Apr. 1, 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 April.
Maruani Mercier
Kate Gottgens: ‘Darkening Dusk’
Exhibition: Apr. 12-May 25, 2025
maruanimercier.com
Kustlaan 90, 8300 Knokke-Heist, Belgium, click here for map
South African artist Kate Gottgens’ inaugural solo show at Maruani Mercier, Knokke presents a body of work where nature serves as the subject and entry point. Gottgens’ paintings walk the line between reality and dreamscape, using material from found images online, photographs from flea markets and family vacation photos. This collection of sourced material comes together in landscapes that feel sentimental and intimate while being stripped of their original contexts. Through transformation and reconstruction, Gottgens creates nostalgic landscapes with unexpected colours and transparency, grappling with exposing the reality of the idealized past.
Kate Gottgens: ‘Summoned by the tides,’ 2025 // © Kate Gottgens, courtesy of Maruani Mercier, Belgium
The Arts Club of Chicago
Huguette Caland: ‘Bribes de corps’
Exhibition: Apr. 17-Aug. 2, 2025
artsclubchicago.org
201 E Ontario St., Chicago, IL 60611, USA, click here for map
The Arts Club of Chicago presents ‘Huguette Caland: Bribes de Corps,’ the most extensive exhibition to date of Caland’s ‘Bribes de Corps’ (“Body Bits”) series, created during her two decades in Paris from the 1970s onwards. Leaving Beirut in 1970 to pursue a full-time artistic career in Paris, Caland cultivated professional connections and sustained herself by selling paintings to friends, artists and acquaintances. Celebrated for their bold use of color and irreducible sensuality, Caland’s ‘Bribes de Corps’ paintings render distinctions between color and line indiscernible. Through the series, the painter interrogates Western artistic conventions as analogies for the categorization of the body through a gendering gaze, channeling contemporary debates about gender and sexual norms in both France and Lebanon. The exhibition, curated by Hannah Feldman, also includes a recent work from her later tapestry paintings, which draw inspiration from the techniques and cultures of tatreez, Palestinian embroidery, furthering her exploration of the body’s relationship to landscape and material culture.
Huguette Caland: ‘Eux,’ ca. 1975, oil on linen // Courtesy of Huguette Caland Estate
Nasher Sculpture Center
Otobong Nkanga
Exhibition: Apr. 5-Aug. 17, 2025
nashersculpturecenter.org
2001 Flora St., Dallas, TX 75201, USA, click here for map
Otobong Nkanga has received the Nasher Prize under the new biennial format in 2023, recognizing her profound impact on the field of sculpture, culminating in an exhibition from April through August. Continuing ongoing projects, among others ‘Carved to Flow’ (2017-), Nkanga presents new iterations of recurring works that interact with the North Texas region at the artist’s Nasher Prize exhibition. Engaging with Texan history, material culture, ecology and community via research and exchange of knowledge, Nkanga navigates patterns of migration across the region and collaborates with local artists. In addition to site-responsive iterations of her works, new works relating to her poetry practice will debut in Dallas.
Otobong Nkanga: ‘Carved to Flow: Germination,’ 2017, installation view of ‘Craving for Southern Light’ at the IVAM Centre Julio González, 2023 // Photo courtesy of IVAM Centre Julio González
Galerie Eva Presenhuber
Steven Shearer: ‘The Golden Recline’
Exhibition: Apr. 5-May 16, 2025
presenhuber.com
Zahnradstrasse 21, 8005 Zürich, Switzerland, click here for map
Canadian artist Steven Shearer will open his solo show ‘The Golden Recline’ at Galerie Eva Presenhuber in Zurich. The exhibition features photographs sourced from Shearer’s extensive collection of found online images of people sleeping, many of which have disappeared from the internet. These images capture vulnerable, unguarded moments of rest in various settings, from couches to cars, and evoke strong contrasts of innocence and discomfort. Some of the works recall art historical references to death and ecstasy, and their themes have sparked controversy, as seen in the 2021 censorship of a similar project in Vancouver. Shearer’s works bridge a gap between contemporary images of sleep and historical art forms. His photographs critique modern capitalism’s disruption of rest, suggesting that sleep, in its stillness, serves as a subtle refusal of constant productivity and hyperactivity.
Steven Shearer: ‘Black Velvet,’ 2025, UV print on canvas, framed, unique, image 277.5 x 408 cm, frame 280 x 408 cm // Courtesy the artist and Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich / Vienna, © the artist
Milano Art Week
Exhibition: Apr. 1-5,2025
milanoartweek.it
Various Venues
Milano Art Week takes place from April 1st to 5th, alongside the Milan art fair miart, and offers a host of exhibitions, performances, screenings and events across the city. Among the highlights, Iranian artist Shirin Neshat will open a solo exhibition at PAC Padiglione d’Arte Contemporanea, showing almost 200 photographs and ten video installations, made over the course of her 30-year career. The GAM-Galleria d’Arte Moderna will also host the first institutional exhibition in Milan by Ugo Rondinone, one of the most acclaimed international artists of his generation, born in Switzerland to Italian parents and residing in New York since the late 1990s. The curator Caroline Corbetta draws correspondences between selected masterpieces from the museum’s collection and artworks by Rondinone. Meanwhile, the Fondazione Prada will open ‘Typologien,’ an exhibition dedicated to 20th-century German photography, including works by Bernd and Hilla Becher, Isa Genzken, Candida Höfer, Wolfgang Tillmans, Rosemarie Trockel and many more. Pirelli HangarBicocca is showing Tarek Atoui’s ‘Improvisation in 10 Days,’ a rearrangement of the space’s composition to “improvise” movements, harmonies and tunings that help to create a collective experience in a sonic environment. The commercial gallery Gió Marconi will open ‘Tristesse,’ a new fashion collection and shop by the Berlin-based artist John Bock. With all outfits made between fall 2024 and early 2025, ‘Tristesse’ showcases “fragmented second-hand clothing in a new and ill-fitting way to create 50 ‘Quasi Me’ outfits with emerging bubbles and pegs.”
Heinrich Riebesehl: ‘Menschen Im Fahrstuhl, 20.11.1969,’ 1969 // Kicken Berlin © Heinrich Riebesehl, by SIAE 2025
ILHAM Gallery
Group Show: ‘The Plantation Plot’
Exhibition: Apr. 20-Sept. 21, 2025
ilhamgallery.com
Ilham Tower, 8, Lrg Binjai, 50450 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, click here for map
‘The Plantation Plot’ gathers works by 27 artists and collectives—including Allora & Calzadilla, Cian Dayrit, Diane Severin Nguyen, Kelly Sinnapah Mary and Noara Quintana. Curated by Sheau Yun Lim and drawing from Jamaican writer and cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter, this group exhibition examines the role of plantation from European imperial expansion to contemporary economies. It refigures the plantation plot in its co-constituting meaning of story and place, grounding itself in the context of Southeast Asia while addressing a global condition. At the core of the exhibition is the idea that a world without the plantation and its structuring power is no longer imaginable; therefore, its strategies and constructed histories must be acknowledged and estranged while making aesthetic and narrative provocations anew.
Kelly Sinnapah Mary: ‘Notebook 10: L’enfance De Sanbras’ // Courtesy of the artist
Gropius Bau
Yoko Ono: ‘Music of the Mind’
Exhibition: Apr. 11-Aug. 31, 2025
berlinerfestspiele.de
Niederkirchnerstraße 7, 10963 Berlin, click here for map
Born in 1933 in Tokyo, Yoko Ono has been a pioneering figure in art, music and activism since the 1950s. Her experimental practice spans conceptual art, performance, installation, music and film, consistently challenging conventional boundaries of artistic practice. Ono’s early “instruction pieces” invite audiences to engage in acts of imagination and participation, setting the tone for her expansive body of work. The exhibition ‘YOKO ONO: MUSIC OF THE MIND,’ traveling from Tate Modern to Gropius Bau, features over 200 works, revealing her radical approach to language, art and participation that continues to speak to the present moment. Highlights include ‘Painting to Shake Hands’ (1961/2025) and ‘Shadow Piece’ (1963/2025), alongside the ‘PEACE is POWER’ campaign (2017/2025) and ‘Wish Tree for Berlin’ (1996/2025), continuing Ono’s call for peace and creative collaboration.
Yoko Ono: ‘Lighting Piece,’ 1962, performed by Yoko Ono as part of Works of Yoko Ono, Sogetsu Art Center, Tokyo, 24 May 1962 // © Yoko Ono, photo by Yasuhiro Yoshioka
Tate Britain
Ed Atkins: ‘Darkening Dusk’
Exhibition: Apr. 2-Aug. 25, 2025
tate.org.uk
Millbank, London SW1P 4RG, UK, click here for map
In his largest UK survey exhibition to date, Ed Atkins presents 15 years of his oeuvre, ranging from moving image works to painting to writing. Examining the relationship between reality and fiction, Atkins touches on themes of intimacy, digression, confusion and the messy reality of life in his show at the Tate Britain. Incorporating anecdotes from his personal life, a mass of post-it note drawings the artist created for his children become the heart of the exhibition. While exploring his range of interests over his career up until now, the survey exhibition includes his self-portraits, including life-like pencil drawings of the artist’s legs, hands, feet, face and imprints of bodies on empty pillows and mattresses.
Ed Atkins: ‘Copenhagen #6,’ 2023 // © Ed Atkins, Courtesy the Artist and Cabinet Gallery, London
Tselinny Center of Contemporary Culture
Group Show: ‘Imagination of Central Asia on the Map of Contemporary Art’
Exhibition: Apr. 25-Sept. 3, 2025
tselinny.org
Masanchi St 59, Almaty 050000, Kazakhstan, click here for map
Curated by Asel Rashidova, this exhibition in Almaty’s Tselinny Center revisits the emergence of contemporary art in Central Asia during the 1990s and 2000s, a transformative period defined by the creation of artistic languages and complex negotiations with global, predominantly Western, art discourses. Drawn from Tselinny’s extensive Documentation project, the exhibition presents a dynamic, fragmented archive of artworks, documentation, sketches and texts that reflect the disjunctions and coherences of an evolving cultural landscape. Staged within the adaptive, research-oriented environment of the Tselinny studio—an intersection of workshop, laboratory and exhibition space—the show foregrounds interaction and dialogue as essential methods for preserving and reimagining the past while situating it firmly within contemporary discourse.
