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Our editors on the exhibitions they’re looking forward to around the world this month – everywhere but Venice
\n\n\n\nSeveral of the intricate works in Métis and Cree artist Audie Murray’s solo exhibition incorporate organic materials derived from the artist’s body. The sculpture Net Weavers; (2026) consists of a tiny cradle of clear pony beads made by an unknown artist, which Murray has threaded with her own hair. The work on paper Gold Thread (2026) is stained with Murray’s breast milk. Altered readymades like Old Bra (2026) retain bodily residues: the materials list describes it as a ‘worn bralette,’ its yellow-green fabric slightly stretched. The garment’s yolk-coloured inserts are beaded in a spiderweb pattern, lending them a shield-like quality while invoking a motif that has recurred throughout Murray’s decade-long practice: as the artist has noted, a Cree creation story tells of a spider lowering the first humans to earth on a silk strand. Net Charm; > (2025) and Net Charm; < (2025) reference amulets found on cradleboards across the Plains and Subarctic. Here, rectangular meshes of dewy glass beads hang from copper wire attached to two gauntlets cut from secondhand gloves. Anthropologist George Fulford, whom Murray cites, proposed that for infants such ornaments offer both spiritual protection and visual amusement – a dual function that serves as well as any metaphor for art. Jenny Wu
\n\n\n\nApril April, Pittsburgh, 9 May – 27 June
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Activating the Barbican’s Sculpture Court for the first time in a decade, Delcy Morelos brings her brand of minimalist earthwork to its most monumental iteration: a 24-by-18-metre ovular pavilion, handbuilt from clay, soil, hay and plant seed, sewn with aromatic spices and penetrated by multiple tunnels as entry points. Those fortunate to have seen other recent iterations of the artist’s recent work, like El abrazo (The Embrace) (2023) at Dia Chelsea in New York, or Madre (2025) at Berlin’s Hamburger Bahnhof, will know the feeling awaiting them. There’s something disquieting to how a structure this large and alive could be – and feel – so silent, so unstirring; something vertiginous to seeing the earth elevated high above your head (or has the artist plunged us beneath its surface?). Morelos was born in Colombia’s Tierralta (which translates to something like ‘high ground’ in English), a town and municipality situated on ancestral Andean land, the traditions of which view the human body as living earth, within the country’s northern Córdoba department, which in the course of Morelos’s lifetime has suffered both decades of armed conflict and extractive, often violative mining practices. Morelos’s post-earthwork, then, is as spiritual as it is mournful. Alexander Leissle
\n\n\n\nBarbican Sculpture Court, London, 15 May – 31 July
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Bold Tendencies 20th Anniversary Season
\n\n\n\nBack in 2016, Simon Whybray’s hi boo i love you became an Instagram sensation (not to mention something of a south-London icon in its own right). The bubblegum-pink staircase leading up to Frank’s Café, perched on the top of a Peckham multi-storey car park, was originally conceived as part of Bold Tendencies, the not-for-profit cultural organisation behind a range of permanent and temporary visual-arts commissions in the area. This year, the platform turns 20, and is celebrating with a vast programme titled ‘Euphoria’ spanning everything from performance, music, sculpture and photography to digital art, design, and architecture. The line-up features new site-specific works by the likes of Andreas Gursky, Emma Hart, Tarek Lakhrissi and Louis Morlæ; live performances from the dazzling Multi-Story Orchestra and the Fitzcarraldo summer party (featuring readings from Alice Hattrick and Saskia Vogel, among others), should be highlights, too. Chiara Wilkinson
\n\n\n\nBold Tendencies, 95a Rye Ln, London. 15 May – 12 September 2026
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Arts Collective, a new artist-centric contemporary art organisation opening this May in England’s Northampton, is laying down its House Rules with an inaugural exhibition exploring the work of the late Rose Finn-Kelcey. The Northampton-born artist is known – though perhaps not well enough – for her striking, often humorous investigations of power structures using a range of media including performance, photography, video, flags and LED signage. Despite a large portion of her work being site-specific, Arts Collective has stated it will do its best to contextualise pieces in their display, such as her Power for the People flags initially presented on London’s Battersea Power station in 1972 (when it was still a functioning power station) and Bar Doors (1991), a set of seven saloon doors first installed in a park in Houston, Texas. By bringing together a selection of the artist’s works that explore how architecture, language and spirituality shape experience, the exhibition doubles up as a critical foundation through which to consider this newly established art centre. Mia Stern
\n\n\n\nArts Collective, Northampton. 1 May – 1 August 2026
\n\n\n\nIn the End There Will Be No End
\n\n\n\nIn 2002, a Renaissance statue of Adam at the Met Museum buckled, seemingly spontaneously, and smashed into pieces. Such symbolism was a gift to Kristián Németh, a Slovak artist, who was struck by how this monument to Christian beauty and the fall of innocence could no longer support its own weight, collapsing under stress. The result was his multimedia work No Beginning No End (2017), a project about how societies, systems of control and institutions, too, can become so riddled with contradictions that their end is foretold, however monolithic they appear. It’s apt, then, that the work reappears and lends its title to this exhibition of art from the Art Fond Collection at the Ludwig in Budapest – mostly by neo-avant-garde artists who operated under Communism – at a moment when the monolithic authoritarianism of Victor Orban has also disintegrated. Oliver Basciano
\n\n\n\nLudwig Museum, Budapest. 24 April – 20 September
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How do you get from one place to another without using Google maps? Global Positioning System, a two-part show to open across Art Jameel’s two spaces in Dubai and Jeddah, explores the titular infrastructure of movement and navigation, investigating how it structures our experience of space, and what we’re left with in its absence. With an emphasis on ‘friction, interruption and uncertainty’, works interrogating the ideological practices of mapping, surveillance, connectedness will be on display, such as Mohammed Kazem’s Directions (2002), which sees him throw wooden boards inscribed with GPS coordinates in the Arabian Sea, highlighting the arbitrary, fluid nature of borders and territory. Something that has a particular relevance in the context of the ongoing Iran War (under the pall of which institutions like Jameel still carry on operating, if largely for the benefit of a local audience). But the exhibition is not limited to the venues’ immediate geography. Work by Cheng Xinhao sees the artist kick a piece of rock all the way from southwest China to its border with Myanmar (Stratums and Erratics Part 1, 2023), channeling the region’s geopolitical history. At a time when much of geopolitics revolves around surveilled migration and blockades – of people as well as materials – Global Positioning System introduces some possibility of escape from designated routes and destinations. Yuwen Jiang
\n\n\n\nJameel Arts Centre, Dubai: May 9 – October 4. Hayy Jameel, Jeddah: May 20 – October 26
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‘‘Should you ever need to get hold of us, just give us a ring!” said King Charles III to Donald Trump at a recent state dinner, an invitation proper of the old world and a past century. To experience Dial-A-Poem Thailand, one must also ring a number (who remembers how to make an international call without Skype?), without knowing which of the 44 recorded poems one will hear. Giving their devouring eyes a rest, callers may instead relinquish control and just listen. For this writer, there’s also a pleasure in taking respite in an unknown language: though the meanings of the words, which purportedly address poetry and Thainess, are inaccessible to me, the situation is nevertheless satisfying in being both private and poetic. This morning, I dialled twice. The first call seemed to deliver a poem and the second a Buddhist chant; both lifted me out of place, albeit briefly. Taro Nettleton
\n\n\n\nBangkok Kunsthalle, Khao Yai Art Forest, via +66 97 531 0708. From 24 April 2026
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Sara Cwynar: Baby Blue Benzo Beta
\n\n\n\nSara Cwynar works across photography, film and installation, drawing on collage as both method and structure to examine the visual excesses of advertising, the internet and social media. Her practice disassembles and reorders images to examine how they shape desire, memory and systems of value, layering these in ways that are associative yet fragmentary, splintering connections and destabilising fixed meaning. At MOCA, she transforms the gallery into a hybrid set – part theatre, part studio, part showroom – where images are staged, yet unsettled. At the centre is Baby Blue Benzo (2024), a research-driven film that moves from the record-breaking sale of a Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR to the chemical logic of benzodiazepines, tracing how value is constructed, marketed and then absorbed into the human psyche. Alongside it, Cwynar’s most recent work Alpha/Alphabet (2025/26) reconfigures MOCA’s space via modular panels that translate search terms and browsing habits into visual sequences. Images fed to us online sell persuasive narratives that shape how we see and understand the world, yet Cwynar exposes their instability, revealing them to be constructed, partial and ultimately fallible. Her work speaks directly to a culture saturated by images, where meaning, truth and value are continually produced – and distorted – through mass circulation. Fi Churchman
\n\n\n\nMoCA Toronto, 15 May – 16 August
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Niamh O’Malley Interval / Dori Deng Sculpting
\n\n\n\nIrish artist Niamh O’Malley’s work quietly picks apart the habits of seeing, with elegant sculptures, often in wood, glass and metal, that re-accentuate and reframe the rooms they inhabit, frequently accompanied by slow-paced videos that ask us to pay attention to the mundane peculiarities of observing the world. This is her first solo exhibition in China, with new work developed on residency in the semi-rural gallery complex. In parallel, artist (and gallery co-founder) Dori Deng presents a solo show of her own sculptural installations that similarly prise open layers of perception, with dissected geometries of projected light and intricate interruptions of glass, metal and stone. Between them, expect the way you see things to be dismantled from the inside out. Chris Fite-Wassilak
\n\n\n\nSpace of Time Gallery, Beijing, 20 May – 25 July (parallel shows)
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The relationship between art and fashion is characterised by a mixture of desire and repulsion. (Although that perhaps describes any relationship.) Put crudely, fashion needs art so that it can become permanent rather than temporary and art needs fashion so that it can become popular rather than… well… you’re art lovers: you know. And, of course, each discipline is slightly revolted by what the other has that it does not. Desire always wins, of course, and over in Tokyo, MOT is about to launch an exhibition of veteran Japanese designer Hiroko Koshino’s work. Renowned for blending traditional clothing-types with avant-garde structuring, she’s been creating garments since the 1960s and has often said that she would like her work to be characterised by its lack of pretension (which might make you wonder why she wants to show it off in an art museum); but, more to the point, the exhibition promises to explore the constant dialogue the designer has maintained with the evolving art movements of her time, as a way of exploring how ideas don’t simply pop out of nowhere and how apparently discrete disciplines are not as separate as one is told to think. For those of you who live on the other side of the world or who don’t have your own private supply of aviation fuel, you can check out something similar in London, at the Design Museum, where fellow Japanese designer NIGO (of A Bathing Ape and Kenzo fame) will be exploring his influences, which include architecture, ceramics (including his own), hip hop and Japanese craft (including examples from his personal collection). Nirmala Devi
\n\n\n\nHiroko Koshino, unknown, MOT Tokyo, 26 May – 26 July; NIGO, From Japan with Love, Design Museum, London, 1 May – 4 October
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Relaunch of vwfa.net
\n\n\n\nI believe I speak for many in the Southeast Asian art world when I say: I miss Valentine Willie. Before retiring in 2013, the Malaysian lawyer-turned-gallerist ran one of the region’s most influential private gallery networks for nearly two decades, with spaces in Kuala Lumpur, Bali, Singapore, Manila and Yogyakarta. His exhibitions were bold and eclectic, offering a critical alternative to state-run institutions. His annual Singapore Survey series, for instance, featured politically engaged works at a time when most galleries avoided such topics. Willie’s shows also bridged diverse art scenes, fostering cross-border dialogue and exchange. Without proper documentation, much of this history risked being lost, especially after his galleries closed and the website went dormant. Fortunately, supporters have relaunched the site, now hosting materials from nearly 300 exhibitions. These include landmark series like CUT: Photography from Southeast Asia, featuring artists such as Yee I-Lann. It’s an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the region’s recent art history. Adeline Chia
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