Shows & Exhibitions

The basketball court as canvas? It’s not such a stretch—the likes of Robert Indiana, Yinka Illori, and KAWS have all put their artistic spins on hardtops and hardwoods over the years. Houston-based Trenton Doyle Hancock is the latest artist to leave his mark on one such court, though, notably, his entry isn’t bound for the gymnasium, but the museum.
On March 18, the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston will unveil Hancock’s latest commission, titled CAMH Court, within its Brown Foundation Gallery. The first artist-designed basketball court installed at a museum, the work won’t just be on view, but entirely playable too.
Visitors are invited to play on the court on a first-come-first-served basis, with a youth court available for those aged 12 and younger (basketballs will be provided). On either court, players will get to dribble across surfaces and dunk off a backboard painted with Hancock’s signature Bringback characters, cartoon figures the artist invented and has scattered throughout his poppy body of work.
CAMH Court, Hancock told Artnet News, sees “basketball and my art come together to make space for pure play.”
An overview of CAMH Court by Trenton Doyle Hancock. Photo courtesy of the artist and CAMH.
According to museum’s executive director Hesse McGraw, CAMH had envisioned installing a basketball court within its building as early as the 1990s. But, institutional rigidity aside, the gallery didn’t lend itself naturally to a site where basketball could be played. 
In Hancock’s view, the space represented “a unique architectural environment,” particularly for its dimensions that take the form of “a famous parallelogram that has vexed artists for generations.”
To fit the work into the space meant canting a regulation-sized court into that famed parallelogram, with help from project partners Adidas Basketball and Creative Court Concepts—in turn putting an oblique angle on the game.
“This space creates a distorted and torqued basketball court that’s highly dynamic and generates a new kind of game,” Hancock added. “I’m interested in new types of basketball play emerging here.”
Trenton Doyle Hancock. Photo courtesy of the artist and CAMH.
In fact, “play” has long been an operative word for the artist, who, across paintings, sculptures, and murals, has unfurled a lore of his own making, threaded throughout with elements of pop culture, comic books, and art history. His self-made universe is home to a regular cast of characters with names like Vegans, Mounds, and Torpedo Boy, who engage in ongoing good versus evil battles—a flight of fancy that Hancock has sustained for nearly two decades.
“My artistic practice is play. My paintings are like large toys, and my studio is a playground. I’m trying to create new worlds where things might be skewed, but your imagination is on fire,” Hancock said.
For his first basketball court, Hancock deployed his Bringbacks as a way for players to engage and above all, play with his fictional characters. “I wanted to create a place where people could lose themselves in my artwork,” he explained. “I love the idea that people will try to play basketball despite the best efforts of the Bringbacks.”
This latest project with CAMH also builds on Hancock’s long-standing relationship with the institution that staged his first solo museum exhibition in 2001 and his most recent retrospective, “Skin and Bones, 20 Years of Drawing,” in 2014.
McGraw, for his part, sees CAMH Court as offering an unexpected encounter with contemporary art as much as a “unique expression of basketball as art.” More so, echoing Hancock, he views the exhibition as a way for the artist “to meet audiences where they are.”
“What comes next,” he added, “will be up to all the players.”
CAMH Court is on view at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, 5216 Montrose Boulevard, Houston, Texas, March 18–April 27, 2023.
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In the 50 years since Picasso’s death in 1973, his profound influence on contemporary art and culture has shown no signs of slowing down, continuing to appear in new guises in the 21st century. This is the lens through which the many phases of his practice are reconsidered in a new show celebrating the anniversary at the Picasso Museum in Paris, which has been assembled with help from British fashion designer Paul Smith, who served as guest artistic director.
“Picasso Celebration” waves goodbye to the white cube in which we are all too accustomed to seeing modern art, instead giving us a suite of newly designed galleries that feel gimmicky but fun. Smith has noted his particular interest in appealing to younger audiences.
Pablo Picasso, Paulo as Harlequin (1924), hanging at the “Celebrate Picasso” exhibition in collaboration with Paul Smith at the Picasso Museum in Paris. Photo: © Vinciane Lebrun/Voyez-Vous and Succession Picasso 2023.
Early on in the survey, for example, Picasso’s obsession with the pantomime characters Harlequin and Pierrot, featured here in two large oil paintings and a few sketches, is brought vividly to life as the colorful patterns from the subjects’ outfit jump out from the canvas and are splashed across the neighboring walls.
Touches like these jazz up an otherwise conventional, roughly chronological retelling of Picasso’s story—starting with the Blue Period and Cubism before examining works relating to his most famous masterpieces like Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) and Guernica (1937)—so that it feels genuinely fresh and easy to engage with.
Installation view of “Celebrate Picasso,” in collaboration with Paul Smith at the Picasso Museum in Paris. Photo: © Vinciane Lebrun/Voyez-Vous and Succession Picasso 2023.
Among these already familiar works, however, is the inclusion of pieces by living artists who are strongly inspired by Picasso or interested in similar themes. One example can be found in a room dedicated to the ethnographic objects of African and Oceanic origin that Picasso collected from markets in Paris, a selection of which are included in the show. Picasso was seeking a radical break from Western tradition, but today his use of the objects has been problematized by a post-colonial critical lens.
Welcoming more contemporary perspectives, the museum has staged these items alongside Landscapes of My Childhood Remembered (2015), a triptych of collages by the Nigerian artist Obi Okigbo. The artist’s use of traditional Igbo masks and sculptures relates to her exploration of a local custom known as the Mbari rite.
Elsewhere, a powerful 1997 work by the Congolese painter Chéri Samba is a direct response to Picasso’s thorny legacy. Standing in for the archetypal Western artist, his Picasso looks greedily over at the continent of Africa and its culture, represented here by a traditional mask. The painting honors the many African artists whose work has been othered, fetishized, and consumed without proper representation in Western museums.
Chéri Samba, Quand il n’yavait plus rien d’autre que… L’Afrique restait une pensée (1997). Photo: © Florian Kleinefenn, courtesy Galerie MAGNIN-A.
Additions like these are part of a wider strategy on the part of the museum to continue to recontextualize Picasso’s practice for new generations. The result is that even those already familiar with the gems of this collection can expect to keep discovering something new.
Nothing could be more of-the-moment than drawing a connection between groundbreaking modern and contemporary art movements and other art forms. In recent years, many luxury and high fashion brands have been clamoring to be associated with the world’s best-loved artists, including Louis Vuitton’s much-discussed partnership with Yayoi Kusama.
Installation view of “Celebrate Picasso,” in collaboration with Paul Smith at the Picasso Museum in Paris. Photo: © Vinciane Lebrun/Voyez-Vous and Succession Picasso 2023.
Smith himself is represented by a multicolored rug leading visitors from the second floor to the third floor. Otherwise, the revered designer’s perspective is communicated almost entirely via the wacky color schemes.
“Truthfully, l have little academic knowledge of Picasso, so the project is very much about visual and spontaneous associations,” he told the museum’s director Cécile Debray and head conservator Joanne Snrech during an interview for the exhibition’s catalogue. “I’m a very visual person, so it always come back to approaching things in a visual way.”
“In a way, I’m covering myself from potential criticism by some of the more academic connoisseurs of Picasso in the art world, who might think this exhibition is disrespectful in some way,” he added.
Delicately handling the complicated public image, this new exhibition leaves us with little doubt that Picasso’s influence will remain strong for at least another 50 years into the future.
“Picasso Celebration: The Collection in a New Light!,” under the artistic direction of Paul Smith, runs until August 27, 2023. 

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When artist and developer Josie Williams began looking into A.I. chatbots some two years ago, she was immediately taken with the technology, but also with the possibilities of what more she could do with it. These natural-language applications, after all, suffer from a clear set of limitations. They are told to make relational connections and stick to syntax in their outputs, and most damningly, have been trained on datasets that often lean European, leading to the technology’s notable racial bias.
“What would happen,” Williams wondered, “if I used the words of radical Black thought leaders in an A.I. dataset, so that was the only thing that a chatbot could use to formulate responses about itself or the world?”
Thus was born Ancestral Archives, Williams’s latest project encompassing four A.I. chatbots that will be unveiled at an installation at SXSW in Austin, Texas, on March 10. 
Each of these chatbots has been built on a dataset exclusively containing the work of a Black author, inviting viewers, in effect, to interact with these subjects in an A.I.-mediated conversations. The four thinkers—James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Octavia E. Butler, and Zora Neale Hurston—are the “ancestors” referenced in the work’s title, who, Williams told Artnet News, “really allowed me to have a sense of identity, and feel seen and heard as a Black femme queer person.”
Josie Williams. Photo: EY.
To further maximize the technology’s potential, Williams lifted constraints when it came to syntax in the chatbots’ responses, allowing their output to be “more abstract and fluid,” she said. “I was really curious how an A.I. chatbot would say things, given the dataset, when having free bounds for how it can deliver that information.”
The results, Williams admitted, were often “nonsensical,” but also, hauntingly poetic. She brings up an interaction with the James Baldwin bot that, when asked if it was dreaming, returned with: “A dream so infantile / That is practically forbidden, forbidden, forbidden.”
“I call them virtual poets,” said Williams, “because they produce really beautiful couplets that only have actual meaning in the terms of [the user’s] contextual understanding.”
The work’s physical installation will feature four traditional Nigerian masks to house each chatbot, all of them designed by Williams in a nod to her West African heritage. These masks, she explained, played key roles in traditional ceremonies, enabling wearers to channel their ancestors and their ancestors, in spirit, to be part of these rituals.
Ancestral Archives is embedded with that same purpose, staging meetings between tradition and technology, forebears and heirs. “I’m by no way trying to reanimate them,” Williams said of her ancestral subjects, “but rather [highlight] that the energy and meaning behind their words will always be here to inspire and lead us.”
The Octavia E. Butler chatbot, part of Ancestral Archives. Photo courtesy of the artist and New Inc.
The project is supported by New Inc, the New Museum’s innovation incubator, in partnership with Ernst and Young, the multinational consultancy which recently initiated its EY Metaverse Lab aimed at building inclusivity and equity into the virtual space. In addition to Williams’s piece, New Inc and EY are backing the development of a host of other tech-assisted art with an eye on an inclusive metaverse.
“Where Black speculative futures fit into how A.I. is measured and learned is really interesting for a practitioner who has always felt like her story has been on the outskirts of technology’s development,” Salome Asega, the director of New Inc, told Artnet News. “It’s our place as a program that nurtures cutting edge and emerging art practices to support the research and the questions artists are asking.”
Indeed, the question posed by Ancestral Archives is less about the creative potential of A.I. than how Black experiences and identities can be centered in the build-out of A.I.—making them the core, not an afterthought. 
Williams further intends to build this same inclusivity into the delivery of Ancestral Archives. Following its physical launch, she hopes to host the project online to ensure it an expansive reach beyond the niche corners of technology or academia, where it might be “hard for people from under-resourced demographics to have access to it.”
“It’s this idea of building for people who are most marginalized rather than building for people who are already benefiting from the system,” she emphasized, “starting from the outside in, rather than the inside out.”
“SXSW Art Program Installation: Ancestral Archives by Josie Williams” will be on view at the Austin Convention Center, 500 Cesar Chavez St, Austin, Texas, March 10–17, 2023.
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Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral is on track to reopen to worshippers and tourists in 2024—but not in time for that year’s Summer Olympics, as originally hoped.
In the wake of the fire that nearly destroyed the historic cathedral on April 15, 2019, President Emmanuel Macron had vowed to rebuild the landmark in time for the Paris games.
That goal was always ambitious, and became even more so after pandemic lockdown restrictions meant work ground to a halt for much of 2020. (Concerns about lead pollution also slowed work.) It took two years just to stabilize and reinforce the structure—which was at risk of collapse—before reconstruction could begin in earnest.
“My job is to be ready to open this cathedral in 2024. And we will do it,” Jean-Louis Georgelin, who is overseeing the reconstruction efforts, told the Associated Press. “We are fighting every day for that and we are on a good path.”
A wooden model of Notre Dame cathedral on view in “Notre Dame de Paris: at the heart of the construction site,” a new underground exhibition in the forecourt of the cathedral. Photo by Thierry Chesnot/Getty Images.
But as recently as last July, the €846 million ($865 million) project appeared to be on track to begin welcoming visitors in summer 2024.
Now, it seems that travelers planning to attend next year’s Olympics will have to make a return visit if they wish to enter the famed church. (And even after Notre Dame reopens in late 2024, work on the site is expected to continue into 2025.)
The legend of Sainte-Genevieve Panel of a stained-glass window from the cloister of the sacristy of Notre-Dame cathedral on display in “Notre-Dame de Paris: at the heart of the construction site,” a new underground exhibition in the forecourt of the cathedral. Photo by Thierry Chesnot/Getty Images.
But while the church remains closed, today marks the opening of the new exhibition “Notre-Dame de Paris: At the Heart of the Construction Site,” staged in an underground space outside the cathedral.
The attraction is free of charge, unless visitors want to purchase a ticket for a virtual reality show on the history of Notre Dame.
Remnants of charred wood from Notre Dame cathedral are displayed during “Notre Dame de Paris: at the heart of the construction site,” a new underground exhibition in the forecourt of the cathedral. Photo by Thierry Chesnot/Getty Images.
The rest of the show gives viewers a glimpse into the ongoing work to reopen the cathedral. Some displays illustrate the devastating effects of the fire, such as a display of charred roof timbers and led ornaments melted by the intense heat of the blaze. The exhibition also celebrates the expertise and skills of workers bringing the church back to life, providing details about how the restoration is being carried out.
Stained glass windows and other artworks from the cathedral are on view alongside a scale model of Notre Dame, as well as part of the church’s massive pipe organ. The instrument needed to be disassembled and cleaned; putting the 8,000 pipes back together is expected to take a full year.
The best-know of the thirty seven representations of the Virgin Mary at Notre Dame cathedral on view in “Notre Dame de Paris: at the heart of the construction site,” a new underground exhibition in the forecourt of the cathedral. Photo by Thierry Chesnot/Getty Images.
As reconstruction work continues, French officials also anticipate beginning to rebuild the church’s rooftop spire, which collapsed during the blaze, later this year.
“The return of the spire in Paris’s sky will in my opinion be the symbol that we are winning the battle of Notre Dame,” Georgelin said.
Following the fire, the question of how to rebuild the spire became the subject of a spirited debate. The spire as it stood before the blaze was the work of architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, who oversaw an 1844 restoration at Notre Dame, and created many of the well-known sculptural details on the 13th-century cathedral’s exterior, including gargoyles that serve as drain pipes and decorative grotesques.
A polychrome angel’s head from Notre Dame cathedral on view in “Notre Dame de Paris: at the heart of the construction site,” a new underground exhibition in the forecourt of the cathedral. Photo by Thierry Chesnot/Getty Images.
Initially, Macron had proposed an international competition to redesign the 315-foot-tall spire with “a contemporary architectural gesture.” The idea sparked some intriguing ideas, but also controversial, and ultimately scrapped.
A team of 1,000 people are currently at work on the cathedral, using period-appropriate materials and techniques to faithfully rebuild the structure. That includes a stone vaulted ceiling—not modern-day concrete—and the wooden timbers of “The Forest,” as the attic is known, which is being reconstructed from 1,000 150-year-old trees.
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Forget animated light projections. Transfix, the latest in immersive art experiences, will bring 50 interactive, kinetic, illuminated artworks—including pyrotechnics—to Las Vegas, in the first stop of a planned tour that will bring monumental, festival-style works to cities across the U.S.
The project is the brainchild of Michael Blatter and Tom Stinchfield of New York marketing agency Mirrorball. They originally conceived of the idea during the pandemic as a free, COVID-friendly event staged in Brooklyn Bridge Park that would support artists who normally made work for large-scale festivals like the Burning Man gathering in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert.
“These things shouldn’t be gathering dust in a warehouse—they should be out on the road, they should be installed somewhere where people can enjoy them and be as inspired by them as we are,” Stinchfield told Artnet News.
“Most of the artists who make these big pieces for these events are only doing it out of passion, which is really beautiful. But afterward, it’s often out of their pocket to bring it back to wherever they may live, and store it in a warehouse or their studio, and they end up losing money,” he added. “It’s a very niche market to to sell a piece of art that’s five stories tall!”

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Stinchfield and Blatter actually met years ago through a mutual friend who suggested Stinchfield might benefit creatively from accompanying Blatter on one of his annual trips to Burning Man.
“Michael said, ‘I’m not gonna take some random person to Burning Man.’ We had lunch, and about a week later we were sharing an RV in the desert,” Stinchfield recalled.
The Brooklyn Bridge Park project to showcase the kind of art they encountered there never came to fruition. But it did become the basis of the business plan for Transfix, which the duo likens to a high-production value rock tour for experiential art.
They hope that Transfix will help create a broader audience for the ambitious, large-scale works created for Burning Man and other similar events. (Only half of the art was originally created for the Nevada gathering.)
Christopher Bauder & KiNK, AXION. Photo by Ralph Larmann, courtesy of the artist and Transfix.
“This is art that was never created within the existing museum and gallery infrastructure,” Blatter told Artnet News. “This art is gigantic, it’s illuminated, some of it’s fire-breathing—it’s certainly not traditional museum-style art.”
Transfix aims to create a new source of income for this kind of work by paying participating artists a rental fee for their artworks.
“We can give artists predictable income, and free up space in their studios while giving these pieces a place to be seen and recognized by the masses,” Stinchfield said, noting that many of the artists they approached were so eager to stop having to store these works that they would have happily lent them for free.
The Las Vegas edition will open at Resorts World in April, and will run through at least September—although that could be extended if things go well.
Marco Cochrane, R-Evolution. Photo courtesy of the artist and TRANSFIX.
There will be works by artists such as Marco Cochrane, Foldhaus Collective, Christopher Schardt, Playmodes, HOTTEA, and Kevin Clark. The largest work is Christopher Bauder and KiNK’s Axion, a 10,000-square-foot illuminated sonic experiential installation that has never been shown in the U.S.
“We’re taking the underbelly of a 747 to fly that piece over here from Berlin,” Stinchfield said.
Works will be on view in 130 shipping containers in a sprawling 200,000 square-foot outdoor venue, with two-story viewing platforms to experience the monumental art from multiple vantage points—plus 10 bars where you can grab a drink. (Exploring the entire maze-like exhibition is expected to take about two hours.)
“It will be a great place to hang out and experience art in a whole new way,” Blatter said.
Pablo González Vargas, ILUMINA. Photo courtesy of the artist and TRANSFIX.
If Transfix’s ticket sales prove profitable, the proceeds will be used to commission new works for future residencies, with plans for stops in Los Angeles, Miami, New York, and Chicago.
“I’ve been participating as a sculpture artist at Burning Man since 1999, and I can tell you Burning Man creative culture is a gold mine of large-scale art. We pioneered massive, immersive and experiential art out there in that dessert,” Kate Raudenbush, whose 25-foot mirrored pyramid As Above, So Below is one of the inaugural works at Transfix, told Artnet News in an email.
She’s tired of being told that displaying her monumental works for free will provide valuable “exposure,” and is eager to create even bigger and more ambitious projects as Transfix takes off.
“I’m already dreaming up new ideas!” Raudenbush said.
“The ultimate goal is to build a creative ecosystem where people can be inspired by this art, but also give artists space to create,” Stinchfield added. “What we’re most excited about is writing that first check to an artist commissioning a piece that they’ve dreamed of their whole life that nobody would ever fund.”
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Now in its 19th year, Collect Art Fair returns (March 3–5) to Somerset House—the impressive neoclassical structure on the banks of the Thames—showcasing unique contemporary craft and design from close to 40 international galleries representing more than 400 living artist-makers. The fair attracted over 9,100 visitors in 2022.
“Collectors, interior designers, art advisors, and enthusiasts will be vying with arts institutions, such as the Victoria & Albert Museum, to buy and commission contemporary craft across disciplines and materials,” according to fair organizers. Fair-goers will discover works spanning ceramics, glass, lacquer, jewelry, metalwork, textiles and fiber, wood and paper, as well as reused, repurposed, and recycled materials.
Collect 2023 at Somerset House in the U.K. Photo: David Parry. Courtesy of Collect 2023.
A number of galleries from South Korea and Asia will be returning post-pandemic. “We’ve always had very good representation of Asian and East Asian work,” said Isobel Dennis, Fair Director at Collect, to Artnet News, “While collectors will still be seeing incredible work across a range of materials, I think it’s the subtleties and the richness of these cross-cultural influences that will be really exciting for audiences both on and offline.”
This year’s Collect also presents an opportunity to acquire work from makers who’ve been incubated by the Loewe Foundation, including Healim Shin (Siat Gallery, South Korea), Keeryong Choi (Bullseye Projects, USA), and Jaiik Lee (Gallery Sklo, South Korea), among others.
Keeryong Cho, presented by Bullseye Gallery. Photo: David Parry. Courtesy of Collect 2023.
Since 2017, Collect has worked with the online marketplace Artsy.net. The partnership came into its own in 2021 when the pandemic forced the closure of the physical fair. “Artsy provided us with a way to host the entire fair virtually online without having to build all the infrastructure ourselves,” Dennis said. The hybrid model quickly established itself as another ‘new normal’ with Collect becoming Artsy’s top performing fair of 2021.
Xanthe Somers, presented by Galerie REVEL. Photo: David Parry. Courtesy of Collect 2023.
“What we’ve seen—even last year as the world opened up—is our traffic has remained pretty consistent with that year,” Jennifer Pratt, Director of Fair Partnerships Team at Artsy, revealed. This growth is attributed in part to a new generation of collectors who have the confidence to purchase online. “What’s really cool is that young collectors are beginning to buy works that perhaps they didn’t even know existed before,” Pratt observed.
Collect Art Fair, March 3–5, 2023, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 1LA, United Kingdom.

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Every two or three years since 2000, cities around the world have vied to play host to a massive celebration of LGBTQ Pride events in an event dubbed WorldPride. Rome, Jerusalem, London, Toronto, Madrid, New York, Copenhagen, and Malmo have all set the stage for the events, which include concerts, exhibitions, marches, and conferences.
Now, for the first time, WorldPride is taking place in the southern hemisphere in the city of Sydney, Australia, coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the first-ever Australian Gay Pride Week and the fifth anniversary of Marriage Equality in Australia.
Below, we’ve rounded up some of the most exciting exhibitions taking place across the city.

“Queer Encounters” at the Art Gallery of New South Walesthrough March 5, 2023
Sione Tuívailala Monū, KAKALA (TRIPTYCH) (2021). Courtesy of the artist.
The Art Gallery of New South Wales is bringing together the work of artists Dennis Golding, Bhenji Ra, Sione Tuívailala Monū, and Sidney McMahon in an immersive installation that responds to the historic entrance of the museum, creating a “queer threshold.” Through cinematic photography, performance, and video, the artists imagine alternate landscapes through a queer lens.

“Paul Yore: WORD MADE FLESH” at Carriageworksthrough February 26, 2023
Installation view, “Paul Yore: WORD MADE FLESH” (2022). Courtesy of Carriageworks. Photo: Zan Wimberley.
Carriageworks is presenting a maximalist, raucous, and engaging gesamtkunstwerk, encompassing artist Paul Yore’s handmade quilts, banners, sculptural collages, and architectural interventions. “WORD MADE FLESH imagines a queer alternative reality, erected from the wasteland of the Anthropocene, performatively implicating itself into the debased spectacle of hyper-capitalist society.”

“Karla Dickens: Embracing Shadows” at the Cambelltown Arts Centrethrough March 12, 2023
Karla Dickens, For Sale (2022) [detail]. Photo: Michelle Eabry.This 30-year career survey of Lismore-based Wiradjuri artist Karla Dickens features important bodies of work spanning collage, sculpture, photography, painting, film, and poetry that reflect on a lifetime of generational trauma and learning to accept her identity. Her searing and insightful artworks probe broad political and societal issues like environmental degradation and institutional racism, as well as personal experiences of being a woman.

“Braving Time: Contemporary Art in Queer Australia“ at NAS Galleriesthrough March 18, 2023
Amos Gebhardt, Family Portrait (2020). Courtesy of the artist and NAS Galleries.
This group exhibition curated by Richard Perram highlights the work of 31 artists  who bring unique perspectives toward queerness in Australia today. Representing a large swath of identities, the artists address themes of beauty, ancestry, heritage, self-love, and politics.

“Absolutely Queer” at Powerhouse Ultimothrough December 2023
Mardi Gras costumes by Renè Rivas in “Absolutely Queer.” Photo: Zan Wimberley.
This exhibition is truly a celebration of the queer creative community in Sydney, featuring artists, designers, and performers in an explosion of color, texture, and form. From the inflatable installations by Matthew Aberline and Maurice Goldberg of “The Beautiful and Useful Studio” to the cartoonist and social activist Norrie to the Mardi Gras costume designer Renè Rivas, “Absolutely Queer” is an absolute must-see.

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Visitors could be prosecuted for viewing some of the materials included in an art exhibition being staged by Wikileaks in London. The show will address tactics of government oppression and the state of freedom of speech in contemporary societies, and includes hard copies of the classified government cables leaked by Julian Assange in 2010.
Ai Weiwei, Dread Scott, Santiago Sierra, Andrei Molodkin, and the late Vivienne Westwood are among the artists ensemble also featured in the upcoming exhibition. Titled “States of Violence,” the show that will run from March 24 to April 8 is a first-time collaboration between the international nonprofit, the London-based art organization a/political, and the Wau Holland Foundation, named for the German activist cofounder of the Chaos Computer Club. The exhibition coincides with the fourth anniversary of the detention of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in the U.K. capital. Assange remains in the high security Belmarsh Prison while the U.S. attempts to extradite him under the Espionage Act, which could lead to 175 years of imprisonment.
The show will also feature Secret+Noforn (2022) by the Institute for Dissent & Datalove. The body of work is said to be the largest physical publication of classified U.S. diplomatic cables from the 2010 WikiLeaks Cablegate—the publication of which led to Assange’s prosecution. Consisting of 66 books, the presentation will be the first time the top secret government cables have been shown in hard copy in the U.K.
Dread Scott, Obliterated Power Pentagon. Courtesy of the artist.
Although the cables have been widely available online for over a decade, possession and access of the materials may still come with legal consequences as the American Espionage Act enacted in 1917 is still valid today. This means that visitors at the exhibition opening one of the 66 books are advised that they risk being prosecuted for the same crime for which Assange is facing extradition.
The goal of the exhibition, explained WikiLeaks Ambassador Joseph Farrell, is not just about campaigning for Assange, but raising awareness about wider threats to freedom of speech. “If they are successful in getting an Australian out of Europe, the precedent will be set for a British journalist that writes something that the Chinese government doesn’t like—there’s nothing to stop the Chinese government from requesting the extradition and putting them in prison. It is a much greater issue,” Farrell told Artnet News.
The organizers hope the artworks on show demonstrate various forms of violence and institutional oppression that have been employed by the states to target dissidents.
Andrei Molodkin, Wikileaks Blood Logo. Courtesy of the artist.
The curatorial team is still finalizing the exhibition plan and declined to say exactly how many works and how many artists will be featured in a/political’s Kennington venue. “We hope that culture is the last free space to be speaking about this. But even culture, even artists are struggling for their freedom of speech. A number of artists we work with have been imprisoned or on the wrong side of the law or their work being censored,” said a spokesperson of a/political.
Among the works on show will be Ai Weiwei’s photography series Study of Perspective, which sees the Chinese artist-activist raising his middle finger to pieces of architecture representing the institutional authority. One of the works the series, Tiananmen, which has been censored in Hong Kong, will also be on display. Works by the legendary designer Westwood, supported by the Vivienne Foundation, will “have a strong presence” at show, according to a/political, as well as a public program hosted by hip-hop artist and activist Lowkey. A closing music event will be held in collaboration with Shangri-La Glastonbury on April 8.
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