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.
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
Installation view of Sixties Surreal (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, September 24, 2025–Jan 19, 2026). Peter Saul, Saigon, 1967. Photograph by Matthew Carasella
When you step off the elevator onto the 5th floor at the Whitney Museum, you enter a scene of three life-size camels against a bright orange-red wall. This feels almost misplaced as a leading work in the exhibition, but it’s only at the end when viewers find their way to a didactic that describes the illogical nature of camels—from four stomachs to a dislocating jaw—but they still exist. Reality is strange.
Sixties Surreal, currently on view at the Whitney Museum of Art, is a compelling argument that Surrealism was far from dead in the era of Pop Art. An argument that takes form in the shape of sculptures made from “junk,” otherworldly paintings, and haunting photographs. The curatorial team brilliantly positioned this collection not as a nostalgic look back, but as a critical examination of how the classic movement, built on Freudian theory, mutated into a politically-charged, media-saturated, and truly American force during the decade of cultural upheaval.
The exhibition’s core power lies in its unflinching focus on the era’s social and political injustices. This is exemplified in Noah Purifoy’s “Untitled (66 Signs of Neon),” made following the Watts Rebellion. Purifoy walked the streets of litter and so-called junk, where he aimed to give new life to these found objects. Taking the objects out of a negative context to put into his art brings a new, empowering meaning and reclaiming of the events. The rubble that made its way into the piece has a darkness that emulates a haunting past, but is put into a new environment surrounded by stamped symbols and words. Surrealism emerged as the ultimate tool for protesting the unspoken contracts of the era.
Installation view of Sixties Surreal (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, September 24, 2025–Jan 19, 2026). Nancy Graves, Camel VI, Camel VII and Camel VIII, 1968–1969. Photograph by Matthew Carasella
This strain of Surrealism is deeply intertwined with the proliferation of television. The medium didn’t just report the news of upheaval to the American public; it delivered the chaotic images of war and protest directly into their living rooms, fusing reality with performance. The curatorial choice to present the exhibit in highly contrasted environments—sudden walls of hot pink interrupting stark, institutional grey—serves the subject matter well. It forces a jarring, non-linear experience that mimics the sensory overload and fractured perception delivered by the blinking, often distorting, television screen. The consistent use of small, scattered screens looping avant-garde animated shorts throughout the galleries is a clever tactic, effectively tying the artwork to the rise of mass media and demonstrating how artists were already diagnosing the medium that would eventually dominate culture.
The consumerist boom could not be left out when discussing the post-World War II era. Martha Rosler’s “Kitchen I, or Hot Meat” was a piece that stood out in its portrayal of this phenomenon. Female body parts appear on appliances, leaving the greater message that women’s bodies were readily commodified and contorted to fit within their economically prescribed domestic roles. Rosler reminds us that the human body was not meant to fit onto an appliance, so women should not be forced to conform to any specific role.
On a similar note of early feminism, Martha Edelheit’s “Flesh Wall with Table” is a breathtaking, large-scale repudiation of the male gaze. Edelhait depicts almost two dozen naked women lounging across the canvas. She did not use any models, opting instead to focus purely on her perception. The women vary greatly in position, shape, and skin tone, most having non-flesh-colored skin, like shades of green and blue. As a female artist, there was a particular pride in painting female nudes, especially so many for such a large piece, when you consider how much of the canon is filled with nude women rendered by men. Lastly, near the center of the work, lies a white rectangle wherein a woman is painting. This is Edelheit including herself in the work, further empowering herself in the building of a utopia where women can relax.
Installation view of Sixties Surreal (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, September 24, 2025–Jan 19, 2026). From left to right: Karl Wirsum, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, 1968; Claes Oldenburg, Soft Toilet, 1966; Alex Hay, Paper Bag, 1968; Lee Lozano, No Title, 1964. Photograph by Matthew Carasella
While the show occasionally leans into the obvious tropes of the era, its central thesis holds firm: Surrealism became the ultimate protest art of the 1960s. It provides a necessary historical correction, proving that the decade’s artistic legacy is not merely defined by Abstract Expressionism’s final bow or Pop Art’s slick surfaces, but by the messy, urgent, and deeply subconscious cries of the artists who tried to make sense of a world where domestic dreams were exposed by televised violence. It’s an essential, if disquieting, tour.
Sixties Surreal is on view through January 19, 2026 @ Whitney Museum of Art in New York 99 Gansevoort St, New York.
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.
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.
Sasha Gordon: A Gaze Cutting Inward
Sasha Gordon
Flame Like Blush, 2024
Oil on linen
60 x 60 1/4 inches
Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York
text by Emma Grimes
On an unpleasantly hot and humid September evening, unfazed and well-dressed New Yorkers filed into David Zwirner Gallery, where the latest work from Brooklyn-based artist Sasha Gordon is on view.
Last year, David Zwirner and Matthew Brown announced that they would co-represent Gordon. While still a student at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2019, she showed some work with Brown and began her rise to prominence. Most recently, she had a solo show at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami.
Haze consists of seven paintings that turn inwards, probing Gordon’s complicated relationship with herself. Her hyperrealist self-portraits, often using neon hues, almost seem to glow. And she includes surreal splashes: a chain of tiny, floating rocks tethered to the one she sits on or the straps of her LED-lit tank top floating off into the canvas. The effect sometimes evokes science fiction, as if a UFO might just drift into the next canvas.
Gordon brazenly pushes past the surface of her image, instead foregrounding the cruel and varying personas of her psyche. That these works are on exhibit and available for an audience to view feels incidental to their purpose.
Sasha Gordon
It Was Still Far Away, 2024
Oil on linen
72 1/4 x 96 1/8 inches"
Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York
In It Was Still Far Away, a figure in Gordon’s likeness, wearing a white tank and mesh shorts, sits on a picnic blanket as a neon-orange mushroom cloud bursts behind her. As the bomb explodes, she clips her toenails, headphones on.
On the subway, waiting for a coffee, and before closing our eyes at night, our screens bring every global disaster to our door. And it seems that even our language has fallen behind; words like catastrophe and tragedy imply an anomaly, but what if watching war and famine and genocide unfold has become as quotidian as eating, working, and sleeping?
In Trance, a close-up of Gordon’s distorted face, painted in fluorescent gray, shows her eating a nail clipping. Below, a hand that’s speckled with more nail clippings is held out like an offering. In some ways, this painting of a hard-to-break habit feels more revealing than any of her nudes.
In the following room, the paintings turn increasingly self-lacerating. In Whores in the Attic, three nude women with oblong breasts, sturdy legs, and skin dimpled like the texture of the moon, stand insolently in front of the other Gordon, peeking out from behind a door. One of the antagonists haughtily smokes a cigarette while the other two gaze with scorn.
Sasha Gordon
Whores in the Attic, 2024
Oil on linen
96 1/8 x 78 1/4 inches
Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York
Her thorny relationship with herself turns even more torturous. In Pruning, one of the antagonizing personas is holding another Gordon underwater inside a glass box, her skin illuminated a brilliant green-blue. The underwater Gordon stares straight ahead, directly confronting the viewer, while her knees have cracked the corners of the glass. Some air bubbles, rendered with stunning technical precision, float up to the surface.
In the exhibit’s final painting, Husbandry Heaven, set against a mint-green and grey swirled backdrop, one version of Gordon forces food into the mouth of another, hands bound behind her back. Ashes float down from somewhere, smoke drifts across in swirls, and fragments of other selves are perched on floating rocks. Unlike the former paintings, this one has a distinct tenderness. For all her looks of scorn and ridicule, Gordon never abandons herself, and one is left wondering what love and care for oneself might look like.
Haze is on view through November 1 at David Zwirner Gallery 537 West 20th Street, New York.
Making Things You Can Feel: Read An Interview of Larry Bell →
Larry Bell with Pacific Red II. Photography by Matthew Millman, San Francisco
For over six decades, Larry Bell has skillfully molded contemporary art in America. Born in Chicago in 1939, Bell moved to the West Coast to study at the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles, the historic precursor to CalArts.
There, Bell became a member of Los Angeles’s Cool School, a rebellious group of artists, largely represented by Walter Hopps and Irving Blum of Ferus Gallery in the 1950s and ’60s, who brought modern-day avant-garde to the West Coast. Alongside Ed Ruscha and Robert Irwin, Bell is one of the last living members of the School. As a foundational figure in the Light and Space movement, Southern California’s take on Minimalism, which often employed industrial materials and aerospace technology to explore the ways that volume, light and scale play with our sense of perception, Bell made innovative work that experimented with the interconnections of glass and light and their relations to reflection and illusion.
His most notable works involve his creation of semi-transparent cubes made out of vacuum-coated glass to form an immersive experience as the art melts into space. Recently, six of Bell’s cubes have been installed in Madison Square Park, where they will be on view until March 15, 2026. Improvisations in the Park carries on Bell’s legacy, but with a twist. Instead of their typical white cube environment, they have been placed outside to interact with the constantly changing elements, causing a new perception almost every hour.
This idea, related to the flexibility of perception, is also highlighted in Bell’s recent series of collage works, Irresponsible Irridescence, on view now at the Judd Foundation in New York. These collages poured out of Bell after the passing of his wife two years ago, sharing a more emotional side of his work with audiences. They also subtly allude to the close friendship between Bell and the late Donald Judd. It was Bell who convinced Judd to build this now-historic organization in Marfa, Texas, rather than El Rosario, Mexico, impacting American art history forever. Read more.
Virgil Abloh: The Codes Preview At Grand Palais In Paris
Tickets are now available for Virgil Abloh: The Codes, the first major European exhibition devoted entirely to the visionary’s multidisciplinary legacy. Running September 30 through October 9, 2025 at the Grand Palais in Paris, the show—curated by Chloe Sultan and Mahfuz Sultan—will showcase hundreds of objects, sketches, prototypes, and personal pieces that trace the “codes” uniting Abloh’s work across fashion, architecture, music, and more. All ticket proceeds benefit the Virgil Abloh Foundation (VAF), continuing Abloh’s mission to empower emerging creatives and drive systemic change in creative industries. photographs by Flo Kohl
Opening Party For Virgil Abloh: The Codes On View Now At Grand Palais in Paris
photographs by Flo Kohl
Living Vicariously Through Paintings: Read Our Interview of Alison Blickle →
In Alison Blickle’s work, viewers are invited to witness a glimpse of a world just as realized off the canvas as it is on it. The figures at the heart of her painting—sometimes based on elaborate photoshoots, sometimes an amalgam of disparate body parts from various sources—are characters who signal larger narratives reflecting our modern world, or concocted visions that live outside of time. Her latest collection, Future Ruins, on view at the Kravets Wehby Gallery, invites attendees to inspect a future that infuses a nostalgic melancholy for nature with a glimmer of the beauty still accessible in her perhaps pessimistic view of what lies ahead.
Blickle has effectively been painting her whole life, but went on to study Political Economy when plagued with the feeling that “it felt too impractical to pursue as a career.” After working for Diane Feinstein for six months, her realization that “whatever your job is is what your life is” would send her back to get her MFA at Hunter College and embark on the creative path that sees her work on display in New York City now, over a decade later. As we prepare to discuss her new collection, she reflects to me how she first made the leap into pursuing painting: “I have to pursue what I know fulfills me and what I love.” Read more.
Avant Arte Hosts a Maurizio Cattelan Scavenger Hunt Across New York, London & Amsterdam
Maurizio Cattelan, Untitled, 1999, photo Zeno Zotti, Courtesy: Maurizio Cattelan Archive
“If you never thought you would be able to hang my effigy in your home, that makes two of us.” —Maurizio Cattelan
Known for his irreverent humor and incisive social critique, Maurizio Cattelan is often described as both an art-world prankster and one of the most influential artists of his generation. In a first-ever collaboration with Avant Arte, Cattelan has reimagined his revered work Untitled (2000) to create We are the Revolution (2025). The work is the latest of Maurizio's revered miniatures—perhaps the most famous of which, La Rivoluzione Siamo Noi (2000), nods to German artist Joseph Beuys and his canonical felt suit.
Maurizio Cattelan, We Are the Revolution, 2025, image courtesy of Avant Arte
Cattelan’s motto, “I am not really an artist,” playfully inverts Beuys’ famous declaration that “every man is an artist.” The statement encapsulates the tongue-in-cheek sentiment of this sculpture: at once a parody of Cattelan’s own role as creator and a reflection on the place of the artist in society.
Each resin sculpture is handcrafted, and meticulously hand-painted by a team of specialized artisans. Limited to 1,000 editions and priced at €1,500 each, We Are The Revolution (2025) is set to be released via a randomized draw. Entries for the draw are now open exclusively on Avant Arte’s website and will close on October 24. Successful entrants will be notified within 24 hours of the draw’s closing.
In anticipation of its launch, Avant Arte is introducing a global scavenger hunt, Where’s Maurizio?, giving collectors the chance to acquire an edition ahead of the official release.
Inspired by Cattelan’s enduring interest in value, context, and power structures—most famously highlighted by Comedian (2019), when the artist’s duct-taped banana fetched $6.2 million at auction last year, sparking global media interest and public fascination about its cost and origins—this treasure hunt will place his sculptures in unexpected, everyday locations, from market stalls to bodegas, across major global cities spanning New York, Amsterdam and London.
From September 30 to October 7, Avant Arte will release two clues per location on their dedicated microsite for the scavenger hunt, inviting the public to join the search and track down the hidden sculptures across the three cities. New York will host a physical scavenger hunt, while London and Amsterdam will offer digital-only hunts, with participants submitting their answers via the microsite.
Cattelan’s sculpture edition will be playfully priced according to its location—ranging from $0.99 at a bodega to €9,999 at an antiques dealership—exploring how context shapes value while offering a whimsical twist on the conventions of the art world. Each location becomes both stage and gallery, bringing Cattelan’s humor directly into the public space.
Otherwise Part II: Art & Power; The Professional Managerial Class, Administrative Aesthetics, and the Big Data Sublime
Philippe Parreno, Anywhere out of the world, Pinault Collection 2022
text by Perry Shimon
The development of art as a category in Western thought has historically unfolded alongside shifting regimes of power. The Pinault Collection in Paris, housed in the historic Bourse de Commerce building, embodies three centuries of such shifts, providing a palimpsest of ideological progression. Built in the 1760s as a circular grain hall, its form symbolized the monarchy’s role in securing bread supplies and maintaining social order. In the 19th century, it was transformed into the Commodities Exchange, trading sugar, coffee, cocoa, and other goods, capped with an iron-and-glass dome, and encircled by murals romanticizing France’s colonial ambitions—while simultaneously obscuring histories of dispossession, slavery, and genocide. By the late 20th century, the building’s economic function had faded, and in the 21st century it reemerged as a cultural landmark under the Pinault Collection, marking the shift from mercantile and industrial power to finance and cultural capital.
Architect Tadao Ando was commissioned to erect a massive concrete silo in the rotunda, the most ubiquitous material of capitalist infrastructure. Within, artists such as Philippe Pareno staged interventions articulating a Silicon Valley ethos of big data capture and biosensing. 2022’s group exhibition Une seconde d’éternité featured a Pareno “bioreactor” that controlled lights, sounds, and movement in the rotunda, with a “brain” conditioned by externally captured data—temperature, noise, humidity, and light—effectively turning the space into a responsive, sensing environment. The iron-and-glass dome itself now reads as a kind of observing eye, reinforcing the aesthetic of surveillance and technological governance.
Bourse de Commerce - Pinault Collection
The neoliberal age, and its technologies of administration, are the primary object of study in this collection of essays. The valuation and management of social, attentional, and affective energies—enclosed and expropriated by platform capitalism—are fundamentally restructuring life and producing a distinct aesthetic regime. This regime is administered by what Barbara and John Ehrenreich termed the Professional-Managerial Class (PMC): “salaried mental workers who do not own the means of production, and whose major function in the social division of labor may be described broadly as the reproduction of capitalist culture and capitalist class relations.” The Ehrenreichs noted that this class is increasingly vulnerable to the very systems it sustains, a vulnerability amplified by AI automation of administrative duties.
The Professional-Managerial artist today devotes much of their labor to evaluative, data-centered activities: producing statements, obtaining credentials, developing proposals, submitting applications, building CVs, applying for grants, professional networking, producing social media content, sending and receiving emails, designing PDFs, producing promotional videos, and filling in spreadsheets. Artistic production is often dictated by institutional mandates; demands explicit rhetorical framing, measurable “impact,” and quantifiable metrics. While these tasks have become de-facto expectations for the professional artist, many artists reflexively engage these same practices in their work, while interrogating the logics that govern them.
Taryn Simon, A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I – XVIII, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, 2011
Some of the most compelling examples emerge from artists who deploy these practices with fluency while maintaining criticality. Taryn Simon’s A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters I–XVIII (2008–2011) explores eighteen family lineages across 25 countries, addressing genocide, genetic engineering, human trafficking, and state propaganda. Simon employs a poetic variation of social-scientific methods to comment on how knowledge and institutional systems are structured.
Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler, Anatomy of an AI, 2018
Kate Crawford and Vladan Joler’s Anatomy of an AI is a massive data visualization that functions across galleries, a dedicated website, and contextual texts. The project maps the production of an Amazon Echo in a systemic, planetary-scale cartography, extending beyond supply chain analysis to reveal labor exploitation, material extraction, and ecological impact. In the gallery context, the immersive scale evokes Kantian awe: a sense of sublime cognitive overwhelm as viewers confront global networks of extraction, labor, and data capture. The work highlights the social and ecological implications of corporate superpowers while reflecting the epistemic and administrative protocols of the neoliberal PMC subject.
Forensic Architecture, website homepage, September, 2025
Forensic Architecture describes itself as “a research agency developing and disseminating new techniques, methods, and concepts for investigating state and corporate violence,” comprising architects, software developers, filmmakers, investigative journalists, scientists, and lawyers. Their work employs compelling evidentiary aesthetics toward counter-hegemonic social justice in legal and cultural contexts, representing an expanded notion of multi-authored juridical poetics and political intervention. Investigations address state violence, human rights abuses, environmental destruction, and corporate complicity, using tools such as 3D modeling, satellite imagery, open-source video analysis, and architectural reconstruction.
Jonas Staal Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes, 2022
Jonas Staal explores intersections of art, politics, and ecological-social systems, expanding democratic practice through experimental public architectures and civic platforms. His projects examine how political ideologies, institutions, and infrastructures shape collective life, engaging with broader concerns of planetary governance and more-than-human agency. Collaborative and ongoing projects include The New World Summit, The Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes, and The Interplanetary Species Society: a large-scale installation and series of assemblies in a former nuclear facility challenging neocolonial and extractivist logics in space exploration and political organization, while proposing cooperative and multispecies approaches to governance.
These artists, through explicitly political and socially engaged practices, adopt the aesthetic and administrative protocols of the Professional-Managerial Class. Their work of resistance, however, risks structural affirmation, echoing Audre Lorde’s caution against attempting to dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools.
A 360-Degree David Attenborough Experience @ the Natural History Museum
text by Poppy Baring
Often described as a national treasure, David Attenborough acts as a grandfather figure to those who have watched his explorations across our planet, a wise adventurer who always talks with warmth and kindness while discussing a subject that is ever-growing in its melancholy. Our Story is a fifty-minute, immersive cinematic experience that takes visitors through the start of human life, to our present, and ends with a hopeful prediction of our future that can be achieved if we are willing to work together.
As summers pass, natural disasters persist, and the world’s balance seems so completely off-kilter in more ways than one, this experience, which explains the development of life and the continuous redevelopment of our world and its inhabitants, leaves your chest tight and heavy with emotion.
Audiences take their seats in a room full of stars projected onto the surrounding walls. The Hunger Games effect of a room made out of pixels is only felt while waiting for the show to begin. Once it does, you no longer feel surrounded by computers, but are traveling through space with the spark of life fully ignited. Stars begin to pass you, as do galaxies and planets, until we pass over the moon and reach our planet.
What is our significance? Attenborough asks. We are significant because the Earth is significant and the Earth is significant because of us, he answers. Earth is the only planet we know of that thrives in the way it does. Once unable to support life because of its unstable climate, Earth changed when temperatures became predictable and microbes expanded in their complexity. With every asteroid attack, to which Attenborough explains there have been at least six that have led to mass extinction, the last of which was 66 million years ago, our planet rebuilds, and with it so do new biospheres.
After coming face to face with gorillas, being immersed amongst hunter-gatherers, and being told the hopeful story of how great blue whales were saved from extinction, we are brought back up into space with humans’ first mission beyond the atmosphere. This was the moment we gained perspective and the first time humans saw Earth from afar, allowing us to see our home as vulnerable and finite.
Somehow, this perspective, described by astronauts as “the overview effect,” has not been enough to create an adequate change in our behaviors, and today we ourselves are responsible for disrupting Earth’s balance. The show, however, ends with a hopeful message: we can make a difference. We are all important, and there has never been a more exciting time to exist on this planet. David Attenborough sits in a chair to talk face to face with visitors, and there is a feeling that when he is no longer here, the hope that he brings to this conversation will fade, and we will all be left fully responsible, with no grandfatherly comfort to soften our fate.
Our Story is on view through January 2026 at the Natural History Museum, Cromwell Rd, South Kensington, London SW7 5BD
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Between Puppeteer and Prop: Kaari Upson’s Dollhouse—A Retrospective @ The Louisiana Musuem
Kaari Upson, Courtesy of Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark
text by Kim Shveka
Kaari Upson, one of the most significant and versatile artists of her generation, was notable for her ability to merge various media, exchanging textures and techniques from one work to the next. Her boundary pushing complexity is one main motif of Dollhouse - A Retrospective at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, the artist’s first career retrospective spanning the last two decades of her life.
Upson wove her own life in and out of her work, clawing at the walls of domesticity, memory, and identity, to re-inscribe herself between body and psyche, fact and fiction.
At the center of the exhibition is The Larry Project (2005-2012), her most discussed work. “Larry” was born when Upson passed an abandoned house in her hometown of San Bernadino, back in 2003. She formed a fictional character based on the abandoned belongings of her unknown neighbor, whom she named “Larry,” basing his appearance on Playboy mogul, Hugh Hefner.
Photo Kim Hansen/Courtesy of Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark
Larry and his shadows are shown throughout the exhibition, encapsulating the entirety of Upson’s approach to her creation—blurring sentience and the conspicuous into a mirror of self, home, and American culture. Larry might be viewed as a catalyst, accessory, or supplement. He might also be seen as a prop, mirror, or vessel. Whatever he is, he is not the “center,” she said.
Her performance with a life-sized Larry doll, her manic drawings littered with scrawls and body fluids, her forensic adherence to his archive—none of it was really about him. He is not the center.
The center, if there is one, is the house. Kaari Upson has stated that San Bernardino had become the landmark of her art making practice, always circling back to her origins in an attempt to untangle the knot of subject and memory, of desire and trauma. Upson understood viscerally that her core memories cannot be erased, so she found herself looking forward and backward in an attempt to recreate her own neighborhood, in the time and place of its situational trauma, and created her art from that place. In THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS OUTSIDE, first shown in Venice in 2019 and now reinstalled at Louisiana, overlapping models of domestic spaces are obscured from any coherent scale. We peer into corners, stumble through projections, eavesdrop on voices. The effect is both theatrical and intimate, claustrophobia disguised as play, a look inside Upson’s childhood, or perhaps her memories from it. The show’s title, Dollhouse, is an open metaphor: architecture as anatomy, art as a vessel to her soul. Here, the artist was once the puppet, but now she’s the puppeteer.
Photo Kim Hansen/Courtesy of Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark
By the end of the exhibition, we meet Untitled (Foot Face), a series of 140 drawings repeating the same wide-eyed head and the same severed foot. Her mother’s. A symbol, a scar, the last image Upson left us before she died. Like everything else in her work, it’s both singular and serial, intimate and estranged. She traps us in the loop that she orbited from her early beginnings to her untimely passing.
In Dollhouse, Kaari Upson doesn’t offer resolution, only recursion. Her work doesn’t ask to be understood, it insists on being felt, like a bruise you can’t remember getting. She left behind no manifesto, just fragments, skins, splinters. And yet what emerges is a radical form of autobiography: not a story told from the outside, but one lived from the inside out.
Kaari Upson, Untitled, 2007
Courtesy of Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark
Dollhouse - A Retrospective, is on view through October 26th at The Louisiana Museum, Gl Strandvej 13, 3050 Humlebæk, Denmark