Shows & Exhibitions

Even authors who create elaborate fictional landscapes need directions sometimes. That much is clear in “Mapping Fiction,” a new exhibition at the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in California, which examines the ways authors and cartographers have mapped out fantastical worlds both like and unlike our own. 
The show coincides with the centennial of James Joyce’s opus, Ulysses, and sure enough, several relics related to the book—including a first edition copy, a typescript draft of one of its chapters, and various intaglio prints of Dublin as described by the author—are on display. 
But it wasn’t just the anniversary of Joyce’s novel that inspired the show, explained Karla Nielsen, the Huntington’s curator of literary collections who organized the effort.
“Joyce adamantly did not want Ulysses published with a schema, a map of Dublin, any type of explanation really,” Nielsen said in a statement. “His resistance provoked me to think about how maps function when inset into a print novel. How do they influence how readers imagine the narrative?”
Octavia E. Butler, Map of Acorn from notes for Parable of the Talents (ca. 1994). © Octavia E. Butler. Courtesy of The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.
Some 70 items gathered from the museum’s collection offer viewers answers to the curator’s prompt. Among the highlights are elaborate maps that accompanied early editions of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island and Kidnapped, and George R. R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones. Meanwhile, Octavia E. Butler’s hand-drawn—and unpublished—diagrams of her own imagined landscapes provide a peek into her processes of writing Parable of the Talents and Parable of the Trickster (which was never published).
There are plenty of treats for rare book fans, such as early editions of Miguel de Cervantes’s El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha (The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha), Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days. The latter is presented next to a vintage board game inspired by Nellie Bly, a journalist who herself circumnavigated the world following the publication of Verne’s novel. (It only took her 72 days).
See more images from “Mapping Fiction” below.
Map from front endpapers to The Odyssey of Homer (1935). © Oxford University Press, Inc. Courtesy of The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.
D.W. Kellogg & Co., The Open Country of a Woman’s Heart (1833-42). © Nancy and Henry Rosin Collection. Courtesy of The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.
Map from Ludvig Holbergs Nicolai Klimii iter svbterranevm (1741). © The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.
David Lilburn, “The Quays” from In medias res (2006). © David Lilburn, 2021. Courtesy of The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.
A map from Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883). Courtesy of The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.
McLoughlin Bros., “Round the World with Nellie Bly” (1890). Courtesy of Jay T. Last and The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens.
“Mapping Fiction” is on view through May 2 at the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California.
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They may have been created decades ago, but Op Art pioneer Victor Vasarely’s dizzying geometric shapes and colorful graphics have never felt as relevant as they do now, in the age of digital art and NFTs. At least, that’s what an exhibition opening on Thursday at one of London’s biggest department stores strives to demonstrate.
Running until March 31 at Selfridges, the show features a total of 55 works ranging from canvases to ceramics and tapestries. It marks the first display of work by the late French-Hungarian artist in the United Kingdom in more than 50 years.
But the exhibition isn’t just about exposure—it’s also about raising money. Thirty-seven of the works—together with a series of freshly minted NFTs created by London-based NFT platform Substance—are available for sale. Proceeds will go toward the restoration of monumental works at the Fondation Vasarely Museum in Aix-en-Provence, France.
The show also features a creative partnership with fashion brand Paco Rabanne, which will be launched in a new 2022 collection inspired by Vasarely’s art at the Oxford Street store.
Victor Vasarely at Selfridges in London’s Oxford Street. Photo credit: Andrew Meredith and Selfridges.
The exhibition strives to bring the legacy of the Op Art movement pioneer to life while introducing him to a younger audience, said Pierre Vasarely, president of Fondation Vasarely.
“He wanted to promote art [through] architecture, urbanism, music, fashion, just like the way people think in recent years,” Vasarely told Artnet News. “He wanted to bring art to the city, to the streets, to everyone.”
Pierre Vasarely said his grandfather originally created the works on view, including the geometric designs gracing the storefront, by hand, before the introduction of computers. “It was revolutionary,” he said. “The NFT trend today is heading toward this direction.”
Victor Vasarely, Okta Cor (1973) Acrylic on canvas. Photo: Fabrice Lepeltier and Fondation Vasarely.
The physical works available for sale, including 15 unique works and 20 silkscreen prints, originally belonged to French collectors. A total of 12 Vasarely NFTs attached to Vasarely’s monumental works at the foundation will be released, with the first batch of six going live on February 16 and the remaining six available on March 12. Each NFT can be purchased at the London store in person or online on Subtance’s platform (and can later be accessed in the metaverse, naturally). Prices have yet to be announced.
Born in Pécs, Hungary, in 1906, Vasarely first studied medicine before venturing into painting. He moved to Paris in 1930 and began experimenting with Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism before developing his signature checkerboard paintings in the 1940s. He died at the age of 90 in 1997. He was the subject of a retrospective at Paris’s Centre Pompidou in 2019.
Victor Vasarely, Bleu n° IIIV (1970-2009). Photo: Fabrice Lepeltier and Fondation Vasarely
The artist built Fondation Vasarely between 1973 and 1976. It was declared a historic monument in 2013 and has annual attendance of around 100,000 visitors. The foundation is not the first to create NFTs based on a late artist’s work: Alphonse Mucha’s foundation debuted its own line of NFTs at the end of last year.
Pierre Vasarely said he has “no idea” how much money the sales will raise, but he hopes the project will allow more people to see Vasarely’s art, particularly in a moment when travel and gathering indoors is difficult.
“We make this exhibition at Selfridges with technology to show how contemporary his work still is today,” he said. “It is a good opportunity to imagine what Vasarely would’ve done if he had access to computers back then.”
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Prince Charles has commissioned seven leading artists to paint portraits of Holocaust survivors as a gesture of tribute to the aging generation. The portraits will be unveiled at the Buckingham Palace towards the end of this month.
The established artists participating in the project include the most expensive living female artist Jenny Saville, BP Portrait Award-winner Clara Drummond, original member of the Young British Artists Stuart Pearson Wright, and painters Paul Benney, Peter Kuhfeld, Massimiliano Pironti, and Ishbel Myerscough, according to the BBC.
“As the number of Holocaust survivors sadly but inevitably declines, my abiding hope is that this special collection will act as a further guiding light,” Prince Charles told the BBC, adding that the portraits will also serve as a reminder of “history’s darkest days.”
Most of the Holocaust survivors featured in the portraits are more than 90 years old. They were imprisoned in concentration camps during their childhood years and are living in Britain as adults.
The survivors depicted include Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, a 96-year-old musician from a German Jewish family who played in an orchestra of prisoners at the Auschwitz concentration camp, and was later held in the Bergen-Belsen camp in Germany. Her portrait was painted by Kuhfeld. Benney has painted Helen Aronson, 94, a survivor of the imprisonment of Jewish people in Nazi-occupied Poland’s Lodz ghetto.
The paintings, which will be featured at the Queen’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace from January 27 to February 13, and the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh from March 17 to June 6, are hoped to serve as a reminder of not just one of the darkest chapters in history, but also to show “humanity’s interconnectedness as we strive to create a better world for our children, grandchildren and generations as yet unborn,” Prince Charles said, adding that this world should be “one where hope is victorious over despair and love triumphs over hate.”
The paintings will also be featured in a BBC Two documentary that will air on January 27 to mark Holocaust Memorial Day. It will include interviews with the survivors, who will share their experiences of events during the Nazi era.
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Europe’s art world will be bustling this year with a string of biennial exhibitions in the first half of 2022, beginning with curator Cecilia Alemani’s 59th Venice Biennale, which opens this April after being pushed back a year due to health restrictions. In June, documenta returns to Kassel, this time curated by Indonesian collective ruangrupa. But in and around these two landmark shows are many must-see exhibitions across Europe, from a major Hito Steyerl retrospective in the Netherlands to an exhibition in the U.K. dedicated to the textile works of Louise Bourgeois.

Georgia O’Keeffe Fondation Beyeler, BaselJanuary 23–May 22
Oriental Poppies (1927), Georgia O’Keeffe. Sammlung des Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Ankauf, 1937. 
© Georgia O’Keeffe Museum / 2021, ProLitteris, Zurich.
“One rarely takes the time to really see a flower. I have painted it big enough so that others would see what I would see,” said Georgia O’Keeffe in early 1926. Visitors at Fondation Beyeler will have five months to see first-hand what the artist, who died in 1986, saw through an in-depth survey of this key figure of modern American art. The exhibition, the first of its kind in Switzerland in almost two decades, will showcase important works by O’Keeffe spanning six decades.

Hito Steyerl: “I Will Survive”Stedelijk Museum, AmsterdamJanuary 29–June 12
Hito Steyerl, SocialSim (2020). Courtesy the artist, Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York and Esther Schipper, Berlin. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2021. Film still © Hito Steyerl

“I Will Survive,” Steyerl’s largest-ever retrospective exhibition in the Netherlands, will span the German artist’s career, from her video works made in the early 1990s to her architectural installations that have become predominant in the last decade. Rein Wolfs, director Stedelijk Museum, called it a “sweeping overview” that will bring together 20 major loaned works from “each phase of Hito Steyerl’s artistic practice,” including a few early works that are in the Stedelijk collection.

Francis Bacon: Man and BeastRoyal Academy, LondonJanuary 29–April 17
Francis Bacon, Head VI (1949). Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London. © The Estate of Francis Bacon. All rights reserved, DACS/Artimage 2021. Photo by Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd.
The RA will hold a large-scale exhibition on the 20th-century Irish painter, focused on his visceral works depicting animals. The son of a horse breeder, Francis Bacon’s lifelong fascination with fauna shaped his approach to the human figure. It is sometimes hard to discern whether his abstracted creations—riddled with anxiety and bursting with deep instinctual drive—portray a human or a beast. The exhibition includes 45 paintings spanning 50 years, from his early paintings of biomorphic creatures from the 1930s and ’40s to a trio of works about bullfighting from 1969—the latter are shown together for the first time next to his final work, a study of a bull, painted in 1991.

Louise Bourgeois: The Woven ChildHayward Gallery, LondonFebruary 9–May 15
Louise Bourgeois, The Good Mother (2003). Detail. © The Easton Foundation/VAGA at ARS, NY and DACS, London 2021. Photo by Christopher Burke.
This major retrospective of the renowned French artist will focus exclusively on Bourgeois’s late career turn to sculptures made using domestic textiles and fabrics. More than 90 works spanning the mid-1990s to her death in 2010 will be presented, revisiting many of the subjects that preoccupied the artist throughout her storied career. Topics including identity, sexuality, and family relationships are explored in “The Woven Child,” as well as her spider motifs and figurative sculptures of female bodies. All told, the survey hopes to address broader themes of reparation and memory, and explore what the artist called “the magic power of the needle… to repair the damage.”

Revolusi! Indonesia IndependentRijksmuseum, AmsterdamFebruary 11–June 5
Affiche met opschrift ‘Perlawanan seloeroeh rakjat pokok kemenang revolusi (1945-1949). Museum Bronbeek
Indonesia was one of the trailblazing nations in the fight for decolonisation, and an exhibition in Amsterdam, co-curated by Dutch and Indonesian curators, explores the former Dutch colony’s road to independence between 1945 and 1949. More than 200 objects are on view, threaded throughout experiences shared from 20 individuals who witnessed the revolution in some way, from varying locations and political standpoints.

Rachel Jones: Say CheeeeeseChisenhale GalleryMarch 12–June 12
Rachel Jones, Production Image (2021). Commissioned and produced by Chisenhale Gallery. Courtesy of the artist.
For the rising market star’s first institutional solo, “Say Cheeeeese,” Rachel Jones will present a newly commissioned work at Chisenhale Gallery. Jones is also producing a new body of oil pastels and oil stick paintings on canvas and paper, building on previous work that explore the motif of obscured teeth and mouth parts—these abstracted forms she creates symbolize entry points into the inner self.

Carrie Mae Weems: The Evidence of Things NotSeenWürttembergischer Kunstverein, StuttgartMarch 12–July 3
Carrie Mae Weems, Constructing History (Mourning), (2008). © Carrie Mae Weems. Courtesy of the artist, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

The name of U.S. artist Carrie Mae Weems’s upcoming show in Stuttgart, set to be one of her most comprehensive institutional shows yet in Europe, borrows its title from a book by writer James Baldwin. The exhibition will feature 40 groups of works, including photographs, videos, and an immersive installation that is being conceived for the show. Weems is also creating a new photo series called “Monuments” that deals with the hot-button issue of colonialism and public memorials.

Donatello: the RenaissancePalazzo Strozzi and Museo del Bargello, FlorenceMarch 19–July 31
Donatello, Madonna col Bambino (Madonna Pazzi) c.1420-1425. Photo Antje Voigt
Billed as a once-in-a-lifetime show, this exhibition of work by 14th century Renaissance master Donatello seeks to illustrate his legacy and influence. Curated by Francesco Caglioti, the joint presentation between Palazzo Strozzi and the Musei del Bargello will place sculptor’s work in context with other Italian Renaissance masters such as Brunelleschi, Masaccio, Andrea Mantegna, Giovanni Bellini, Raphael, and Michelangelo.

Gaudí (1852-1926)Musee d’Orsay, ParisApril 12—July 17
Gaudì Mirror. Courtesy Musée d’Orsay
This exhibition, a rare celebration of the iconic Spanish architect and designer, takes a deep dive into what he and his workshop produced out of Catalonia at a time of great upheaval in Spain. Using the lens of space and colour and including drawings, models, and furniture, the show will guide the visitor through his amazing creations—from parks to churches and, of course, the Sagrada Familia church.

Barbara KrugerNeue Nationalgalerie, BerlinApril 29–August 28
Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Forever) (2017). Installation view, Sprüth Magers, Berlin, 2017–18. Amorepacific Museum of Art (APMA), Seoul. Photo by Timo Ohler and courtesy of Sprüth Magers.
The newly reopened Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, an exquisite museum of contemporary and modern art designed by Mies van der Rohe that will now be headed up by Klaus Biesenbach, will see Kruger install a new text installation for its main floor. Out of respect for the design of van der Rohe, Kruger will leave key parts of the building untouched (which is not her usual way). From outside the glassed-in museum, passersby might not even see the show, which only becomes fully revealed once inside the space.

“Meriem Bennani: Life on the CAPS”Nottingham Contemporary, NottinghamMay 7–September 4
Meriem Bennani, Party on the CAPS (still), 2018–19, eight-channel video installation, 30 min. Courtesy the artist and Clearing, New York & Brussels.
For the Moroccan artist’s largest solo exhibition in the U.K. to date, Bennani will show her eight-channel video installation Party on the CAPS (2018/19) alongside a newly-commissioned sequel. The films track the movements of inhabitants of a fictional island called CAPS in the middle of the Atlantic ocean across three generations—it is an internment camp for refugees and migrants hoping to head to Europe or North America, an isolated island that has become a bustling megalopolis. A new work will be premiered during the show, a sequel to this earlier piece, moving forward the artist’s fascination with displacement and biotechnology, and unpacking themes of privacy, protest, and public gathering.
Etel AdnanVan Gogh Museum, AmsterdamMay 20–September 4
“Le poids du monde” exhibition from 2016 by Etel Adnan at the Serpentine Gallery. Photo: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images for Serpentine Galleries.
The Van Gogh Museum will present the first retrospective of work by Etel Adnan since her death at age 96 in November 2021, as well as her first major exhibition ever in the Netherlands. The acclaimed, Beirut-born artist and writer was known for her vivid abstracted landscapes. The Dutch exhibition will consider the overlap in Adnan and van Gogh’s art practices—their mutual fascination with color and nature, but also poetic language—by showing paintings and literary works by both artists side-by-side.

A Century of the Artist’s Studio 1920–2020Whitechapel Gallery, LondonFebruary 17–May 29
Lisa Brice Untitled (2019). Courtesy © Lisa Brice Courtesy the artist; Stephen Friedman Gallery, London; Salon 94, New York; and Goodman Gallery, South Africa. Katrin Bellinger Collection
The artists’ studio is an endless source of fascination. A Century of the Artist’s Studio follows three years of research led by outgoing Whitechapel Gallery Director Iwona Blazwick. This ambitious show will chart the history of the studio and include 100 works by 80 artists across the globe, with art by Francis Bacon, Louise Bourgeois, Pablo Picasso, Lisa Brice, and Kerry James Marshall to be included.

Anish KapoorGallerie dell’AccademiaApril 20—October 9
Anish Kapoor Black Within Me (2021). Photo Dave Morgan © Anish Kapoor. All rights reserved SIAE, 2021
Curated by director of the Rijksmuseum Taco Dibbits, this retrospective of Kapoor promises to be one of 2022’s blockbusters. “It is a huge honour to be invited to engage with the collections at the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice; perhaps one of the finest collections of classical painting anywhere in the world,” said Kapoor. “All art must engage with what went before.” His unmistakable works will sit alongside the existing collection.

“The Milk of Dreams”The Venice BiennaleApril 23—November 27
Venice’s Basilica of San Maria de Salute and a gondolier at sunset. Photo by Michel Baret/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images.
We have waited long enough! The postponed Venice Biennale of 2020 looks like it is finally happening. “Under the increasingly invasive pressure of technology, the boundaries between bodies and objects have been utterly transformed, bringing about profound mutations that remap subjectivities, hierarchies, and anatomies,” reads the statement from curator Cecelia Alemani. The central exhibition will be based around The Milk of Dreams, a book by surrealist artist Leonora Carrington.

Tony Cokes: ”Some Munich Moments 1937-1972″Haus der Kunst, MunichJune 10–October 23
Tony Cokes. Photo: Stan Narten
Tony Cokes will have his first solo exhibition at Munich’s historic Haus der Kunst this summer, in a collaboration with Kunstverein München nearby. Cokes plans to present newly commissioned works called ”Some Munich Moments 1937-1972″ that will be presented at both institutions and in the public spaces between them. Cokes’s video essays, which are often text-based, focus on the African American experience, racism, and capitalism.

‘I Call It Art’National Museum, OsloJune 11, 2022
Oslo’s new National Museum. Photo: Borre Hostland.
The National Museum in Oslo is set to be Scandinavia’s biggest art institution when it opens this June. Featuring more than 150 artists and collectives, “I Call It Art” is one of the inaugural exhibitions of the long-awaited Norwegian institution. The show takes stock of contemporary art in Norway, while asking the age-old question of “What is good art?”. It answers this by featuring recent works from Norway, ranging from paintings and installations to video works that were selected via open call.

Documenta FifteenVarious Locations, KasselJune 18–September 25
© documenta fifteen 2022
Documenta will be helmed by ruangrupa, a collective of artists and creatives from Jakarta, Indonesia. The concept of lumbung, meaning “rice barn” in Indonesian and referring to crops stored as a common resource for future use, drives the exhibition. “For documenta fifteen, we will focus on art practices that depend on accumulations of value in time, knowledge, and dissemination. How can we invest in those types of practices? What does investment mean?” Already, the curators are thinking differently about what an exhibition should do for the public: they announced their first artist list in a local magazine that benefits the homeless.

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“You still don’t understand what you’re dealing with, do you?”
That’s the famous question posed by Ash (Ian Holm) in one of the many tense scenes of Ridley Scott’s 1979 film Alien. Ash goes on: “Perfect organism. Its structural perfection is matched only by its hostility… Unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.”
Holms’s character is describing the dark creature at the center of Scott’s masterpiece, an extraterrestrial dubbed the xenomorph. This unforgettably terrifying alien set a new bar for cinematic angst about deep space and existential dream—one that, some argue, has not been matched in the more than 40 years since the film’s release.
The otherworldly creation has an origin story that stems back to a niche in the late 1970s art world. It was dreamed up by a then relatively little-known surrealist artist from Switzerland, H. R. Giger, who created what became the on-film xenomorph years earlier, in a 1976 painting titled Necronom IV.
The detailed work, plus many others that comprehensively chart his practice, is on view in “H. R. Giger and Mire Lee,” an unlikely show at Schinkel Pavillon in Berlin (until January 16, 2022).
H. R. Giger’s Necronom IV (1976). Photo: Frank Sperling.
The exhibition, organized by Agnes Gryczkowska, has been so well attended that the institution decided to extend it until January 16. It pairs the cult favorite artist alongside Mire Lee, who was shortlisted for the Pinchuk Foundation’s Future Generation Art Prize this December.
Lee’s hypersexual, oozing bio-mechanical sculptures draw out the erotic themes in Giger’s gender-bending works and illustrations, and allow for a new, Feminist reading of his early prototypes. The octagonally shaped venue and its early 20th-century decadence gives a lively juxtaposition to these two artists’s harsh but sleek futuristic visions.
Giger fought for recognition in both the film and art worlds while fitting neatly into neither. Despite having been the inception for Alien‘s antagonist (he designed the creature through all its phases, from egg to super-predator) and the spacecraft and environmental settings of the film, he felt shunned by Hollywood.
“Fox started to dread me,” Giger wrote in a notebook on view in the show, referring to the production studio. “Fox does not want to give me any credit at all.”
His legacy also still has room for growth in the art world. In an era of mass production and AI- and VR-generated images, Giger’s meticulously craftsmanlike works, which were time-intensive and material-oriented, are the dark shot to the heart that we need.
See images from the exhibition below.
H. R. Giger and Mire Lee at Schinkel Pavillon. Photo: Frank Sperling.
H. R. Giger and Mire Lee at Schinkel Pavillon. Photo: Frank Sperling.
H. R. Giger and Mire Lee at Schinkel Pavillon. Photo: Frank Sperling.
H. R. Giger and Mire Lee at Schinkel Pavillon. Photo: Frank Sperling.
H. R. Giger and Mire Lee at Schinkel Pavillon. Photo: Frank Sperling.
H. R. Giger and Mire Lee at Schinkel Pavillon. Photo: Frank Sperling.
H. R. Giger and Mire Lee at Schinkel Pavillon. Photo: Frank Sperling.
H. R. Giger and Mire Lee at Schinkel Pavillon. Photo: Frank Sperling.
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In the 1991 animated film Beauty and the Beast, a young woman, Belle, dances and sings inside a magical castle where inanimate objects come to life. The cast of characters includes a French-accented candelabra and a flirtatious feather duster; a matronly teapot and her son, a teacup; a pendulum clock; and a loud-mouthed wardrobe.
These may seem like figments of animators’ imaginations, but in fact their genesis comes directly from the French Rococo, the decorative and indulgent 18th-century style that sought to bring levity and liveliness to the dark seriousness of the Baroque.
The parallel desires of 18th-century Rococo artisans and 20th-century Disney animators—to inspire, delight, and awe their audiences—are the crux of the exhibition “Inspiring Walt Disney: The Animation of French Decorative Arts,” on view now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
In all, dozens of Rococo art objects from the Met’s own treasure trove are on view alongside 150 original artworks from the Disney Studio from three animated films: Cinderella (1950), Sleeping Beauty (1959), and Beauty and the Beast (1991).
Although the term “Disneyfication” tends to be used negatively, Max Hollein, the museum’s director, writes that Walt Disney exerted an influence like few others.
“It is hard to think of any other American who has had as far-reaching and long-lasting an impact on the visual arts,” he writes.
Below, see images from the exhibition.
Eyvind Earle, Sleeping Beauty (1959). Walt Disney Animation Research Library. © Disney.
Anonymous, Portrait of Magdalena Gonzales (1580). Schloss Ambras, Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna © KHM-Museumsverband.
Mary Blair, Cinderella (1950). Walt Disney Animation Research Library © Disney.
Meissen Manufactory, Johann Joachim Kändler, Faustina Bordoni and Fox (ca. 1743). Courtesy of the Met.
Frank Armitage, Le Chateau de la Belle au Bois Dormant, Disneyland Paris, (1988). Walt Disney Imagineering Collection© Disney
Walt Disney Studios, The Vultures (ca. 1937). Courtesy of the Met.
Installation view, “Inspiring Walt Disney: The Animation of French Decorative Arts at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.” Photo: Paul Lachenauer, Courtesy of The Met. © Disney
Installation view, “Inspiring Walt Disney: The Animation of French Decorative Arts at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.” Photo: Paul Lachenauer, Courtesy of The Met. © Disney
Installation view, “Inspiring Walt Disney: The Animation of French Decorative Arts at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.” Photo: Paul Lachenauer, Courtesy of The Met. © Disney
Installation view, “Inspiring Walt Disney: The Animation of French Decorative Arts at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.” Photo: Paul Lachenauer, Courtesy of The Met. © Disney
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The line snaked down the block when I strolled up to Galerie König on Tuesday night to see Refik Anadol’s new show at the gallery, which is causing a small sensation among a cross-section of the public that does not normally show up at art exhibitions. In the queue was a pair from the finance industry who were trying to get in for the third time. Up ahead, some Albanian tourists from the tech industry were also waiting, having heard about it online. In front of them, one girl said she was too stoned to talk.
At least she had something to trip on while waiting between one and three hours to get in: projected onto König’s brutalist bell tower was an NFT by Anadol called Winds of Berlin, a giant, data-driven projection that warped constantly into vibrant cascades of color informed by real-time data collected from the city’s landscape and environment.
Refik Anadol Machine Hallucinations: Nature Dreams at Galerie König, Berlin. Photo: Roman Maerz.
Inside was another massive NFT work occupying an entire wall of the main upstairs gallery, the work’s light washing over the space. People lay around, basking in its glow. The 20-minute algorithmic data visualizations writhed inside what looked like a white box extending from the wall.
Downstairs, a series of abstract digital paintings shifted through strangely bright colors that were indiscernibly culled from images of perennials, forests, and flowers. They pulsated on high-definition screens as crowds of people milled around. The other half of that floor, where traditional artworks are on view, was quietly cordoned off by a velvet rope.
Christian Marclay debuted The Clock, an ambitious 24-hour film project that spliced thousands chronicling every single minute in a day, at White Cube’s London gallery in 2010. It had lines down the street too. David Zwirner’s show of Yayoi Kusama, “Every Day I Pray for Love,” clocked around 2,000 visitors a day in New York when it was on view. So maybe it shouldn’t be surprising that Machine Hallucinations: Nature Dreams, which similarly warps time and space, has caused a bit of a scene on an otherwise quiet residential street, especially given that it’s coupled with buzzy crypto keywords. 
Refik Anadol, Machine Hallucinations: Nature Dreams at Galerie König, Berlin. Photo: Roman Maerz.
König seemed pleasantly stunned at the crowds, though he was also focused on his gallery’s and Anadol’s current auction through OpenSea, which ends this week. So far, the price of Anadol’s piece is at nearly 5 ETH (about $19,000)—a far cry from the $800,000 transaction König organized for a similar work by the artist at Art Basel Miami Beach this month.
“Maybe we should have sold the work as a DAO so that more members of the public could collect the piece,” he ruminated. “We knew this would be risky.”
DAO (decentralized autonomous organizations) are leaderless bands of internet users who are known to make collective decisions on the blockchain. That’s a whole other story, but the art industry began taking them seriously when one called ConstitutionDAO nearly nabbed the winning bid for a first edition of the US constitution at Sotheby’s this fall. Ironically, the crypto-buying conglomerate was scandalously beat by Kenneth Griffin, a hedge-fund billionaire who has been the subject of Reddit and retail investor rage since the whole GameStop saga earlier this year.
The Anadol work shown in the U.S. went to a Miami collector in the usual way of an art deal, with handshakes and fiat money, not on a peer-to-peer NFT sales platform. Bridging these two worlds has been complicated for art dealers thus far, especially in Europe where know-your-customer laws, which are intended to minimize money laundering, are in place. 
König’s own web platform, MISA, which will sell NFT editions via proof-of-stake (a consensus mechanism on blockchain), is figuring out those last kinks, but it can’t carry a titanic art piece like Machine Hallucinations, which is minted via proof-of-work, a method that takes a large amount of computational power. The difference? To use the metaphor of trad artworks, think of it like this: “Proof-of-work you would put into a climate-controlled crate and deliver by hand, the other, you ship with Fedex,” said the dealer.
The two NFT sales Anadol made through König this month were not his first. He had his own direct NFT sale through Sotheby’s Hong Kong this fall, where he set a record by selling an immersive NFT for 18,325,000 HKD ($2.4 million). He also recently collaborated with MoMA in New York on another project. The Istanbul-born artist, who is based in Los Angeles, has also been working on his “Data” paintings for nearly a decade.
Refik Anadol Machine Hallucinations: Nature Dreams at Galerie König, Berlin.
Digital artists, of course, bring their own sets of rules, and their language is just as jargon-y as the artspeak of old. The rapid emergence of DAOs, NFTs, and the crypto art scene have been predictably confusing to traditional art-world gatekeepers—a cohort that König, who launched an NFT auction in Decentraland in March before setting up his own NFT marketplace this fall—seems keen to distance himself from. Nor is he the only Berlin dealer moving into the space: Galerie Nagel Draxler is opening a second space that will be called Crypto Cabinet next year, selling and showing all things crypto- and blockchain-related.
The emergence of not one, but two, Berlin galleries keen on crypto is not surprising, given that the city is a new tech capital, soon to have its own Tesla factory on the outskirts of town and already filled with tech coworking spaces on seemingly every corner. Dealers have complained that it’s been hard to attract tech collectors who like money but tend not to cherish culture in the ways people expect. NFTs were the missing ingredient: Unlike a painting, “they are super liquid, so it’s easy to go into a market if you can exit again,” König said.
The more I think about it, the more tired I become of the rapid dismissal of this nouveau riche who want to spend their wealth buying and trading art. And had König created a DAO, those collectors, and anyone else with some crypto, could have participated not just by visiting the show, but also by potentially owning a piece of it. While the aesthetic language may not please everyone, every art era has its conceptual artists, its sell-outs, and its blockbusters. König said some have compared Anadol to Monet, which even he finds a bit “heavy-handed” (I do too), but the Impressionists were also outsiders to the 19th-century art canon at first.
Something really is happening, and it’s not only speculative market fluff either. Just take a look at the scores of people shivering outside König’s gallery. This is art that seems to matter in a more public way, and we should celebrate that.
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A dozen Riyadh-based dancers in cream-colored clothes moved to the blended guttural sounds of a South African Xhosa song, a Sufi chant, and a Fijiri folk song from the Arabian Gulf. Their asynchronous movements carried the explosive intensity of a simmering pot. Behind them stood a video installation of their bodies in aerial view. Marwah AlMugait, the artist who made this piece, called This Sea is Mine, looked around intrepidly at the hundreds gathered for Saudi Arabia’s inaugural Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale. People seemed compelled not just by the visceral choreography of women performing live, but by the act of witnessing this historic moment in the artistic life of a country.
Attention to the plight of women was also a strong theme at the adjacent Tuwaiq International Sculpture Symposium, one of the government-backed programs of Riyadh Art. New Zealand artist Anna Korver’s abstract sculpture evoking draped female figures won an award on December 10 and her work is a part of the city’s first public initiative to build 1,000 permanent urban sculptures.
These were paradigm-shifting moments as the art world congregated in Saudi Arabia for the inaugural biennial, called “Feeling the Stones” and the adjacent symposium in Riyadh, as well as Misk Art Week. In Jeddah, a new art space Hayy Jameel has opened.
A sense of urgent transformation can be felt in the Middle Eastern nation, which was culturally insulated from the world until Prince Mohammed Bin Salman laid out Vision 2030’s social and economic reforms five years ago. Through its cultural endeavors, the newly formed ministry of culture has been articulating a position focused on enriching local cultural contexts while participating in the global art discourse.
Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale launch event. Courtesy Canvas and Diriyah Biennal Foundation
A New Center for Art
The biennial, which is on view until March 11, 2022, spans six warehouses in the JAX district in the industrial part of Diriyah on the northwest fringes of Riyadh, an area that will be refurbished into an arts hub in the coming years.
The show title—“Feeling the Stones”—comes from a saying about crossing a river that Chinese revolutionary leader Deng Xiaoping used frequently during the 1980s. “He used it as a way of talking about economic and cultural reform, the platforms of his decade and a half in power,” said Philip Tinari, head of the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing and curator of the Diriyah Biennale alongside Wejdan Reda, Shixuan Luan, and Neil Zhang. “It was a time when China was reassessing its system and opening up to the world.”
The saying was actually first coined in 1980 by Chen Yun, a leader of the Chinese Communist Party, in relation to garnering economic stability (it later became associated with Deng as he helped China become an economic powerhouse). “I felt like [the expression] has resonances with where things are in Saudi today in the aftermath of massive changes and big dreams on the horizon,” said Tinari. “It’s an abstract way of thinking about artistic experimentation and practice.”
Installation view, Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale 2021. Courtesy Canvas and Diriyah Biennale Foundation
He added that many artists included in the exhibition work with a method “that’s iterative yet experimental, tentative yet directed, going from one side to the other by charting the course as it is traveled.” He noted that the biennial came together in a similar way, by putting in place “structures and processes at the same time as doing them.”
This approach has allowed for magical encounters within the show itself such as Zahra Al Ghamdi’s sculpture Birth of a Place (2021), which was inspired by the ruins of mud-houses in Diriyah and which appears as a clever 3D extension of Xu Bing’s lightbox Background Story: Streams and Mountains Without End (2014), which itself mimics a traditional landscape painting though it is actually sculpted from newspaper and plant detritus.
The rules of engagement for the cultural scene in what is an extremely conservative nation are still unclear. Tinari was likely tapped for his experience in running a museum in China, which requires the fine art of dealing with the People’s Republic and censorship.
“What’s become clear to me is that any context has things that can and can’t be said,” said Tinari. “I always look back to working on ‘Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World’ at the Guggenheim [in 2017] and finding ourselves on the wrong side of animal rights, having to deactivate the presentations of three artists in New York City…The question is less what is censorship and more what is respect for cultural mores in a context that’s not your own?”
Abdullah Al Othman, Manifesto, The Language & City (2021). Image courtesy Diriyah Biennale Foundation and the artist.
A Bridge to the West and East
More than half of the 64 artworks are by Saudi or Chinese artists—and nearly half the works are newly commissioned. The works are divided into six “chapters” that flow via pathways and ramps that link each of the thematic sections of a warehouse (the exhibition design is by Saudi architecture studio and participating artists Bricklab). The color of the rooms reflects the natural landscape beyond the show, and walls are punctured, letting in natural light and views of Wadi Hanifah. It is a thoughtful and considered showcase that does not sensationalize the seismic shift Saudi Arabia is experiencing but instead pushes on boundaries without breaking them.
South African artist William Kentridge’s More Sweetly Play the Dance (2015), in which celebratory music is played by shadow projections, heralds the first chapter, “Crossing the River.” Here, one will also find Maha Malluh’s wall-sized World Map (2021) of 3,840 cassette tapes bearing religious sermons remain silent relics of an analog world of conservative Islam. It lies adjacent to Richard Long’s Red Earth Circle (1989/2021) made from red clay from Saudi Arabia that was first created in 1989 for Centre Pompidou’s groundbreaking “Magicians de Terre,” considered the first exhibition of global contemporary art.
The biennial often juxtaposes the 1980s Chinese avant-garde with the historical emergence of art in Saudi Arabia in the 1990s. Yet Tinari emphasizes that there are important differences between these moments in the two nations. “A lot of artistic production in Saudi isn’t actually just about the question of nationhood or national identity, in a way that I think burdened the artistic production in China for a long time,” he said. He added that Saudi Arabia was more connected to the global scene than China during its transformation, “for better or worse.”
Sarah Abu Abdallah and Ghada Al Hassan, ‘Horizontal Dimensions’, 2021, courtesy Canvas and Diriyah Biennale Foundation
Elsewhere, unexpected threads unfold: prominent Chinese artist Wang Luyan’s miniature humanoid sculptures converse with Ayman Yossri Daydban’s paintings of alienated figures from the 1990s. There are conversations between Saudi artists as well—Ahmed Mater’s video installation of life before and after the oil boom in Desert Meeting (2021) is installed nearby Mohammed Al Saleem’s modernist ode to arid topography, Desert Spring (1987).
Comments on the family unit, which in Saudi Arabia extends to the larger tribe and is traced through patrilineality, manifest in Dania Al Saleh’s That Which Remains (2021), which blurs computer-generated archival portraits with personal footage mixing official and personal narratives. It is set against Japan’s Koki Tanaka’s provocative Abstracted/Family (2020), which stages a mock nuclear family and comments on estrangement and minority politics. Manal Al Dowayan’s brass leaf installation of matrilineal lines, on the other hand, through the drawings and recordings of 300 women from Dammam, Riyadh, and Jeddah in Tree of Guardians (2014), brings invisible histories to light.
But one of the most urgent sections was “Brave New Worlds,” which focused on the apocalyptic present of the world as a whole. A film by Ando Wekua focuses on a burning palm tree overlaid with screeching sounds and Ayman Zedani’s recorded intonations of the endangered Arabian Sea humpback whales laments a collective environmental demise. Mohannad Shono’s tired mark-making robotic sculpture and Lawrence Lek’s envisioning of an automated hotel depict a world without humans. Also on view was Sara Ibrahim’s video performance Soft Machines/Far Away Engines (2021) which traces dancers who multiply, heave, and touch, providing a bit of solace in this grim setting.
Sarah Ibrahim Soft Machines/Far Away Engines. Image courtesy Diriyah Biennale Foundation and the artist.
A Dizzying Transformation
Despite the curatorial prowess of the show, it would be a mistake to consider this biennial as completely unprecedented. Although there is now a shining focus on the capital Riyadh, Jeddah has enjoyed a thriving art scene for decades, which began underground with the independent collective Edge of Arabia in 2003 and continued with the private philanthropy of the Saudi Art Council in 2014. What is new, however, is the openness to developing deeply collaborative curatorial models at an international level. In addition to the biennial, which brought on Beijing-based Tinari and other UCCA curators from China, Hayy Jameel co-curated an exhibition on food futures called “Staple: What’s on your plate” together with the U.K.-based Delfina Foundation.
That show was bustling like the biennial, with 1,650 visitors attending its opening on December 6. “Jeddah is a cosmopolitan city, a gateway for pilgrims,” said Antonia Carver, director of Art Jameel. She added that the exhibition, which includes artists from South Asia, Barbados, Bangladesh, and the Congo is “less about a nation-to-nation” discourse and more about “the city’s connections to elsewhere.” The history of Jeddah, she said, is “intertwined with other places, defying the stereotype as a place that’s closed off.”
Xu Bing, Background Story Streams and Mountains Without End (2013). Image courtesy Diriyah Biennale Foundation and the artist.
These dramatic moves in bringing both Riyadh and Jeddah onto the world stage are somewhat dizzying. While the biennial has most certainly become a catalyst for the Kingdom’s role in the region’s artistic landscape, a major question looms about the extent to which cultural production will be grounded by local government bodies and infrastructures of power as this art scene attempts to situate itself within the globalized art world.
Rashed Al Shashai’s contribution to the biennial, Cultural Wall (2021), a spiraling sculpture of wicker and steel, alludes to the structural problems implicated in such moments of progress. Even as a local, he says the future shape of Saudi Arabia’s culture scene is anything but clear: “It’s like trying to make sense of hazy shapes out from a fast-moving car.” What is sure, in any case, is that this indeterminate present is a new starting point for Saudi Arabia, one that will usher in an artistic era that is not seen as a counterpart to the Global North but which is very much coming into its own.
The Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale is on view in Riyadh until March 11, 2022.
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