Fiji Museum’s Voyages: Stories of an Ocean People places maritime knowledge at the centre of Fijian history, from early Lapita navigation to iTaukei voyaging and later migrations. What stays with me is how differently the ocean appears when it is understood as a route rather than a barrier. On many maps, islands look isolated by huge areas of blue. For generations of Pacific navigators, that same water connected communities through knowledge of currents, stars, weather and vessels. Geography changes when you change the knowledge used to read it.
Machines Performing Belief
Light as a Form of Resistance
The National Gallery of Canada’s Qillaniq brings together more than seventy contemporary artists from the circumpolar Arctic. Its title is an Inuktitut word describing light shimmering on water. I like that image because the exhibition uses brightness rather than darkness as a way to speak about resilience. Indigenous contemporary art is too often framed primarily through loss or historical damage. Joy, humour, imagination and continuity can be equally political. Survival is not only the preservation of what existed before. It is also the freedom to keep inventing what comes next.
Rebuilding a House at Full Scale
For Obras extraordinarias in Santiago, Carolina Illanes reconstructs a fragment of a politically charged residence at full scale while working with housing archives and documents. The gesture fascinates me because architecture becomes evidence. A room is never only walls and dimensions; it can contain assumptions about power, privacy and who is allowed to occupy space comfortably. Rebuilding part of a structure inside a museum does not simply reproduce architecture. It removes the building from normal use so that its politics become much harder to ignore.
Dakar Looking Forward Again
The Dakar Biennale returns in November 2026 for its sixteenth edition, continuing a history that has made the city an important platform for contemporary African art and its diasporas. What interests me is not simply the scale of a biennale, but what happens when an international art event grows from a cultural history that predates the current global exhibition circuit. Dakar connects contemporary practice to earlier Pan-African cultural ambitions. A biennale can be temporary, yet the conversations it keeps reopening may last much longer than the exhibition itself.
BIENNALE DE L'ART AFRICAIN CONTEMPORAIN PRESS RELEASE - BIENNALE DE L'ART AFRICAIN CONTEMPORAIN The Government of Senegal, through the Ministry of Culture, Crafts, and Tourism, is pleased to announce the organization of the 16th edition of the Biennale of Contemporary African Art, which will take place in Dakar from November 19 to December 19, 2026. Recognized as one of the most prominent artistic events on the international stage, […]
An Archive Beside the Painting
Jakarta’s National Gallery of Indonesia is currently presenting Oesman Effendi through both artworks and archival material. I like exhibitions that refuse to separate the finished object from the traces surrounding its creation. A painting may appear self-contained once it reaches a museum wall, but sketches, letters, photographs and documents can reveal a much less orderly process. Archives remind us that an artistic career is not a straight line of masterpieces. It is made from experiments, discarded directions, friendships, arguments and unfinished thoughts.
Galeri Nasional Indonesia Galeri Nasional Indonesia Situs Resmi Galeri Nasional Indonesia
Machines Performing Belief
Twenty-one years after representing New Zealand at the Venice Biennale, et al.’s the fundamental practice is being shown in its entirety in Aotearoa for the first time. Five moving autonomous systems, computer-generated voices and sound form what feels like a dystopian orchestra. What interests me is how easily machines can borrow the language of authority. A synthetic voice does not need to understand an idea to repeat it convincingly. The work turns technology into a strange theatre of belief, obedience and doubt.
Auckland Art Gallery Toi o T?maki New Zealand’s 2005 Venice Biennale presentation to be shown in Aotearoa for the first time | Auckland Art Gallery Toi o T?maki New Zealand’s 2005 Venice Biennale presentation to be shown in Aotearoa for the first time.
A Geography Made From Feeling
MAMBO’s Desconfinamientos revisits works from its collection through the idea of affective geography rather than placing them neatly inside a conventional history of Colombian art. I find that approach interesting because places are never only coordinates. A city can be mapped through memories, disappearances, encounters and emotional attachments that no official map records. Collections can work the same way. Rearranging familiar works can reveal relationships that chronological order quietly hides. Sometimes changing the map is enough to change the story.
MAMBO Colección en escena #7 Desconfinamientos: Geografías afectivas en la Colección MAMBO - MAMBO El oráculo de la noche es la exposición individual de la artista colombiana María Isabel Rueda.
The People Behind the Museum
Fabienne Hess’s Lo invisible y sus tramas at Museo Amparo turns attention toward museum staff whose work normally disappears behind the exhibition. Images printed on silk move through the space while rarely shown collection pieces sit beside familiar works. I like this reversal of attention. Museums teach us what to look at, but they can also make the labour supporting that act of looking almost invisible. An exhibition does not simply appear on a wall. It is built from hundreds of decisions, gestures and forms of care that usually remain outside the frame.
https://museoamparo.com/exposiciones/piezas/315/lo-invisible-y-sus-tramas
#FabienneHess #MuseoAmparo #MexicanArtScene #InstallationArt
museoamparo.com Fabienne Hess. Lo invisible y sus tramas | Exposiciones | exposiciones actuales | Museo Amparo, Puebla El trabajo del personal del Museo Amparo, que habitualmente es invisible en las galerías, ahora está en los muros. Las jerarquías se alteran: obras ...
A Painting That Also Performs
Pata Dekhabo? at KNMA follows narrative image-making traditions from Bengal and Jharkhand across three centuries. These scrolls are interesting because the image was never necessarily meant to stand silently on a wall. Storytelling, performance, ritual and community were part of how it lived. That changes the way I think about painting. We often separate image, sound and performance into different disciplines, but these traditions show how artificial those borders can be. Sometimes an image was always meant to unfold in time.
KNMA Pata Dekhabo? - KNMA An exhibition exploring narrative scrolls, storytelling traditions, and vernacular image-making across Bengal and Jharkhand. The exhibition brings together picture-making traditions from Bengal and Jharkhand through narrative scrolls and single-format images spanning three centuries. Featuring works from pattachitra and Santhal traditions, it explores how storytelling, performance, ritual, and everyday life intersect within these living practices. Tracing […]
Painting a Return Home
Gabriel Selassie Tsagli’s Son of Kafui marks his first exhibition in Accra after living between Ghana and Germany. The paintings grow from memory, family, displacement and his return to the city, with figures emerging through accumulated, scraped and pressed layers of paint. I like that memory is not treated as something precise enough to illustrate. Faces can appear as traces, colour can carry emotion, and a place can remain inside someone even after years elsewhere. Returning home does not necessarily close a circle. It may reveal how much the circle has changed.
https://www.gallery1957.com/exhibitions/141-gabriel-selassie-tsagli-son-of-kafui-gallery-ii-accra/
Gallery 1957 Gabriel Selassie Tsagli - Son of Kafui | 23 Jul - 12 Sep 2026 The exhibition marks Selassie’s first with Gallery 1957, following his residency. Son of Kafui is a deeply personal return—shaped by memory and carried forward through devotion. The exhibition begins in the body’s remembrance of place: a specific mother, a specific city, a specific quality of light that never fully leaves....
When Unease Becomes a Collection
At Serralves in Portugal, Vexation of Spirit brings together works collected over four decades around moral unease and historical awareness. What interests me is the idea that a collection can become more than a sequence of individual tastes. Over time, choices begin to reveal a way of looking at the world. The artworks may have been created independently, yet placing them together produces another layer of meaning. Collecting is also editing: deciding which voices should remain beside one another long enough for unexpected conversations to begin.
https://www.serralves.pt/en/ciclo-serralves/2605-colecao-duerckheim/
serralves.pt Vexation of Spirit. The Duerckheim Collection x Serralves Vexation of Spirit brings the Duerckheim Collection to Serralves. Art, conflict, religion and society in dialogue with recent history.