Contemporary Art encompasses artistic practices from the late twentieth century to the present, using media ranging from painting and sculpture to installation, performance, video and digital technology. It often responds directly to current social, political, ecological and technological conditions.
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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…
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…
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