If somebody were to write a new Book of Revelation for the 21st century, it would read a lot like the multimedia miseries of Hito Steyerl. The 53-year-old German artist is foremost a researcher interested in the effects of globalization, the onslaught of technology, the future of labor, and our susceptibility to abuses under this new techno-regime....

VENICE, Italy — Acqua alta: high water. It's something Venetians have learned to live with, when the city floods under high tides and strong winds. It mainly happens in the winter, but even under the mild May sunshine, the crowds sipping coffee in Saint Mark's Square will sometimes get their feet wet. At these times, the lines between lagoon,...

There are hundreds of exhibitions in Venice during the Biennale. Alongside the main exhibition in the Giardini and Arsenale, there are 90 national presentations, many in nearby pavilions in the Giardini and in spaces around the Arsenale, but also dotted throughout Venice. Then there are the official collateral exhibitions in museums and galleries,...

For the past couple of years, the arrival of spring has coincided with the transformation of the Centre Pompidou's South Galleries into a laboratory for experiments at the crossroads of art and new technologies.

How much of Darren Bader's art do we need in the world? The world, after all, is already full of the kinds of objects that Bader brings into his exhibitions: art, words, images, personalities, ideas. Its very fullness is arguably the condition that Bader's work both critiques and thrives on. 'The world is full of objects, more or less interesting;...

The state of the "millennial" is a complex and nebulous thing. Some define Generation X by its widespread affinity for decorative succulents. Some note an eye for a very specific, and hotly debated, shade of apricot-salmon pink. Others scorn millennials for the remorseless, cold-blooded murder of wine corks, the napkin industry, and...

I haven’t seen anyone capture our current state of disconnect better than Josh Kline does in Evidence, a show of work by seven artists, himself included, that he curated for Metro Pictures. In the front room, Oto Gillen’s handsome photographs of ominous Wall Street skyscrapers and Allyson Vieira’s apocalyptically cheery wall-mounted arrows made of...

For his current exhibition at Michigan State University’s Broad Museum, Michael E. Smith had the handles removed from the large glass doors to the exhibition space. Smudges from the labor remain — he requested that custodians not clean the glass for the show’s duration.The blemishes are barely noticeable, as the doors stay open during business...

Why make art when buyers treat works as an alternative currency, hiding them away like bullion bars in storage facilities? Can anything be done about questionable corporations and oppressive regimes using contemporary art to generate a spot of positive PR for themselves? And what links can be made between fuzzy surveillance images and abstract...

Münster, in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, is a worthy contender for the title of bicycle capital of Europe. Visitors heading to the city's decennial event, Skulptur Projekte, saw bicycles parked or abandoned immediately outside Münster Central Station, a telling sign that the event and city is best experienced on two wheels, and on a leisurely...

It is not always clear that one is looking at a Darren Bader work. The venturesome New York–based artist has quietly, almost covertly, presented two burritos on a windowsill at MoMA PS1, his aunt's SUV in a sculpture park during Miami Basel, and a ponytail floating in a canal in Venice (that one was called canal and/with ponytail). Once you are...

Given the current political climate, we here at frieze have been reflecting on the role of art in responding to conflict. With this in mind, we invited a cross-section of artists, curators and writers to answer two deceptively simple questions: ‘How important is art as a form of protest?’ and ‘How effective is it as a conduit of change?’ Responses...

More than two hundred artists, musicians, writers, and arts professionals from forty countries have pledged to take part in Hands Off Our Revolution, a global art project that will organize a series of exhibitions and other programming to confront the rise of right-wing populism around the world.

Water gives life; life needs water. These fundamental realities can easily sound like truisms. But artist Kader Attia managed to invigorate conversations on the subject with renewed environmental and political urgency during the two-day symposium Vive L’Indépendance de L’Eau (Long Live the Independence of Water) that he organized at the University...

Japanese artist Takashi Murakami’s artistic practice is expansive – spilling into fashion, film and other commercial areas. The artist turned to curating in the early 2000s, producing several projects, including Superflat (an exhibition that toured Nagoya Parco Gallery, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Walker Art Center and Henry Art...

On 15 November 2016 the Chinese Contemporary Art Award (CCAA) announced winners Cao Fei, He Xiangyu and Xu Bing. In its 10th edition, the award was founded in 1997 by pioneering Swiss collector Uli Sigg, who began collecting Chinese contemporary artists in the 1990s.The aim of CCAA is to give awards to Chinese artists and art critics who show...

By asking what art 'does,' the curators of the eleventh Gwangju Biennale betray a palpable anxiety about whether the field in which we work makes any meaningful contribution to the societies in which we live. The feeling will be familiar to many of us in these increasingly ugly times, in which to be 'doing' anything other than...

Victoria Miro stages a group exhibition by artists concerned with socio-political issues of their day, who question the status quo and the power structures found within societies, and who take the language of protest as a means to explore its potency. Inspired by Alice Neel’s 1936 painting Nazis Murder Jews, the exhibition draws together new...

An undulating promenade enters, wraps and surmounts the new building’s roof. Inside, in MAAT director Pedro Gadanho’s words, ‘a totally fluid space, counter-intuitive to the idea of the white cube’ unfurls with a sequence of museological greatest hits woven into both the building’s physical form and the ambitions of...

The opening ceremony of the 2016 Gwangju Biennale, Asia's oldest contemporary art biennale, is set to kick off in the southwest city of Gwangju next week, the festival's foundation said Friday.During the ceremony, set to start at the plaza in front of the Gwangju Biennale Exhibition Halo at 6:40 p.m. Thursday, Park Yang-woo, chief of...

Could you tell us something more about the concept The Eight Climate (What does art do?), this year’s biennial theme?Maria Lind: Imagine that you are walking on a ramp leading from one floor to the next in a big exhibition space. In the corner of your eye you notice something on the long smooth white wall: in one place it looks like...

About two months ago, T and I went to Southwest London’s K-Town (otherwise known as New Malden, an area that has one of the largest communities of expat Koreans in Europe) in search of pickles. As we were exploring our way through plates of assorted preserved vegetables, with staff and fellow diners eyeing our particular menu choices, one...

While crafting Castaway—his life-size bronze statue of Alexander Selkirk, the 18th-century mariner who is said to be the inspiration behind Robinson Crusoe—for a public art commission in Bristol, England, Frank Benson said that he took great care to make sure that the concerns of the local community were taken into consideration....

Family-friendly exhibitions have dominated the Korean art scene this summer, but come September, several festivals appealing to more progressive tastes will take their place. Here are overviews of three biennials among them.The 9th Media City SeoulUnder the odd title Neriri Kiruru Harara, the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA)’s biennial...