Beyond Ruptures includes works of Aref el Rayess, Jean Khalife, Samir Khaddaje, Samia Osseiran, Shafic Abboud, Said Akl, Akram Zaatari and Nesrine Khodr as a testimony and tribute to the cultural resistance led by artists, cultural workers, and art patrons, in the challenging environments Lebanon has presented over the years. Selected works in the timeline, mark important events in the lives of each artist, and act as time capsules showing different artistic practices shaped by violence.
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Meşher’s new exhibition Istanbul as Far as the Eye Can See: Views across Five Centuries is curated by Şeyda Çetin and Ebru Esra Satıcı. Based on a selection of more than 100 rare works from the Ömer Koç Collection, the exhibition spans 500 years, from the 15th century – when Istanbul became Ottoman Empire’s capital – to the first quarter of the 20th century. Paintings and engravings showing wide-angle views, together with rare books, albums, panoramic photographs, and even souvenirs of Istanbul, offer visitors a richly varied visual record of the city. Curated by Şeyda Çetin and Ebru Esra Satıcı.
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The exhibition probes the ways in which the domestic context of a private collection can be transferred into a museum context. In so doing, it explores the possibilities of restaging and articulating the affinities created between distinct objects by means of a collector’s desires and endeavours. The exhibition, which spans the 4th and 3rd-floor galleries of Arter, brings together works by almost 400 artists, anonymous artefacts and mass-produced items, as well as multifarious objects.
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Delving into Charbel Samuel Aoun’s exploration of matter and kinetic artistry, the exhibition highlights the artist’s unique engagement with processes of co-creation and features new productions that bring to life earth, stones, wood, and wax through motors, amplifiers, and microphones. Running through each gallery is an installation showcasing the intricate weaving between matters and the continuum of movement.
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A group exhibition featuring selected pieces from Sama Alshaibi’s ‘Carry Over’ project and sculptures by Azza Al Qubaisi. By engaging in a direct dialogue with 19th century Orientalist portrait photographs of Middle Eastern women, captured by Western photographers, the exhibition critically explores the representations of Arab women in historical images and navigates the nuanced interplay of history, power, and representation to ultimately reclaim the narratives.
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Presenting a wide selection of works by Ozan Sağdıç (b. 1934), one of the most prominent names in the history of photography in Türkiye, the exhibition focuses on documentary photography, a widespread genre of photography in the world, while also shedding light on the country’s social, political, economic, cultural, and visual history from the 1950s to the present day.
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To mark the occasion of Noa Eshkol’s 100th anninversary, the Georg Kolbe Museum is presenting an exhibition showcasing the life and work of this groundbreaking choreographer and dancer, thus in a new way bringing to life the themes such as modern dance and modernist architecture. The focus is on Eshkol’s research into movement since the 1950s, choreographies, language studies, dances, textile art and the notation system she developed for human and animal movements.
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By putting in dialogue the digital works of the 1980s with recent canvases form the 2020s, the exhibition underscores the links between the different phases in the artist’s practice. It also highlights her unwavering exploration of abstraction: Samia Halaby is a very particular, innovative figure within her generation of artists. In over six decades she constantly foregrounded works and techniques and, in retrospect, was working in the zeitgeist of her time throughout her career.
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The Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris is inviting visitors to rediscover the diversity of 20th-century Arab modernism and to take a fresh look at the history of art scenes still little known in Europe. Through a selection of over 200 works, most of which have never before been exhibited in France, this exhibition focuses on the relationship between Arab artists and Paris throughout the 20th century. With works by Etel Adnan, Nadia Saikali, Mona Saudi, and Juliana Seraphim, among many others.
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Raed Yassin delves into themes of failure, death, loss, memory, and disappearance, confronting the spectral presence that permeates both the past and the future. He evokes these existential questions through a host of familiar yet haunting figures and symbols, ranging from pop culture icons to representations of the devil, funerary-like imagery, animals, skulls, and found photographs. Among these, the presence of Beirut’s cherished Shushu adds a poignant layer, inviting viewers to contemplate the fragility and complexity of corporeal existence in the face of protracted failure and loss.
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Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere is the title of the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. The part of the exhibtion called Nucleo Storico is gathering works from 20th century Latin America, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Much has been written about global modernisms and modernisms in the Global South, and a number of rooms will feature works from these territories, much like an essay, a draft, a speculative curatorial exercise that seeks to question the boundaries and definitions of modernism. Around forty artists who were active in the art contexts of West Asian and North Africa such as Baghdad, Beirut, Cairo, Damascus, and Tehran, are included in the exhibition, among them Dia al-Azzawi, Huguette Caland, Gazbia Sirry, Marwan, and Bahman Mohasses.
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Artist Yto Barrada will transform the MoMA PS1 courtyard with a large-scale installation, her first major outdoor work is composed of colorful concrete blocks stacked into pyramidal towers whose lower levels visitors can sit on and explore, providing an interactive experience in the courtyard and a setting for PS1’s signature summer music series Warm Up. The sculptures’ formations draw inspiration from multiple histories of surmounting barricades and retooling architectures: the construction of human pyramids in Morocco, Moroccan Brutalism, and Barrada’s family lore.
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This project has been developed using the visual archive of a entomologist from Tabriz and the collection of Nasser Bakhshi. It aims to depict the viewer being placed or positioned in a situation that is relevant to contemporary human. Placing the human on a path where their expectations are met.
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Galerie Nagel Draxler presents the first exhibition of Riyadh-based artist Halla Bint Khalid in Germany. In addition to her paintings and watercolors, with which she documented the hidden lives of Saudi women in the 1990s, Bint Khalid began writing and illustrating children’s books. In her famous series Body Beautiful, or Beauty Knows No Pain (ca. 1966–1972), Martha Rosler extracts depictions of womens’ bodies from popular media sources – glossy print ads and men’s magazines and reassembles them in ways that upend the original messages. Rosler is largely concerned with the external pressures, expectations, and fantasies projected upon women and the exploitation of their labor.
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This ambitious new work continues Ahaad Alamoudi’s expansive exploration of rapidly changing social and cultural environments, situating Saudi’s natural and urban landscapes as sites of possibility – punctured by effort and powered by fantasy – where both individual and collective attempts to do the seemingly impossible are imbued with humour, absurdity and, at times, hopefulness.
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Across this collection, the pieces speak to each other as they tread the fine line between despair and hope. Many of the artworks are vibrant in their form yet often bleak in their content. Some works critique our current social condition with sharp wit, while others playfully invite us to join in on the joke. Yet, they all engage with a dystopian reality characterized by our inability to escape the confines of various systems of control. However, as is common within the dystopian genre, the ultimate motive is not to despair, but to imagine different paths for a better future.
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‘‘Unfolding the Embassy ‘‘presents a fictitious time-space, a rediscovery of the human condition in the very present of 2024, through the perceptual distance of the dauntingly near future. The date is 2040, and we are situated in a Space-X satellite orbiting around a meta-earth, decomposed of its state borders due to environmental failure, and regulated by cyborgs wary of human intervention. ‘‘Unfolding the Embassy ‘‘brings together works of installation, video, photography, and print media that address the state of our globe in relation to the economy, the Anthropocene, and artificial intelligence. In exploring the works of art and their conversations with one another, exhibition visitors are invited to speculate on the role of fiction in constructing the systems that hold our societies together.
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Looking at port cities, shifting sands and riverbanks, ‘At the Edge of Land’ delves into the intricate and often concealed relationships between landscapes and trade. The exhibition highlights unexpectedly interconnected geographies, resources and commodities, moving between land and sea to tell stories of conflict, erosion and extraction. It challenges ideas of emptiness and development, shedding light on the regions and people on the margins of trade routes.
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The Hamburg-based French-Egyptian artist Hoda Tawakol ( born 1968 in London) is developing a new site-specific work for the garden of the Georg Kolbe Museum, Berlin. With her outdoor textile work, she creates spaces for dialogue: with native and non-native plants, with her own and other identities, as well as experiences and challenges that appeal to the senses and stimulate the mind.
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HOUSE OF SYRIAN ART will be showing for the first time a selection of drawings and sketchbooks by the Syrian painter Abdullah Murad, from the collection of the TAKLA FOUNDATION.Murad is considered one of the outstanding pioneers of contemporary abstract expressionist Arabic art. Drawing reflects the movements of life in the most direct form, its rise and fall, its swelling and fading. “One must always,” writes Matisse, “follow the desire of the line, the point at which it wants to begin or disappear.”
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Made up of a composition of vertebrae, disks, joints, soft tissues, nerves and your spinal cord – the backbone serves as a central, internal structure of strength that binds and connects things together. Backbone explores the complexities and fragilities of these structures which at times can be exposed, excavated or elusive. Salasil invites six artists who engage in risk and interruption within their practices, ranging from painting, sculpture, video, sound and textile. backbone reveals how the “image”, whether dreamt or felt, can begin to materialise into a physical form, producing outcomes that self-alter within a constant balance & tension between shifting & collapsing temporal spaces.
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“Unobservable dreams” focuses on the diverse realities of society and the contrasting desires arising from them. The exhibition explores how social values and economic prosperity are replaced by crises in a rapidly changing and unpredictable world, and how these changes impact different layers of society. This results in a more nuanced and complex societal landscape, reflecting its sensitive and multifaceted nature. The artists, adapting mythological references to contemporary realities, attempt to “voice” the “unobservable” dreams of their characters through their video works.
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An exhibition of works by Tala Madani as part of the museum’s exhibition cycle, “What If Women Ruled the World?”
This four-part series is exclusively dedicated to the work of women artists or artists who identify as female. Initiated by EMΣT artistic director Katerina Gregos and inspired by Yael Bartana’s 2017 neon work of the same name, this cycle of exhibitions is based on an often-repeated hypothetical question: What would happen if governance was characterized by female traits?
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“Unobservable Dreams” showcases video works from YARAT’s collection by artists like Zamir Suleymanov, Emin Azizbeyli, and Vajiko Chachkhiani. The exhibition explores societal shifts, crises, and contrasting desires in an unpredictable world. Through mythological references, the artists give voice to hidden dreams and emotions. Themes of hope, identity, and despair are woven throughout, reflecting the complex layers of society. The exhibition delves into both collective and personal struggles across cultures.
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“Voices of Silence” is Aidan Salakhova’s first large-scale museum exhibition in Baku, commissioned by YARAT. It addresses domestic violence, amplifying the voices of its victims through an installation of 12 white stone jugs. Each jug tells a tragic story from the past 12 years, blending beauty with haunting narratives. The exhibition urges society to break the silence, fostering dialogue and action against domestic violence.
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The exhibition presents works by six artists from Iran: Homa Emami, Parastou Forouhar, Samira Hodaei, Simin Keramati, Roshi Rouzbehani and Jinoos Taghizadeh.
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Samy Zarka offers us a contemporary journey into the imagination of the identity of Palmyra in Roman Gaul. Through the collection of testimonies of exiles about their destroyed, abandoned Syrian homes, the artist approaches the site of the mosaics with its traces of Syrian presence, like a landscape of memories of lost dwellings offering a captivating temporal echo to the faces of Palmyra, cycles of construction and deconstruction over time.
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Shirin Neshat (b. 1957) is an Iranian visual artist and photographer who lives in New York City. For decades, Neshat’s expansive body of work has focused on the problematics of the female body in Islamic cultures, specifically in relation to her country, Iran, and the way in which the female body has continued to be a contested space for sin, shame, desire, repression, political & religious ideology, while also rebellion, power and protest.
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Zad Moultaka is a composer and visual artis presenting installation, painting, photography, and video in this solo exhibition.
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The exhibition VALLEYS OF THE SIMORGH emerged from the INTRA project with the same title and, inspired by the Persian poet Attār’s Conference of the Birds, embarks on the quest for the Simorgh . Following the structure of the tale, the exhibition consists of the Valley of the Quest (Ahmadjan & Maren Amini), Valley of Love (Tanja Boukal), Valley of Knowledge (Monika Huber), Valley of Detachment (Ali & Maheen Kazim), Valley of Unity (Anahita Razmi), Valley of Wonderment (Mohsin Shafi), and Valley of Poverty and Annihilation (Farkhondeh Shahroudi). This exhibition addresses the political sphere of Attār’s narration while it recounts the collective struggle for freedom and equality.
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Abdulmohsen Albinali’s journey into the world of storytelling was sparked by a deep fascination with oral histories and folklore of the Arabian Peninsula and stop motion animation. This early enchantment with world-building allowed him to adapt oral narratives into a tangible realm, creating immersive installations where stories experienced.
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Curated by Övül Ö. Durmusoglu, the exhibition focuses on one of the central threads of Yalter’s practice coming from the nomadic lives and their resistance in Aşık tradition in Anatolia for centuries. The works are inspired by the LP vinyl record “le chant des troubadours de turquie: Achik Nesimi” that Nil Yalter produced in collaboration with Bernard Dupaigne for Aşık Nesimi Çimen in 1979, who was at that time in exile in Paris.
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Setareh Düsseldorf presents Sassan Behnam-Bakhtiar’s third solo exhibition with the gallery, Life or Else, an important exploration of environmental vulnerability. The French-Iranian artist utilizes his signature scraped painting technique to prompt viewers towards a critical contemplation of the delicate link between humanity and the natural world.
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Curatored by Dodie Kazanjian, the exhibition of artworks by Hadi Falapishi, an Iranian artist who lives and works in New York, takes place at Rough Point Museum in Newport, Rhode Island.
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The artist Mona Hakimi-Schüler, who grew up in Tehran and now lives in Berlin, uses a wide range of artistic forms of expression to address the political situation in Iran and the role of women in society. Her own life story is also reflected in her works and the artist herself appears again and again in her works.
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Curatored by Dodie Kazanjian, the exhibition of artworks by Hadi Falapishi, an Iranian artist who lives and works in New York, takes place at Great Friends Meeting House in Newport, Rhode Island.
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Dis-placed at Konschthal Esch, part of the Biennale 2024 – Architectures, d’Esch Capitale Culturelle, examines the notion of ‘loss of home.’ From September 2024, the second part of the exhibition will take place, featuring works by Taysir Batniji, Marco A. Castillo, Vajiko Chachkhiani, Haus-Rucker-Co, Sebastián Díaz Morales, Marlene Dumas, Guillaume Delaperriere, Omer Fast, Tirdad Hashemi & Soufia Erfanian, Samira Hodaei, Candida Höfer, Hiwa K, Lisa Kohl, Gregor Schneider and The Blaze.
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With her solo exhibition, Nairy Baghramian concludes her series ‘Modèle vivant,’ initially begun on the occasion of her exhibition at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas TX in 2022. For this presentation, Baghramian will present eight new sculptures.
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The artists in this group show challenge the outdated notions that have relegated textile work to a backseat view of the art world and disassemble the politics that placed it there. Through repurposing cultural fabrics, weaving empathetic organic figures, or encompassing self-portraits with stitching, they step away from both traditional practices and traditional lines of thinking.
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This solo exhibition presents works by Moein Memar Kashani.
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“Mohsen Vaziri Moghaddam > 100 Years”, celebrating the 100th year since the birth of artist Mohsen Vaziri Moghaddam, organized by Fondazione Mohsen Vaziri Moghaddam, takes form in numerous international events and exhibitions in collaboration with institutions and galleries, such as 009821 , Azad, Bavan, Bostan, Dastan, Etemad, Sam Center, Vali, galleries in Tehran, Emrooz gallery in Isfahan, and Fiuz gallery in Kashan.
In this exhibition, Mahmoud Alhaj examines the colonial violence and mechanisms of domination and control imposed on Palestinian geography over the years. Alhaj’s projects preceded the intensification of these oppressive tools, ultimately leading to the ongoing atrocities in the Gaza Strip over the past months.
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Yalda Bidshahri is an Iranian writer and curator in the United Arab Emirates. She creates communal spaces of imagination and freedom through exhibitions, programs and publications developed in close collaboration with artists and practitioners across disciplines. Born from a premonition, In your dreams features multidisciplinary artworks that often combine traditional elements of Iranian culture with imagination and provocation offering emancipatory perspectives on identity and gender.
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Yellow Area is an online solo photo exhibition by Erfan Dadkhah that explores the rise and decline of Alborz, Iran’s first industrial city. Established in the 1960s, Alborz thrived during urbanization but faced economic hardships in the 2000s, leading to layoffs, industrial shutdowns, and rising living costs. Through personal experiences, the exhibition captures the struggles and fading memories of the city’s inhabitants, highlighting its uncertain future.
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Archipelago: Visions in Orbit uses the metaphor of an archipelago—distinct yet connected islands—to explore diverse artistic perspectives. In response to societal fragmentation and geopolitical tensions, the exhibition highlights a shared cultural fabric while embracing complex differences. Featuring artists like Esther Teichmann and Jade de Montserrat, it examines themes of migration and belonging. Curated by MA Curating Art and Public Programmes students, the show reflects Whitechapel’s rich history of migrant communities and includes public performances and events.
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Inspired by Jonas Mekas’ Manifesto Anti-100 Years of Cinema, this performative exhibition in Tehran unfolds in two episodes. It celebrates collaborative creativity, friendship, and reflection, exploring the balance of light and darkness as essential to image-making. Featuring diverse artists, the exhibition spans film, video, sound, and poetry, engaging Tehran as a resonating hub of universal human experience. Curated by Raha Raissnia and Martin Germann, it also includes live performances and screenings.
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