhibition and talk at Plural

We visited artist-run Cooperates studios and residency in Chapinero, anchored by the painter and teacher María Morán, and the communal Plural project—part art space, part kitchen—where Chinese-American artist Charlie Mai was showing an installation with a series of performances reflecting on Chinese capital, North/South American labor, transportation infrastructure, and hybrid identity. We were sad to miss the closing party with a durational cowboy performance, Chinese dragon dancing, and DJ set by underground club hero DJ Bclip.

José Darío Gutiérrez at Espacio El Dorado

At Espacio El Dorado, José Darío Gutiérrez gave a highlights tour of his impressive collection of overlooked political Colombian art and their marginalization through Cold War-era collecting policies imposed by major Western foundations. During our visit, a young scholar from Buenos Aires working on a curatorial project about political photographers and left-wing conferences overheard the conversation and joined our group, offering a recently published dissertation called “The Cultural Cold War in Colombia: Oil and Washington’s Policies for ‘Pacification’ of Art in Conspiratorial Times” by Christian Padilla Peñuela that Jose was coincidentally trying to place with a publisher. As we were leaving I noticed the young man and Jose in a deep thoughtful conversation, Jose generously retrieving books from his collection to give as gifts. 

Taller Arte Gráfico

Subachoque

Perhaps the most moving experience of the trip was a pair of visits to Taller Arte Gráfico and Sextante, founded by Luis Ángel Parra and María Eugenia Niño fifty years ago. They welcomed us warmly to their Bogotá gallery and country atelier in Subachoque and let us marvel at the breathtaking collection amassed over a lifetime of artful collaboration. They described their printmaking and publishing practice as a ‘love story’ and shared how they met fifty years ago, moved in on that very same day, and have been together ever since. We learned a few days after our visit that sculptor Hugo Zapata—a dear friend of theirs, whose works were on display in the gallery—had passed away, making the visit a poignant and beautiful parting gift.

Subachoque

Hugo Zapata

There were countless other stops: Liz Caballero’s impressive three-story SKETCH Gallery, La Casita’s misleadingly named sprawling intergenerational and dialogic collection, Casa Hoffmann’s austere kinetic and music themed program, NC-Arte’s gorgeous design villa, Desborde Gallery’s anarchic installation and performance works by Alfonso Aguas Negras, a tour of artist duo Eduard Moreno & Andrea Marín García studio and upcoming works for the Medellín biennial, perhaps the world’s most significant pre-Columbian metalwork collection at the Oro Museum, and a very moving studio visit with the young Bogotá-born-and-raised painter Angie Vega, whose extraordinarily skillful intimate portraits of her Tunjuelito neighborhood familiars had garnered her invitations to apprentice with master painters in Europe and Saint Petersburg. The lingering impressions from this vibrant and flourishing art ecosystem were its warm hospitality, generous sociality, and a sense of experimentation that felt neither reactionary nor utopic, rather present, responsive, and open.

SKETCH Gallery

Daniela Acosta Parsons and Danilo Roa’s studio

Jeronimo Villa at La Casita

Angie Vega

Lia García in her studio

Camilo Bojaca at Galería El Museo

Miller Lagos in his studio

Studio of Andrea Marín García & Eduard Moreno

Mauricio Gallego in his studio

.

Alfonso Aguas Negras at Desborde Galería

Hugo Zapata at Sextante

Theatron

Cloud theater

Put On A Face, Any Face: Read An Interview of Kenny Scharf & Curator Shai Baitel →

Courtesy of Roger Davies

It’s not often that an artist and a curator connect the way Kenny Scharf and Shai Baitel do. Emotional, the biggest show of Scharf’s career, didn’t come out of a typical museum timeline or curatorial trend. It came from Baitel’s urgent feeling of injustice that the art world hadn’t given Scharf the recognition he deserved, and he wanted to change that. When we spoke, Scharf joined the Zoom call straight from his studio, answering questions with a paintbrush in hand. It felt intimate and telling: Scharf doesn’t separate art from life. His world is constantly in motion, fueled by color, feeling, and spontaneity.

The dynamics between Scharf and Baitel set the tone for a conversation that highlighted the reverent partnership between them, whose collaborative spirit is at the heart of the exhibition. What initially started as an interview about an art show quickly turned into a rhythmic conversation about friendships, personal stories, timing, and how things can easily fall into place when two people believe in the same thing.

Scharf came up in the late seventies and early eighties in New York, rubbing shoulders with Basquiat and Haring, bringing a psychedelic, cartoon-fueled energy that set him apart. He paints like he’s channeling something from another planet, but also something deeply familiar and simple. Emotional is more than a retrospective—It’s a long-overdue celebration of a singular voice in contemporary art. Read more.

BHAKTI—Krishna’s Grace Celebrates the Transformative Power of Devotion @ NMACC in Mumbai

Bhakti opens an immersive and enlightening dialogue between the viewer and devotional art. It showcases artworks made in reverence of Krishna.

 

Shreenathji in Divine Adornment – A Pichwai painting capturing the grace and splendour of Krishna in his Govardhan-lifting form, resplendent in intricate jewels and devotional symbolism.

 

text and photographs by Parrie Chhajed

In a world where devotion often lives quietly—in morning rituals, household shrines, whispered prayers, and temple bells—Bhakti elevates it to a form of collective artistic expression. It draws from the everyday but expands into the eternal. This summer, the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre (NMACC)—a multidisciplinary arts space dedicated to preserving and promoting India’s artistic heritage across visual art, performance, design, and culture—presents Bhakti—Krishna’s Grace. The exhibition reflects on the divine power of Krishna and the devotional path of bhakti through the evolving lenses of art, history, and lived spirituality. It explores how the transformation of humankind and landscapes has unfolded through sacred narratives. Perspectives from artists, devotees, and storytellers converge to honor the enduring presence of Vishnu in Indian spiritual and artistic traditions.

Chennai-based art historian Ashvin E. Rajagopalan’s curation brings together myth, memory, and material practice. As Director of the Piramal Art Foundation, he helped establish the Piramal Museum of Art in Mumbai and founded Ashvita’s, a cultural platform for emerging and established Indian artists.

Ananta Shayana Vishnu – A sculptural depiction of cosmic repose, where Lord Vishnu lies on the serpent Ananta as creation begins, watched over by Brahma and Lakshmi in celestial harmony.

The journey begins with Vishnu’s Dream, a specially commissioned centerpiece anchoring the exhibition’s cosmological vision. A visual timeline follows—moving from early human settlements and cave dwellings to ancient temple architecture, culminating in a sensorial reconstruction of Tamil Nadu’s Vaikuntha Perumal Temple, highlighting sacred geometry and cosmic design in early Indian architecture.

One of the more thought-provoking parallels often drawn in this context is between Vishnu’s Dashavatar and Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. Though rooted in mythology and science respectively, the progression of the avatars appears to echo the arc of life—from Matsya (fish) to Kurma (tortoise) to Varaha (boar) and Narasimha (man-lion), symbolising transitions from aquatic life to mammals to early humans. The later avatars—Vamana, Parashurama, Rama, Krishna, and Buddha—map onto stages of human development, from survival and order to emotional and spiritual evolution. Kalki, the final avatar, possibly hints at a future transformation—ecological or spiritual. Whether coincidental or intuitive, the parallel adds another dimension to the global relevance of these spiritual and religious perspectives.

This theme continues in the Crafts Village, where master artisans from across India demonstrate traditional techniques—sculpting, weaving, painting—that keep devotional practices alive. Over forty rare artworks and sculptures, many publicly displayed for the first time, celebrate diverse expressions of Krishna devotion through literature, performance, and material culture.

Among the highlights is a Pattachitra painting, created on a long scroll using the traditional storytelling technique from Odisha and West Bengal. Known for its delicate linework, vibrant natural pigments, and decorative floral borders, Pattachitra was historically used by chitrakars (scroll painters) to narrate epics and myths door-to-door—functioning much like what we today call storyboards. This particular scroll illustrates the birth and early life of Lord Krishna, beginning with the divine prophecy that he would end the tyranny of his uncle Kansa. The narrative unfolds as Kansa imprisons his sister Devaki and brother-in-law Vasudeva, and kills their first seven children. When Krishna is born, divine forces intervene—the prison gates open, the guards fall asleep, and Vasudeva carries the newborn across the stormy Yamuna River to safety in Gokul, where he is raised by Yashoda and Nanda. Each sequential panel captures a moment of this miraculous tale, blending devotional intensity with visual rhythm and artistic finesse.

Raas Leela – A celebratory textile painting capturing the divine dance of Krishna and the gopis, where love, rhythm, and surrender unfold beneath celestial trees and blooming devotion.

Another striking work uses the Rajasthani miniature painting technique, likely inspired by the Kishangarh or Mewar school of thought. With detailed landscapes and a radiant saffron sky, it portrays Radha and Krishna in a divine forest encounter, reflecting the tradition’s romanticism and spiritual subtlety.

In contrast, a painting in the Tanjore style celebrates Krishna’s childhood as Nandkishor and Makhanlal. This South Indian form is known for its bold colors, raised relief work, and gold leaf detailing. The depiction captures Krishna’s playful charm and the devotional love surrounding his early years in Vrindavan.

Tying these expressions together is the philosophy of idol worship in Hinduism, where God is both formless (nirguna) and with form (saguna). Idols become focal points of devotion after rituals like prana pratishta, inviting divine presence into sacred forms. Spiritually and psychologically, they anchor memory, imagination, and connection, serving as both mirror and portal for inner transformation.

Bhakti is more than an exhibition—it is a multi-sensory invitation to witness how art, myth, and memory intertwine to express the sacred. It reminds us that devotion is not static;it evolves, adapts, and continues to offer grace in ever-new forms.

Bhakti—Krishna’s Grace is on view through August 17 at the Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre (NMACC), Mumbai 

 

Installation view of BHAKTI—Krishna’s Grace at Nita Mukesh Ambani Cultural Centre, Mumbai.

 

Rick Owens' Retrospective Is A Paean to the Designer's California Roots @ Palais Galliera in Paris

Rick Owens, Temple Of Love is a meditation on romance, beauty, and diversity. It archives one of today’s leading designers, transforming the museum into a shrine to creativity.

 

Courtesy of Palais Galliera

 

text by Kim Shveka

Rick Owens, Temple of Love is the first exhibition in Paris dedicated to fashion designer Rick Owens, which he creative directed himself. The massive retrospective features collections from his beginning in Los Angeles through his most recent theatrical runways in Paris’s Palais de Tokyo.

With his radical fusion of Gothic Romanticism, Brutalism, and Minimalism, which often provokes social and political themes on his runways, Rick Owens has long been known as fashion’s avant-garde designer. His aesthetic challenges conventional notions of beauty, gender, and form, often occupying a space between fashion, performance art, and architecture.

In the exhibition, we gain rare insight into the designer’s creative inner world, understanding how his references come to life and the ideas that lie behind his work. Gustave Moreau, Joseph Beuys, and Steven Parrino were among Owens’s sources of inspiration, resonating with his embrace of destruction as creation, the usage of art as a vehicle for criticism, and the glorification of beauty through excess. The exhibition also focuses on the central role played by his lifelong wife and muse, Michèle Lamy, whose presence is always felt through Owens. We get an intimate glimpse into the couple’s private world through a recreation of their California bedroom, designed using pieces from Owens’ furniture line. Just beyond the wall, their closet room is unveiled, with dark garments loosely folded next to a packed bookshelf. This section of the exhibition feels like a genuine invitation into their daily lives, where we are meant to truly feel their presence. The air itself is infused with Rick Owens’ signature scent, activating all five senses for a complete journey through their rituals.  

 

Courtesy of Palais Galliera

 

In another room, plastered with “No photos please” signs, stands perhaps the most Rick Owens-esque piece in the exhibition: a towering statue of Rick himself, mid-urination. It reads as the most cynical, provocative fountain since Marcel Duchamp.

The exhibition is extended throughout the entirety of the Palais Galliera campus, as well as the outside garden, wherein California-native plants and vines surround thirty brutalist cement sculptures. Above the garden is the building of the exhibition, whose windows display three colossal statues of Owens covered head to toe in gold. Owens saw the importance of finishing his retrospective with his origin, California. As a designer whose presence casts a looming glunge shadow over the City of Light, it’s easy even for him to overlook his roots in the Sunshine State.

Courtesy of Palais Galliera

Rick Owens, Temple of Love is on view through January 4, 2026 at Palais Galliera, 10 Av. Pierre 1er de Serbie, 75116 Paris

Encounters at the Barbican: Giacometti x Huma Bhabha

Special Guest Star, 2016. Huma Bhabha. Clay, wood, wire, t-shirt, acrylic, tin, paint brush, White Tailed Deer horns, and steel. Overall: 39 3/4 x 94 x 13 3/8 inches. Image credit: Kerry McFate. Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner Gallery

text by Poppy Baring

The Barbican’s Level 2 gallery reopened in May with a joint exhibition featuring sculptures by Alberto Giacometti and Huma Bhabha. Encounters: Giacometti x Huma Bhabha features works, some of which are nearly a century old, that explore the human figure, the trauma it faces, and the process of survival. This ‘dialogue across time’ allows viewers to examine the artists’ responses to human vulnerability, violence, and displacement, and is the first time Bhabha has exhibited her work at a public London gallery.

The entrance upon arrival is currently home to four titan-aged bronze sculptures made by Bhabha. Debuted in New York last year, where the artist currently lives, these figures are being displayed in Europe for the very first time. Continuing inside, visitors encounter “The Glade” (Composition with nine figures), created in 1950 by Giacometti, a small tabletop sculpture that marked a significant shift in Giacometti’s practice. These supremely thin, isolated figures were created to capture people as they were, vulnerably themselves, on the street. 

Alberto Giacometti holding Three Men Walking, 1940s, Photo: anonymous, Silver print on paper, 11.9 x 17.2 cm, Archives Fondation Giacometti. © Succession Alberto Giacometti / Adagp, Paris 2024


Giacometti’s observation of individuals “coming and going...unconscious and mechanical... each having an air of moving on its own, quite alone,” inspired how Bhabha approached the composition of the exhibition. She sets sculptures up as groups and allows visitors to potentially cross paths with these works, as though the space were a public street, bringing a sense of life and interaction to the statues. The message becomes progressively clearer, as phantom-like, vulnerable figures gradually replace fragmented works. Collectively, both these artists’ work point to conflict and highlight its effects as human life becomes increasingly disfigured.

This exhibition is entirely suited to the Barbican. As far as Giacometti is concerned, he made some of his most significant pieces at the same time as the Barbican was under construction. Art and architecture made in this post-war period are often considered a response to the brutality of the Second World War, and both Giacometti’s work and the gallery, at that time, proposed a new (not so fresh) perspective on what it means to live and be human. The non-materialisticness of the work and the space that surrounds it creates a mass of meaningful beauty that explores a way of thinking where art is deemed crucial to living.

The Encounters: Giacometti x Huma Bhabha exhibition is on view through August 10th 2025 at the Barbican, Silk Street, London, EC2Y 8DS.

 

What Should it Be, 2024, Huma Bhabha. Painted and patinated bronze and concrete pedestal. 44 3/4 x 31 x 31 inches. Photo credit: Kerry McFate. Courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner Gallery


 

It Has Its Own Presence: Read an Interview of Ceramicist Kathy Butterly →

Photo credit: Alan Weiner

Kathy Butterly, sixty-two, is one of forty-one women whose work is being showcased at The Grey Art Museum’s exhibition, Anonymous Was A Woman. The show celebrates the recipients of the grant, anonymously awarded to mid-career women artists living and working in the United States. Butterly’s three ceramic sculptures—Heavy Head (2002), Chinese Landscape (2005), and Garter (1996)—are three of the 251 works on display until July 19, 2025. 

Butterly, born in Amityville, New York, splits her time between New York City and Maine. “If I didn’t have Maine as an outlet, I don’t think I’d still be in New York,” she said over the phone from her home in Maine. Butterly did not come from an art family—one of the reasons she initially believed she would study interior design over an art like ceramics. But once she began studying at Moore College of Art and Design, where she met American sculptor Viola Frey, she discovered her passion for combining painting and sculpture. While she sipped juice from a wine glass and I coffee from a ceramic mug, we talked about the evolution of her work, her Anonymous Was a Woman grant, and the different functions of the interiors and exteriors of her lively sculptures. Read more.