Sophie Smorczewski

The Whitney Biennial has long asked what it means to be American. As the United States marks its 250th anniversary, this year’s exhibition refuses easy answers. Instead, 56 artists explore grief, belonging, and interspecies kinship in New York’s most talked about and hotly debated exhibition. Several works give the Whitney Biennial 2026 its emotional weight. Kelly Akashi’s Monument (Altadena) is

Imagine walking into a museum where artworks respond to your heartbeat and even the scents adapt to your body’s signals. That is the promise behind DATALAND, media artist Refik Anadol’s new Los Angeles institution, whose founders describe it as the world’s first museum dedicated to AI-driven art. Anadol founded DATALAND with his wife and longtime creative partner, painter and cultural

More than 800 pounds of peanut butter cover the floor of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, reviving one of Wim T. Schippers’ most iconic conceptual works. Staged after the artist’s death last month, the installation celebrates his lifelong commitment to redefining what art can be. Installed at the museum’s Depot, Pindakaasvloer (Peanut Butter Floor) consists of a 270 square

Ai Weiwei’s Button Up! examines the intertwined histories of China and Britain through an ambitious exhibition of sculpture, installation and new commissions. Set within a former industrial hall in Manchester, it explores empire, industrialisation, migration and censorship, revealing how history shapes today’s political and humanitarian realities. Button Up! is Ai Weiwei’s most expansive exhibition in northern England to date. Conceived

Manifesta, the nomadic European biennial that uses each edition to engage with the social and historical realities of its host region, presents its sixteenth edition across Germany’s Ruhr Area, transforming disused postwar churches into spaces for art, dialogue, and community, exploring how history can unite. Manifesta 16 unfolds across Duisburg, Essen, Gelsenkirchen, and Bochum, with twelve former or underused churches

Sonia Boyce’s Demonstrate at the Queens Museum brings together film, photography, sound, and installation to explore collaboration, participation, and collective making, treating these not as subject matter but as a working method through which meaning is produced in real time within shared space. Developed over two days of filming at the Queens Museum in October 2025, the project continues Boyce’s