Oct. 3, 2025
Every month, Berlin Art Link shines a spotlight on international exhibitions and events with our list of Top Exhibitions. 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 October.
M HKA
‘The Associations of Pauline Curnier Jardin’
Exhibition: Oct. 10, 2025-Jan. 25, 2026
muhka.be
Leuvenstraat 32, 2000 Antwerpen, Belgium, click here for map
This autumn, M HKA presents the first survey exhibition of French artist Pauline Curnier Jardin, whose unique world merges personal and collective stories. Featuring film, drawings, sculptures, scenographic installations and stage performances, the exhibition brings together a broad range of exuberant, hybrid works that were created between 2006 and 2024. More than 20 films directed by Curnier Jardin will be shown simultaneously for the first time, allowing visitors to discover the wide variety of cinematic genres the artist explores and experiments with. Pauline Curnier Jardin is the winner of the 2019 German Preis der Nationalgalerie, the 2021 Villa Romana Prize in Firenze and recipient of the 2019-2020 Villa Medici fellowship in Rome.
Centro Botín
Cooking Sections: ‘Waves Lost At Sea’
Exhibition: Oct. 18, 2025-Mar. 1, 2026
centrobotin.org
Plaza Emilio Botín, P.º de Pereda, s/n, 39004 Santander, Cantabria, Spain, click here for map
Cooking Sections’ first exhibition in Spain, ‘Waves Lost at Sea’ is a performative installation that examines the global disappearance of historical waves. From Mundaka’s sandbar in the Cantabrian sea to El Marsa’s phosphate port in Western Sahara, industrial and infrastructural shifts have eroded coastal communities while also forcing different species to the migrate or disappear completely. The exhibition, which follows on from last year’s workshop ‘Reading Ocean Imprints,’ is a commemoration of waves: it recalls why these waves no longer break or foam, the way we listen to their vanishing and what might, beyond what has already been lost, require protection.
PEAC Museum
Schirin Kretschmann: ‘Ten By One’
Exhibition: Sept. 21, 2025-Feb. 8, 2026
peac.digital
Robert-Bunsen-Straße 5, 79108 Freiburg im Breisgau, click here for map
‘Ten By One’ at PEAC is one of Schirin Kretschmann’s most extensive exhibitions to date and features a new body of work that has been especially created to reflect on the museum’s architecture, usage and materiality. Guided by questions such as “what defines a space? Which visible and invisible structures shape it? What actions are inscribed into it?”, Kretschmann reinterprets existing materials, movement patterns and acoustic traces. The video and sound works featured in the exhibition continuously reconfigure themselves, generating a charged atmosphere that creates a multilayered experience. The use of unusual materials such as leather grease, ice cream, loose pigments, plaster, packaging elements and vehicles are a recurring feature in Schrin Kretschmann’s work: she sees them as carriers of information that—depending on how they are processed and combined—can shape and transform our relationship to space, time and their associated imaginations.
Gropius Bau
Diane Arbus: ‘Konstellationen’
Exhibition: Oct. 16, 2025-Jan. 18, 2026
gropiusbau.de
Niederkirchnerstraße 7, 10963 Berlin, click here for map
Widely regarded as one of the most original and influential artists of the 20th century, Diane Arbus’ bold black-and-white photographs demolish aesthetic conventions and upend all certainties. With ‘Diane Arbus: Konstellationen,’ Gropius Bau presents the most comprehensive exhibition of her work to date. Featuring 454 prints, many of them shown here for the first time, ‘Konstellationen’ offers new perspectives on Arbus’ iconic images and the wide range of her portraiture. Presented as a labyrinthine “constellation” of photographs, the exhibition follows neither chronological nor thematic grouping. Instead, it invites visitors to wander freely among the images, discovering the resonances and relationships that emerge between them.
Museion
Nicola L.: ‘I Am The Last Woman Object’
Exhibition: Oct. 11, 2025-Mar. 1, 2026
museion.it
Piazza Piero Siena, 1, 39100 Bolzano BZ, Italy, click here for map
From the mid-1960s onward, Nicola L. developed a body of work that is both radical and playful, imbued with subversive wit and ideals of equality and collectivity. Despite being associated with Pop Art, Nouveau Réalisme, feminism and design, her practice defies categorization. ‘Nicola L. – I Am The Last Woman Object’ is the artist’s first museum exhibition in Italy and the most expansive presentation of her work to date. Encompassing sculpture, painting, drawing, collage, performance and film, the exhibition is an unprecedented opportunity to experience the full breadth of her multidisciplinary oeuvre that navigates subjects such as cosmology, spirituality, sexuality, environmental protection and political resistance.
Sainsbury Centre
Tesfaye Urgessa: ‘Roots of Resilience’
Exhibition: Sept. 20, 2025-Feb. 15, 2026
sainsburycentre.ac.uk
Norwich NR4 7TU, UK, click here for map
Informed by themes of geographical displacement and migration, Tesfaye Urgessa creates paintings that interrogate the politics and layered narratives of war, race, identity, migration and survival. Following a residency with the Sainsbury Centre, the Ethiopian artist unveils ‘Roots of Resilience,’ featuring a new series of paintings that respond to the refugee crisis. The exhibition celebrates the human body as dignified, defiant and resilient. Urgessa’s painterly reimagining of the human figure reflects not only personal and collective trauma but also our potential for empathy, endurance and transformation. This body of work was created in dialogue with pieces from the Sainsbury Centre’s global collection—including Pablo Picasso’s ‘Woman Combing Her Hair’ (1906) and Henry Moore’s ‘Mother and Child’ (1932)—which serve as key sources of inspiration and resonate with Urgessa’s practice.
Kunstmuseum Basel
Group Show: ‘Ghosts: Visualizing the Supernatural’
Exhibition: Sept. 20, 2025-Mar. 8, 2026
kunstmuseumbasel.ch
St. Alban-Graben 16, 4051 Basel, Switzerland, click here for map
This exhibition of over 160 works and objects created during the past 250 years explores the visual culture associated with ghosts that emerged in the Western hemisphere in the 19th century when science, spiritualism and popular media began to intersect in new ways and inspire artists ever since. While that era is often remembered as a golden age of rationality, science and technology, it was also a time of fascination with spirits and apparitions, which became a way of exploring the psyche and people’s inner lives. Despite modern advances, belief in the supernatural persists, showing how ghosts continue to shape our collective imagination. The exhibition highlights the enduring presence of this theme in art, featuring works by an extensive list of artists including Thomas Demand, Nicole Eisenman, Mike Kelley, René Magritte, Meret Oppenheim, Philippe Parreno and Rosemarie Trockel, among many others.
Mimosa House
Claire Fontaine: ‘Show Less’
Exhibition: Oct. 10-Dec. 6, 2025
mimosahouse.co.uk
47 Theobalds Rd, London WC1X 8SP, UK, click here for map
‘Show Less’ at Mimosa House marks Palermo-based Claire Fontaine’s first significant solo show in a publicly-funded space in London. The duo, a conceptual and feminist collective founded by Fulvia Carnevale and James Thornhill in 2004, works across video, sculpture, painting and writing, exploring themes of resistance, identity and power. Coinciding with Frieze London, ‘Show Less’ includes new and existing works that offer a visual and theoretical exploration into feminism, which has shaped Claire Fontaine’s long-standing practice. Central to the exhibition is a questioning of the criteria through which visibility is regulated in dominant cultural, social and political narratives as described by Italian feminist theorist Carla Lonzi (1931-82), whose books include ‘Let’s Spit on Hegel’ (1970).
Lafayette Anticipations
Meriem Bennani: ‘Sole Crushing’
Exhibition: Oct. 22, 2025-Feb. 8, 2026
lafayetteanticipations.com
9 Rue du Plâtre, 75004 Paris, France, click here for map
In her upcoming exhibition, Meriem Bennani transforms Lafayette Anticipations into a sound box. The sound installation ‘Sole Crushing’ brings together over 200 flip-flops, which play a musical composition mixing symphony and riot. The footwear comes to life, striking different surfaces with its soles, creating an unusual array of percussive sounds that allows Meriem Bennani to explore ways of being together as well as the individual’s place within the community. For this reinterpretation of the work that was originally presented in the exhibition ‘For My Best Family’ at Fondazione Prada in 2024–25, the artist has invited Reda Senhaji (Cheb Runner) to compose a new soundtrack and designed a site-specific installation for the Lafayette Anticipations spaces.
Tate Modern
Group Show: ‘Nigerian Modernism’
Exhibition: Oct. 8, 2025-May 10, 2026
tate.org.uk
Bankside, London SE1 9TG, UK, click here for map
‘Nigerian Modernism’ at Tate Modern brings together over 250 works from the 20th century to map a crucial, yet under-acknowledged chapter in global art history. From the Zaria Art Society to the Mbari Artists and Writers Club, the exhibition traces how painters, sculptors, ceramicists and textile artists forged a distinctly Nigerian movement in the midst of independence, decolonization and civil war. Rather than treating European modernism as a model, these artists reimagined its forms through local traditions, diasporic exchange and political urgency. Figures such as Ben Enwonwu, Uzo Egonu and Ladi Kwali emerge not as regional outliers but as central protagonists in a broader redefinition of modernity. The exhibition positions Nigerian modernism as a living archive—experimental, manifold and deeply entangled with global narratives.
