Zineb Sedira @ Marseille, Friche La Belle de Mai - Installation "Les rêves n’ont pas de titre" - Saison Méditerranée 2026

Zineb Sedira 

Les rêves n’ont pas de titre

Friche La Belle de Mai, Marseille

21 mai — 27 septembre 2026

Présentée pour la première fois en France, l’installation Les rêves n’ont pas de titre de Zineb Sedira a été conçue pour le pavillon français de la 59e édition de la Biennale de Venise en 2022 qui a reçu la mention spéciale du jury. Cette présentation à Marseille, à la Friche La Belle de Mai, à lieu dans le cadre de la Saison Méditerranée 2026.

Zineb Sedira propose une expérience de la fiction du réel et brouille les frontières entre intimité et mémoire collective. À travers un récit autobiographique, l’artiste relie des moments clés de sa vie à des événements géopolitiques plus larges, au cinéma d’avant-garde et à des expériences diasporiques.

Depuis 25 ans, Zineb Sedira développe une pratique sensible portant sur la migration, l’acte de raconter et les biais inhérents aux récits officiels. Ses films constituent une exploration archivistique approfondie de l’identité et de l’activisme culturel.

Née en France en 1963 au sein d’une famille algérienne, elle s’implante à Londres au milieu des années 1980. Son histoire et celle de sa famille deviennent vite un terrain propice aux expérimentations artistiques.

L’installation Les rêves n’ont pas de titre de Zineb Sedira constitue une réflexion majeure sur les enjeux contemporains de la décolonisation et de l’identité hybride. À travers un dispositif immersif mêlant film, archives, reconstitutions scénographiques et éléments autobiographiques, l’artiste élabore une œuvre qui interroge simultanément les récits historiques, les formes de représentation et les constructions identitaires issues de l’histoire coloniale. Loin d’adopter une posture strictement documentaire ou militante, Zineb Sedira choisit une approche complexe et stratifiée, où le cinéma devient à la fois sujet, médium et métaphore.

L’un des axes fondamentaux de l’installation réside dans la réactivation du cinéma militant et tiers-mondiste des années 1960 et 1970, période charnière qui suit l’indépendance de l’Algérie en 1962. À cette époque, le cinéma ne se limite pas à un divertissement ou à une production culturelle nationale : il devient un instrument politique, un espace de construction symbolique et un vecteur de solidarités internationales. Les coproductions entre l’Algérie, la France et l’Italie témoignent d’un moment d’effervescence où l’image filmique participe activement à la formulation d’un imaginaire post-colonial. En revisitant ces références, Zineb Sedira ne se contente pas d’en proposer une lecture nostalgique. Elle en explore la dimension utopique : celle d’un art pensé comme outil d’émancipation collective et de dialogue transnational.

Toutefois, la décolonisation qu’elle met en scène ne se réduit pas à un événement historique clos. Elle apparaît comme un processus critique en cours, notamment dans la manière dont les récits sont produits et transmis. En brouillant les frontières entre fiction et archive, en mêlant images authentiques, reconstitutions et mises en abyme cinématographiques, l’artiste remet en question l’autorité des discours historiques stabilisés. Le spectateur est placé dans une situation d’incertitude : ce qu’il voit relève-t-il du document ou de la fiction ? Cette indétermination constitue précisément un geste de décolonisation formelle. Elle souligne que toute archive est construite, que toute mémoire est médiatisée, et que l’histoire officielle peut – et doit – être réécrite à partir de points de vue marginalisés. Décoloniser, chez Zineb Sedira, signifie ainsi déplacer le regard, interroger les hiérarchies narratives et réinscrire des voix longtemps tenues à l’écart dans l’espace symbolique de la représentation.

L’installation constitue un récit fondamentalement transnational. Les langues s’y croisent – français, arabe, anglais, italien – et les références culturelles circulent d’un territoire à l’autre. Cette pluralité linguistique et culturelle vient fissurer l’idée d’une identité nationale homogène. La décolonisation ne s’opère donc pas uniquement au niveau du contenu, mais également dans l’occupation symbolique de l’espace institutionnel.

Parallèlement à cette dimension politique et historique, l’œuvre développe une réflexion approfondie sur l’identité hybride. Née en France de parents algériens et vivant entre plusieurs pays, Zineb Sedira inscrit son propre parcours dans la trame de l’installation. La présence de membres de sa famille et de proches dans le film renforce l’articulation entre mémoire intime et mémoire collective. L’identité qui se dessine n’est ni univoque ni stable ; elle se construit dans l’entre-deux, dans la circulation et la superposition des appartenances. L’artiste ne choisit pas entre France et Algérie, entre héritage et contemporanéité : elle revendique la complexité d’une identité diasporique façonnée par les déplacements, les transmissions et les fractures historiques.

L’organisation spatiale de l’installation participe pleinement de cette réflexion. Elle comprend un ensemble de décors – studio de cinéma, salon domestique, bar, salle de projection – qui se répondent et se superposent. Cette pluralité d’espaces crée une expérience immersive où le visiteur circule entre différentes strates de réalité. Comme l’identité hybride, l’espace n’est pas unifié ; il est fragmenté, composite, en constante reconfiguration. L’oscillation entre plateau de tournage et intérieur familial matérialise la tension entre représentation publique et mémoire privée. L’identité apparaît alors comme une construction scénographique, toujours en train de se jouer et de se rejouer.

Le titre même, Les rêves n’ont pas de titre, offre une clé de lecture essentielle. Le rêve échappe à la catégorisation et aux assignations fixes. Il renvoie à un espace de liberté où les frontières nationales et identitaires se dissolvent. En suggérant l’impossibilité de nommer ou de circonscrire le rêve, Zineb Sedira affirme que l’identité post-coloniale ne peut être réduite à une étiquette. Elle est mouvante, plurielle, traversée par des mémoires contradictoires. L’absence de titre devient ainsi un refus de l’enfermement symbolique.

FRICHE LA BELLE DE MAI

41 rue Jobin, 13003 Marseille

www.lafriche.org

Entryways: Xenobia Bailey @ ICA - Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia - Univesity of Pennsylvania - A Site-Specific Installation

Entryways: Xenobia Bailey 

ICA - Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia 

Through August 9, 2026

Entryways: Xenobia Bailey 

Photo courtesy of the artist and Maharam

In July 2025, the Institute for Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (ICA), unveiled a striking new public artwork as part of ICA’s annual Entryways commission by visionary artist Xenobia Bailey. Spanning 400 square feet, the site-specific installation transforms ICA’s façade with a “Funktional” design and visionary illusion inspired by domestic crochet, natural cosmologies, masquerading culture, and local Philadelphia legend Sun Ra’s artistic philosophy. Entryways: Xenobia Bailey was developed in partnership with Maharam, North America’s leading creator of textiles for interiors, and is on view through August 9, 2026.

“Entryways: Xenobia Bailey continues our partnership with Maharam to transform ICA’s entrance into a space for experimentation,” said Hallie Ringle, ICA’s Daniel and Brett Sundheim Chief Curator and Interim Director. “ICA champions exploration and public engagement in meaningful ways, and local artist Xenobia Bailey’s site-specific work will do just that, inspiring visitors and redefining the way we remix, and they encounter, our space.”

For the Entryways commission, Xenobia Bailey began by crocheting decorative elements of vibrant yarn, before draping these crochet afghans over a ladder and photographing them. These images were digitally composed into the work’s centerpiece: a figure of Afrofuturist musician Sun Ra, whose Philadelphia-based jazz group Sun Ra Arkestra embodied a holistic Black cosmology and philosophy. Bailey drew inspiration from masquerading traditions—used to channel ancestral spirits—and memories of homemakers such as her mother, who transformed household furniture pieces by draping colorful crochet textiles over them. Astrological symbols orbit the figure and reappear across the building’s surface. Later this year, Xenobia Bailey will also introduce a digital element to her process for the first time. An Augmented Reality (AR) feature extend the installation into an interactive realm and virtually suspend the masquerade designs, underscoring their multidimensionality and further evolving a “Funktional” Black aesthetics into the future. Deploying intuitive, organic improvisation, Xenobia Bailey translates the frequencies of Sun Ra’s music into a symphony of crochet stitches, colors, and forms that come to life through AR. Honoring Sun Ra’s ability to bring the frequency of a Black cosmic aesthetic into material culture and lifestyle and using textiles as animating masks that energize space, Bailey’s Entryways design reimagines ICA’s façade as that of Sun Ra’s spirit welcoming visitors and passersby.

Entryways: Xenobia Bailey 

Photo courtesy of the artist and Maharam

Entryways: Xenobia Bailey 

Photo courtesy of the artist and Maharam

“In this expansive new commission, Xenobia Bailey draws on the legacies of Black utilitarian makers, including her own maternal lineage, from whom she inherited her ‘Funky’ textile aesthetics. She brings her medium of crochet, which she associates with domestic and sharecropping textile craft, into conversation with the architecture of ICA,” remarks Denise Ryner, ICA’s Andrea B. Laporte Curator. “Bailey carries this spatial expansion into the all-encompassing experimental cosmos of Sun Ra’s Arkestra, who surveys Philadelphia from above. Bailey adds to this Funk-tional orbit a towering masquerader.”

Entryways is a continuation of Bailey’s ongoing, multi-part, research project Paradise Under Reconstruction in the Aesthetic of Funk, a series she began in 1999 to build a distinctly African American aesthetic—one she experienced in her childhood, but had not seen represented in her academic industrial design education. Bailey’s body of crochet work, developed since 1984, stands as a testament to evolving textile material culture “funktioning” simultaneously as a source of sanctuary, comfort, historical preservation, and cultural identity. Born in Seattle and raised in rural and urban Washington, Bailey’s early life was shaped by Northwest forestry seasonal rhythms and land and stream-based living, guided by tools like the farmer’s almanac. Informed by this upbringing of being in sync with the natural environment, as well as thorough research on independent historical and contemporary radical elite Black communities, Bailey's work contributes to an ongoing dialogue on the material culture of funk, and emphasizes research, experimentation, development, and sustainable socio-economic models.

Artist Xenobia Bailey

Internationally recognized artist Xenobia Bailey (b. 1955, Seattle, WA) produces artworks and installations inspired by urban material culture and rural African-American homemakers. A student of ethnomusicology and industrial design, Bailey is well known for her crocheted sculptural headwear, wall hangings, and tents that articulate the utilitarian material crafts of the funk counterculture of the 1960s and ’70s. Using fiber and found items as her primary materials, Bailey produces a range of pieces that frequently riff on traditional home furnishings with inventive twists of color and texture.

Entryways: Xenobia Bailey is commissioned by The Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania (ICA) and developed in partnership with Maharam as an initiative of Maharam Digital Projects. The installation is curated by Denise Ryner, ICA’s Andrea B. Laporte Curator.

ICA PHILADELPHIA - UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

118 South 36th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104

icaphila.org

Entryways: Xenobia Bailey

Institute for Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (ICA)

July 12, 2025 –– August 9, 2026

Magdalene Odundo @ Xavier Hufkens, Brussels - Ceramic Vessels and a Large-Scale Glass Installation

Magdalene Odundo

Xavier Hufkens, Brussels

13 November 2025 —​ 24 January 2026

Xavier Hufkens presents Kenyan-born British artist Magdalene Odundo’s first exhibition at the gallery. Featuring a new body of ceramic vessels and the large-scale glass installation Transition II (2014), the exhibition showcases the two central disciplines that shape her artistic practice.

At the heart of the exhibition is a recent series of ceramic vessels, a form that has been a cornerstone of Odundo’s practice for nearly five decades. These vessels, refined in shape and rich in symbolism, draw inspiration from a wide array of global ceramic traditions—African, European, Asian, and Indigenous American – as by the human body, which Magdalene Odundo likewise regards as a vessel. Her work carries a distinct anthropomorphic presence: gestures, physical states and bodily movements often serve as starting points for a vessel’s form, silhouette, proportion or balance. As one of the oldest and most universal of human-made objects, vessels transcend time, geography and culture. Moreover, they are rich with dualities: inside and outside, fullness and emptiness, fragility and strength. These oppositions echo the deeper conceptual themes in the artist’s oeuvre, such as transition, identity and cultural hybridity. For Magdalene Odundo, the vessel is more than a physical object. It is an archetypal and elemental form through which to articulate relationships – between materials, histories, cultures and individuals.

The making of each vessel is a laborious and intensely physical act. Working alone, Magdalene Odundo hand-builds her vessels using coiling techniques before meticulously burnishing their surfaces. The distinctive colours – typically deep terracotta and lustrous black – emerge from a controlled firing process. This slow, embodied method underscores the intimate relationship between maker and material. In Odundo’s practice, the vessel is not a static object, but a living entity. Left unglazed, the works retain a subtle porosity, enhancing their sense of life and allowing them, quite literally, to "breathe."

Also on view is Transition II (2014), a large-scale installation comprising 1001 suspended glass vessels. Each vessel is individually mouth-blown yet they are united by a formal coherence that balances repetition and variation. In contrast to Odundo’s ceramic practice, which is a solitary activity, glass-blowing is a collective endeavour. The vessels in Transition II are inspired by an ancient Egyptian glass earplug in the Petrie Museum in London, a reflection of Odundo’s ongoing engagement with historical forms and cross-cultural material references. The resulting objects appear to hover in space: weightless and precarious; they are ‘hanging by a thread’. Glass, like clay, is an ancient and elemental medium, both ubiquitous and fragile, that is transformed by fire. In a phenomenon known as the ‘melt memory effect’, it retains information about its previous crystalline structure, even after heating above its glass transition temperature. These qualities are central to Transition II, and resonate with broader themes in Odundo’s practice.

The installation draws visual and conceptual parallels with a murmuration – a phenomenon in which large flocks of starlings move in coordinated, shape-shifting formations. Within this work, each glass shape maintains its singularity while simultaneously contributing to an energetic, collective rhythm. In an era increasingly marked by fragmentation and estrangement, Transition II speaks of gathering and mutual recognition, whereby uniqueness and difference contribute to a dynamic whole.

Magdalene A N Odundo (b. 1950) received her initial training as a graphic artist in Kenya before moving to the UK in 1971. She studied at the Cambridge School of Art (now Anglia Ruskin University), the University for the Creative Arts and the Royal College of Art. In 2018, Magdalene Odundo was appointed Chancellor of the University for Creative Arts (UCA) and was made a Dame in the Queen’s New Year Honours list in 2020. She has been the subject of major solo exhibitions at Houghton Hall, Norfolk, England (2024); the Gardiner Museum, Toronto, Canada (2023-2024); The Hepworth Wakefield, Wakefield, England and Sainsbury Centre, Norwich, England (2019); The High Museum of Art, Atlanta GA, USA (2017); British Council, Nairobi, Kenya (2005); Blackwell House, Bowness-on-Windermere, England (2001); The National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian, Washington D.C., USA (1995); Stedelijk Museum Voor Hedendaagse Kunst, s’Hertogenbosch, Netherlands (1994); Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg, Germany; and Badisches Landesmuseum, Karlsruhe, Germany (1992).

XAVIER HUFKENS

6 rue St-Georges | St-Jorisstraat, 1050 Brussels

www.xavierhufkens.com

Aziz Hazara: Bow Echo @ SMAK Gand - Installation vidéo sur cinq écrans géants

Aziz Hazara: Bow Echo 

S.M.A.K. Gand

29 novembre 2025 – 3 mai 2026

Aziz Hazara 

Bow Echo, 2019 

Collection S.M.A.K

Bow Echo est une puissante installation vidéo en cinq parties de l’artiste afghan Aziz Hazara. Depuis sa donation à S.M.A.K. en 2022, l’oeuvre est exposée pour la première fois dans le musée.

L’installation Bow Echo (2019) est composée de cinq écrans géants sur lesquels on voit cinq jeunes garçons qui affrontent un vent violent pour escalader un gros rocher. Une fois arrivés au sommet, ils jouent presque solennellement du kazoo, un petit instrument à vent qui produit un son nasillard. Le contraste entre la rigueur des conditions climatiques sur le haut plateau près de Kaboul et le maigre son du kazoo est une métaphore poétique de l’âpre situation de guerre qui règne en Afghanistan. 

Aziz Hazara dévoile les mécanismes du pouvoir sous-jacents qui sont à l’œuvre et montre comment une population traumatisée tente de s’accommoder du conflit et de l’oppression. Dans ce contexte, les notes qui sortent du kazoo résonnent comme une bande son ténue et macabre au-dessus d’un territoire occupé et en même temps comme un puissant appel à l’expression individuelle, l’espoir et la vie. 

AZIZ HAZARA (né en 1992, Wardak, Afghanistan) vit et travaille à Kaboul et à Berlin. À travers son art – dans lequel il combine photographie, vidéo, son, langages de programmation, texte et installations multimédias –, il étudie des thèmes tels que l’identité, le souvenir, les archives, le conflit, l’occupation et la migration, invariablement dans une perspective plus large, à la fois géopolitique et critique envers le pouvoir.

S.M.A.K

Jan Hoetplein 1, 9000 Gand

www.smak.be

Sana Musasama @ Eric Firestone Gallery, NYC - "Raised Earth" Exhibition

Sana Musasama: Raised Earth

Eric Firestone Gallery, New York

September 5 – October 18, 2025

Sana Musasama in her studio, 2023

Photograph by Grace Roselli, Pandora’s BoxX Project

Sana Musasama

House Series #17, 2023

Glazed earthenware, 25 x 16 x 11 in.

© Sana Musasama, courtesy Eric Firestone Gallery

Eric Firestone Gallery presents its first solo exhibition of the internationally recognized ceramic artist Sana Musasama. The exhibition is a dynamic installation of Musasama’s formative House series: vertically stacked ceramic sculptures, like abstracted small-scale temples, exploring multicultural connections to home and community. The work is inspired by the artist’s time living in adobe houses in West Africa in the mid-1970s, her recurrent travel to Cambodia, and time spent in the American West.

The slab-formed ceramics are multi-planar, touched and textured structures with deep color areas and repeated oval shapes that can be read variously as eyes, leaves, or vaginal forms. They are etched with intricate sgraffito marks suggesting body adornment, weavings, flora, and fauna. Elements extend from the planes: rings suggesting jewelry and grids like open baskets or seed pods. In her House series, Sana Musasama uses both earthenware and stoneware and accomplishes her vivid colors through various ceramic glazes, often finishing her works with salt or soda firing to create exquisite surfaces that contrast with the red-brown clay she prefers.

Sana Musasama

Tuscarona (House Series #4), 1983-1984

Glazed earthenware, 64 x 14 x 10 in.

© Sana Musasama, courtesy Eric Firestone Gallery

Sana Musasama first began her House series in the late 1970s, and they were the subject of a 1985 exhibition at the Studio Museum, following her 1983–84 residency with the museum. She decided to revisit these works 45 years later, creating what she called “siblings” to the original works in response to the isolation of 2020. Over the past two years, the artist has worked across the globe to create about twenty significant new House sculptures. This will be the first time work from the two periods are joined into a solo, survey exhibition.

Sana Musasama (b. 1951, New York, NY) is a Black activist feminist artist and global citizen, whose time spent living with women and girls in village societies in Cambodia, South America, Asia, and West Africa has shaped her artwork, developed alongside her humanitarian work. She defines her practice through the motto "Inspire, Commit, Act."

Sana Musasama grew up in St. Albans, Queens, and continues to live and work in her childhood home. She received her BA from City College, City University of New York in 1974, and her MFA from Alfred University in 1987. Musasama’s first formative trip was to Sierra Leone in the 1970s, where she lived amongst the Mende people. Musasama notes that traveling around the world centered and grounded her, making her understand the differences between what she grew up with, and how others around the world grew up and lived.

During her travels, which often involved living in village societies, she would first get to know people and the culture by going to markets, which were dominated by women. Sana Musasama came to understand how women look out for other women. Young girls—the daughters of these women—often became her guides, as she learned the language, how to shop, prepare food, and use tools.

She also came to appreciate how clay is everywhere, and that “it comes in as many different colors as we do.” The landscape and the decorative arts were inspirations for her work. The patterns of rice paddies in Vietnam found their way onto the surfaces of her ceramics, as did the sgraffito lines of the temples of Burma. She understood that baskets—which were often lined with clay or mud—were the origins of pottery, and incorporated the patterns of their weaving. Cinnamon plants sold on the side of the road informed leaf patterns. The sight of rows of cabbages inspired her to experiment with walls of clay conveying compression. Abstract signs and symbols were everywhere: in adornment practices, markings of identity, and clothing that signified specific societies. Sana Musasama combined these visual forms with her expertise in ceramics.

Sana Musasama recognized that her travels were joyous but also could be uncomfortable, scary, and dangerous, and these feelings were embedded into the forms. Her small-scale temples explore healing from multi-generational trauma through the touch of clay.

Through an article in Glamour in 2006, Sana Musasama learned about the Somaly Mam Foundation, which rescued teenage girls and young women who were victims of sex trafficking. She traveled to Cambodia to volunteer for a program that used artmaking and craftwork as a healing modality from this trauma. After her first experience, she knew that she would spend the rest of her life working with these Cambodian girls on beading and textiles. She developed the entrepreneurial “Apron Project” to give girls who lacked education an extra way to make income through their creations. On her first trip to Cambodia, Sana Musasama was dismayed to realize she had never been taught about the Cambodian genocide. She began to make ceramic work reflecting the images and remains she saw.

Musasama’s self-stated goal is to create art “for us,” centering her experience as a Black woman, to tell cultural and historical stories which are often suppressed. Her work often moves past its racist, historical narrative. They speak of cultural pride and self love. From early in her career, Sana Musasama has been committed to spaces that highlight Black artists and celebrate multiculturalism within New York. In addition to the Studio Museum, she had a residency and exhibitions at the Jamaica Arts Center (where she has taught since 2008), and showed at Cinque Gallery in the 1980s.

Sana Musasama is the recipient of an Anonymous Was a Woman Grant (2002) and the Outstanding Achievement Award (2018) from the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA) for her years of teaching and her humanitarian work with victims of sex trafficking in Cambodia. In 2024 she was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY, and became the first recipient of the NCECA Innovator Award. Musasama's work is held in the collections of the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; the Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, NH; the Museum of Art and Design, New York; Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum, New York; Mint Museum of Craft and Design, Charlotte, NC; the European Ceramic Center in Hertogenbosch, the Netherlands; the Archie Bray Foundation in Helena, Montana, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York.

Eric Firestone Gallery began working with Sana Musasama in 2022, presenting an in-depth solo installation of her work at the 2023 New York edition of the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair. Over the past two years, Sana Musasama has participated in a series of residency programs: the Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts, Edgecomb, ME; Township10, Marshall, NC; The New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, NY; Penland School of Craft, Mitchell County, NC; the Archie Bray Foundation, Helena, MT; and most recently the Shangyu Celadon Modern International Ceramic Center in Zhejiang Province, China.

Her work will be included in the exhibitions Re-Union: Syd Carpenter, Martha Jackson Jarvis, Judy Moonelis, Sana Musasama, and Winnie Owens Hart at the Frances M. Maguire Art Museum and Clay Has Memory: Generational Knowledge from Africa at the Princeton University Art Museum, both opening in 2026.

The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by Patricia Spears Jones.

ERIC FIRESTONE GALLERY

40 Great Jones Street, New York, NY 10012

www.ericfirestonegallery.com

Now Showing: Youssef Nabil's I Saved My Belly Dancer LACMA, Los Angeles - Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Now Showing: Youssef Nabil’s I Saved My Belly Dancer 

LACMA, Los Angeles

Through January 11, 2026

Youssef Nabil

I Saved My Belly Dancer #XXIV, 2015

Courtesy of the artist

© Youssef Nabil

Youssef Nabil

I Saved My Belly Dancer #II, 2015

Courtesy of the artist

© Youssef Nabil

Youssef Nabil

I Saved My Belly Dancer #XXV, 2015

Courtesy of the artist

© Youssef Nabil

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) presents Now Showing: Youssef Nabil’s I Saved My Belly Dancer, the first public presentation of the film since it entered the museum’s collection in 2025. The exhibition is centered around Nabil’s film, I Saved My Belly Dancer (2015), which marks its 10th anniversary this year. Tahar Rahim, who resembles Nabil, embodies the artist’s alter ego, while Salma Hayek stars as the titular belly dancer. For Youssef Nabil, the dancer represents both a remembered and an imagined memory of Cairo. He states, “I wanted to talk about belly dancing as an art form that is probably unique to us [Egypt]. It’s our dance. I’ve always loved it. So, I wanted to talk about saving the idea of belly dancing in my memory, more than anything.” 

The installation of Now Showing intends to evoke the type of mid-20th-century movie theater, including retro seats, contemporaneous with the Egyptian films that inspired the works in the exhibition. The space contains a photographic portrait of the director, hand-colored by Nabil’s mentor, Van Leo, and vintage movie posters. Additionally, the exhibition features photographs, based on the film, created by Nabil’s signature practice of hand-painting on silver gelatin prints rendered dreamlike by the unearthly intensity and tonality of the color palette. This is a revival of a mid-20th century technique associated with such Cairo-based photographers as Van Leo (Levon Alexander Boyadjian (1921–2002)).

This presentation continues LACMA’s history of exploring how film and popular culture interrelate with traditional areas of art from all periods and cultures. Over the past 30 years, the museum has acquired time-based media objects in nearly every curatorial department, including Nam June Paik’s Video Flag Z (1986), Matthew Barney’s REPRESSIA (decline) (1991), Bill Viola’s Slowly Turning Narrative (1992), and Mariko Mori’s Miko no Inori (1996), as well as works by Tacita Dean, Stan Douglas, Pierre Huyghe, Christian Marclay, Steve McQueen, Bruce Nauman, and Diana Thater.

Artist Youssef Nabil

Born in Cairo in 1972, Youssef Nabil began his career as a photographer in 1992, shooting his friends and creating scripts for them to perform, inspired by films from Egypt, Europe, and Hollywood. He developed a distinctive style by hand-painting gelatin silver prints reminiscent of glamorous celebrity portraits from the 1940s and ’50s, a technique he mastered through his friendship with renowned studio photographer Van Leo (Levon Alexander Boyadjian (1921–2002)). In 2003, Youssef Nabil left Cairo for an art residency in Paris, where he began taking self-portraits, addressing more personal issues of identity and displacement. Nabil continued his artistic practice in New York, where he lived from 2006 to 2018. His artistic practice addresses universal themes of absence, nostalgia, and cultural identity, while maintaining strong connections to his Egyptian heritage. Youssef Nabil has continued to draw inspiration from cinema, making portraits of contemporary film stars and artists, such as Catherine Deneuve, Omar Sharif, and Marina Abramovic. He also makes video works, collaborating frequently with actor Tahar Rahim. Currently, he is working on his first feature film, which will be multilingual and partially filmed in Egypt. Today Youssef Nabil resides between Paris and New York.

This exhibition was organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and is curated by Linda Komaroff, Curator and Department Head, Art of the Middle East, LACMA.

LACMA - LOS ANGELES COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART 

5905 Wilshire Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA, 90036 

lacma.org

Now Showing: Youssef Nabil’s I Saved My Belly Dancer 

LACMA - Los Angeles County Museum of Art 

August 24, 2025 – January 11, 2026

Carol Bove @ Gagosian, Beverly Hills - "Nights of Cabiria" Exhibition of new sculptures

Carol Bove

Nights of Cabiria

Gagosian, Beverly Hills

September 25 – November 1, 2025 

Carol Bove

Nights of Cabiria, 2025, installation view

© Carol Bove Studio LLC

Photo: Maris Hutchinson

Courtesy Gagosian

Carol Bove

Idiopathic Abstraction, 2020-25

Found steel, stainless steel and urethane paint

84 13/16 x 100 1/2 x 89 5/8 inches (215.4 x 255.2 x 227.6 cm)

© Carol Bove Studio LLC

Photo: Maris Hutchinson

Courtesy Gagosian

Carol Bove

Nights of Cabiria, 2025, installation view

© Carol Bove Studio LLC

Photo: Maris Hutchinson

Courtesy Gagosian

Gagosian presents Nights of Cabiria, an exhibition of new sculptures by Carol Bove. This is the artist’s first exhibition at the gallery in Beverly Hills.

In Nights of Cabiria, Carol Bove reflects on the industrial heritage of Los Angeles as a Cold War–era center for precision aerospace and weapons manufacturing, along with subcultural expressions of that focus such as surfboard production, with its devotion to perfect surface finish. The exhibition design responds to the unique architectural features of the Beverly Hills gallery and makes use of reclaimed structural scaffolding components called “soldier beams.” This scaffolding, intended for applications in civil engineering, provides the components for an architectural folly that supports two of the sculptures and partially reconfigures the gallery space.

Also dividing the gallery’s interior are a fence-like suspended metal lattice and two fabric scrims. One of these, made from diaphanous chiffon, has been screenprinted with an image of the lattice at the same scale. The other is made from the silkier material known as charmeuse, and is printed with a still from Italian silent film Cabiria (1914). Directed by Giovanni Pastrone, shot in Turin, and set during the Second Punic War of 218 to 202 BCE, the classical epic is credited with various innovations including the first extensive use of a moving camera.

Carol Bove

Similar Salamander, 2025

Nickel-plated steel structural scaffolding and stainless steel

76 3/4 x 44 1/4 x 38 3/4 inches (194.9 x 112.4 x 98.4 cm)

© Carol Bove Studio LLC

Photo: Maris Hutchinson

Courtesy Gagosian

Carol Bove

Tied Light, 2025

Steel structural scaffolding, stainless steel and fluoropolymer coating

102 1/8 x 28 1/8 x 27 1/8 inches (259.4 x 71.4 x 68.9 cm)

© Carol Bove Studio LLC

Photo: Maris Hutchinson

Courtesy Gagosian

Carol Bove

Priestcraft, 2025

Steel structural scaffolding, stainless steel and urethane paint

100 3/4 x 24 1/2 x 20 1/4 inches (255.9 x 62.2 x 51.4 cm)

© Carol Bove Studio LLC

Photo: Maris Hutchinson

Courtesy Gagosian

Several of Bove’s new works also integrate scaffolding into their formal designs, some retaining the beams’ raw surfaces. Priestcraft (2025), for example, incorporates a crumpled steel tube that has been bent into a loop, painted a vibrant orange, and perched atop a stand made from the weathered girders. Other works combine square tubing with mirror-polished steel disks, recalling Hardware Romance (2021), Bove’s sculpture that was on view in 2023–24 at Gagosian’s Park & 75 gallery in New York, their varied surface treatments prompting viewers to question assumptions about the “inherent” qualities of the material world.

GAGOSIAN, BERVERLY HILLS

456 North Camden Drive, Beverly Hills, CA 90210 

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Mary Heilmann: Long Line @ Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Mary Heilmann: Long Line

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

Through January 19, 2026

Mary Heilmann 

Long Line, 2020 

Acrylic on wood panel 

24 × 96 × 3.25 in. (60.96 × 243.84 × 8.26 cm) 

Collection of Megan & Mark Dowley

Courtesy of the Artist, 303 Gallery, New York, and Hauser & Wirth 

© Mary Heilmann.

Photograph by Thomas Barrat

Artist Mary Heilmann on the Terrace 

Installation view of Mary Heilmann: Sunset 

(Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 

May 1, 2015 – September 27, 2015) 

Photograph by Marco Anelli

Inspired by Mary Heilmann’s expansive practice and ethos of social connection, this new site-specific project celebrates the 10th anniversary of the opening of the Whitney Museum’s downtown building, for which Mary Heilmann (b. 1940, San Francisco, CA) created Sunset (2015) on the fifth-floor terrace. That project, which included a large-scale reproduction of a vibrant painting, a film, and Heilmann’s signature Monochrome Chairs, inaugurated the Museum’s largest outdoor gallery and transformed it into a site of reverie, memory, and leisure.

Mary Heilmann and curator Laura Phipps

Photograph by Matthew Carasella

Installation view of Mary Heilmann: Long Line

(Whitney Museum of American Art, New York,

April 9, 2025-January 19, 2026)  

On floor: Monochrome Chairs, 2015; April Chairs, 2025

Installation view of Mary Heilmann: Long Line

(Whitney Museum of American Art, New York,

April 9, 2025-January 19, 2026)  

On wall: Long Line, 2025 

On floor: Monochrome Chairs, 2015; April Chairs, 2025 

Photograph by Matthew Carasella

Mary Heilmann: Long Line further considers the relationship between the Museum's architecture and the city. Heilmann's immersive environment includes a hand-painted enlargement of her 2020 painting Long Line, as well as a variety of chairs related to furniture she has displayed in homes and exhibitions. Serving as elements in her larger composition, this furniture also encourages visitors to recharge and interact with one another and the environment outside the Museum.

Mary Heilmann: Long Line is organized by Laura Phipps, Associate Curator.

WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, NEW YORK

whitney.org

New Photography 2025 @ MoMA, NYC - "Lines of Belonging" - The Museum of Modern Art, New York

New Photography 2025 

Lines of Belonging

MoMA, New York

September 14, 2025 – January 17, 2026 

Prasiit Sthapit 

Saloni and friends (2013) 

from Change of Course. 2012-18 

© 2025 Prasiit Sthapit. Courtesy the artist

Renee Royale 

River at Chalmette Battlefield (Fazendeville) 

from Landscapes of Matter, 2023 

© 2025 Renee Royale. Courtesy the artist

Lindokuhle Sobekwa 

uMthimkhulu IV (The Great Tree). 2025 

Installation with photographs, Japanese kozo paper, 

gampi paper, colored pencil, oil pastel, acrylic paint, 

and polymer photogravure

© 2025 Lindokuhle Sobekwa

The Museum of Modern Art presents New Photography 2025: Lines of Belonging, the 40th anniversary edition of MoMA’s celebrated New Photography series. This exhibition brings together a group of 13 international artists and collectives, from four different cities around the world, who are expanding the horizons of the photographic field in the 21st century. Each at various stages in their careers, these artists are presenting distinct bodies of work for the first time in New York. Their creative contributions interweave personal narratives with structural, environmental, and colonial histories to consider forms of belonging that shape communities.

Tania Franco Klein 

Mirrored Table, Person (Subject #14) 

from Subject Studies: Chapter 1, 2022 

Inkjet print, 29 1/2 × 39 1/2″ (74.9 × 100.3 cm) 

© 2025 Tania Franco Klein. Courtesy the artist

L. Kasimu Harris

“King” Joe Lindsey and his Royal Setup 

(Roberton’s Vieux Carre Lounge), New Orleans 

from Vanishing Black Bars and Lounges, 2022 

Inkjet print, 24 x 36” (61 x 91.4 cm) 

© 2025 L. Kasimu Harris. Courtesy the artist

Sabelo Mlangeni

Faith and Sakhi Moruping, Thembisa Township (2004) 

from Isivumelwano, 2003-20 

Gelatin silver print, 14 5/8 × 10 9/16″ (37.1 × 26.8 cm) 

© 2025 Sabelo Mlangeni

Since it was launched in 1985, New Photography has introduced MoMA audiences to the innovative practices of more than 150 international artists. The featured practitioners in New Photography 2025 work in and out of one of four cities that have existed as centers of life, creativity, and communion for longer than the nation states within which they are presently situated: Johannesburg, Kathmandu, New Orleans, and Mexico City.

“The 40th anniversary of the program offers an opportunity for curatorial reflection on creative expressions of kinship and solidarity in a tumultuous political moment, centering artists who sustain communities, and drawing out connective threads within, across, and beyond the idea of borders,” Roxana Marcoci says. 

 

Clockwise from top left: Sandra Blow. Tony, 2018. Inkjet Print, 7 5/8 × 11 3/8″ (19.4 × 28.9 cm) © 2025 Sandra Blow; L. Kasimu Harris. Come Tuesday (Marwan Pleasant at Sportsman’s Corner), New Orleans, 2020. Inkjet Print, 24 x 36 in. (61 x 91 cm) © 2025 L. Kasimu Harris. Courtesy the artist; Saraswati Rai Collection / Nepal Picture Library. Print from digital archive. Courtesy GEFONT Collection / Nepal Picture Library; Sabelo Mlangeni, Mbulelo and Friends, Thembisa Township, 2004. Gelatin silver print, 9 5/8 × 14 3/8″ (24.4 × 36.5 cm) © 2025 Sabelo Mlangeni

 

Installation view of 

New Photography 2025: Lines of Belonging 

on view at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 

from September 14, 2025, through January 17, 2026

Photo by Robert Gerhardt

Organized across three gallery spaces, New Photography 2025 includes works by artists who variously explore the natural, manmade, and immaterial forms that shape communal lives and personal histories—from rivers to museums to family trees. 

Saraswati Rai Collection / Nepal Picture Library 

A mass meeting of former kamlaris (women bonded labourers) 

in Kanchanpur, Nepal (2010) 

from The Public Life of Women: A Feminist Memory Project, 2023 

Digital Image

Courtesy GEFONT Collection / Nepal Picture Library

Some reimagine the notion of the archive to formulate expressions of collectivity and interconnectedness, including a site-specific presentation of images preserved by the Nepal Picture Library, a digital archive. Titled The Public Life of Women: A Feminist Memory Project, it brings visibility to Nepali women’s lived experiences. 

Gabrielle Garcia Steib 

Still from The Past is a Foreign Country. 2020 

Super 8 and archival footage. 3 min. 19 sec. 

© 2025 Gabrielle Garcia Steib. Courtesy the artist

Transforming family archives into moving images and installation, New Orleans–based artist Gabrielle Garcia Steib explores personal and structural connections between Latin America and the southern United States. 

Others give space to tender and emancipatory possibilities of chosen families and social forms of kinship, positing a politics of everyday life that invites inclusiveness and resilience. 

Gabrielle Goliath

Berenice 29–39 (detail)

Eleven inkjet prints 

Each 35 7/16 × 35 7/16″ (90 × 90 cm)

© 2025 Gabrielle Goliath. Photo: Martin Parsekian

Installation view of 

New Photography 2025: Lines of Belonging 

on view at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 

from September 14, 2025, through January 17, 2026

Photo by Robert Gerhardt

Johannesburg artist Gabrielle Goliath’s 2022 serial photographic work Berenice 29–39 is featured among other works that engage iterative modes of address. 

Sandra Blow 

Allan Balthazar (2017) from Untitled, 2017-20 

Inkjet print, 43 1/4 × 28 13/16″ (109.9 × 73.2 cm) 

© 2025 Sandra Blow

The exhibition concludes with a group of photographs by artist Sandra Blow that celebrate the vibrancy of LGBTQ+ youth culture and artistry in Mexico City. 

Engaging a shared set of concerns—from notions of intergenerational memory to the living nature of the archive and the transnational stakes of cultural expression—the artists of New Photography 2025 collectively offer persistence and care as a rejoinder to the viral and profit-driven speed of contemporary image culture.

Lebohang Kganye 

Untouched by the ancient caress of time, 2022 

Installation view of Staging Memories, 

the Grand Prix Images Vevey 2021/2022 winning project, 

produced by Images Vevey (Switzerland) 

and premiered at the Biennale Images Vevey 2022 

Photo: Emilien Itim

Sheelasha Rajbhandari 

Agony of the New Bed (detail), 2023 

Thirty inkjet prints on linen, embroidery thread, metal thread, 

glass beads, on 30 beds, wood, imitation gold leaf 

Each 12 3/8 × 8 7/16 × 6 1/2″ (31.5 × 21.5 × 16.5 cm) 

© 2025 Sheelasha Rajbhandari

New Photography 2025: Featured artists

Sandra Blow (b. 1990, lives and works in Mexico City)

Gabrielle Goliath (b. 1983, lives and works in Johannesburg)

L Kasimu Harris (b. 1978, lives and works in New Orleans)

Lebohang Kganye (b. 1990, lives and works in Johannesburg)

Tania Franco Klein (b. 1990, lives and works in Mexico City)

Sheelasha Rajbhandari (b. 1988, lives and works in Kathmandu)

Renee Royale (b. 1990, lives and works in New Orleans and Chicago)

Nepal Picture Library (est. 2011, based in Kathmandu)

Sabelo Mlangeni (b. 1980, lives and works in Johannesburg)

Lindokuhle Sobekwa (b. 1995, lives and works in Johannesburg)

Gabrielle Garcia Steib (b. 1994, lives and works in New Orleans)

Prasiit Sthapit (b. 1988, lives and works in Kathmandu)

Lake Verea (Francisca Rivero-Lake, b. 1973; Carla Verea Hernández, b. 1978, live and work in Mexico City)

Lake Verea 

(Carla Verea Hernández and Francisca Rivero-Lake) 

Hojas de Metal (Metal Leaves), 2019 

Chromogenic print. 118 1/8 × 72″ (300 × 182.9 cm) 

© 2025 Lake Verea. Courtesy the artists

New Photography 2025: Lines of Belonging is organized by Lucy Gallun, Curator; Roxana Marcoci, Acting Chief Curator and The David Dechman Senior Curator; Oluremi C. Onabanjo, The Peter Schub Curator; and Caitlin Ryan, Assistant Curator, Department of Photography.

MoMA - THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, NEW YORK

11 West 53 Street, New York, NY 10019

www.moma.org

Rafaël Rozendaal @ MoMA, New York - "Light" An immersive Digital Artwork

Light: Rafaël Rozendaal 

MoMA, New York

Through September 1, 2025 

Rafaël Rozendaal 

Quadrant, 2023 

Digital animation using generative algorithm

Private collection

Rafaël Rozendaal 

Pages, 2023 

Digital animation using generative algorithm 

Variation 39: Erick and Mara Calderon Collection 

Rafaël Rozendaal 

Implosion, 2023 

Digital animation using generative algorithm 

Collection the artist

The Museum of Modern Art presents Light: Rafaël Rozendaal, an immersive digital artwork, on view on the Hyundai Card Digital Wall in MoMA’s Agnes Gund Garden Lobby. This is the last chance to view this installation that presents a selection of Rozendaal’s vibrant animated works, each sampled for two to three minutes. Each work originates as a storyboard sketched on paper, which is then translated into code of only a few kilobytes (the exhibition's total file size is 135 KB). The resulting final form is an autonomous website powered by that algorithm, generating the animation in real time. 

Rafaël Rozendaal 

Rooms, 2024 

Digital animation using generative algorithm 

Collection the artist

Rafaël Rozendaal 

Many Moment, 2018 

Digital animation using generative algorithm 

Collection Family Kolen

Rafaël Rozendaal (Dutch-Brazilian, born 1980) has been an innovator in the realm of Internet-based art since the early 2000s. He produces captivating animations that explore the aesthetic and conceptual possibilities of code, treating it as if it were paint. Rafaël Rozendaal has historically planned his websites to be robust enough to withstand the evolution of both software and hardware, and to be equally vivid at any screen resolution. The artworks adapt fluidly to any display, from a smartphone to the high-resolution LED screen in MoMA’s Agnes Gund Garden Lobby—which spans nearly 25 feet across. The result is a state of immersion so complete that it seems to merge with the physical world. Because Rafaël Rozendaal has chosen the Internet as his canvas, his works exist within the browser’s flat yet multidimensional digital landscape. For the same reason, these and all his works are accessible to all online through their URLs, even though they are held in private and public collections.

Rafaël Rozendaal 

Photomontage of the Gund Lobby featuring Flood, 2023 

Digital animation using generative algorithm 

Private collection 

Rafaël Rozendaal 

Photomontage of the Gund Lobby featuring 

Twisting and Turning, 2021 

Digital animation using generative algorithm 

Collection Russell Smith

Rafaël Rozendaal 

Photomontage of the Gund Lobby featuring Pages, 2023 

Digital animation using generative algorithm 

Variation 39: Erick and Mara Calderon Collection

“I imagine we will live in a world where there is no difference between a screen and any other surface,” said Rafaël Rozendaal. “I always wanted to make work that could be seen by anyone, anywhere, anytime. I wanted to create work that gives the viewer a feeling of possibility.”

“Rafaël’s digital artworks are lean, accessible, indestructible. They bend and adapt and never break. They are the ultimate example of the power that comes from lightness” says Paola Antonelli.

Light: Rafaël Rozendaal is organized by Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator, Department of Architecture and Design, and Director, Research and Development, and Amanda Forment, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Architecture and Design.

The Hyundai Card Digital Wall is a space for digital works and emerging technologies by contemporary artists.

MoMA - The Museum of Modern Art

11 West 53 Street, New York City

www.moma.org