Jan. 31, 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 February.
Sharjah Biennial 16
Group Show: ‘to carry’
Exhibition: Feb. 6-June 15, 2025
sharjahart.org
Various Venues, Sharjah, UAE
The 16th Sharjah Biennial explores its theme ‘to carry,’ a multi-vocal and open-ended proposition. With 16 feature works and over 190 participating artists, this year’s program investigates intergenerational stories, modes of inheritance and collective wayfinding. The curatorial approach for Sharjah Biennial 16 reflects on what it means to carry change, encountering the positions of five curators on its societal, technological and ritualistic possibilities. Highlighting artists in the fields of visual art, performance, music and publication, this edition will showcase works by Sky Hopinka, Arthur Jafa, Kate Newby, Ndidi Dike, Michael Parekōwhai, Stephanie Comilang and Lorna Simpson, among others.
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Aluaiy Kaumakan // Courtesy of the Sharjah Biennial
Norval Foundation
Billie Zangewa: ‘Breeding Ground: the care we give becomes our breeding ground for life’
Exhibition: Feb. 19-Sept. 11, 2025
norvalfoundation.org
4 Steenberg Rd, Tokai, Cape Town, 7945, South Africa, click here for map
Based in Cape Town, the Norval Foundation presents contemporary African art from the continent and its diaspora since 2018. Billie Zangewa’s exhibition ‘Breeding Ground: the care we give becomes our breeding ground for life’ invites the viewer to explore the artist’s understanding of care, creation, community and the intimate intricacies of motherhood. Curated by Anelisa Mangcu, Zangewa’s hand-stitched collages comprised of silk fragments portray a contemporary intersectional identity with the intention of challenging the exploitation and objectification of the Black female body.
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Billie Zangewa: ‘Free Spirit’ // Photo by Amber Alcock
Haus der Kunst
Shu Lea Cheang: ‘KI$$ KI$$’
Exhibition: Feb. 14-Aug. 3, 2025
hausderkunst.de
Prinzregentenstraße 1, 80538 München, click here for map
‘KI$$ KI$$’, Shu Lea Cheang’s survey exhibition at Haus der Kunst, takes the net artist and filmmaker’s first feature film ‘Fresh Kill’ as a starting point to demonstrate her world-building practice. Extending through four gallery spaces, Cheang updates her works from the past three decades alongside previously unrealized works, creating new landscape formations. Curated by Sarah Theurer with Laila Wu, the exhibition is reimagined as a “machine of experience.” The multiplayer performance and internet-based installation summons the audience into a playful interaction, using play as a form of embodied knowledge.
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Shu Lea Cheang: ‘KI$$ KI$$,’ 2025, installation view at Haus der Kunst München // Photo by Milena Wojhan
Pirelli Hangar Bicocca
Tarek Atoui: ‘Improvisation in 10 Days’
Exhibition: Feb. 6-July 20, 2025
pirellihangarbicocca.org
Via Chiese, 2, 20126 Milano MI, Italy, click here for map
In this exhibition, Tarek Atoui explores the potential of composition in space, bringing the material, sculptural, architectural and relational qualities of the works into dialogue with the immaterial nature of sound and its reverberation in bodies and things. Using the exhibition space as a large blank canvas, the artist rearranges and recomposes works from one of his previous exhibitions, starting from the identity of the space (a place of production) and the time coordinates (the days on which the artist will set up the exhibition) and using them to “improvise” movements, harmonies and tunings to create a collective experience in a sonic environment. This is the first time that Atoui has conceived an exhibition as an actual device capable of evolving and materializing over time.
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Tarek Atoui: ‘The Rain,’ Art Sonje Center, Seoul, 2023, exhibition view // © Art Sonje Center; Photo by Ahina
Mariane Ibrahim
Salah Elmur: ‘The Land of the Sun’
Exhibition: Feb. 4-May 3, 2025
marianeibrahim.com
Río Pánuco 36, Col. Renacimiento, Cuauhtémoc, 06500 Mexico City, Mexico, click here for map
Inspired by his upbringing near the Blue Nile in Khartoum, Salah Elmur’s work predominantly reflects the rich history of Sudanese culture. In the 1990s, after being imprisoned for a cartoon critical of the government, he left Sudan for Kenya before eventually settling in Egypt. His experiences across these three countries shape his paintings, imbuing them with cosmopolitanism and Pan-Africanism. Through recurring figures of peasants, fishermen and laborers inhabiting a pastoral world, Elmur’s paintings are simultaneously autobiographical and collective, depicting a community both real and imagined. In this Mexico City exhibition, the artist’s established connection to Diego Rivera’s work particularly resonates: both Elmur and Rivera devoted their efforts to representing the people in a reformist, revolutionary and postcolonial spirit.
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Salah Elmur Helloub: ‘Wall,’ 2024 // Courtesy of the artist and Mariane-Ibrahim
Whitney Museum
Christine Sun Kim: ‘All Day All Night’
Exhibition: Feb. 8-July 6, 2025
whitney.org
99 Gansevoort St, New York, NY 10014, USA, click here for map
Christine Sun Kim’s museum survey at the Whitney Museum, ‘All Day All Night,’ features the artist’s extensive approach to art-making. Presenting works spanning from 2011 to the present, the exhibition brings together Kim’s drawings, site-specific murals, paintings, video installations and sculptures. With experimentation as a persistent and defining part of her practice, the title ‘All Day All Night’ references the energy Kim brings into her artistic practice. In both her native American Sign Language and written English, Christine Sun Kim produces a body of works that make ‘All Day All Night’ a political, humorous and perceptive overview of the artist’s career thus far.
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Christine Sun Kim: ‘Cues on Point,’ installation view at Secession, Vienna, 2023. From left to right: Christine Sun Kim: ‘Prolonged Echo,’ 2023; ‘Long Echo,’ 2022; and ‘Cues on Point,’ 2022 // Photo by Oliver Ottenschläger, courtesy the artist, Secession, François Ghebaly Gallery and WHITE SPACE
LAS Art Foundation
Laure Prouvost: ‘We Felt A Star Dying’
Exhibition: Feb. 21-May 4, 2025
las-art.foundation
Kraftwerk Berlin, Köpenicker Str. 70, 10179 Berlin, click here for map
Following two years of research with access to a quantum computer, Laure Prouvost presents a new multi-sensory work with LAS Art Foundation. Beginning with the question, “How could we sense reality from a quantum perspective?” Prouvost weaves video, sound, scent, sculpture and scenography into a fluid installation that explores quantum phenomena and their sensitivity to cosmic and planetary forces. Combining her playful ways of shifting perception with the counterintuitive logic of quantum physics—whose applications are expected to drive a paradigm shift—she invites audiences into the emerging world of quantum technologies. The exhibition marks the launch of LAS’s ‘Sensing Quantum’ program, which will continue through 2026 with further installations, a public symposium and a publication.
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Laure Prouvost: ‘WE FELT A STAR DYING,’ 2024, video still // Commissioned by LAS Art Foundation; Courtesy of the artist; LAS Art Foundation, Berlin, 2024
Tate Modern
‘Leigh Bowery!’
Exhibition: Feb. 27-Aug. 31, 2025
tate.org.uk
Bankside, London SE1 9TG, UK, click here for map
Tate Modern presents an immersive exhibition of Australian artist, performer, model, TV personality, club promoter, fashion designer and musician Leigh Bowery’s “looks,” alongside his collaborations with artists like Michael Clark, Charles Atlas, Nick Knight, Fergus Greer, John Maybury, Nicola Rainbird, Baillie Walsh, Stephen Willats, Fiona Freund, Mr Pearl and Lucian Freud. From his early days in 1980s London nightlife to his later daring performances in galleries, theaters and the street, Bowery was said to have influenced many designers and artists with his wildly creative costumes, makeup, wigs and headgear. The exhibition promises to provide insights into London’s creative scene and the ways in which Bowery “reimagined clothing and makeup as forms of painting and sculpture, tested the limits of decorum, and celebrated the body as a shape-shifting tool with the power to challenge norms of aesthetics, sexuality and gender.”
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Dick Jewell, still from ‘What’s Your Reaction to the Show,’ 1988 // © Dick Jewell
David Zwirner
Tau Lewis: ‘Spirit Level’
Exhibition: Feb. 13-Mar. 29, 2025
davidzwirner.com
616 N Western Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90004, USA, click here for map
David Zwirner’s Los Angeles location will open a solo exhibition of work by Jamaican-Canadian artist Tau Lewis, showing five monumental sculptures and a circular quilt, first realized for Lewis’s 2024–2025 solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, which was curated by Jeffrey De Blois. In the exhibition, Lewis presents a series of majestic figures that tower above visitors, at more than three-meters-tall. Lewis’ totemic sculptures, as the title of the exhibition suggests, are indicators of mythical territories beyond our world and have expressed connections to the syncretism of the Caribbean. ‘Spirit Level’ opens ahead of Frieze Los Angeles and will remain on view until the end of March.
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Tau Lewis: ‘The Night Woman,’ 2024 (detail) // © Tau Lewis, courtesy the artist