The 7 Most Striking Artworks at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2025–2026 https://ift.tt/EiW6cD7

“I am an artist. I only know how to work in the studio, and this biennale is an extension of that studio,” said Nikhil Chopra at the opening of the 6th Kochi-Muziris Biennale, South Asia’s largest contemporary art exhibition and the first biennial founded in India. An internationally renowned performance artist and founder of HH Art Spaces, Chopra has shaped the curatorial vision of this edition.

Titled “For the Time Being,” the biennale brings together 66 artists from 25 countries across 29 venues in Kochi, India, a historic port city on the country’s southwestern coast. Much like a performance, the program unfolds gradually, running across 110 days. Rather than presenting a fixed exhibition, many venues function as active sites for durational works, shifting installations, and slow processes of gathering and making.

Responding to a world shaped by conflict, rapid technological change, deepening inequality, environmental crisis, and a pervasive sense of hopelessness, Chopra selected artworks that propose presence and friendship as practical responses to the moment. Many of the works invite visitors to slow down and engage with art through the body—by sitting, walking, sleeping, eating, listening, or simply conversing.

Here, we highlight seven powerful works that made an impression.

Panjeri Artists’ Union

Assemblies of Hope Amidst the Death-Worlds, 2025

The first work visitors encounter at the entrance of Aspinwall House, the Biennale’s main venue, is by Panjeri Artists’ Union, a 14-member anti-caste art collective formed in 2021. Based in Uchu Amtala, West Bengal, just a few train stops from the India-Bangladesh border, the group works from a region shaped by the consequences of the 1947 partition.

Their practice responds to border realities—surveillance, restricted movement, violence under security regimes, and disputes over shared rivers such as the Ichamati—conditions that disproportionately affect marginalized communities. At Kochi, this context takes physical form as a dense room full of ephemera. Protest posters and slogans line the walls, including texts by Indian social reformers, Dalit thinkers, and political poets. Charcoal drawings by members of the collective depict hands, faces, and bodies bent under injustice, alongside watercolors of rivers and children’s drawings that imagine quieter, more idyllic worlds.

The installation also includes handwoven textiles made by laborers put out of work by the shift to machine-weaving in the area. These hang opposite elaborate costumes designed to resemble gods, which draw from Bhaona, a centuries-old theater tradition from the neighboring state of Assam that’s rooted in Bhakti philosophy. This theater is historically performed by lower-caste communities, invoking a sharp tension between spiritual equality and lived inequality.

The space is alive with performance as well. One artist draws chalk lines across the floor while another follows, erasing them. As Anupam Roy, a member of the collective, put it: “Other industries have unions. Art should too, so artists can organize themselves politically.”

Ibrahim Mahama

Parliament of Ghosts, 2017–present

Moving deeper into the Biennale, the viewer finds themself inside the Anand Warehouse, a space once used by the Dutch, and later the British, to store goods moving through Kochi’s ports. Here, Ibrahim Mahama has built Parliament of Ghosts (2017–present), an enclosed chamber lined with heavy curtains made from used jute sacks with over a hundred chairs salvaged from furniture shops across Kochi. The sacks, previously used to transport pepper, grain, and timber from the colonies to Europe, still carry the smell of labor and sea, as if histories of extraction and colonial violence have not fully settled.

An evolution of earlier versions presented at the Manchester International Festival in 2019 (and currently on view at project space Ibraaz in London), the work resembles a parliament, a cathedral, and a courtroom—institutions tied to Western power—but also a classroom, held open for gathering. This openness echoes Mahama’s own training; as he recalled in an interview, his art education in Ghana focused on “transforming art from a state of commodity into a gift.”

Recently ranked at the top of ArtReview’s Power 100 list, Mahama, who founded the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art (SCCA) and Red Clay Studio in Tamale, Ghana, was present throughout the opening week, talking with visitors and hosting public conversations and performances.

Kulpreet Singh

Indelible Black Marks, 2022–present

Right across from Mahama’s installation, visitors enter a darkened room with three haystacks arranged as seating where they can watch an eight-minute film titled Indelible Black Marks (2022–present). The nightmarish work focuses on stubble burning in Patiala, India, the heart of India’s Green Revolution and its rice-growing belt.

The film unfolds in a surreal, cinematic register with a menacing soundtrack: Farmers run through fields overtaken by fire, the air thick with smoke, carrying canvas in an attempt to extinguish the flames, the land visibly suffocating. The burning of leftover rice stalks after harvest, often due to a lack of alternatives, has become widespread, contributing to severe air pollution across northern India, including Delhi.

Artist Kulpreet Singh, who is from a family of farmers, approaches his subject from within. In particular, his work is shaped by the farmers’ protests against market deregulation that were brutally suppressed in the wake of COVID-19 in 2020–21. “This is a systemic problem,” he said, in an interview. Outside the screening space, two blackened canvases rubbed with burnt hay bear the residue of the process seen on screen.

Dima Srouji and Piero Tomassoni

Air of Firozabad/Air of Palestine, 2025

On the first floor of a former rice warehouse, hundreds of delicate glass bubbles hang in a floating cloud, dancing to the shifts in wind and light.

The installation by Dima Srouji and Piero Tomassoni builds on Srouji’s decade-long engagement with glassblowers in Palestine, a craft facing steady decline. This work was realized instead in Firozabad, India, home to one of the world’s oldest glassblowing communities. Of the 451 glass forms on view, 450 were made in India, while one was produced in Palestine, subtly linking the two sites.

“This is a space for exhalation,” the artists explain. Along a narrow corridor, a small library of philosophy books invites visitors to sit and read. Above, the glass forms hover like held breath, quietly drawing attention to the invisible makers behind the objects we encounter, and to their often-unacknowledged presence across the Biennale.

Otobong Nkanga

Soft Offerings to Scorched Lands and the Brokenhearted, 2025

Stepping back outdoors, visitors enter a dilapidated, roofless space threaded with banyan tree roots where Otobong Nkanga is growing a garden. Known for projects that use gardening as a way to heal land damaged by colonial exploitation, Nkanga turns here to a mix of flowering and fruiting plants suited to Kochi’s tropical soil.

Heliconia, clock vines, frangipani, hibiscus, peacock flowers, bamboo, lemongrass, pepper bushes, torch ginger, ixora, orange jasmine, and lily varieties form the beginnings of a living landscape. Nkanga’s artwork will grow over the course of the Biennale under the care of local gardeners.

Titled Soft Offerings to Scorched Lands and the Brokenhearted (2025), the work creates a gentle space of repair. Women’s voices—folk stories, conversations, lullabies—echo through the garden from hidden speakers, while mud seats facing the pond and sea invite visitors to pause, listen, and rest.

Marina Abramović

At the Waterfall, 2003

On a small island a short ferry ride from the main venue, a monumental curved screen fills the space of Wellington Warehouse. It plays recordings of the faces of 120 Tibetan monks and nuns from five Buddhist schools, along with their voices. It’s a work made by Marina Abramović, captured at the Sacred Music Festival in Bangalore, India, in 2000, as these religious devotees recited the Heart Sutra.

Abramović, who has long been drawn to ancient ritual as a way of cultivating presence, recalled a moment of realization she had while editing the footage: “When you hear all the prayers from different monasteries and traditions at the same time, they sound like a huge waterfall.”

Only 12 chairs face the screen. Those who choose to sit become part of the energy field created by the overlapping chants, entering not just the sound, but its physical force.

Bani Abidi and Anupama Kundaroo

Barakah, 2025

Chosen by Nikhil Chopra as one of his favorite works of the Biennale, Barakah (2025) is a community kitchen conceived by artists Bani Abidi and Anupama Kundaroo, from Pakistan and India respectively. Named after the Arabic term for “blessing,” the work is shaped by their shared experience of hosting meals and gatherings in their homes in Berlin, where they both live. The project brings together artists, cooks, and local communities around the simple act of sharing food.

The exhibition note calls these gatherings-cum-artworks “a counterspell to the anxieties of capitalism,” and, in the Indian context, to communal divisions as well. Run by women from Kudumbashree, Kerala, India’s state-supported network of women’s self-help groups, the kitchen is open daily from 12 to 3 p.m., serving freshly cooked South Indian meals made from local produce at affordable prices, regardless of who you are.

The space itself is modest and welcoming: a circular canteen built from local timber, with a thatched roof and rope joinery that echoes vernacular architecture. In the spirit of the Biennale, Barakah becomes a place to eat and be together, if only for the time being.

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Janet Fish, who painted radiant still lifes, dies at 87. https://ift.tt/M2Xlo1s

American artist Janet Fish, known for her luminous realist portraits of everyday objects, died at her home in Wells, Vermont at 87 on December 11th. Her death was announced by DC Moore Gallery, which represents the artist.

Fish’s husband, artist Charles Parness, told the New York Times that the cause was a recurrence of a brain hemorrhage.

Fish painted hyper-luminous still lifes that revel in reflections and saturated color, transforming everyday glassware and fruit into sensuous objects. Her works invite slow looking, using excess and clarity to make perception itself part of the subject.

Born in 1938 in Boston, Fish was raised by art historian Peter Fish and sculptor Forence Whistler Fish. Her grandfather was the American Impressionist painter Clark Greenwood Voorhees. Janet moved to Bermuda with her family at age 10, where she remained until she enrolled at Smith College in Massachusetts in 1956. After receiving her bachelor’s degree, she pursued painting at Yale, earning a master’s degree.

Football, 1986
Janet Fish
DC Moore Gallery

At Yale, she worked alongside notable artists including Nancy Graves, Chuck Close, and Richard Serra, s. During her time in school, Fish admired painters like Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, but she never resonated as an artist with Abstract Expressionism. Instead, her instructor, Alex Katz, encouraged her to paint a landscape. She did, and continued to paint flowers throughout her career.

Fish arrived in New York City in 1965. In the late 1960s and ’70s, she arranged everyday objects beneath the sunlit window of her sixth-floor SoHo walk-up, using the space itself as both studio and subject.

Fish relocated to Vermont in 1979 and adopted a horizontal format, incorporating people and animals into her paintings for the first time. One painting, Football (1986), features a chaotic lunch spread, a television playing a football game, and a newspaper open to the sports section. Her dog sits underneath this scattered table. She painted until 2009, when she stopped due to her health.

Fish’s work is held in prestigious collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

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Larry Gagosian, Marilyn Minter, and More on Their Favorite Art World Movies https://ift.tt/ZNHPGv2

Art world stories find a natural home in film. Industry scandals and the dramas of artists’ lives easily unfold with cinematic flair. Over the decades, directors have focused on tense studio rivalries and dealers’ rituals in order to distill an ecosystem that’s as emotionally charged as it is visually rich.

For audiences, these films offer entry points into a trade that might otherwise feel elusive. They depict aspirations and conflicts, humor and pathos that resonate on a grand scale. And of course, there are exceptional, compelling characters. Documentaries take us behind the scenes, into the studios and minds of some of the world’s most creative people. Dramas illuminate the pressures and emotional currents that shape lives with art at their center.

Artsy spoke with 10 art world figures, from legendary gallerist Larry Gagosian to artist Marilyn Minter, to compile a movie list for anyone interested in the art world.

Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film, 2006

Directed by Ric Burns

Recommended by Larry Gagosian, founder of Gagosian

Andy Warhol in Convertible, ca. 1985
Andy Warhol
Hedges Projects

Larry Gagosian, founder of mega-gallery Gagosian, recommended Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film (2006). “My professional life has had so much to do with Andy Warhol,” he told Artsy. “I gave him his last show while he was alive, and continued selling works from his estate after his death.”

The nearly four-hour, Peabody Award–winning film traces the artist’s life in New York as he skyrockets from a commercial illustrator to an era-defining pop artist. It also has some winning cameos: Marlon Brando, John F. Kennedy, and other A-list names appear in archival footage. “[Warhol] had a fascinating mind, and Andy Warhol: A Documentary Film was the first major film to tell his remarkable story,” Gagosian said. “It’s an essential watch for anyone interested in the artist.”

Anselm, 2023

Directed by Wim Wenders

Recommended by Thaddaeus Ropac, founder of Thaddaeus Ropac

Throughout his work, German artist Anselm Kiefer confronted Europe’s violent histories of war and Jewish persecution. He translated those wounds into materially daring, physically imposing works built from raw materials. Thaddaeus Ropac told Artsy that Wim Wenders’s 2023 documentary Anselm invites viewers into Kiefer’s “vast universe.” For two years, Wenders observed the artist as he created his monumental pieces. Ropac explained that the film “offers a rare glimpse into the ideas, memories, and historical references that shape Kiefer’s multilayered practice.”

The film premiered at the 76th Cannes Film Festival and earned rave reviews. Wenders, whose films have long treated physical space as active emotional terrain, chose to shoot the documentary in 3D to fully immerse viewers in Kiefer’s monumental environments. “The film is not a conventional artist biography but rather an homage to the creative world of one of the most important contemporary artists of our time,” Ropac said.

All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, 2022

Directed by Laura Poitras

Recommended by Marilyn Minter

American painter and photographer Marilyn Minter told Artsy that Laura Poitras’s documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed (2022) is simply “the best.” It focuses on Nan Goldin’s advocacy during the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and on her current work forcing pharmaceutical corporations to take accountability for the opioid crisis. Poitras is an artist herself and often makes films with an activist bent, including her Edward Snowden documentary, Citizenfour (2015). In 2016, the Whitney Museum of American Art gave Poitras her own exhibition.

“Most movies about the art world are so far off it’s ludicrous,” Minter said. “They never get it right, but documentaries about artists are always interesting to me, even if they are badly made.” That said, some of the films the 77-year-old artist has watched recently and recommended include Mapplethorpe: Look at the Pictures (2016), How to Draw a Bunny (2002) (about artist Ray Johnson), Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV (2023), Gerhard Richter Painting (2011), and Alice Neel (2007).

Gerhard Richter Painting, 2011

Directed by Corinna Belz

Recommended by Adam Pendleton

Ifrit (Ifrit), 2010
Gerhard Richter
David Zwirner

American conceptual artist Adam Pendleton recommended Gerhard Richter Painting (2011), Corinna Belz’s documentary about the eponymous painter. It offers a rare visit into Richter’s studio, which, according to Pendleton, helps dispel inaccurate ideas about what painters do. “The romantic flash of inspiration or sweeping gesture we imagine is only part of the story,” he said. The documentary shows just how physically and emotionally taxing painting can be. According to Pendleton, it’s “as thrilling as any action movie” to watch Richter “maneuver his large, awkward squeegee across the plane of the canvas.”

Belz also captures Richter’s studio manager, who keeps the operation running. Pendleton called that unseen structure “the backbone of an artist’s studio.…This is what artists do,” he said. “Physical, deliberate acts of magic, balanced by the familiarity of everyday life.”

Taking Venice, 2023

Directed by Amei Wallach

Recommended by Nancy Olnick and Giorgio Spanu, collectors and founders of Magazzino Italian Art

Nancy Olnick and Giorgio Spanu, founders of Magazzino Italian Art in upstate New York, organize an annual Cinema in Piazza series. This year, the collectors-turned-gallerists showed one of their favorites: Taking Venice (2023). This film focuses on the scandals of the 1964 Venice Biennale, where Robert Rauschenberg won the Golden Lion amid a Cold War–era U.S. government campaign to slant the award in his favor.

“Rauschenberg was the first American artist in the history of La Biennale to receive the top prize from the hands of the Italian Minister of Education, Luigi Gui, [who was] highly criticized for handing such a grand prize for the best foreign painting to an American artist,” Olnick and Spanu said in a joint statement sent to Artsy. “Paced like a thriller, this remarkable film weaves together strands of art, personalities, politics, and history into a taut and powerful narrative. Any art lover will find it irresistible.”

Sister Wendy’s Story of Painting, 1996

BBC Television Program

Recommended by Jack Shainman, founder of Jack Shainman Gallery

When asked to share his favorite art world movie, New York gallerist Jack Shainman instead recommended a television miniseries about Sister Wendy Beckett, the famous nun who also published books on art. Her fame came from a chance encounter with a BBC film crew, who interviewed her at an art exhibition in Norfolk. They decided to give her her own show. In 1992, the BBC released Sister Wendy’s Odyssey, a six-episode series on the beloved art historian. Sister Wendy’s Story of Painting followed in 1996.

“As a nun, Sister Wendy provides such a unique perspective, and it is absolutely captivating to hear a nun describe the rapture of painting and the passions of the artists,” Shainman said. “Her own eloquence and intelligence are so apparent throughout all her programs, and she is such a charming host that I cannot help but love her.”

Still, Shainman made sure to emphasize that his favorite depiction of art in a film can be found in What a Way to Go (1964), a comedy starring Shirley MacLaine. Paul Newman plays an avant-garde artist, Larry, who marries MacLaine’s character and makes conceptual work that literally kills him. “The humorous, accidental approach to the whims of the art market truly tickles me, and Shirley MacLaine is, as always, just phenomenal,” he said.

The Draughtsman’s Contract, 1982

Directed by Peter Greenaway

Recommended by Lawrence Lek

London-based artist Lawrence Lek selected a film set three centuries ago: The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982). Peter Greenaway’s British period drama focuses on R. Neville (Anthony Higgins), an artist commissioned to create 12 meticulous drawings of a wealthy patron’s country estate. The works become entangled in a murder mystery. The bizarre and brainy film has become a cult classic.

Lek felt inspired by Greenaway’s ability to channel his own creative experiences into the movie. “Greenaway trained as a painter and turns perspective itself into an observational weapon about patronage and control,” Lek said. He noted that if you “strip away the English period setting,” the film becomes a cutting “satire of art-making that still feels uncannily true to today.”

Eva Hesse, 2016

Directed by Marcie Begleiter

Recommended by Kennedy Yanko

Sans II, 1968
Eva Hesse
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)

American artist Kennedy Yanko chose Eva Hesse (2016), a documentary about the eponymous sculptor. Directed by California-based artist Marcie Begleiter, the film celebrates Hesse’s groundbreaking contribution to sculpture in the 1960s: The German American artist used latex, fiberglass, and plastics to put a deeply embodied, feminist spin on the minimalist work of her era. Yanko noted that Begleiter “offers an intimate view into the mind and life of one of the most influential artists of our time.”

“In a cultural moment where the market often dominates conversations, this film reminds us of the irreplaceable value of the artist’s voice and vision,” Yanko told Artsy. “Through Hesse’s diaries, personal reflections, and incisive observations of the world around her, we witness not just an artist at work, but a mind deeply engaged with culture itself.” Yanko believes the film is “profoundly illuminating” for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the contemporary art world.

Art School Confidential, 2006

Directed by Terry Zwigoff

Recommended by Peggy Leboeuf, senior partner at Perrotin

Peggy Leboeuf, a New York–based senior partner at Perrotin, recently rewatched Terry Zwigoff’s Art School Confidential (2006). She’d forgotten “just how much of a hidden masterpiece it is,” she told Artsy. The narrative feature follows Jerome, a student who enrolls in art school among a cast of crazy professors (one played by John Malkovich) and delusional peers. “It’s one of those films that completely skewers the art world while also somehow being totally in love with it,” she continued.

Before Art School Confidential, Zwigoff was best known for Crumb (1994), his unflinching documentary about the underground cartoonist R. Crumb. That same fascination with creative dysfunction runs beneath Art School Confidential, an adaptation of a Daniel Clowes comic. Leboeuf warns that the film “might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but if you’ve ever studied art, lived around artists, or dipped even a toe into the gallery scene, you will absolutely recognize these characters.” This acidic view of the art world and its delusions “really captures the twisted, beautiful contradiction that is trying to ‘make it’ in the creative world.”

The Photograph, 2020

Directed by Stella Meghie

Recommended by J.J. Anderson, Los Angeles–based filmmaker

Los Angeles–based director J.J. Anderson—known for Positive Space (2020), a short film following four Black women curators—recommended The Photograph (2020). This rom-com by Canadian filmmaker Stella Meghie follows Mae (Issa Rae), the daughter of a famous photographer, as she dives into the complex life of her mother, Christina Eames (Chanté Adams). “This gentle love story is an intimate testimony of a photographer’s compulsive need to self-express, as well as the generational ripple effects of such expression,” Anderson told Artsy. Meghie highlights “the emotional labor Eames underwent to manifest a sense of autonomy through her work for the sake of herself and her lineage.”

Anderson connected with the film on a personal level. It reflects, she said, the lives of many art professionals she knows “whose work becomes an extension of themselves, their ancestors, and their descendants.” The director believes that The Photograph serves as a “necessary reminder of art’s existence, impact, and urgency” beyond its institutional and market value.

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Engaging with art is good for your health, new analysis reveals. https://ift.tt/ra3IzOq

Let's Go Look at Some Art, 2024
Sara Arsenyuk
Zemack Contemporary Art

We all might think that art is good for us, but now scientists are adding to research that’s making it official. Daisy Fancourt, a professor of epidemiology at University College London, is about to make a case for the arts that is anything but subjective. Her new book, Art Cure: The Science of How the Arts Save Lives, which will be published on February 3rd, assembles a decade of research arguing that cultural engagement produces measurable benefits for physical and mental health.

Fancourt’s work combines research from public health and cultural policy, a field that has often been met with skepticism because of its reliance on small or anecdotal studies. Instead, her research taps into large-scale epidemiological data collected over long periods, much of it originally gathered for medical and social science purposes rather than for arts advocacy.

To start her research, Fancourt identified existing studies involving tens of thousands of participants tracked over decades. Seven of these studies, primarily based in the U.K. but also conducted internationally, included detailed questions about cultural engagement alongside data on income, education, social life, and health. The professor analyzed these data sets and found a correlation between arts participation and health outcomes.

One early analysis focused on the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing. Since 2002, this study has followed more than 12,000 people born before 1952. Among participants with no prior history of depression, those who regularly engaged in cultural activities developed depression at a significantly lower rate over the following decade than those who did not. These findings were originally published in an essay in 2019.

Fancourt then traced similar patterns across studies involving millions of people, linking arts engagement to reduced depression, as well as other health issues, including blood pressure and cognitive functioning.

This new analysis joins a growing body of research linking art to psychological and physiological health. In October 2025, King’s College released a study asserting that looking at original artwork—rather than reproductions—significantly reduces stress.

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Why These Collectors Are Building a Platform for Southeast Asian Women Artists in London https://ift.tt/lkmZDsQ

After 23 years based in Singapore, Krystina Lyon and her husband Mark Budden are returning to London, but they plan to take the cultural influences of Southeast Asia with them.

Over the past three decades, the couple has amassed around 200 works of art that trace both the arc of Southeast Asia’s contemporary scene and their personal journey as collectors.

In their collection are works by Charles Lim Yi Yong, who represented Singapore at the Venice Biennale in 2015; Maria Madeira, who gave a voice to Timor-Leste in its inaugural Venice Biennale pavilion in 2024; the British abstract expressionist Albert Irvin; and the British Balinese artist Sinta Tantra.

For their next chapter in London, the couple plans to focus their collection on Southeast Asian women artists. “The women artists in my collections are articulating histories, untold stories, and struggles that are important to understanding Southeast Asia now,” said Lyon.

Tentatively named the Nassim Road Collection—after the street in Singapore where they lived—the couple hopes it will become a platform for deeper research into the history of contemporary art in the region.

“It would be nice to make it a place of encounter where students, scholars, and visitors can engage with the collection,” Lyon added. “Where dialogues around gender, history, and contemporary art in Southeast Asia can continue.”

From decoration to devotion

Like many collectors, Krystina Lyon and her husband first began buying art as a way to decorate their home, with early purchases including a set of screenprints from Kee Levi.

When the couple relocated to Singapore in the early 2000s, their business grew, and so did their collection. Paintings, artifacts, collectible Danish furniture: The range widened, and Lyon found herself with more time to devote to her own passion.

She began volunteering as a docent at heritage and history museums, including the Peranakan Museum, the Malay Heritage Centre, and the National Gallery Singapore. “Through them, I gained a much deeper knowledge of national histories in Singapore and in the region,” she noted.

Gradually, her focus shifted from heritage to the immediacy of contemporary art. The turning point came in 2014, when Lyon volunteered as a guide for a major exhibition at the now-defunct Centre for Contemporary Art.

Titled “No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia,” it featured 19 works by 16 artists and collectives from 11 countries, including Shilpa Gupta, The Propeller Group, and Aung Myint.

It delved into the diversity of art practice, exploring everything from the legacy of major political events such as the Indian Partition to the perception of womanhood and family.

The show had a profound emotional effect. “My husband and I always remember walking into that exhibition and seeing Tayeba Begum Lipi’s bed made of razor blades and Sopheap Pich’s Morning Glory (2011), woven from rattan.”

“These works were no longer about national narratives; they were questioning, reshaping, and telling their own stories,” she said.

Nearly a decade later, in her living room, sit two glass-encased works by Lipi: a pair of palm-sized baby shoes—Lost (2019)—and a set of stiletto heels—Her Stilettos 1 (Day) (2019)—both cut from the glint of razor blades.

For the works, Lipi draws on her roots in Bangladesh, where access to healthcare is limited. The razor blade is a tool used to sever an umbilical cord, and Lipi turns that brutal necessity into a metaphor for the struggles faced by women in her home country.

A collection with an academic catalyst

What ultimately steered Lyon toward collecting women artists with intention was her enrollment in a joint MA program in Asian art histories.

“When I began researching women’s art collectives in Southeast Asia, I started to see patterns, urgencies, and resonances I hadn’t noticed before,” Lyon said. “I realized I had to marshal my resources to build a collection with real depth and coherence.”

One of the first works Lyon acquired by a Southeast Asian women artist was Ad Infinitum (2019) in 2021 by Melbourne-based Indonesian artist Octora Chan. Chan is known for interrogating how ethnographic portraits of Indonesian women produced during the colonial era continue to shape perceptions of gender in the region today. In Ad Infinitum, she restaged a photograph of a Legong dancer. Legong, a classical Balinese court dance, has long been performed by women. Yet under colonial rule, dancers were often stripped of their individuality and treated as objects of exotic curiosity.

“I was immediately intrigued by the layered narrative in the work,” Lyon said. “I was familiar with parts of Dutch colonial history in the East Indies, but this was the first time I encountered a young contemporary artist critiquing that period in a way that also engaged with current sociopolitical issues.”

In 2024, Lyon purchased another work by Chan, Recoup 1920: wuorv egnoj (2023), the artist’s first foray into tapestry.

Here, Chan restages herself as the subject of an ethnographic portrait of Balinese women shown from a three-quarter back view. Golden threads glint in her earrings and hair ornaments, set against the muted tones of merino wool, imbuing the work with elegance and softness.

“This is probably what they would have liked to show the colonizers—not everything, just their backs,” Lyon said. “It’s as if she’s giving them their agency back.”

A collection of dialogue

For Lyon, collecting has always been about “dialogue rather than possession.”

“It reflects what I have learned from living here [in Singapore] for over three decades,” she said.

Her commitment extends beyond acquiring works, as she revealed plans to lend several pieces to museum exhibitions next year in both London and Boston. But the culmination of her research and collecting philosophy will arrive next year with the publication of her book, You Are Seen: Women’s Contemporary Art Practices in Southeast Asia.

The volume, set to coincide with the Art SG art fair in January, spotlights 35 women artists from nine ASEAN countries. Drawing from her personal collection and spanning both emerging and established voices, the book served a crucial purpose for her. “The aim is not to speak for these artists, but to amplify the resonance of their work,” she said. “I hope to continue this journey through speaking, writing, and sharing the collection so that others can encounter them, too.”

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The Artists on Our Radar in 2025 https://ift.tt/sJNVEDG

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The Best Public Art of 2025 https://ift.tt/8QDXqpa

This year’s standout public artworks brought civic imagination into parks, mountains, tunnels, and rooftops. From interactive sculptures to ecologically attuned installations, artists around the world are expanding the role of public art as a catalyst for reflection, play, and connection. The art and design fabrication company UAP has revealed its annual list of the most notable public art projects of 2025, curated in partnership with six internationally recognized curators.

The 2025 projects were selected by Salamishah Tillet, Pulitzer Prize–winning critic at the New York Times; Amanda Abi Khalil, founder of TAP (Temporary Art Platform); Pojai Akratanakul, curator of the 2026 Timor-Leste Pavilion at the Venice Biennale; and Deborah McCormick, a public arts strategist. They collaborated with Natasha Smith, UAP’s director of curatorial, and Danielle Robson, principal curator and curatorial manager at UAP.

“This year’s cohort of contributing curators presents a powerhouse of women, leading in the arts and reporting from New York to Beirut and beyond,” Smith said. “The artworks featured render this year of 2025 in a diversity of forms, color, light, culture and beauty.”

Ja’Hari Ortega

Big Hoops to Fill (2025)

Boston

Travel to downtown Boston until next October, and you’ll come across a large-scale sculpture I would never have imagined as a Black girl growing up in [Boston neighborhood] Dorchester in the early 1980s. Currently on display at the Rose Kennedy Greenway, you can catch Ja’Hari Ortega’s Big Hoops to Fill, a functioning swing set in the form of gigantic gold bamboo earrings, or, as they are colloquially known, “door knockers.” Roxbury-born artist Ortega grew up mesmerized by the jewelry her mother adorned and shared with her. She also remembers how Black and Latinx girls and women popularized gold bamboo earrings within hip-hop’s early days.

Made of steel, resin, and fiberglass composite, epoxy paint, and polyurethane, Ortega’s 10-foot-tall monument recognizes the cultural significance of these earrings and rightly credits the mainly urban, working-class girls and women of color who wear them as critical artistic innovators and fashion influencers.

—Salamishah Tillet

Nekisha Durrett

Don’t Forget to Remember (Me) (2025)

Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania

When Bryn Mawr College, a private women’s liberal arts college in Pennsylvania, admitted its first African American student, Enid Cook, in 1927, she was not allowed to live on campus. Finding housing off campus, she had to travel a mile to attend classes and was the only Black student enrolled there until she graduated in 1931. The only other African Americans she encountered were those hired to maintain campus grounds. Today, Cook’s name and those of other African Americans who worked as groundskeepers, housekeepers, waitstaff, and laundresses from 1900 to 1930 are inscribed on nearly 250 bricks, forming a monument to their lives.

Commissioned by Bryn Mawr College in partnership with Monument Lab, Nekisha Durrett’s Don’t Forget to Remember (Me) is a winding brick pathway outside the cloisters of Bryn Mawr’s Old Library. Woven together, the bricks form braids or plaited hairstyles. This symbol, alongside those bricks made of glass and designed to be lit up at night, invokes Cook’s body and her daily walk on campus, and insists on the remembrance of the many who labored and dedicated their lives to a college that neither they nor most of their children could attend. Subtle and yet sophisticated, Don’t Forget to Remember (Me) engages the complex histories of racial discrimination, diversity, and desegregation in higher education by inviting all who walk on this path to never forget.

—Salamishah Tillet

Shaikha Almazrou

Deliberate Pauses (2025)

Hatta, United Arab Emirates

Shaikha Almazrou’s Deliberate Pauses is a defining gesture in the evolving field of public art in the Gulf. Installed across the terrain of Hatta and Leem Lake, five red, reflective sculptures are dispersed across the mountains and hiking paths, entering into dialogue with the wind, the light, and the bodies that traverse them.

Globally, public art is increasingly shifting from object-based commissions toward situated practices that address ecology, access, and coexistence. Almazrou’s work embodies this shift. It rejects spectacle and decoration, the tropes that have often defined public art in Dubai, and replaces them with presence, attention, and reciprocity.

In a context where visibility is often conflated with value, Deliberate Pauses invites another temporality, one of slowness, listening, and stillness as political gestures. This work opens a necessary space for reflection. It asks how we might inhabit the landscape differently and what it means to pause deliberately within the urgencies of our time.

—Amanda Abi Khalil

Laura Lima

Indistinct Form (2025)

Boston

Laura Lima’s Indistinct Form expands the field of public art beyond the human gaze. Installed within the Boston Nature Center, the work redefines spectatorship by shifting attention toward the nonhuman. Lima creates sculptural environments not for people to look at, but for birds and woodland creatures to inhabit, occupy, and transform.

Working in close collaboration with wildlife experts from Instituto Vida Livre in Rio de Janeiro and the Mass Audubon Boston Nature Center, Lima designed a series of sculptural elements that function as both habitat and gesture. These forms, produced with local artisans in wood and ceramics, operate within a living ecosystem where authorship is shared and unpredictable.

This work is radical in its simplicity: It recognizes that the aesthetic experience is not exclusive to humans and that art can emerge from interspecies proximity, touch, and use. Within a global landscape of public art still driven by visibility and human-centered narratives, Indistinct Form proposes a more porous, ethical, and generous form of creation—one that listens before it speaks.

—Amanda Abi Khalil

Antony Gormley

Close (2025)

Bukhara, Uzbekistan

The inaugural Bukhara Biennial, “Recipes for a Broken Heart,” curated by Diana Campbell, activates the historical UNESCO heritage city, once the heart of the Silk Road. Antony Gormley’s Close (2025), a collaboration with Uzbekistani artist Temur Jumaev and local brickmakers, is one of the biennial’s most ambitious site-specific commissions. Situated within the ruins of the Khoja Kalon mosque built in 1598, the work comprises 95 tons of unfired sun-dried earth and straw. The bricks were hand-made to form “pixelated” bodies, employing the same vernacular techniques of how buildings in the city were made. Visitors navigate the maze-like installation, encountering 100 sculptures in crouching, reclining, or meditating postures, compelling a close proximity and bodily engagement. Absorbing its heritage context, the artwork appears to transform throughout the day with the play of light and shadow. It extends Gormley’s longstanding exploration of material physicality, the way parts come together as a whole, and his interests in human history, while addressing the idea of the body as a dwelling.

The experience is universal, appealing to audiences of all ages. It truly achieves what public art in a biennale setting is supposed to do, and not only connecting with the art crowds, but truly engaging with the site. It prompts visitors, whether local or international, to reconnect with their roots and question how one coexists, belongs, and takes part in history.

—Pojai Akratanakul

Tuan Andrew Nguyen

Temple (2025)

Singapore

Temple (2025) by Tuan Andrew Nguyen is a new sculpture commissioned for the Ng Teng Fong Roof Garden of the National Gallery Singapore, co-presented with the Singapore Art Museum at the launch of the eighth Singapore Biennale, [which is titled] “pure intention.”

Forming the foundation of this work, an abstract and geometrical bright red structure stands with extended curved legs made of industrial steel, evoking construction sites in one of Southeast Asia’s most vertical metropolises. Hung from these frames are six instruments—discs, chimes, bells, and gongs—that create an ambient soundscape. They are forged from alloys of unexploded ordnance (UXO) removed from the ground of Quảng Trị in central Vietnam. This material bears testament to the Vietnam War, which left countries like Laos and Vietnam as the most bombed areas in the world per capita. To this day, the remains of the two million tons of ordnance dropped in the 1960s–70s still threaten daily lives.

Nguyen’s installation subtly demands awareness of this trauma. The instruments, tuned to frequencies believed to promote somatic healing, urge visitors to rest and listen, and perhaps spend time with the piece. Situated right in the center of Singapore’s civic district, the artwork calls for the attention of nearby high-rise dwellers and office workers, making visible the buried history of the war and unheard stories of loss, while making a new form from these remnants, thereby exploring a path towards restoration and peace.

—Pojai Akratanakul

Judy Darragh

Ether (2025)

Auckland

Commissioned by Sudima Auckland City Hotel, Ether takes its inspiration from its location. The hotel sits on Auckland city’s Nelson Street ridge, and Sunset, the rooftop bar, takes in dramatic views west over the Waitematā Harbour to the Waitakere Ranges. At 11 metres in length, Ether is an epic work for the four-and-a-half-star hotel. It is the first permanent artwork of this type and scale in the country. The sculpture redefines the heart of New Zealand’s largest city with adventurous colour and form—appearing to escape from its glassed atrium. The sculpture includes a built-in fan to keep its form fully inflated and alive.

Darragh is a maker of magical artworks that leave memorable impressions on viewers. She says she wants us to “feel knocked out” when viewing this work. “When we look at art...it should be something that is transformative.”

While public art in Aotearoa New Zealand is a growing space, it’s an area dominated by men. Ether presents an opportunity to highlight women’s public art. Darragh coedited the publication Femisphere and has long advocated for better visibility for women artists. Ether is an outstanding contribution to an urban neighbourhood already notable for its public civic art, firmly anchoring the Sudima Auckland City hotel as a contributor to the location and community.

—Deborah McCormick

Mike Hewson

The Key’s Under the Mat (2025)

Sydney

I met Mike Hewson during the Earthquake recovery period in Ōtautahi Christchurch [New Zealand]. His greatest feat, The Key’s Under the Mat, is a masterclass in community and socially engaged public art practice. It is a boundary-testing social sculpture across a 2,200 square metre space in the Nelson Packer Tank and came to life under the curatorship of Justin Paton at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

The ambition is high, with the Kiwi number eight wire innovation mentality across the entire project in spades. Mike’s training as an engineer and a conceptual artist come together to refashion and repurpose found items into one large play space for young and old. Mike’s design ingenuity, resourcefulness, can-do attitude, and ability to think laterally to solve a problem have brought to life artworks, play areas, and places to be. It’s a combination park, playground, barbeque, laundromat, steam room, recording studio, artist-in-residence space, construction site and commons; all for anyone to use.

For me, this artwork ultimately challenged our perceptions of the gallery environment (especially how we can behave within it), and what is public art. With over 100,000 visitors since the opening in October, the community’s response to this project is a message to the art institution: This is right on the pulse of what people want from their public art gallery.

—Deborah McCormick

Tony Albert and Nell

The Big Hose (2025)

Brisbane

The concept behind Tony Albert and Nell’s The Big Hose speaks to the quintessential Queenslander vernacular, where one might find the garden hose strewn across the front yard after a bit of water play on a hot summer’s day. This hose is supersized to join Australia’s list of “big” things and to take your imagination to new heights. The work is much more layered and nuanced than just this of course, with meanings inspired through local histories of First Peoples, migration, and art.

Measuring 119 meters in length, twisting and looping around the bright orange soft fall ground, it seemed to me like a friendly green tree snake. Its bright surface is adorned with an intricate boomerang pattern (so very Tony), emulating a braided hose design. It is truly a sight to behold, with treasures to discover, like the Lemon Migrant Butterfly who gently perches on its tallest arc, the smiley face wooden seating (so very Nell), and the sleepy “Kuril” water rat, hiding in the cool of the hose connector.

I am such a fan—as a public art curator, as a mother of an 11-year-old, and as an adult dreaming of being young once more—it has something to offer us all!

—Natasha Smith

Maurizio Cattelan

Where is Maurizio? (2025)

New York, London, Amsterdam

Public artwork, participatory game, marketing gesture, or conceptual prank? Maurizio Cattelan’s Where is Maurizio? was all of the above—and deliberately so. Conceived as an international treasure hunt, the project was commissioned by Avant Arte, unfolding online and in real time between September 30 and October 7, 2025.

Three hand-painted, miniature self-portrait sculptures [each individually titled We are the Revolution] by Cattelan were discreetly placed for sale in everyday retail settings: a New York bodega for $0.50, a London fruit stall for £0.99, and an Amsterdam antique shop for €5.00. This radical repositioning stood in stark contrast to the editioned works’ gallery price of €1,500, humorously subverting notions of value, access, and authorship in the art market. Digital clues to each sculpture’s whereabouts invited global participation: The New York piece could be purchased in person, while the London and Amsterdam works were sold via an online entry form stating the correct location. The first find—resting on a newspaper in a Soho corner store—occurred within two hours of a nondescript image being shared online.

Cattelan is renowned for his incisive, satirical practice that interrogates and destabilises the hierarchies of the art world through wit and provocation. When developing his idea for Where is Maurizio?, his duct-taped, store-bought banana work, Comedian (2019), had recently sold at auction for $6.2 million. America (2016), Cattelan’s fully operational toilet cast in solid gold, was also making headlines, and at the time of writing, has just sold for $12.1 million.

For the 11,000 participants who hunted for a “bargain” artwork, there were countless others who may have seen the small, hunched figure for sale while going about their day, unknowingly missing the chance to acquire an “art jackpot.”

—Danielle Robson

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