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2 Sep 2026 Chasing Storms Through Screens

Chasing Storms Through Screens

Shuang Li’s Alliance begins with storm chasing, the deliberate pursuit of tornadoes, hurricanes and other extreme weather.

At Kunsthalle Basel, where the exhibition runs until 13 September 2026, that pursuit expands into an immersive environment of video, sound and architecture. Roads, weather forecasts and meteorological imagery appear within a visual world that connects physical storms to the less visible systems shaping contemporary digital life.

The comparison works because both kinds of systems are difficult to see as a whole.

A storm can be tracked on a screen, measured and predicted, yet standing inside one is completely different from reading its data.

Digital infrastructures behave similarly. Algorithms, networks and platforms surround daily life while most of their operations remain invisible.

What I like here is that weather is not reduced to a metaphor pasted onto technology. Both involve prediction, control and a point where prediction fails.

The storm chaser moves toward instability in order to observe it.

Most technology is designed to do the opposite. It promises to remove uncertainty.

Li seems interested in the moment when that promise begins to break down.

https://kunsthallebasel.ch/de/exhibitions/shuang-li

#ShuangLi #VideoInstallation #DigitalCulture #ContemporaryArt

Chasing Storms Through Screens Kunsthalle Basel Alliance · Kunsthalle Basel Seit 1872 zeigt die Kunsthalle Basel nicht nur Kunst – sie hat sie immer wieder neu definiert. Mit unerschütterlichem Engagement für aufstrebende Künstler:innen rückt sie deren bahnbrechendes Schaffen ins Rampenlicht – oft lange bevor diese international bekannt werden.

2 Sep 2026 Contemporary Art

The Video Keeps Jumping Through Time

Hito Steyerl’s The Island, currently at Fondazione Prada’s Osservatorio in Milan until 30 October 2026, refuses to stay inside one period of history.

The project combines a newly produced film with installation, objects and video interviews. Its stories move from microorganisms and Neolithic time to war, contemporary technology and imagined futures. Flooding keeps returning as a connecting image.

Steyerl describes two very different experiences of time.

One is the frantic time produced by technology and capitalism: updates, interruptions, loops and information constantly replacing information.

The other is deep time.

Geological time.

Underwater time.

Time that barely notices whether a smartphone generation lasts three or five years.

I like the collision because moving image normally controls time extremely well.

Twenty-four frames.

Cut.

Jump.

Repeat.

Speed up.

Slow down.

But Steyerl uses those tools to point toward scales of time the video itself cannot really contain.

A five-minute sequence can jump thousands of years.

The screen makes that transition instantaneous.

Reality cannot.

Perhaps that is one reason moving image is so effective for thinking about our current technological culture.

The edit has taught us to expect reality to move at the speed of an edit.

The planet never agreed.

https://www.fondazioneprada.org/project/the-island-hito-steyerl/?lang=en

#HitoSteyerl #VideoArt #TheIsland #ContemporaryArt

The Video Keeps Jumping Through Time fondazioneprada.org Hito Steyerl’s The Island, currently at Fondazione Prada’s Osservatorio in Milan until 30 October 2026, refuses to stay inside one period of...

1 Sep 2026 Contemporary Art

An Island That Refused a Border

In 1831 an underwater volcanic eruption created a temporary island between Sicily and Tunisia. Britain, France, Spain and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies quickly became interested in claiming it. Then the island disappeared beneath the Mediterranean again.

Elisa Giardina Papa turns this strange historical episode into She Flickered In and Out of History, a new 18-minute video installation currently at London’s ICA until 6 September 2026.

The work was filmed around Mount Etna, Stromboli and the submerged slopes of Mediterranean volcanic islands. It appears on a large freestanding LED screen alongside photographs and glass sculptures. A Sicilian spoken poem and an original score by duendita move through the images.

What interests me is that the island behaves almost like an impossible political object.

A territory normally becomes valuable because it stays where maps put it.

This one appeared, attracted competing claims of ownership, and then physically removed itself from the argument.

Video seems particularly suited to that story because moving image also refuses the stability of a photograph. Land emerges, changes, flickers and disappears.

Giardina Papa does not simply reconstruct the island as a forgotten historical curiosity. She lets geological time interfere with political time.

Governments can draw borders rapidly.

A volcano has another schedule.

There is something satisfying about a landscape that briefly enters European geopolitics and then sinks before anybody can permanently possess it.

Elisa Giardina Papa: She Flickered In and Out of History

#ElisaGiardinaPapa #VideoArt #MovingImage #ContemporaryArt

An Island That Refused a Border iiclondra.esteri.it Elisa Giardina Papa: She Flickered In and Out of History 17 July – 6 September 2026 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) ICI London is proud to support She Flickered?In?and Out of History, a new video and?mixed-media?installation by interdisciplinary artist Elisa Giardina Papa (b. Italy;?lives and works in New York,?U.S.,?and?Sant’Ignazio, Sicily) at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA). In 1831, an underwater volcanic eruption […]

31 Aug 2026 Antwerp Art

Not Knowing as a Working Method

Jürgen Addiers opened I Have No Idea What I Am Doing at M HKA in Antwerp on 28 August 2026.

The exhibition combines painting, installation, neon and video, but its title may be the most interesting material in the room. The sentence itself becomes a physical sculpture made from metal spheres suspended from the ceiling.

The museum describes uncertainty not as failure but as a position from which experimentation and curiosity can begin.

I like that because creative culture usually tells the opposite story after the fact.

An exhibition makes an artist’s process look inevitable.

Finished works stand in carefully chosen positions.

A text explains the connections.

The uncertainty that produced them has disappeared.

Anyone who actually makes things knows how misleading that can be.

You try something.

It fails.

Another accident becomes useful.

A technical limitation changes the direction.

You discover the idea while making the object supposedly based on the idea.

“I have no idea what I am doing” therefore does not necessarily describe incompetence.

It can describe the moment before a procedure hardens into habit.

Knowing exactly what will happen is efficient.

Not knowing may be where the new work begins.

https://www.muhka.be/en/exhibitions/jurgen-addiers-i-have-no-idea-what-i-am-doing/

#JurgenAddiers #ContemporaryArt #AntwerpArt #InstallationArt

Not Knowing as a Working Method M HKA Jürgen Addiers: I Have No Idea What I Am Doing | M HKA The M HKA is a museum for contemporary art, film and visual culture in its widest sense.

24 Aug 2026 Cabaret Crusades

History Performed by Clay

For Cabaret Crusades: The Path to Cairo, Egyptian artist Wael Shawky reconstructed episodes from the medieval Crusades using approximately 120 handmade clay puppets. The larger trilogy draws on Amin Maalouf’s The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, shifting attention toward historical narratives recorded from an Arab perspective.

The choice of puppets makes the work stranger than a conventional historical reconstruction.

A puppet cannot pretend that we are watching reality. We constantly see the mechanism of representation. The figures are obviously artificial, yet they perform events whose consequences were violently real.

That distance interests me.

Film normally tries to make historical reconstruction convincing through costumes, locations and actors. Shawky removes that illusion almost completely. History becomes theatre, and because the manipulation is visible, we start thinking about who is moving the characters.

Perhaps that is appropriate. Historical narratives are also constructed. Events happened, but every retelling involves selection, framing and perspective.

The puppet strings are simply more visible than the ones inside a history book.

https://www.lissongallery.com/artists/wael-shawky

#WaelShawky #EgyptianArt #CabaretCrusades #ContemporaryArt

History Performed by Clay Lisson Gallery Lisson Gallery Wael Shawky tackles notions of national, religious and artistic identity in contemporary art through film, performance, and storytelling.

23 Aug 2026 Contemporary Art

A Nation Drawn While It Was Changing

The National Gallery of Australia’s Bilong Papua New Guinea looked at fifty years of independence through art rather than through a conventional political timeline. Papua New Guinea became independent on 16 September 1975 after periods of British, German and Australian colonial rule. The exhibition placed contemporary works beside cultural forms and showed how artists have addressed independence, ancestral knowledge, Christianity, technology and rapid social change. Figures such as Mathias Kauage and Timothy Akis helped shape a modern visual language that could absorb new materials without abandoning local cultural references.

Papua New Guinea contains extraordinary linguistic and cultural diversity. That makes the idea of a single national image complicated from the beginning. What interests me is how artists can participate in creating national identity without making everyone look the same. Art can connect different histories while allowing their differences to remain visible. Perhaps a nation becomes more convincing when its image is allowed to stay unfinished.

https://nga.gov.au/stories-ideas/bilong-papua-new-guinea/

#PapuaNewGuineaArt #PacificArt #ContemporaryArt #CulturalIdentity

A Nation Drawn While It Was Changing The National Gallery of Australia’s Bilong Papua New Guinea looked at fifty years of independence through art rather than through a conventional political…

22 Aug 2026 Art History

Digging Through the Recent Past

Before the Eclipse looks back at art made in Mexico between 1981 and 1991 through archaeology, ecology, popular culture and the country’s move toward globalisation. I like the use of archaeology as a metaphor for such a recent period. We normally dig through centuries. Here only a few decades are enough to reveal that ideas about national identity can become historical layers surprisingly quickly.

https://www.museotamayo.org/en/exposiciones/ante-el-eclipse-arqueologias-del-arte-en-mexico

#MexicanArt #MuseoTamayo #ContemporaryArt #ArtHistory

Digging Through the Recent Past museotamayo.org Before the Eclipse Jun 10, 2026 - Oct 18, 2026