William Kentridge’s solo show at St. John's Hospital in Bruges embodies ‘art as healing’

Kentridge is the focus of a solo exhibition, Smoke, Ashes, Fable (20 October – 25 February), at St. John’s Hospital in Bruges, one of Europe’s oldest surviving hospital buildings. This major exhibition presents a unique selection of Kentridge’s work organised around the themes of trauma and healing, with his 2015 video installation More Sweetly Play the Dance – a contemporary interpretation of the medieval Dance of Death – as its centerpiece. Through a dialogue between the displayed artworks and the remarkable hospital setting, the exhibition presents art as a powerful means of ‘working through’ layers of history. The artist also delivers Peripheral Thinking, a lecture-performance at Bruges’ Concert Hall on 17 October.

Solo show for Alfredo Jaar at Yorkshire Sculpture Park

Jaar shares recent works not shown before in the United Kingdom in a major solo exhibition, titled The Garden of Good and Evil, at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (14 October – 8 April). Jaar’s installations will transform the park’s underground gallery and its open-air concourse. The exhibition takes its title from a major new commission, presented in the open air and visible through the glass façade of the gallery. On entering what appears to be a beautiful grove of trees, visitors experience elegantly fabricated steel cells referencing ‘black sites’, the secret detention facilities operated by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) around the world. Carefully chosen to enhance YSP’s landscape, many of the trees will be planted into the park once the exhibition closes. A work that Jaar has wanted to realise for some years and that YSP is uniquely placed to create, The Garden of Good and Evil is a significant temporary commission for YSP and for the UK. Powerful mixed media installations transform the underground gallery, including The Sound of Silence (2005), A Hundred Times Nguyen (1994) and Shadows (2014).

Various artists on the Prospect.4 Triennial in New Orleans

Four Goodman artists – Alfredo Jaar, Kiluanji Kia Henda, Paulo Nazareth and Hank Willis Thomas – will participate in the Prospect.4 Triennial, titled The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp, in New Orleans (18 November – 25 February). Artworks commissioned for Prospect.4 will address themes of identity, displacement and cultural hybridity. Curated by Trevor Schoonmaker, the triennial acts like a citywide exhibition and is staged at 17 venues around New Orleans, with an emphasis on the Mississippi River waterfront.

Grada Kilomba launches solo show at MAAT in Lisbon

Showing her work in Portugal for the first time, Grada Kilomba presents a solo exhibition, Secrets to Tell, in the Museum Art Architecture Technology’s (MAAT) Project Room programme in Lisbon (8 November – 5 February). The exhibition is inspired by the video installation The Desire Project – an artwork created for the 32nd São Paulo Biennale (2016) and featured on Goodman Gallery’s South South: Let me begin again (2017) exhibition. Her work deals with questions raised by narratives around gender, race, trauma and memory, within the context of current issues about colonialism and post-colonialism at the beginning of the 21st century. Despite being better known as a writer, Kilomba has been exploring experimental and multidisciplinary artistic practices, using and combining different means of expression: from performance and video installation, to stage readings and lectures, enabling an interface between text and image, artistic language and academic language.

Yinka Shonibare MBE on group exhibition in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

Shonibare’s Butterfly Kid (Boy) II features on the Athr Gallery’s group exhibition, We Are Not Alone, in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia (17 October – 16 November). Organised by the British Council as part of its Contemporary Collective initiative to develop a new generation of curators from the Middle East, the exhibition is curated by six women from Saudi Arabia – Reem Aljalhami, Dalia Fatani, Raneen Bukhari, Maryam Bilal, Solafa Rawas and Thahab Alosaimi. The exhibition “explores shared feelings and anxieties, expressed through the familiar, the peculiar, the uncanny and the transcendental, with art acting as a medium to start conversations that matter to young people in Saudi Arabia and communities around the world,” explains Alosaimi.

Alfredo Jaar on first contemporary art exhibition at the Quirinale Palace in Rome

Jaar is included on the Quirinale Palace’s first-ever exhibition of contemporary art, From Me to Us: The City Without Borders, in Rome (24 October – 17 December). The exhibition, proposed by Italian President Sergio Mattarella and supported by the Directorate General for Art and Contemporary Architecture and Urban Peripheries of the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Tourism, is curated by Anna Mattirolo. It features artwork by 22 international artists across ten historic halls of Alessandro VII Chigi’s apartments. As an ambitious project, the exhibition explores multiple themes with the intention of presenting the poetic dimensions of a transforming society through the different languages ​​of contemporary art.

Broomberg & Chanarin at Akademie der Künste in Berlin

Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin feature on the Akademie der Künste’s group exhibition, Benjamin and Brecht. Thinking in Extremes, in Berlin (26 October – 28 January) which is dedicated to the unusual friendship between Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) and Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956). The exhibition explores the topicality of this friendship, and responds to how Benjamin’s and Brecht’s names have become theoretical models for art and particular worldviews.

Broomberg and Chanarin on museum show in Norway

Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin feature in the group exhibition, Bending the Frame, produced by Fotografisk Center in Copenhagen in collaboration with Preus Museum in Oslo (15 October – 4 March). Based on the American professor Fred Ritchin’s book Bending the Frame and in cooperation with him and the Danish photographer Tina Enghoff, Fotografisk Center has curated an exhibition that focuses on current global issues such as war, migration, racism and climate change. It presents strategies within visual art, documentary and journalistic photography, which convey other stories than the ones we often meet in conventional news media.

Claire Gavronsky and Rose Shakinovsky in St. Petersburg

Works by Gavronsky and Shakinovsky are included on the group exhibition, Right to the Future, at the Museum of the 20th and 21st Century in St. Petersburg (25 October – 3 December). The exhibition is devoted to celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution.

Essop Brothers and Gabrielle Goliath at Spielart Festival in Munich

Hasan and Husain Essop and Gabrielle Goliath present performances in this year’s SPIELART Festival in Munich (27 October – 11 November). Under the artistic direction of Jay Pather and Sophie Becker, the Chasing Rainbows section of the festival explores ideas surrounding the post-apartheid era whilst critically questioning the state of Nelson Mandela’s “Rainbow Nation”. Hasan and Husain Essop’s GADAT, a performative reading of a melodious sequence of Koran verses that are recited by Muslims all over the world, is shown as a video installation with live singing performed by Hasan Essop at Rathausgalerie Kunsthalle (31 October). In Elegy at St. Johannes am Preysingplatz (5 November), Goliath creates a lament for collective memory and mourning by bringing together a group of singers to commemorate the deceased. The performance is Goliath’s response to the extreme violence that women in South Africa are subjected to every day.

Ghada Amer honoured with Smithsonian African Art Award

Ghada Amer is one of two artists honoured at the second annual African Art Awards Dinner hosted by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art (27 October). According to Christine Mullen Kreamer, acting director of the museum, “[the Smithsonian is] delighted to recognise the outstanding achievements of Ghada Amer… whose beautifully realised and compelling works of art recognize the potency of women to confront globally relevant issues of gender, identity, inequality, access, privilege and power”.

Paulo Nazareth on inaugural show of Canada’s new art museum

Nazareth’s work is included on the inaugural group exhibition, Field Guide, of Remai Modern in Saskatoon, Canada (opens 21 October). The exhibition features works from the museum’s collection that are displayed in dialogue with contemporary projects, commissions and installations by international and Canadian artists.

Sue Williamson on Parisian group exhibition celebrating women

As the first in a series of exhibitions featuring over 50 international artists, Williamson participates on a group museum show, Women House, at La Monnaie de Paris in France (19 October – 21 January). Organised in partnership with the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, the exhibition reflects on the on the daily rituals of domesticity, the home and women’s relationship with the domestic space from the 1960s until today.

Tabita Rezaire on panel discussion in the Netherlands

Rezaire takes part in the ’The Technological Body’ panel at the Impakt Festival, Haunted Machines & Wicked Problems, in Utrecht (25 –29 October). This edition of Impakt Festival seeks to address the relationship between technology, religion, magic and the occult.

Tabita Rezaire on ‘Afro-Tech’ exhibition in Germany

Rezaire exhibits a video work on a group exhibition, Afro-Tech and the Future of Re-Invention, at the Hartware MedienKunstVerein (HMKV) in Dortmund, Germany (opens 20 October). Curated by Dr. Inke Arns and Fabian Saavedra-Lara, and organised in collaboration with Interkultur Ruhr, the exhibition establishes a connection between Afro-Futurism and alternative technological energies and imaginations.

Willem Boshoff at UJ Art Gallery in Johannesburg

Boshoff’s work features on a group exhibition, SHIFTING CONVERSATIONS: A Visual Art Exhibition, hosted and organised – in partnership with the MTN SA Foundation – by the UJ Art Gallery in Johannesburg (18 October – 22 November). The exhibition, curated by Johan Myburg and Melissa Goba, thematically explores binary divisions (such as ‘colonised’ and ‘coloniser’) prevalent within the MTN and UJ Art Collections. The aim is to present an open-ended discourse that might invite new or different ways of experiencing art.

Alfredo Jaar at the Imperial War Museum in London

May 1, 2011 by Jaar features on Age of Terror, a group exhibition, at the Imperial War Museum in London (12 October – 28 May). Looking at issues of security, secrecy, representation and legality, the exhibition focuses on the measures taken by nation states to protect their citizens from the threat of terrorism, and the far-reaching effects of such methods of control.

Kendell Geers in group show connecting Berlin and Brussels

To celebrate 25 years of partnership between the cities of Brussels and Berlin, the cities are collaborating on a series of exhibitions, the first of which is titled Gemischte Gefühle (9 October – 9 November). Held in Berlin’s former Tempelhof Airport, the show includes young artists active in Brussels whose work explores how cultural identity can be re-thought under the current conditions of globalisation and migration. The curators intend for the exhibition to establish a space for intercultural border-crossing and intersections where critical impulses can be explored in order to abolish identity boundaries. The artworks from the artists which are on display underline the status of Brussels as an open centre for inter-cultural border-crossing and intersecting. A Berlin answer to Brussels is already in the making.

Kudzanai Chiurai and Kiluanji Kia Henda on exhibition in São Paulo

Chiurai and Kia Henda are included on a group exhibition, Ex Africa, at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil in São Paulo, Brazil (11 October – 30 December). Curated by Alfons Hug, the exhibition features work by various African artists whose work deals with the continent, its peoples’ migration and the diaspora. The exhibition will travel to various venues around Brazil, from Rio de Janeiro to Brasília, throughout 2018.

Tabita Rezaire on London show about the digital female body

Rezaire is one of four artists to participate in an exhibition, organised by the Drive-Thru curatorial collective, at Lewisham Art House in London about how artists today are employing technology to stage, interrogate and celebrate the digital female body (12 October – 15 November). Titled Disturbed, Hacked, Reassembled, the exhibition reflects on how technological developments and online spaces – since the inception of the internet – have framed the female body and how it is being experienced in new ways digitally and virtually. A programme of performance, discussion and workshops explores ideas surrounding the posthuman, the cyborg, digital eroticism, feminist digital art practices and the augmented body, as well as the gender gap in the world of technology, female representation online and the importance of digital exchange.

Kendell Geers participates in politically charged exhibition in Brussels

Alongside his heavy-weight contemporaries including ORLAN and Marina Abramovic & Ulay, Geers’ work is featured on the group exhibition, SUPERDEMOCRACY – The Senate of Things, at the Belgian Senate in Brussels (1 – 31 October). Organised by BOZAR in Brussels, the M HKA Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp in Antwerp and the BPS22 Musée d’art de la Province de Hainaut in Charleroi, the exhibition adds a cultural and artistic dimension to fifteen political issues currently being discussed in Belgian government. The exhibition intends to encourage audiences to discover, contemplate and participate within sociopolitical debate through observing the visual manifestations and relationships between the artworks and the country’s contemporary political climate.

Alfredo Jaar and Hank Willis Thomas exhibit work for the FOR-SITE Foundation

Jaar and Willis Thomas are included on the FOR-SITE Foundation’s group exhibition, Sanctuary, at the Fort Mason Chapel in San Francisco (7 October – 11 March). In exploring the notion of sanctuary – both physical and psychological – and how it has been fundamental in shaping a sense of selfhood and social identity throughout human history, the exhibition invites the 36 participating artists, from 22 different countries, to design and present contemporary prayer rugs which reflect on such shared ideas and concepts.

Candice Breitz at Arken Museum of Modern Art in Denmark

Breitz’s video work Queen (A Portrait of Madonna) is part of My Music (7 October – 25 March) at the Arken Museum of Modern Art in Denmark. The exhibition looks at the intersection of pop music and art, calling it “a sensory eruption of music video, video art, sculpture, painting and installation”.

Hank Willis Thomas at the Des Moines Art Center

Willis Thomas participates on a group exhibition, Alchemy: Transformations in Gold, at the Des Moines Art Center in Iowa (7 October – 21 January). The exhibition brings together a group of international artists whose work incorporates gold or another metal disguised as gold because, as glamorous and sought after as gold may be, the metal is capable of suggesting complicated politics and potent symbolism. The works on exhibition embrace both dark and light readings of this glittering metal.

Kendell Geers and Shirin Neshat on group show in Dublin

Geer’s Signs Taken for Wonders (102) and Neshat’s Guardians of Revolution (from the Women of Allah series) are included on a group show, How to Say It the Way It Is!, at the RUA RED, South Dublin Arts Centre (7 October – 2 December). Organised by Italian artist, Franko B, the exhibition features work that has either been commissioned or collected by the non-profit organisation, a/political. As a London-based NPO, the group often collaborates with socio-politically engaged and aware artists from across the globe.

Hank Willis Thomas on group show in Alabama

Willis Thomas exhibits work on a group show, Posing Black Beauty in African American Culture, curated by Deb Willis at Mobile Museum of Art in Alabama (6 October – 8 January). As a traveling exhibition, the show explores the contested ways in which African and African American beauty have been represented in historical and contemporary contexts through a diverse range of media including photography, film, video, fashion, advertising, and other forms of popular culture.

Kendell Geers at the OH LES BEAUX JOURS Biennale in Belgium

Geers is one of 60 artists included on the OH LES BEAUX JOURS Biennale in Louvain-La-Neuve, Belgium (6 October – 10 December). Conceived as a platform to share contemporary art with the Belgian public, the ninth edition of the biennale brings together artworks that explore the state of the world today, its uncertainties and the potential global questions that might arise in the future. Through its exhibition, the biennale intends to serve as an experimental platform where artists can meet and work together with and alongside fellow artists, academics, students, cultural and public actors.

Liza Lou on group exhibition in Massachusetts

Maximum Security by Liza Lou is featured on deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum’s group exhibition, Screens: Virtual Material, in Lincoln, Massachusetts (6 October – 18 March). The exhibition, conceptualised by the institution’s Associate Curator Sarah Montross, showcases how contemporary artists create innovative works that reveal the powerful ways screens shape people’s vision, behavior, and beliefs.

Hank Willis Thomas participates in a ‘pop-up’ store/exhibition at Brooklyn Museum

More than 70 artists, including Hank Willis Thomas, have created buttons, thongs, pins, and t-shirts for a resistance-themed pop-up ‘gift shop’ at the Brooklyn Museum (28 September – 12 November). Conceptualised by Marilyn Minter and Andrianna Campbell, the store-exhibition installation, titled Anger Management, serves as an outlet and platform for contemporary American artists to channel their frustrations over the country’s current climate and landscape. For his contribution, Willis Thomas has designed a pin and t-shirt with a twist on the phrase “All Lives Matter” where the “v” has been removed in order to read “All Lies Matter”. The proceeds from Anger Management go to the museum, as well as the American Civil Liberties Union and Planned Parenthood.

Broomberg & Chanarin premiere new film on London underground

Art on the Underground, London’s largest public contemporary arts programme, has commissioned a new video work – titled The Bureaucracy of Angels – produced by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin. The 12-minute video will be projected within King’s Cross St. Pancras Underground (28 Sept – 25 Nov) . Launched in 2000 to promote greater understanding of the ‘Tube’ as a cultural and social space, Art on the Underground will display the duo’s commissioned work throughout the month of September.

The Bureaucracy of Angels records the demolition of 100 migrant boats in Sicily in the winter of 2016. These boats arrived laden with refugees from North Africa and while their human cargo were either sent home or absorbed into the asylum system, the boats themselves were never returned to their owners, laying beached on the concrete forecourt of Porto Pozallo in Sicily.

The film is narrated by the hydraulic jaws of the digger charged with the job of destroying the boats, tearing them apart into their constituent parts of timber and metal, a process that took forty days to complete. The digger appears in the narrow corridors of the boat yard, on the open sea and in the midst of a rescue operation off the coast of Libya, as a Cantastoria or ‘singing storyteller’, recounting the Sicilian ballad Terra ca nun senti. The song speaks of the fear and pain associated with immigration to and from Europe’s most southerly territory over the last 150 years. It was composed and recorded by the London Sinfonietta.

Hank Willis Thomas unveils new public sculpture in Philadelphia

As a project of Mural Arts Philadelphia Monument Lab, Hank Willis Thomas unveils a large-scale, ‘pop up’ sculptural installation, titled All Power to All People, in the city’s Thomas Paine Plaza (25 September). The sculpture takes the form of a giant Afro pick, with a handle shaped like the iconic American power symbol of the Black Power movement’s raised fist. Speaking about the Afro pick’s significance, Thomas states: “[It] exists today as many things to different people: it is worn as adornment, a political emblem, and signature of collective identity. The Afro pick continues to develop itself as a testament to innovation”. All Power to All People confronts and invites the residents of Philadelphia to consider a range of larger social and political issues faced by their community.

Hank Willis Thomas at Oakland Museum of California

As a recently acquired work to the museum’s permanent collection, Hank Willis Thomas’ Question Bridge: Black Males is on exhibition at the Oakland Museum of California (29 September – 25 February). Encompassing themes of family, love, interracial relationships, community, education and wisdom, the artist’s video work presents nuanced portraits of past, present, and future of black men in American society. In so doing, the museum’s exhibition of the work simulates a face-to-face conversation between the men and Willis Thomas with the viewer in the middle as both witness and participant.

Broomberg & Chanarin, Jaar and Kia Henda exhibit in Stockholm

Works by four Goodman Gallery artists – Broomberg & Chanarin, Alfredo Jaar and Kiluanji Kia Henda – form part of the Bonniers Konsthall’s group exhibition, The Image of War, in Stockholm (19 September – 14 January). With artworks from more than 30 international artists, the exhibition explores images of violence, their agency, and the relationships between those who create images, those who are depicted and those who see the final result. Curated by Theodor Ringborg, the exhibition and its participating artists not only depict images of violence but examine the function of these images and the politics formulated as a consequence.

Alfredo Jaar on group show at Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego

Alfredo Jaar features on the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego’s Memories of Underdevelopment (17 September – 7 January). The group show, set within the context of Latin America from the 1960s to the 1980s, explores how Latin American artists responded to the unraveling of the utopian promise of modernisation. The exhibition is organised by the museum in partnership with the Museo de Arte de Lima, the Fundación Jumex Arte Contemporáneo and the Getty Foundation.

Solo retrospective for Kudzanai Chiurai at Zeitz MOCAA

Kudzanai Chiurai’s solo retrospective at Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa’s (Zeitz MOCAA) (22 September – 31 March), Regarding the Ease of Others , presents a survey of his expansive oeuvre since 2006, which include posters, sculpture, photography, painting, print and video. Chiurai is one of the most prominent young artists emerging from the African continent, creating work that powerfully interrogates a contemporary African notion of sacrifice, though not enquiring into its necessity. This mini-survey brings together work from Zeitz MOCAA’s own substantial collection with iconic pieces from other major African collections. These include featured drawings and films shown on dOCUMENTA (13) in 2012, which formed part of Chiurai’s series titled Conflict Resolution. The series, Chiurai explains, ‘grapples with the issue of conflict in the contemporary moment in Africa. The spaces within which conflict has been taking place vary to the extent of our own understanding of what defines conflict. Our understanding of resolution is therefore also brought to the fore as we question the validity and nature of force used in our attempts at peace’.

Various artists on inaugural group show at Zeitz MOCAA

Nine Goodman Gallery artists – Ghada Amer, Hasan and Husain Essop, Kendell Geers, Samson Kambalu, William Kentridge, Liza Lou, Misheck Masamvu, Yinka Shonibare MBE and Hank Willis Thomas – are included on the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA) inaugural exhibition,_ All things being equal…_, in Cape Town (22 September – 19 February). The launch of Zeitz MOCAA marks the opening of the first major museum in Africa dedicated to contemporary art. This show is the first in the museum’s initiative to host international exhibitions, while developing educational and enrichment programmes, encouraging intercultural understanding and facilitating access for all.

Samson Kambalu's solo show inaugurates Centre for the Moving Image at Zeitz MOCAA

Samson Kambalu’s video works are presented in a solo exhibition Wounded Negatives, inaugurating the Centre for the Moving Image at Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (MOCAA) in Cape Town (22 September – 29 November). The exhibition explores the ideas that migration and displacement are no longer an exception, but rather a universal norm. Through Kambalu’s Nyau Cinema binaries of indigenous and alien, nationalism and disaffiliation, viewers are able to negotiate their sense of self in time and place; as the artist asks, ‘[h]ow do we situate ourselves if our geographical placement is continuously in flux?’. Using video and new media for his art production, Kambalu illustrates how technology and new media can be utilised by audiences to liberate themselves from identities which are largely defined by a fixed location.

Shirin Neshat is honoured by the Japan Art Association

Shirin Neshat is one of five recipients – alongside others such as fellow artist El Anatsui and dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov – to receive the Japan Art Association’s prestigious Praemium Imperiale award. The Praemium Imperiale, established in 1989, is an international art prize awarded by the imperial family of Japan on behalf of the Japan Art Association in the fields of painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and theatre or film. Conceived as a prize to recognise areas of achievement not covered by the Nobel Prize, the award is given to artists for outstanding contributions to the development, promotion and progress of the arts. Neshat receives this award at a ceremony held in Tokyo (18 October).

Mikhael Subotzky presents new work and collaborates with The Brother Moves On at Maitland Institute in Cape Town

For the past six years, Mikhael Subotzky has been systematically pulling images apart in an attempt to ‘get inside’ them and understand their representational function. While on residency at the Maitland Institute in Cape Town, Subotzky continues his process of dismantling and reconstituting images, working for the first time with paint and ink on canvas, as well as in collaborative performance with The Brother Moves On. Simultaneous to his residency, Subotzky hosts a ‘work in progress’ exhibition, Yellow Bile (or Work in Progress) (14 September – 31 October) at Maitland Institute. These new formal constituents are wielded around Subotzky’s personal iconography – images that he has found and made that resonate with his experiences, as well as certain texts foundational to his understanding of the world.

The collaborative performance with The Brother Moves On, Four Rehearsals in the Yellow Bile, will take place within the exhibition on the opening night (14 September). It too will ‘pull apart’ the underlying texts and images of Subotzky’s works, while also introducing the narratives and imagery of performance and collaboration synonymous with The Brother Moves On. The performance features Thantaswa May as the female protagonist stuck in the Bile, under the watchful eye of the characters’ current reality. Her story, an ode to Nina Simone’s Four Women and the Marikana widows amongst others, will be sung in counterpoint and conflict with TS Eliot’s Four Quartets (read by Subotzky) and accompanied by a percussive and musical score by Zelizwe Mthembu. The performance takes place in four parts from 17:30 – 20:30.

This ‘work in progress’ exhibition thus introduces a new stream in Subotzky’s work, a cross-medium attempt to illustrate and understand T.S. Elliot’s Four Quartets. Drawing on a long history of artists’ ‘illustration’ of classic texts, Subotzky seeks to get inside a text that has been fundamental to his aesthetic and philosophical understanding of the world. It is a project that he estimates he will be preoccupied with for many years to come.

William Kentridge at Hilliard University Art Museum in Louisiana

The Hilliard University Art Museum in Louisiana presents a solo exhibition for William Kentridge, titled William Kentridge: Journey to the Moon (8 September – 20 January). Centred on Kentridge’s filmic artwork of the same title, the exhibition offers an intimate look into Kentridge’s production process, both physically and psychically. As such, the exhibition explores the studio space as a site of performance. In the role of the protagonist of his artworks, Kentridge appears to probe and question the ideas and processes of vision and creativity.

Alfredo Jaar pays homage to Harun Farocki in Berlin

Jaar’s series of graphical diagrams paying tribute to Harun Farocki, Czech-born German filmmaker, feature in a special external project organised by Neue Berliner Kunstverein (nbk) – and curated by Michaela Richter – in Berlin (opens 14 September). Jaar’s graphical diagrams are displayed on the façade of the nbk building on Chausseestrasse – one of the oldest streets and major centres of production and commerce in Berlin. From 1961 to 1990, the street was divided by the Berlin Wall and marked by a checkpoint. Eight years before the building of the wall, this border crossing was one of the hotspots for the uprising that occurred on 17 June 1953, when thousands of striking steelworkers marched for better working conditions. Fascinated by Farocki’s interest in the power and transformation of the visual and its possibilities in the history of Chausseestrasse, Jaar’s work invites viewers to decipher and reflect upon such ideas and impacts.

Candice Breitz and Samson Kambalu at SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin

Breitz and Kambalu are included on a group show, El Usman Faroqhi Here and a Yonder – On Finding Poise in Disorientation, at SAVVY Contemporary (14 September – 28 January). The programme of video art, part of Berlin Art Week, is dedicated to Harun Farocki, a Czech-born German filmmaker, video artist, and writer known for his provocative politicised ‘film-essays’.

Ghada Amer on exhibition at IVAM in Spain

Work by Amer, alongside some of her contemporaries including Mona Hatoum and Rula Halawani, features on the group exhibition, In Rebellion. Female Narratives in the Arab World, at the Institut Valencia d’Art Modern in Spain (14 September – 28 January). The exhibition explores the realities of the Arab world since the 1990s, seen through the different perspectives of female artists. In showcasing artworks by key feminist artists, in juxtaposition with works by their male contemporaries reflecting on the construction of femininity, the exhibition shows the political capacity of women as social agents for transformation.

David Goldblatt, Haroon Gunn-Salie and Yinka Shonibare MBE on A4 Arts Foundation’s inaugural exhibition in Cape Town

The A4 Arts Foundation’s inaugural exhibition, You & I, in Cape Town (13 September – 30 November) includes work by David Goldblatt, Haroon Gunn-Salie and Yinka Shonibare MBE. As a non-profit arts organisation dedicated to promoting and encouraging innovation within the South African arts, the exhibition uses the Buitenkant Street gallery space as a platform in which the idea of collaboration and collectivity can be explored. Curated by Ziphozenkosi Dayile and Kemang Wa Lehulere, You & I examines the multivocality of collectivity by investigating and reconsidering the social conditions, dynamics and histories of such ideas.

Alfredo Jaar on museum show in Chile

Jaar has work in the Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende’s annual exhibition, Utopía y Crisis. Colección MSSA (8 September – 21 January), in Santiago. Curated by Caroll Yasky, the exhibition presents works from the museum’s collections dating between 1967 and 2010. The exhibition offers challenging points of view regarding various crises in political and ideological models, as well as directing a particular gaze towards the representation of utopias. The works on display operate from multiple and diverse geographies, experiences and creative languages.

David Goldblatt and Haroon Gunn-Salie on A4 Arts Foundation’s inaugural exhibition in Cape Town

The A4 Arts Foundation’s inaugural exhibition, You & I, in Cape Town (13 September – 30 November) includes work by both David Goldblatt and Haroon Gunn-Salie. As a non-profit arts organisation dedicated to promoting and encouraging innovation within the South African arts, the exhibition uses the Buitenkant Street gallery space as a platform in which the idea of collaboration and collectivity can be explored. Curated by Ziphozenkosi Dayile and Kemang Wa Lehulere, You & I examines the multivocality of collectivity by investigating and reconsidering the social conditions, dynamics and histories of such ideas.

Hank Willis Thomas at Art Gallery of Ontario

As a short-listed candidate for the 2017 Aimia | AGO Photography Prize, Hank Willis Thomas’ work will be on exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Canada (6 September – 14 January). The exhibition, which celebrates the artistic talents of the nominees, looks at how the static image can be used as a vehicle not only for social change, but social cohesion.

Various artists at the College of Wooster Art Museum

Five Goodman artists – Kudzanai Chiurai, Hasan & Husain Essop, Gabrielle Goliath, Haroon Gunn-Salie and Gerald Machona – are included on the College of Wooster Art Museum’s group exhibition After the Thrill is Gone: Fashion, Politics, and Culture in Contemporary South African Art, in Ohio (12 September – 12 November). Curated by Dr. Andrew Hennlich, the exhibition features 14 artists who read the political climate of post-apartheid South Africa through fashion’s embrace of the ‘new’. The artists use fashion to shape narratives of representation, identity, memory, xenophobia, violence in the domestic sphere, and allegories of nationalism. Both individually and collectively, these artists locate fashion as a political language and reinterpret the historical terrain of South Africa after the thrill of apartheid’s end is gone

mounir fatmi at Institut Des Cultures d’Islam in Paris

mounir fatmi participates in a group exhibition, Lettres ouvertes, de la calligraphie au street-art, at the Institut Des Cultures d’Islam in Paris (1 September – 21 January). The exhibition explores the calligraphic dimensions in the contemporary arts and testifies to the universality of research around the art of writing, fueled in particular by traditional Arab and Far Eastern calligraphy. The artists exhibiting all approach letters and signs as field of graphic, aesthetic and poetic experiments.

Shirin Neshat at Yale Art Gallery

Shirin Neshat’s 1999 work Untitled, from the series Rapture is currently on Artists in Exile: Expressions of Loss and Hope, a major group exhibition at the Yale Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut (1 September – 31 December). In presenting an innovative approach to the theme of exile, the exhibition showcases artworks by artists who left their country of birth, or their adopted home, for a variety of reasons – including discrimination, war, and genocide – from the 19th century to the present day. Curated by Frauke V. Josenhans, the exhibition explores exile as not only a mental or physical state but also a catalyst for creativity.

Yinka Shonibare MBE at the Grundy Art Gallery in Blackpool

Work by Shonibare features on the Grundy Art Gallery’s exhibition, Paper, Canvas, Neon, about the institution’s most recent acquisitions to its permanent collection (26 August – 23 December). The exhibition includes works by internationally renowned artists, as well as emerging and more established artists from across North West England and the broader United Kingdom.

Paulo Nazareth at the San José Museum of Art

Work by Nazareth is included on the group exhibition, This Is Not a Selfie: Photographic Self-Portraits from the Audrey and Sydney Irmas Collection, at the San José Museum of Art in California (25 August – 14 January). Curated by Deborah Irmas and drawn from the most significant collection devoted to the subject, the exhibition comprises 66 photographs from early 19th-century experiments through to contemporary digital techniques and includes works by many prominent and seminal artists throughout the global art canon. San José Museum of Art is the first venue for the exhibition, which later travels to Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, followed by the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Yinka Shonibare MBE on museum show in Denmark

Shonibare’s Little Rich Girls and Earth feature on the Gammel Holtegård’s group exhibition, Colonial Stories – Power and People, in Copenhagen (25 August – 30 December). The exhibition marks the centenary of the end of the Danish colonies in the West Indies, exploring the history through artworks, cultural artefacts, and contemporary art from Denmark and abroad.

Broomberg & Chanarin show new work on group show in Tuscany

Newly commissioned work by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin is included on the group exhibition, Forever Never Comes, at the Museo Archeologico e d’Arte della Maremma in Grosseto, Italy (26 August – 26 January). In exhibiting works by local and international artists – both established and emerging – the exhibition explores the symbolism and dialogue between the past and its heritage, as well as space, time and art. Conceptualised as part of a larger ongoing museum project, the curators intend for the exhibition to promote the multifaceted relationships and connections between history and contemporary art practice.

Tabita Rezaire at the Bury Art Museum in UK

Rezaire is one of a small group of artists on the Bury Art Museum’s summer exhibition, Foreigners, in Bury, United Kingdom (26 August – 18 November). The exhibition, curated by Tony Trehy, aims to illustrate how society is open and malleable to cultural exchange and the influence of globalisation. The exhibition comes at an important moment and time when borders are closing and cultural foreigners, divergent ideas and alternative modes of thinking are being treated as unwelcome in certain parts of the world.

Tabita Rezaire tackles digital commodification in Switzerland

Rezaire participates in an international group exhibition, Escaping the Digital Unease!, at the Kunsthaus Langenthal in Switzerland (31 August – 12 November). Since the beginning of the web 25 years ago, artists have built their own spaces and channels online. They have created artworks reacting to the commodification and restrictions of the digital medium in a critical way. The exhibition presents works from over 30 artists and collectives tackling these topics, raising awareness of the unease, and showing its causes or possibilities of an escape from it.

Shirin Neshat at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago

Neshat’s work is showcased on We Are Here, a major three-part exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago that investigates the relationship between artist and viewer (19 August – 1 April). The three independent but interrelated ‘chapters’ of the exhibition – individually curated by José Esparza Chong Cuy, Naomi Beckwith and Omar Kholeif – invite viewers to bring their own perspectives to the museum’s collection and to think about how to be active participants in the meaning of art and its making. Included in the ‘chapter’ subtitled You Are Here, the artist’s work is displayed in a way that examines how the role of the viewer has changed over time, especially since the 1960s, from passive onlooker to active participant.

Broomberg & Chanarin at the Deutsches Hygiene Museum in Dresden

Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin exhibit work on a group exhibition, The Face: A Search for Clues, at the Deutsches Hygiene Museum in Dresden, Germany (19 August – 25 February). Looking at artworks that focus on the face and facial expressions in human communication, the exhibition deals with the assumptions, methods and reasons for the visual representation of individual faces.

William Kentridge on group exhibition at Harn Museum of Art in Florida

Work by Kentridge is included on the Harn Museum of Art’s group exhibition, Poetic and Political, at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Florida (15 August – 8 July). Poetic and Political explores two realms of perception often considered oppositional but more likely to work in tandem to make a rich, provocative and compelling visual impact. The exhibition juxtaposes the work of Josef Albers, a single artist focused on the psychic and emotive qualities of colour, with African and African American artists who confront the historic and contemporary traces of colonialism as they contribute to the power of healing and renewal.

Broomberg & Chanarin on Yokohama Triennale

Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin participate, alongside a small group of selected artists who will exhibit multiple works, in the Yokohama Triennale 2017 (4 August – 5 November). Under the title Islands, Constellations & Galapagos, the 2017 edition of the triennale embarks on a multi-faceted examination of the themes of connectivity and isolation.

Broomberg & Chanarin at the Yale University Art Gallery

Photographs by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin form part of a large-scale group exhibition Before the Event / After the Fact: Contemporary Perspectives on War, at the Yale University Art Gallery (21 July – 31 December). Curated by Judy Ditner, the exhibition offers a wide-ranging examination of the representation of war in contemporary photographic and video art practice.

Hank Willis Thomas in two-person show at Baltimore Museum of Art

Thomas’ And I Can’t Run is on exhibition, alongside Kara Walker’s Salvation, at the Baltimore Museum of Art (28 June – 18 March). Through contrasts of light and dark, white and black, and obscurity and revelation, the work engages in a powerful metaphorical conversation about acts of horrific violence and racial inequality in the United States

Yinka Shonibare on group show exploring royalty at the Kensington Palace

Shonibare’s Mrs Pinckney and the Emancipated Birds of South Carolina features on Enlightened Princesses: Caroline, Augusta, Charlotte and the Shaping of the Modern World at Kensington Palace (22 June – 12 November). The work was commissioned especially for the exhibition, which is presented by Historic Royal Palaces and the Yale Center for British Art. It explores the lives of three German princesses whose marriage into the British royal family and wide-ranging interests placed them at the very heart of the Enlightenment underway in 18th-century Britain.

Yinka Shonibare on summer show in Switzerland

Shonibare’s Un Ballo in Maschera and The Crowning feature on the summer group exhibition, Un Bal Masque / A Masked Ball, at Le Chateau de Nyon (9 June – 26 November). The exhibition reimagines objects, artefacts and ceremonial occasions of 18th-century Europe by including works that offer a contemporary colouring to the garments, ornate subject matter and events of the period.

Large-scale survey show for Shirin Neshat at Kunsthalle Tübingen

The Kunsthalle Tübingen is devoting a major retrospective to Iranian-born artist Shirin Neshat (1 July – 29 October). On exhibition are important artworks from all creative phases of the artist’s extensive oeuvre – from the famous superimposed text-based works of the 1990s, the early video installations exploring themes of life in exile and diaspora, to the new filmic productions of 2016 and 2017, including some being shown in Europe for the first time. The exhibition, funded by the German Federal Cultural Institution, will be accompanied by a catalogue as well as a wide range of events organised in cooperation with numerous partners.

Yinka Shonibare MBE on the Diaspora Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2017

Shonibare’s The British Library installation forms part of the Diaspora Pavilion at the 57th La Biennale di Venezia. Presented by the International Curators Forum (ICF) and University of the Arts London (UAL), the exhibition takes place at the Palazzo Pisani S. Marina (13 May – 26 November). The Diaspora Pavilion is conceived as a challenge to the prevalence of national pavilions within the structure of an international biennial. By bringing together a group of 19 UK-based, ethnically diverse artists, the pavilion speaks eloquently of the infinite complexities of the very idea of nationality, whilst highlighting the continued relevance that diaspora as a lived reality holds today.

Candice Breitz represents South Africa at 57th Venice Biennale

Candice Breitz has been selected to represent South Africa at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017. Candice Breitz and Mohau Modisakeng will present a major exhibition in the South African pavilion during the world’s most prestigious contemporary art event, which runs from 13 May to 26 November 2017 in Venice, Italy.

The exhibition staged in the South African pavilion will invite viewers to explore the role of artists in visualising and articulating notions of selfhood within the context of global capitalism. It will ask: What is it to be visible in everyday life, yet invisible and disregarded at the level of cultural, political or economic representation? Placing new works by Breitz and Modisakeng in dialogue, the exhibition will reflect on experiences of exclusion, displacement, transience, migration and xenophobia, and explore the complex socio-political forces that shape the performance of subjectivity under such conditions.

“We are truly thrilled that Breitz and Modisakeng will be representing South Africa. Breitz’s photographs and multi-channel video installations offer nuanced studies of the structure of identity under global capitalism,” says Lucy MacGarry, curator of the pavilion with Musha Neluheni.  

Thabiso Sekgala at the Walther Collection

Sekgala features on the Walther Collection’s group exhibition, Recent Histories – New African Photography (7 May – 29 October). Forming part of the collection’s ongoing projects showcasing contemporary photography and video art from Africa, the show focuses on how African photographers are engaging with revolutionary and current photographic practices to respond to ideas and understandings of African diaspora.

William Kentridge at Cincinnati Art Museum

On loan from the LUMA Foundation, Kentridge’s More Sweetly Play the Dance will make its American premiere at the Cincinnati Art Museum (26 April – 5 November). The artist’s film installation involves seven screen projections, creating an immersive panorama, and showcases a procession of travelers crossing over a charcoal-drawn animated landscape.