Gleanings

Jacqueline Mesmaeker (Brussels, 1929–2023) worked quietly, steadily, for decades. Her practice unfolded across media — drawing, sculpture, video, language — without allegiance to any single form. What binds the work is not a medium but a mode of attention: slow, deliberate, attuned to the minor key. Things half seen, half remembered. A gesture, a shadow, a pause.

From the beginning, her work has been described as steeped in a literary and poetic imaginary, with nods to Carroll’s disorienting logics or the vast, unknowable seas of Melville. Literature is not simply a reference in her work; it is a terrain she inhabits. One might call her practice bibliophilic. Books are everywhere — visible, cited, sometimes concealed — and function both as medium and raw material. She moved through histories — artistic, literary, political — not in search of grand narratives, but to register subtle shifts. In her hands, memory is porous. Language flickers. A line might double as a thread, a horizon, a crease in time. Her pieces often operate just below the surface of recognition.

For years, Mesmaeker taught in Belgian art schools. Her influence is there. For instance in the work of Joëlle Tuerlinckx, who, like her, maps a space where thought and form hover close together. These last years, Mesmaeker’s work is receiving wider attention, finally. The exhibition at Museum der Moderne Salzburg — drawn from the Generali Foundation Collection and developed with the artist before her passing — marks her first retrospective outside Belgium. It gathers works from across the decades, across disciplines, allowing them to speak at their own quiet tempo. Nothing conclusive. Everything, as always, in motion. (Els Roelandt)

Walking through ‘Rien ne nous y préparait — Tout nous y préparait’ by Wolfgang Tillmans at the Centre Pompidou, what stands out first is the scale, and the unexpected setting. This is an exhibition that doesn’t just occupy a space, but rethinks how we move through it. Tillmans has taken over all 6,000 square metres of the second floor of the BPI, the Pompidou’s Bibliothèque publique d’information. But rather than replacing the library, he works with it, turning it into a kind of open experiment in looking and thinking together. Images, objects, sounds and texts overlap and interact. Tillmans doesn’t treat the space as a neutral container, but as an active element that shapes how viewers interact with the works on display.

From the very first room, fragments seem to drift around: uncut magazine spreads, pinboards with clippings, prints taped or mounted on the wall. Like pages torn from different sources and reassembled mid-air, they reflect Tillmans’ view of photography as something in flux, a medium that is responsive and alive. His signature approach to installations — non-hierarchical, open-ended, intuitive — is exemplified here in its rawest form. Some images catch you off guard. A fleeting touch, a sideways glance, a moment of intimacy. The kind of portrait that feels unposed but sharply felt. Just around the corner, you might encounter more abstract work: crumpled paper forms, photocopied textures, silver salt prints that feel like visual experiments in memory and time. Tillmans doesn’t aim for neat conclusions. Instead, he invites us into a process, a kind of visual conversation. We’re asked to move, notice, pause and connect.

The themes are wide-ranging but grounded. Photos from early ’90s rave scenes hum with collective energy, offering glimpses of a countercultural past shaped by movement, music and fluid identity. Curation plays an active role. Wall texts speak to how perception changes over time. Tables are laid out with clippings, zines, letters and other ephemera, clusters of meaning rather than clean timelines. Mirrors scattered throughout the space reflect the viewer into the work, making it clear that our presence matters. This is an exhibition about images, but also about how we look, how we read, how we fit ourselves into what we see.

The library setting shapes everything. Instead of occupying a classic white-cube structure, the show lives inside the BPI’s open-plan library architecture. At first, it can feel disorienting. As you move through it, however, the setting makes more and more sense. Tillmans doesn’t want isolation; he wants overlap. By embedding his work in this everyday, communal space, he reminds us that art and knowledge aren’t separate, that they exist side by side, in the same flow of thought. Beauty appears in quiet moments: a clouded sky, moonlight reflected on water, a soft wash of colour. These landscape photographs offer breathing room, intervals in the exhibition’s rhythm where time seems to stretch. They’re familiar but slightly off, like memories half-recalled. Still, the political edge is always there. Flyers and posters on tables bear slogans decrying far-right extremism. Newspaper clippings speak to the state of the world. The message isn’t forced, but it’s clear: looking is never neutral. Culture is both a form of resistance and a way to care.

This isn’t art as spectacle. It’s art as condition. Many museum shows these days give in to the impulse to wrap things up neatly, offering retrospectives that feel like summaries. Tillmans resists that urge. He puts process first. He leaves space for uncertainty. The viewer becomes part of the work. By the end, the title lands differently: nothing could have prepared us — but everything did. Every image, scrap, caption and crease contributes to something larger. We’ve been prepared by the mess of daily life, by history in motion, by everything we’ve seen and maybe didn’t realise we were storing. ‘Rien ne nous y préparait’ is more than a show. It’s an invitation to slow down, pay attention and think about how we piece the world together. A quiet triumph for Tillmans, and for the Pompidou. As the museum prepares to close for renovation, it offers this final gesture: not just a space to look at art, but one to practice being present, with curiosity, care and a willingness to look again. (Luc Franken)

Franz West (Vienna, 1947–2012) didn’t just change how sculpture looks; he changed how we relate to it. West was never content to let his work sit quietly in a gallery, he wanted it to be touched, tested, worn and lived. Now, over a decade after his passing, Galerie Eva Presenhuber in Zurich, one of his most consistent and long-standing partners, presents ‘Franz West: Die frühen Werke / Early Works’. The exhibition focuses on the artist’s early production between 1975 and 1990, a formative period that laid the groundwork for his unconventional, interactive practice. Zurich playing an important role in West’s international career, and this exhibition not only offers a fresh look at his beginnings but also highlights the city’s lasting connection to his work.

Born in Vienna in 1947, Franz West came of age in post-war Austria, which was dominated by the intellectual legacy of Freud and Wittgenstein and the shadow of political conservatism. Initially trained in philosophy, he later studied at the Academy of Fine Arts under Bruno Gironcoli. West’s early artistic path unfolded against the prevailing formalist and conceptual trends of the time. His response was both personal and unruly: an art that welcomed imperfection, absurdity and physical interaction.

Among the works on view is a striking group of West’s Passstücke (or ‘Adaptives’): handmade objects fashioned from plaster, papier-mâché and other ‘humble’ materials. Created not to be admired from a distance but to be handled, worn or physically engaged with, these pieces invite a level of interaction that was radical for their time. Rather than treating the viewer as a passive observer, West imagined them as a co-author of the work, activating each sculpture through movement, gesture or play. Awkward, playful and often absurd, the Passstücke blur the line between art object and functional prop, transforming the act of viewing into an improvised performance. Other works in the exhibition highlight West’s interest in intimacy, anti-monumentality and mischief. Collaged drawings, rough assemblages and painted panels reflect a raw, tactile sensibility that rejects traditional notions of beauty.

By the late 1980s, West had begun experimenting with furniture, creating pieces that hover between art and utility, such as chairs, divans and tables. Some of these early pieces are also on display. Clunky, colourful and often barely functional, they invite people to sit and lounge, only to undermine the expectations of comfort they create. With these hybrids, West took a further step towards collapsing the division between the art object and lived experience. The gallery is transformed from a sanctuary for contemplation into a space of negotiation — between body and form, viewer and artwork, play and critique.

Importantly, many of the works on display are from private collections, including that of Peter Pakesch, West’s long-time friend and early supporter. These loans lend the exhibition a sense of intimacy and historicity, emphasising not only West’s creations, but also the personal and intellectual contexts in which they took shape.

Franz West’s influence on contemporary sculpture cannot be overstated. Long before the concepts of relational aesthetics and participatory art became institutional buzzwords, West had already explored this territory, not through theory, but through touch, wit and a lasting scepticism towards fixed meaning. His legacy is not just in what he created, but also in how he encouraged others to contribute to his work through their actions, reactions and interpretations. (Luc Franken)

The Dutch artist Viviane Sassen (1972), who lived in Kenya as a child and has lived in Tanzania as an adult, attended both fashion design and fine art school in the Netherlands. Her facility for making objects rather than pictures is refreshing. Although she also works as a fashion photographer and her artistic medium is the photograph, she is really an image-maker. She constructs shaped photographs, plays with scale and routinely manipulates images’ colours and forms, thus going far beyond ‘set-up photography’. Sassen has remarked, ‘You should always be able to judge a photograph on different grounds, on political, social, emotional, but also on personal grounds.’ If that seems like a high bar, her artistic process makes achieving it possible.

Curated by Sassen herself, ‘This Body Made of Stardust’ assembles fifty images and one video, all dating from 2005 to 2025. The artworks are loosely organised around the theme of memento mori, that is, the fleeting nature of life. She prefers memento amoris, as her images capture the ‘beauty and awe of passage’ from earthly dust to stardust. For this exhibition, which coincided with the 20th edition of Fotografia Europea, she has placed her images in dialogue with sculptures by Evgeny Antufiev, Kaarina Kaikkonen, Fabrizio Prevedello and TARWUK (Sassen selected the artworks from Collezione Maramotti).

Given her penchant for shaping both light and shadow, she considers herself no less a sculptor than a photographer. Notions of contortion, distortion and twisting are omnipresent here. Apparently, as a child Sassen played with perspective by twisting her body into unfamiliar postures, leading her to conceive the body as something to be reshaped and reimagined. Although her images are definitely alluring — many are even erotic — she makes a deliberate efforts to deflect the male gaze, as evidenced by the often obscured faces in her pictures.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue with texts by Federica Angelucci of STEVENSON, Cape Town, and the art critic and curator Marco Scotini. (Sue Spaid)

From 6 June to 25 July, the Grand Palais in Paris is hosting a major new installation by the Brazilian artist Ernesto Neto, renowned for his immersive environments that engage the body, the senses and the spirit in a dynamic dialogue with space. The exhibition offers more than just a visual spectacle: it’s a place of encounter, celebration and grounding, staged beneath the glass-and-steel expanse of one of Paris’s most iconic cultural landmarks.

The title itself is a poetic fusion of elements central to Neto’s practice. Barco (boat) evokes the idea of journey and migration, of moving collectively across space and time. Tambor (drum) refers to rhythm and ritual, to the heartbeat of communal life, and the sonic memory of indigenous and Afro-Brazilian traditions. And Terra (earth) roots the experience in the elemental: soil, body, ancestry and the ecological systems that sustain us. Together, these words form a kind of mantra, a symbolic vessel carrying Neto’s long-standing belief in art as a living, breathing ecosystem.

The installation was created in Neto’s Rio de Janeiro studio and is one of the largest he has ever conceived. Suspended from the dome of the Grand Palais, a monumental, hand-crocheted structure unfurls across the space like an organic canopy. Crafted from raw cotton, tree bark, spices and earth pigments, the piece resembles a forest suspended in air, its woven membranes inviting visitors to wander through corridors of scent, shadow and sound. The air is laced with cinnamon, turmeric and clove. Hammocks and bamboo arches invite you to relax. Musical instruments are scattered throughout, waiting to be played. Neto, who has long resisted the idea of the artwork as merely something to look at, calls visitors to participate. Take off your shoes. Touch the fabric. Breathe the air. Tap a drum. Feel the weight of the world beneath your feet. ‘Nosso Barco Tambor Terra’ is not just about the artwork on display, it is about the people within it, the breath they share, the energy they carry and the connections they (re)discover in a space temporarily freed from the demands of speed and screens. (Luc Franken)

Inspired by art critic John Berger’s essay ‘Why Look at Animals?’ (1977), this exhibition, curated by Katerina Gregos, champions the burgeoning non-human rights movement, elements of which have already been enshrined in the constitutions of Bolivia, Ecuador and Switzerland, among others. Apparently, Greece has recently taken huge steps to adopt a fairly strict legal framework for the protection of animals (primarily companion animals), including a clearer articulation of the obligations expected of pet owners. Even so, animal abuse prevails.

‘Why Look at Animals?’ features over 200 artworks by 60 artists from 30 countries across four continents, much of it intended to spark empathy for non-human animals, while bringing attention to their significance as agential beings. Exhibitions such as this one invite spectators to reconsider speciesism, the flawed view that human animals are naturally superior to non-human animals and are thus justified in exploiting animals, so long as doing so benefits human beings.

While Berger’s main focus was our uncanny desire to observe animals, as epitomised by zoos, the artworks on view here question a range of morally specious human habits such as caging songbirds, factory farming, allowing suffering, hunting for sport, trading exotic pets, experimenting on animals, destroying habitats, driving species extinct, bioengineering species, anthropomorphising non-human animals and ignoring complexity. Although Berger attributed humans’ capacity to distance themselves from non-human animals’ agency to the lack of a shared language, it rather seems that the cause lies in the nature of the human species itself, given how terribly some humans treat other humans. If, as Berger claims, non-human animals are largely absent from humans’ lives, hopefully exhibitions such as ‘Why Look at Animals?’ not only draw humans closer to non-human animals, but boost our awareness of non-human animals’ agency. (Sue Spaid)

Since its launch in 1998, the Berlin Biennale has evolved into one of Europe’s most vital platforms for contemporary art. With each edition entrusted to a new curator or curatorial team, the Biennale remains in constant renewal: open to experimentation, driven by urgency and attuned to the cultural and political currents of its time. The 13th edition, taking place from 14 June to 14 September, continues this tradition with a concept as elusive as it is evocative. Titled ‘passing the fugitive on’, it is curated by Zasha Colah, with Valentina Viviani as assistant curator. Their proposal centres on the idea of fugitivity, not just as escape, but as a conscious artistic and ethical position. Inspired by Berlin’s urban foxes, which roam the outskirts of the city largely unnoticed, the Biennale explores how art can operate outside institutional systems. It asks how art might create its own rules or values, resisting imposed structures and opening up new ways of connecting and making meaning.

As usual, the Biennale unfolds across multiple venues, forming a meandering trail through central Berlin. The KW Institute for Contemporary Art remains the Biennale’s familiar base, while the Sophiensæle provides a platform for theatre and performance. At Hamburger Bahnhof, the exhibition connects with one of the city’s key museums for contemporary art, and a former courthouse in Moabit becomes an interesting setting for exploring ideas of justice, structure and resistance. Together, these locations reflect the Biennale’s restless themes and anchor it physically within Berlin’s complex urban landscape.

By focusing on what is fleeting, unconventional or quietly defiant, this edition offers a vision of art that moves gently, thinks critically and leaves something behind. At its core lies the question: How can art stay connected to the world without being defined by it? By inviting us to explore these ideas while moving through the city, the Biennale presents itself not as a solution, but as a path to follow. (Luc Franken)

It’s hard to imagine a bigger topic than ‘infrastructure’, both in terms of scale and significance. In an era when infrastructure issues range from supply chain disruptions to giant ‘distribution centres’ (warehouses) replacing rural farms and AI data centres draining local water and energy sources, it’s a great relief to learn that artists are ‘on it’, but are they really? ‘The Geopolitics of Infrastructure’, curated by Nav Haq, demonstrates that infrastructure is indeed a vital art topic. Rather than proposing viable alternatives, the artists featured here draw our attention to lesser-known infrastructure tales primarily affecting Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia.

With over three hours of genuinely interesting videos, visitors will want to either schedule a half-day or plan to visit twice. Tekla Aslanishvili’s fascinating video A State in a State (2022) not only details the role of freight rail in connecting industrial cites and ports, but it explores the solidarity between railroad workers in Ukraine and Belarus, who have thwarted Russian military shipments despite the Belarusian government’s support of Russia. A massive installation by Mirwan Andan & Iswanto Hartono explores the history of the Games of the New Emerging Forces (GANEFO), first held in Jakarta in 1963 with 51 participating nations. Given the infrastructure necessary to host the Olympic Games, it’s hardly surprising that President Sukarno instigated an alternative. When Xi Jinping launched the Belt and Road Initiative in Indonesia in 2015, he emphasised the special relationship between China and Indonesia to gather supporters, as conveyed by Köken Ergun & Fetra Danu’s beautifully animated video, China, Beijing, I Love You! (2023).

Assem Hendawi’s elaborate video Everything Under Heaven (2022) depicts Egypt’s perilous efforts to convert dystopic wastelands into concrete utopias. Jonas Staal’s New World Summit (2012—2018) assembles maquettes for parliaments and embassies that recognise stateless peoples, such as the Kurds inhabiting four nations. Mountains of Gold and Silver Are Not as Good as Mountains of Blue and Green (2020), Zheng Mahler’s investigation of the transformation of Jingdezhen’s kaolin pits into rare-earth mining sites deploys shape-shifting holograms that oscillate between mountains and nuggets. Jean Katambayi Mukendi, whose art tends to address electricity disparities — see his Afrolampes (2017—2025) and The Concentrator (2022), last seen at Z33 — is presenting several elaborate machines made from found materials that proudly power up. (Sue Spaid)

‘We couldn’t sit down together without creating something new, conjuring up dreams.’ — Niki de Saint Phalle, ‘A little of my story with you Jean’ (1997).

Outside comes inside: In this charming show we are invited to meet Niki de Saint Phalle and her husband Jean Tinguely as an artist couple and the passionate love between these two is tangible. Many of the works have come from the Foundation Niki de Saint Phalle, based in the couple’s marital home at the Auberge Cheval Blanc just outside Paris, and this rural exhibition space feels so intimate it’s almost as if you’ve been invited for tea. The show is curated to give a sense of how their individual and joint perspectives worked. For Niki de Saint Phalle, art was not only her salvation but also her touchstone, and as her granddaughter Bloum kindly explains, the couple created art with the passionate certainty of those who had rejected all other beliefs. While they were playful to the point of breaking the law, as founding members of the Nouveaux réalistes they also took what they did very seriously.

The elements of transgression in their joint output almost feel like a form of ‘resistance’. Certainly, guerilla tactics were employed to erect their major collaborative work Le Cyclop, put up overnight in Milly-la-Forêt in France. Luckily, an enlightened local Major allowed the art to stay. But who knows what permission was obtained for the sculpture Suicide of the Machine, or La Vittoria — a ten-metre golden penis sculpture which the pair blew up outside the Duomo in Milan.

For Niki de Saint Phalle, making public art about serious matters was a necessary expression of the human condition. She identified with the work of Joseph Ferdinand Cheval, and eventually created her own outdoor sculpture, the Tarot Garden. Located in Pescia Fiorentina and opened to the public in 1998, the Tarot Garden is her odyssey and opus magus. Remarkably, it was self-funded with a successful perfume line.

Tinguely’s poetic machines are as delightful today as when they were first made, with their whirring and unexpected jolts — they are alive, curious and enchanting. Kinetic beauty created out of ugly machine parts. They manufacture only wonder.

The exhibition also introduces us to Saint Phalle’s first functional sculptures, made for the film Un Reve plus long que la nuit (1976). The pieces have a fairy-tale quality and speak of their time. In fact, at this time Saint Phalle and Tinguely had their studio in the Impasse Ronsin in Paris, alongside Les Lalanne.

If the first two large galleries are dedicated to Saint Phalle and Tinguely’s work as individual artists, the final space shows what our star-crossed lovers created together. La Grande Tête is simple yet delightful. A large, beautiful face created by Saint Phalle is lit up with circus lights and animated by Tinguely. As the piece turns towards the spectator, it works like a mirror that only gives a beautiful positive reflection, a love letter to dispel any insecurity. As you leave the galleries, Les Trois Graces send you off, endlessly joyful in their bathing suits. Though they might be a little cold — this is Sommerset, after all, and not Saint-Tropez. (Sarah Hyde)