Feb. 28, 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 March.
White Cube Seoul
Mona Hatoum
Exhibition: Mar. 6-Apr. 12, 2025
whitecube.com
6 Dosan-daero 45-gil, Gangnam District, Seoul, South Korea, click here for map
Born in 1952 to a Palestinian family in Beirut, Mona Hatoum has lived and worked in London since 1975. Her poetic and political work spans installation, sculpture, video, photography and works on paper. Hatoum began her artistic journey in the 1980s with video and performance art centered on the body. In the 1990s, she shifted towards creating large-scale installations that provoke a complex mix of emotions, including both attraction and repulsion, as well as fear and fascination. Through her sculptures, Hatoum reimagines common items like chairs, cots and kitchen tools, turning them into objects that appear unfamiliar or threatening. The exhibition at White Cube Seoul is Hatoum’s first solo show in Korea.
Mona Hatoum: ‘Divide,’ 2025, three panel screen and barbed wire, 172 x 188 x 48 cm // © Mona Hatoum, photo © White Cube (Theo Christelis)
Kai Art Center
Flo Kasearu: ‘BANANA – Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone’
Exhibition: Mar. 22-Aug. 3, 2025
kai.center
Peetri 12, 10415 Tallinn, Estonia, click here for map
Curated by Kari Conte, Flo Kasearu’s upcoming exhibition explores the dynamics of public and private space from the NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) perspective, which considers development as negative or harmful regardless of whether this perception is justified. Spanning over 50 newly commissioned and recent works—including installations, paintings, video, photography and sculpture—the show builds a total environment at Kai Art Center. Kasearu invites the audience to engage in discussions about urban and rural development, public participation, local values and property rights. Visitors will arrive at an imagined place where notices are publicly posted, energy flows, surveillance intensifies, power lines are severed, views are obstructed, towering structures loom excessively and neighbors contend with each other and their rapidly reshaped communities.
Flo Kasearu: ‘Disorder Patrol,’ 2021, video still // Courtesy of the artist
Museum of Contemporary Art Australia
Warraba Weatherall: ‘Shadow and Substance’
Exhibition: Mar. 21-Sept. 7, 2025
mca.com.au
140 George St., The Rocks NSW 2000, Sydney, Australia, click here for map
In his first museum solo show, Kamilaroi artist Warraba Weatherall presents new works based on a decade’s worth of research on Kamilaroi culture and histories. Featuring new large-scale installations, among paintings, video works and sculptures, the exhibition sheds light on the practice of research and collecting, with its roots in colonial systems. Challenging the influence of museum objects from within the institution, the artist presents new ways of seeing and tackles how these research and collecting practices influence the representation of contemporary indigenous peoples.
Warraba Weatherall: ‘To know and possess,’ detail, 2021-2024, bronze caste // Image courtesy and © the artist
Mendes Wood DM
Phoebe Collings-James: ‘At the end of the small hours’
Exhibition: Mar. 15-Apr. 12, 2025
mendeswooddm.com
Rue des Sablons 13, 1000 Brussels, Belgium, click here for map
Mendes Wood DM presents interdisciplinary artist Phoebe Collings-James, in her upcoming solo show ‘At the end of the small hours’ in Brussels. Interacting with clay, while viewing it as a site of movement, Collings-James deals with the object as a subject. Based in London, with West-Indian and British roots, her ceramic vessels tackle themes intrinsic to living in a hostile environment. Integrating emotion, language, desire, and even violence–her works function as “emotional detritus”, affective and organic.
Courtesy of Phoebe Collings-James and Mendes Wood DM
Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection
Group Show: ‘Corps et âmes’
Exhibition: Mar. 5-Aug. 25, 2025
pinaultcollection.com
2 Rue de Viarmes, 75001 Paris, France, click here for map
‘Corps et âmes’ at the Bourse de Commerce presents works from the Pinault collection, exploring representations of the body in contemporary art. The works of 40 selected artists, who are a part of the collection, explore the theme through photography, painting, film, sculpture and drawing. The curatorial approach is referenced in the title–body and soul–where each of the nearly 100 works tackles the soul and the body in its own way, reinventing itself each time. The collection features works by Arthur Jaffa, Ana Mendieta, Miriam Cahn, Wolfgang Tillmans and Kara Walker, among others.
Zanele Muholi: ‘Lishonile, Bell Court, Seattle,’ 2019 // Courtesy of the artist
M+ Museum
Lee Mingwei: ‘Guernica in Sand’
Exhibition: Mar. 8-Jul. 13, 2025
mplus.org.hk
38 Museum Dr., West Kowloon Cultural District, Hong Kong, click here for map
In parallel to the special exhibition ‘The Hong Kong Jockey Club Series: Picasso for Asia—A Conversation’ at M+ Museum, artist Lee Mingwei will present his large-scale installation and performance ‘Guernica in Sand.’ Taking Pablo Picasso’s iconic 1937 masterpiece ’Guernica’—painted in response to the violence of the Spanish Civil War—as its departure point, Lee Mingwei recreates this painting in sand, a material that connotes impermanence and instability. In June, toward the end of the exhibition, a live performance will take place in which visitors are invited to walk on the sand painting and, finally, a small group of performers will gently sweep the sand in spontaneous movements that simultaneously destroy and recreate the image anew.
Lee Mingwei: ‘Guernica in Sand,’ 2006–present, performance view of Lee Mingwei and His Relations: The Art of Participation, Taipei Fine ArtsMuseum, 2015 // Courtesy of Taipei Fine Arts Museum
Bienal Mercosul
Group Show: ‘Snap’
Exhibition: Mar. 27-June 1, 2025
bienalmercosul.art.br
Multiple Venues
The two-month cultural and educational program of the 14th edition of Mercosul Biennial spreads across 18 spaces in Brazil’s Porto Alegre. With Raphael Fonseca as Chief Curator, it features 76 artists from different geographies, including Ad Minoliti, Ali Eyal, Christine Sun Kim, Farah Al Qasimi, Firas Shehadeh, Gabriel Chaile, New Red Order, Sandra Vásquez de la Horra and many others. The exhibition revolves around the titular term (‘Snap’), invoking situations in which a sudden movement changes the ongoing state. The main objective of the curatorial concept is to deal with the notion of transformation that can occur rapidly in varying magnitudes, emphasizing the idea that living is synonymous with never being in a stable and safe place.
Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal
Group Show: ‘Skyscrapers by the Roots’
Exhibition: Mar. 6-Aug. 10, 2025
macm.org
Pl. Ville-Marie local 11220, Montréal, QC H3B 3Y1, Canada, click here for map
The group exhibition ‘Skyscrapers by the Roots: Reflections on Late Modernism’ looks at the long life of late modernism in architecture by bringing together a series of works created over the last decade by Shannon Bool, Kapwani Kiwanga, Rachel Rose and Jonathan Schouela, a new film installation by David Hartt, as well as works by Lynne Cohen and François Dallegret produced in the 1960s and 1970s. The show considers key principles of late modernism—climate-controlled interiors, large-scale modular standardization, strategies of accessibility, mobility and transparency, integrated media flows and the development of spaces devoted to self-design—and the ways in which they have contributed to the “unsettling fusion” of private life, labor, consumption and spectacle. Hartt has created the film installation ‘Horizon’ specifically for ‘Skyscrapers by the Roots,’ reconsidering the physical and symbolic horizon as it might be seen by the next generation, and proposing “a new polyphonic heritage story” in which familial and social time underlies the longer and more open time of speculative fiction.
David Hartt: ‘Horizon,’ 2025, video still, video installation: colour, sound, 16min 52 s, looped; with sculptural elements and large-format digital print, dimensions variable, produced with the support of the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal // Courtesy of the artist © David Hartt
Tiwani Contemporary
Emma Prempeh: ‘Belonging In-Between’
Exhibition: Mar. 6-May 24, 2025
tiwani.co.uk
13 Elsie Femi Pearse St., Victoria Island, Lagos 106104, Lagos, Nigeria, click here for map
With this exhibition, Emma Prempeh continues her latest body of works: a series of paintings that considers landscapes as emotionally charged sites, drawing together the experiences and memories of her mother and grandmother. Moving between East and West Africa, the Caribbean and the UK, the artist explores the meaning of home and beloniging through the diasporic lens and with a growing consciousness around the historical, environmental and geopolitical narratives underpinning her travels. The starting point to her paintings is the black color; it establishes a basis for projected memories that elicit appreciation of ancestral time and relationships, selfhood and transformation. She applies schlag metal (a brass alloy imitative of gold leaf) to her paintings, which oxidizes over time and creates a meta-narrative around the passing of time, memory and its representation.
Emma Prempeh: ‘Mildred liked the water,’ 2024, oil, acrylic and schlag metal on canvas, 150×190.5 cm
FOTO ARSENAL WIEN
Simon Lehner: ‘Clean Thoughts/Clean Images”
Exhibition: Mar. 21-June 1, 2025
fotoarsenalwien.at
Arsenal Objekt 19, 1030 Vienna, Austria, click here for map
‘Clean Thoughts. Clean Images’ is Vienna-based photographer Simon Lehner’s first institutional solo exhibition, which blurs image archives that he has created himself with elements from his childhood, youth and the world of media. In doing so, he asks: is there such a thing as “clean” and “pure” thoughts? What role do memories, family contexts and everyday images play in this? The exhibition does not show photographs in the classical sense. In Lehner’s practice, the two-dimensional image is transferred into a three-dimensional form in a multi-layered editing process. Sculptures, 3D films and paintings are created in which every pixel of the original photograph is expanded and transferred into physical space. The exhibition is part of the grand opening of FOTO ARSENAL WIEN—Vienna’s new exhibition space for international photography and lens-based media.
Copyright Simon Lehner, courtesy of KOW Berlin
