All the exhibitions not to be missed this fall

To mark the 500th anniversary of Palazzo Te, British artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien presents the world premiere of All That Changes You. Metamorphosis, a ten-screen film installation curated by Lorenzo Giusti, hosted in the renovated spaces of the Fruttiere di Palazzo Te. Filmed at Palazzo Te with Sheila Atim and Gwendoline Christie in the roles of divine entities, the film explores the themes of metamorphosis, philosophy, and ecology, starting from the imagery of Giulio Romano's Renaissance frescoes and taking the narrative forward in different settings: from Charles Jencks' Cosmic House to Californian forests and other symbolic architectures. Inspired by the writings of authors such as Donna Haraway, Naomi Mitchison, and Octavia E. Butler, the work proposes an alternative imagery that challenges anthropocentrism and restores an active role to nature.

After its run at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, This Will Not End Well, the first retrospective dedicated to American photographer Nan Goldin as a filmmaker, organized in collaboration with Moderna Museet and other international institutions, finally arrives at Pirelli HangarBicocca. The exhibition features the largest collection of slideshows ever assembled, created over decades by Nan Goldin, including The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, The Other Side, Sisters, Saints, Sibyls, Memory Lost, and Sirens, as well as two more recent works, You Never Did Anything Wrong and Stendhal Syndrome, presented for the first time in Europe. Set up in pavilions designed by Hala Wardé, the exhibition also includes a site-specific sound work by Soundwalk Collective.

From September 24, 2025, to February 2026, Delvis (Un)Limited presents Dark Times, Bright Signs, a design exhibition curated by Valentina Ciuffi with Studio Vedèt and Space Caviar. Works by Panorammma, Room-File, Diaphan Studio, Duccio Maria Gambi, Joy Herro, Natalia Triantafylli, Unicoggetto/Zihan Zhao, and Wei Xiaoyan reflect on the apocalyptic scenarios that permeate the contemporary imagination, transforming them into idioms of hope and new forms of balance. Among medieval armor, missile vases, cosmic lamps, and lunar surfaces, the objects oscillate between primitive, cyber, and posthuman aesthetics, creating a new and unsettling universe. The exhibition opens with a performance by Room-File and marks a central stage in the Delvis (Un)Limited project, a research laboratory on collectible design.

Małgorzata Mirga-Tas, a Polish-Roma artist who was already the protagonist of the Polish pavilion at the 2022 Venice Art Biennale, returns to Italy with a solo exhibition hosted in Reggio Emilia by the Maramotti Collection. The project stems from her encounter with the Sinti community in the Emilian city and intertwines stories, memories, and figures linked to the tradition of traveling shows and carousels, symbols of Romani culture in Italy. The artist transforms fabrics and objects recovered from family members, friends, or flea markets into an installation inspired by the world of amusement parks, in which the materials become living presences, bearers of experiences, memories, and resistance. The work takes the form of a choral narrative that claims freedom and dignity, opposing prejudice and stereotypes, and reaffirming the identity and universal strength of Romani culture.

Until January 6, 2026, Fondazione Perugia presents EXTRA. Ancient Signs/Contemporary Visions, an exhibition curated by Marco Tonelli, which brings together around one hundred medieval parchments from the Albertini Collection with over forty works by eighteen contemporary artists, including Alighiero Boetti, Emilio Isgrò, Maria Lai, and David Tremlett. The parchments, dating from the 13th to the 15th centuries and once used as covers for municipal registers and legal documents, reveal coats of arms, motifs, writings, and symbols that become living traces in comparison with current artistic languages. Organized into five sections (Figurations, Abstractions, Motifs, Symbols, (Re)writings), the exhibition explores the relationship between word and image, past and present, restoring vitality and a sense of transcending temporal finitude to historical memory through an exhibition design that highlights references and similarities between ancient artifacts and contemporary art.

With Dead God Flow, Christelle Oyiri makes her debut in Berlin, presenting an immersive installation at CANK Neukölln that intertwines video, sound, and space. At its center is the film Hauntology of an OG (made with Neva Wireko in Memphis), where memories of conflict, symbolic architecture, and the voice of rapper-poet Darius Phatmak Clayton outline a genealogy of mourning and resistance. Alongside it, Hyperfate (2022) explores the posthumous sacralization of rap icons, transforming them into contemporary saints. The artist thus investigates the themes of martyrdom, memory, and resilience, conceiving rap as sound architecture and a critical device. At the same time, the CEL collective presents Foundations, a program of DJ sets, performances, workshops, and talks that brings Black artistic practices and activism into dialogue to imagine alternative cultural spaces.

A dark and disorienting landscape welcomes visitors to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam: Skin to Skin (2025) is Sandra Mujinga's new installation. In the heart of the museum's underground gallery, fifty-five identical figures, multiplied by mirrors and bathed in green light, float in a setting suspended between reality and science fiction. These hybrid presences, halfway between avatars, posthuman bodies, and abyssal creatures, suggest an idea of metamorphosis, secret communities, or new species, and can be perceived as both protective and threatening figures. Through the strategy of multiplication, Mujinga explores replicated and digitized identities, investigating the boundary between what is visible and what is hidden. The space, traversed by electronic sound compositions and changing lights, transforms the experience into a liminal narrative, in which one finds oneself suspended without any recognizable reference points.

With The Delusion, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley presents her most ambitious work to date: an immersive installation and multiplayer experience that blends video games, participatory theater, and satire to explore polarization, censorship, and social connection. Set in a post-apocalyptic future marked by the “Day of Division,” the project imagines closed and radicalized factions, each entrenched in their own truth. Created with a team of artists, researchers, and members of the Black Trans and Queer community, the work continues the artist's work of archiving Black Trans stories through the medium of video games, utilizing both advanced and obsolete technologies, such as the open-source UPGBE engine. Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley sees the audience as an active medium, encouraging visitors to engage with the dynamics of visibility, resistance, and survival in our time, characterized by collapsing systems and distorted realities.

The Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen presents Queer Modernism. 1900–1950, the first major European exhibition dedicated to the central role of queer artists in modernism. With over one hundred and thirty works by thirty-four international artists, including paintings, sculptures, photographs, films, and archival materials, the exhibition tells an alternative history of modernism, focusing on desire, gender, sexuality, and the politics of representation. From the salons of Paris to transnational avant-garde networks, from homoerotic myths to anti-fascist resistance, to the epilogue in the 1950s with the repressions of McCarthyism, the exhibition restores lives and artistic practices often erased from historiography, highlighting the current relevance of queer themes and the need for a more inclusive art history.

The Fondation Louis Vuitton celebrates German artist Gerhard Richter with a monumental retrospective bringing together over two hundred and seventy works from 1962 to 2024. Paintings, glass and steel sculptures, drawings, watercolors, and painted photographs outline a body of work that has redefined the boundaries of contemporary painting, oscillating between figuration and abstraction, tradition and experimentation. Curated by Dieter Schwarz and Nicholas Serota, the exhibition adopts a chronological approach that highlights continuity and fractures: from early photographic canvases to landscapes and portraits, from the famous “Color Charts” to the latest works, testifying to an ever-changing language.

The Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw presents The Woman Question: 1550–2025, curated by Alison M. Gingeras, a major exhibition that overturns the myth of female absence in art history. With over one hundred and thirty artists and eight thematic chapters, the exhibition spans five centuries of creativity, from the Renaissance to the present day, revealing the strength of a journey marked by tenacity and perseverance. From Artemisia Gentileschi to Frida Kahlo, from Cindy Sherman to Yoko Ono, the works address themes such as self-representation, motherhood, mysticism, eroticism, and war. More than a simple historical survey, the exhibition project aims to be a true manifesto for rethinking the canon from a feminist perspective, bringing to light stories of struggle and resistance through art.

The MIT Museum opens its new season with Lighten Up!, an exhibition that explores the role of circadian rhythms and light on daily well-being through light installations, immersive environments, soundscapes, and site-specific works by sixteen international artists. Among them are Liliane Lijn, Colin Fournier, James Carpenter, and Carsten Höller, who presents a new project developed with MIT alumnus Adam Haar Horowitz and the MIT Museum Studio, reinterpreting the exhibition space through light and interaction with the public. Curated by Anna Wirz-Justice, Marilyne Andersen, and other curators from EPFL Pavilions, the exhibition combines new productions and adapted works, exploring the ways in which light can modulate perception, behavior, and biological rhythms, in a hybrid journey between art and science.

From October 4, 2025, Dia Beacon will host the works of American artist Tehching Hsieh in a highly anticipated retrospective: for the first time, all five One Year Performances will be exhibited together, with the premiere of Rope Piece and No Art Piece. Alongside the Thirteen Year Plan project, these works constitute an extraordinary testimony to the artist's so-called “lifeworks,” offering a unique insight into his performative practice. The exhibition, which follows Hsieh's donation of eleven works to the Dia Foundation, conveys the radical and poetic power of a journey that blends art and life, exploring time, isolation, work, and social relationships, confirming Hsieh as one of the most visionary and rigorous artists of his generation. The retrospective is curated by Humberto Moro, deputy director of programs at Dia, together with guest curator Adrian Heathfield.

From September 13, 2025, to January 4, 2026, the Nasher Sculpture Center presents SURVEY: Antony Gormley, the first major museum retrospective of the British artist's work in the United States. The exhibition traces over forty years of research, from the experiments of the 1980s to his most recent works, exploring the relationship between body and space. The sculptures interact with the museum's luminous architecture and the exterior, thanks to a new site-specific project that places figures on the roofs of skyscrapers in downtown Dallas, transforming them into energetic systems of reflected light. In parallel, the artist's models and notebooks document more than sixty public projects, including the iconic Angel of the North (1998).

The Studio Museum in Harlem is dedicating a retrospective to Tom Lloyd (1929–1996), artist, activist, and community organizer, one of the first to think of electric light as an artistic language. In the 1960s, in collaboration with an RCA engineer, he developed an experimental practice that challenged conventional ideas about the role of Black artists. His works were the focus of the Studio Museum's inaugural exhibition, Electronic Refractions II (1968). Today's exhibition, the result of new research and conservation work, traces twenty years of his career, highlighting Lloyd's contribution to the relationship between art and technology, and his political and cultural commitment to the Art Workers' Coalition and the founding in 1971 of the Store Front Museum, the first art museum in Queens.

Robert Rauschenberg and Asia: an intense and creative dialogue at the heart of the exhibition at M+ in Hong Kong, which celebrates the artist's centenary. The exhibition highlights how his travels to Japan, India, and China influenced his approach to materials, colors, and techniques, transforming his artistic practice into a laboratory of experimentation. At the center is the ROCI (Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange, 1984–1991) project with exhibitions in Beijing, Lhasa, Tokyo, and Kuala Lumpur, which left a lasting mark on local artists. In the exhibition, Rauschenberg's works dialogue with those of various Asian artists, recounting a journey of cultural exchange and artistic contamination that redefined the visual language of contemporary art.

The Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo is dedicating its first mid-career retrospective to Aki Sasamoto, running until November 24, 2025, retracing twenty years of work by the Japanese performer and artist. Known for her improvised actions in specially constructed spaces, Sasamoto intertwines performance, installation, dance, and video, transforming objects and sculptures into narrative devices. The exhibition presents works from her early days, which focused more on everyday gestures and individuality, to her recent investigations into natural ecosystems and meteorology. Four key performances (Strange Attractors, Skewed Lies, Spirits Cubed, Sounding Lines) and a reflection on the relationship between museum and performance are scheduled. The exhibition will be accompanied by the first monograph dedicated to the artist.

A major retrospective celebrates Lee Bul, one of the central figures in Korean contemporary art, with around one hundred and fifty works from 1998 to the present day. The exhibition, which ranges from the famous Cyborg and Anagram to the installations and performances that established her on the international scene, explores the body in the post-human era and the tensions between utopia and disillusionment. Hosted by the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul, the exhibition centers on the Mon grand récit series (since 2005), architectural installations that intertwine autobiographical memory, historical avant-gardes, architectural utopias, and Korean history, composing complex allegorical landscapes.

UCCA Beijing presents the largest institutional exhibition ever dedicated to Yang Fudong, a central figure in contemporary Chinese visual production. From his debut with An Estranged Paradise (Documenta XI, 2002) to the monumental cycle Seven Intellectuals in Bamboo Forest, the artist has been able to translate the unease of a generation into poetic images. His research, which has evolved from filmmaking to installations, expands the narrative dimension into multi-temporal spaces. The exhibition includes the debut of the Library Film Project, launched after Seven Intellectuals, an infinite film that intertwines reality and construction. Inspired by childhood in the rural suburbs of Beijing, the exhibition, curated by Philip Tinari and Chelsea Qianxi Liu, blends the artist's personal memory with collective history.

We Proceed in the Footsteps of the Sunlight celebrates Zohra Opoku (1976, Altdöbern), a Ghanaian-German artist based in Accra, retracing a decade of research on identity, memory, and cultural genealogies through textiles, photographs, engravings, and installations. With her studies in fashion and photography in Germany, Opoku weaves autobiography and ancestral heritage into her practice, giving shape to a layered visual language. The first major museum exhibition dedicated to the artist, hosted by Zeitz MOCAA and curated by Beata America and Phokeng Setai, revolves around three symbolic elements—water, breath, earth—and reflects on the continuity of bonds, from everyday rituals to the cosmic dimension. The title, taken from the Book of the Dead, an ancient Egyptian funerary text that guides the soul beyond the physical world, becomes a declaration of resilience and transition.