May 2, 2025
Every month, Berlin Art Link shines a spotlight on international exhibitions and events with our Worldwide Hit List. We want to highlight artists, galleries, museums and new projects touching on a variety of topics, employing multiple media and featuring diverse subjects. Below are some of the stand-outs that we’ve selected for the month of May.
Secession
Jeremy Shaw
Exhibition: May 29-Aug. 31, 2025
secession.at
Friedrichstraße 12, 1010 Vienna, Austria, click here for map
Jeremy Shaw uses various media to explore altered states and the cultural and scientific efforts to map transcendental experiences. Often working with outdated formats like 16mm film and Hi8 video, he presents archival-style footage as visions of the future, creating a disorienting sense of time and place. Shaw’s upcoming exhibition at Secession includes two recent works, ‘There in Spirit’ (2024) and ‘Maximum Horizon’ (2024), marking a return to physical objects that reflect on universal aspirations of infinity and the challenges of depicting them. ‘There in Spirit’ is a sculptural installation of 165 flickering LED candles that slowly evolve to form a vortex animation, evoking prayer, piety and devotion via an interplay of light, shadow, movement and sound. ‘Maximum Horizon’ combines traditional stained glass with sci-fi imagery of wormholes and digital horizons, merging the sacred and the profane to explore contemporary, tech-driven aspirations of transcendence.
Jeremy Shaw: ‘Maximum Horizon,’ 2024, antique stain glass, lead, steel, spotlight; 8 min, 205,6 x 136 x 175 cm; coproduction CIAPV/Jeremy Shaw Studio, installation view ‘Jeremy Shaw, Maximum Horizon,’ exhibition CIAP Vassivière, 2024 // Photo © Aurélien Mole, courtesy of the artist and Bradley Ertaskiran
MoMA
Rosa Barba: ‘The Ocean of One’s Pause’
Exhibition: May 3-July 6, 2025
moma.org
11 W 53rd St, New York, NY 10019, USA, click here for map
Rosa Barba’s conceptual explorations treat film as both a physical material with sculptural properties and an immaterial medium that carries information. She uses film as a speculative tool to probe the sensory and spatial dimensions of cinema. Spanning 15 years of her practice, this exhibition at MoMA features film, kinetic sculpture and sound activations to examine natural landscapes and human-made transformations of the environment, by delving into historical records, personal narratives and the sensory experience of celluloid. At its core is ‘Charge,’ a newly commissioned 35mm film that examines light as a source of ecological change and scientific innovation. For ‘The Ocean of One’s Pause’—a series of live performances conceived by Barba as an “exploded poem”—percussionist Chad Taylor, vocalist Alicia Hall Moran and Barba herself will activate a symphony of images throughout the installation, prompting a live collaboration between light, voice, rhythm and film that emphasizes the interdependency of each.
Rosa Barba: ‘Voice Engine,’ 2021, performance/installation view at Callie’s, Berlin, 2021 // Photo by Callie’s, © Rosa Barba
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art
Kaari Upson: ‘Dollhouse – A Retrospective’
Exhibition: May 27-Oct. 26, 2025
louisiana.dk
Gl Strandvej 13, 3050 Humlebæk, Denmark, click here for map
Kaari Upson once likened her practice to “a fragmented narrative full of cracks and openings,” a structure into which the viewer might fall or briefly dwell. The Louisiana Museum now presents the first major European retrospective of the American artist (1970–2021), whose immersive, psychologically-charged works probe the porous boundaries between self and other, often staging memory against fiction. Rooted in performance and a background in psychology, Upson gave form to the mind’s inner architecture: eerie, half-sculptural dollhouses, fleshy casts of domestic furniture and immersive environments that read like twisted retellings of ‘Alice in Wonderland.’ At the center of her practice lies autofiction. Her most iconic works, including the long-running ‘Larry Project,’ are attempts to unfurl a subconscious archive of buried fantasies and projections. Through ghostly replicas of suburban architecture and disquieting video works, Upson unearthed the latent anxieties of American life, returning again and again to the domestic stage of collective delusion and desire. What emerges is a sustained encounter with the instability of the selves we build and rebuild across a lifetime. The exhibition concludes with her final pieces: here, in an elegiac and intimate reflection on her own mother, Upson’s works turn inward.
Kaari Upson: ‘Untitled,’ 2020-21 // Courtesy Sprüth Magers, photo by Robert Wedemeyer, © Esmé Trust / Kaari Upson Trust
WIELS
Group Show: ‘Magical Realism: Imagining Natural Dis/order’
Exhibition: May 29-Sept. 28, 2025
wiels.org
Av. Van Volxem 354, 1190 Forest, Belgium, click here for map
Unsettling the boundaries between empirical knowledge and mythmaking, ‘Magical Realism: Imagining Natural Dis/order’ at WIELS and ARGOS examines how artistic practice can disrupt dominant narratives about nature, ecology and systems of order. The exhibition brings together over 30 international artists whose works challenge fixed distinctions between the natural and the artificial, the rational and the speculative. From Joan Jonas and Cecilia Vicuña to Otobong Nkanga, Saodat Ismailova and Precious Okoyomon, the artists work across video, installation, performance and material experimentation to probe ecological entanglement and post-anthropocentric imaginaries. Spread across two venues, the exhibition weaves together lineages of myth and science to destabilize these often rigid categories, revealing how both are shaped by cultural bias, historical violence and speculative desire. By placing ancestral knowledge systems, ecological fictions and empirical data in conversation, the works question what we accept as natural and who gets to define disorder in a world already shaped by extraction and imbalance. In doing so, ‘Magical Realism’ attempts to resist moral clarity, instead embracing contradiction and complexity as hallmarks of both the eponymous genre and the ecological moment it confronts. The accompanying program of talks, screenings and performances expands the exhibition into a space of reflection that invites visitors to attune to shifting relations between disorder, care and survival.
Joan Jonas: ‘Moving Off the Land II,’ 2019, video still // Courtesy of the artist
Mudam Luxembourg
Susan Philipsz: ‘The Lower World’
Agnes Denes: ‘The Living Pyramid’
Exhibition: May 10-Oct. 18, 2025
mudam.com
3 Park Drai Eechelen, 1499 Clausen Luxembourg, click here for map
At Mudam Luxembourg, two major commissions by Susan Philipsz and Agnes Denes unfold across the city’s public spaces, inviting sensory and temporal reflection at the intersection of art, architecture and environment. Philipsz, known for her site-specific sound works that explore memory, loss and spatial resonance, presents ‘The Lower World’ within the city’s 900-meter-long Aquatunnel. Her voice is emitted from 12 speakers, merging the haunting tones of civil defense sirens with the mythic pull of the Sirens’ song. The work draws on Philipsz’s ongoing interest in the emotional and political charge of sound in public space, transforming the subterranean tunnel into an immersive acoustic corridor. Outside, Agnes Denes, pioneer of ecological and conceptual art since the 1960s, realizes ‘The Living Pyramid’ on the esplanade of Park Dräi Eechelen. Composed of over 2,000 plants native to the region, the nine-meter-high pyramid continues Denes’s decades-long engagement with sustainability, public participation and systems thinking. This iteration includes a time capsule, filled with public responses to the question of what makes life meaningful, scheduled to be unearthed in a thousand years. Together, the two works ask how we inhabit time and place, whether through echo or root, through monument or ephemeral gesture.
Agnes Denes: ‘The Living Pyramid,’ 2015, wood, soil, plants, 30x30x30 feet, Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island City, NY // Copyright Agnes Denes, courtesy of Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects
K21
Julie Mehretu: ‘Kairos / Hauntological Variations’
Exhibition: May 10-Oct. 12, 2025
kunstsammlung.de
Ständehausstraße 1, 40217 Düsseldorf, click here for map
Julie Mehretu’s first mid-career survey in Germany features nearly 100 works, spanning from her early line drawings of the 1990s to her most recent large-scale abstract paintings. The exhibition also includes time-based media inspired by Mehretu’s practice, such as a music album, documentary and video pieces. In addition to showcasing finished works, the exhibition offers insight into the artist’s creative process. She often begins with media images of political events and historical sites, transforming them into layered abstract compositions marked by notations, overpainting and masking. Through a selection of source materials and rarely seen works on paper, the K21 exhibition contextualizes the conceptual thinking behind Mehretu’s work.
Julie Mehretu: ‘TRANSpaintings(recurrence),’ 2023, ink and acrylic on monofilament polyester mesh in an aluminum sculpture; ‘Upright Brackets,’ by Nairy Baghramian, dimensions variable, 96 x 120 in/24,8 x 304,8 cm, Pinault Collection // Courtesy of the artist, White Cube, London and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, photo by White Cube, Theo Chistelis, © Julie Mehretu
Pace Gallery Tokyo
‘Joan Jonas: Drawings, Curated by Adam Pendleton’
Exhibition: May 17–June 28, 2025
pacegallery.com
1F, Azabudai Hills Garden Plaza-A 5-8-1 Toranomon, Minato-ku, Tokyo, click here for map
Curated by artist Adam Pendleton, Joan Jonas’ collaborator and long time friend, this exhibition at Pace Gallery Tokyo offers a rare and focused look at Jonas’s drawing practice, revealing its deep entanglement with performance, gesture and movement. Featuring approximately 80 works on paper from the 1970s to the 2010s, the selection traces how drawing has served as a core site of experimentation in Jonas’ broader practice. Crucially, the exhibition also reflects on Jonas’ enduring relationship with Japan, where she first traveled in the 1970s. Encounters with Noh and Kabuki theater, as well as traditional Japanese aesthetics and paper-making techniques, left lasting imprints on her visual and performative language. Positioning them within and beyond the lineage of Abstract Expressionism, Pendleton’s curation emphasizes how these cross-cultural dialogues surface in Jonas’ approach to mark-making across the works.
Joan Jonas: ‘Untitled,’ ink on paper, framed // © Joan Jonas / Artists’ Rights Society (ARS), New York
