The Exhibitions Not to Miss This August

Spanning the pioneering video art of Nam June Paik and an imagined queer wedding staged by Leilah Babirye, Ocula’s team of global editors has selected its must-see exhibitions for August. 

Louisa Babari, Africa (until 3 January 2027) at Musée d’Art Contemporain, Marseille 

Before Africa became the name of a continent, it appeared in antiquity as a female figure associated with North Africa—understood both as the Berber divinity Ifri/Ifru and as Rome’s personification of its province. In Africa, this layered history leads back to Louisa Babari’s own name, which she traces to an ancient Berber tribe from Algeria’s Aurès region. This inheritance sets the tone for the whole show: the darkened gallery resembles an archaeological site, where black-and-white photomontages—Babari calls them “visual excavations”—splice fragments of statues, horsemen, animals, ruins and landscapes into possible ancestors. Scattered among the photomontages, surviving objects and invented figures come together, picturing a North Africa shaped by encounters among Libyan, Numidian, Punic, Greek and Roman cultures. Numidian, Punic and Roman pieces from Marseille’s archaeological collection sit alongside Babari’s imagined ancestors. Nearby, a slideshow pauses on eroded stone faces, long enough that they start to resemble sitters posing for a portrait.—Shanyu Zhong 

Nam June Paik, The 20th anniversary of his passing (until 23 November) at WATARI-UM (Watari Museum of Contemporary Art), Tokyo  

This survey of Nam June Paik’s work and legacy as a pioneer of video art is remarkable: it manages to restore works that might otherwise have vanished. These are saved and brought to life here, along with the technologies that once sustained them—from a three-tube projector and restored CRT monitors to the re-creation of Random Access (1963) using magnetic tape. Elsewhere, the second floor transforms the gallery into a living forest, complete with real trees, scent, and works including Forest of Cage / Revelation of the Forest (1993), originally made for Watarium’s own space back when the Tokyo museum was still finding its feet. This exhibition takes its Japanese title, Jugemu, from a folk comedy about a child whose parents preserve every blessing offered to him, creating a long, tongue-twisting name that begins with “Jugemu”(“limitless life”) and unfolds into an almost endless chain of wishes. The title echoes Paik’s own influential afterlife but, in a region still shaped by its many historical divides, perhaps his greatest legacy lies in the kind of figure he embodied: a genuinely East Asian cosmopolitan presence that has become difficult to find since his passing.—Zian Chen 

This is (Not) Conceptual Art (until 11 October) at MMCA, Seoul 

To trace Korean conceptual art from the late 1960s to today is also to follow South Korea’s transformation from military dictatorship, through struggles for democracy, into a country deeply integrated with global capitalism. Many artists and collectives observed and participated in these changes, developing practices that tested the social and artistic orders: artistic group Space & Time (1969–1980) turned everyday gestures into tightly structured “events”; Kim Yong-ik’s polka dot canvases disrupted the modernist language they initially appeared to inhabit; and Inhwan Oh has used participatory projects to examine how identity and difference are negotiated in public. The exhibition follows these evolving approaches, bringing together around 140 works and archival materials. The title recalls Rene Magritte’s This Is Not a Pipe, which unsettles direct correspondence between image, language and reality. However, the exhibition also turns this scepticism towards the category of conceptual art itself, challenging the straightforward transplantation of Western terminology into Korean art history. The shifting vocabulary—from gaenyeom misul (conceptual art) and gaenyeomjeok misul (conceptually oriented art) to gaenyeomjuui (conceptualism)—reflects the complexity of practices that resist being contained within a single imported term.—Shanyu Zhong 

Leilah Babirye, Embaga ya Naki ne Naki (Wedding of Naki and Naki) (27 August 2026–18 January 2027) at ICA Boston 

Abasiyazi, a Luganda slur to describe gay people, means the fibrous remains (husks) of sugar cane. In 2018, Uganda-born Leilah Babirye sought asylum in the US when, as a queer activist, she could no longer live in a country where homosexuality is criminalised and severely punished. In New York City, where she is now based, Babirye reclaims the value of abasiyazi, picking up discarded wire, bicycle chains and rubber inner tubes and turning them into embellishments for her sculptures. Her hand-built ceramics and carved, charred wood pieces draw on sculptural traditions from western and central Africa, with closed eyes, elongated necks and totem-like torsos. “My work represents real people,” the artist says. “They have real names. I also believe they breathe. I believe they have scars.” For her first East Coast museum solo, Babirye stages an imagined queer wedding, with a bride, groom, ring bearer and flower girl joined by towering aunties, uncles and ancestors—a chosen family gathered in celebration and defiance. —Shanyu Zhong 

Tessa Boffin, Where We Touch the Archive (until 5 September 2026) at Devonshire Collective, Eastbourne 

‘This is a woman. She dressed as a man because…’. In British artist and lesbian activist Tessa Boffin’s poster The King’s Trial (1993), a derisory selection of multiple-choice options is laid out in response to a question that centres around the demonising of trans masculinity and cross-dressing. It came out at a moment when the lesbian community was frequently persecuted in the tabloid press. ‘She wanted to seduce other girls’, Boffin proposes in the poster, before giving an alternative: ‘She is a gender bending drag king’. Boffin created the work in response to a real-life 1991 legal case where a woman was tried for indecent assault against two female partners due to her alleged deception through dressing as a man; she was given a six-year prison sentence. A major new exhibition at Devonshire Collective in Eastbourne, Tessa Boffin: Where We Touch the Archive, brings renewed attention to the legacy of an artist who consistently challenged dominant narratives around gender, sexuality and visibility. Following this presentation, the show will travel to Nottingham, Brighton and Portsmouth throughout 2026–27. Two artists from a younger generation also present work in response to Boffin’s work. Malaysian-British photographer Leah McLaine explores queerness through the lens of religious rituals, while Sophie Mak-Schram combines a research-led practice with pedagogy to explore how group dynamics can shift traditional notions of power. The exhibition casts light on Boffin’s archive not as a static relic but a shifting, evolving reflection at time when trans and queer identities continue to face persecution.—Louise Benson

The Clouds Are Two Thousand Metres Up (until 11 October) at Museum of National Taipei University of Education  

Known for locally produced blockbuster exhibitions, this Taipei institution has become one of the city’s most beloved cultural destinations among younger audiences. Its latest, Taiwanese filmmaker Singing Chen’s VR work, looks set to continue this trend. Adapted from Wu Ming-Yi’s acclaimed cli-fi novella, the immersive exhibition reimagines the written work through VR and installation, beginning with a deceptively simple question: Why does the human longing for nature endure in an age of mass extinction? The Taiwanese Formosan clouded leopard—long declared extinct yet still alive in cultural memory—appears as a vessel for grief, remembrance and reconciliation. VR becomes the perfect medium for this impossible encounter: its hour-long narrative unfolds as a space where landscape and consciousness blur, allowing us to journey into Taiwan’s high mountain forests and encounter a leopard that survives only in literary imagination. The exhibition also brings together artefacts from Wu, himself an accomplished artist whose nature paintings were presented at the 2018 Taipei Biennial, as well as contributions from contemporary naturalist scholars whose work continues to influence artistic practices in Taiwan.—Zian Chen 

France-Lise McGurn, The Charm Offensive (22 August–15 November) at Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA)  

To my mind, there are two living artists who produce large-scale wall murals of nymphlike, picaresque women with equal aplomb: Rita Ackermann and Scottish painter France-Lise McGurn. McGurn, like Ackermann, takes inspiration from the fetishisation of the female form (specifically lifting imagery from long-running British spanking magazine Janus) but, unlike the punk language of Ackermann, her works carry an oneiric quality reminiscent of the acid-haze of 1970s film stills. The Dundee Contemporary Arts show is McGurn’s largest exhibition to date, bringing together both paintings and ephemera from her studio. When seen en masse, McGurn’s spectral figures appear as a chorus, each turning their gaze towards the viewer from an almost unnatural angle. The effect is a captivating nexus of the female gaze and the affronting nature of beauty, referencing the cocked angle at which Venus holds her head in Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus (1485). A “charm offensive”, as the exhibition’s title promises, no less.—Lydia Eliza Trail 

Sheyla Baykal, Peter Hujar, Matthew Leifheit, and Paul Thek, The Disappearance of Landscape: Oakleyville, 1964–2022 (29 August 2026 until 20 March 2027) at The Watermill Center, Long Island, New York 

Located just an hour outside of New York City and primarily reachable by boat, Oakleyville’s remote and sparsely populated Fire Island acquired a lore of its own, from the 1960s, as a haven for queer downtown artists. Yet significant portions of the site are due to be submerged within the next 50 years due to rising sea levels, placing a crucial meeting place for a generation of artists at risk of disappearing. The Disappearance of Landscape: Oakleyville, 1964–2022 explores Fire Island not just as a backdrop to artists seeking refuge from the realities of a fast-changing, often hostile city but as an active force in their coming together to commune and create new work in nature. Paintings, photographs and sculptures by artists Paul Thek, Peter Hujar, Matthew Leifheit and Sheyla Baykal made while living in Oakleyville are brought together, bringing an ecological inflection to their respective creative practices. The exhibition continues a flurry of interest in Thek, following a recent solo exhibition at Pace that presented never-before-seen work and a concurrent solo presentation at Galerie Buchholz, both in New York. Andrew Durbin’s double biography of Hujar and Thek, The Wonderful World That Almost Was (2026), adds to the chorus questioning how and why Thek’s remarkable work slipped from view over the years.—Louise Benson

 Gili Tal, Light and Airy (27 August–14 November) at Kunsthalle Basel 

When Gili Tal opens a retrospective of her work at Kunsthalle Basel this August, the show’s centrepiece will be a refrigerator. It’s a motif that Tal has employed for years. A symbol of modern domestic convenience seems odd—even sinister—when plugged into the electrical circuit of a gallery. Tal’s practice has been labelled as “Modern Gothic” by Contemporary Art Writing Daily, alongside the work of artist contemporaries Merlin Carpenter, Georgie Nettell and Morag Keil. Modern Gothic artworks reflect the terrifying banality of modern life through recourse to Marcel Duchamp’s readymade doctrine with distinctly unromantic found objects. Tal’s work reminds me of a display store in London’s Farringdon that specialises in supplying different forms of public recycling bins. Like a polished, post-industrial surrealist take on the urban, Tal’s Basel retrospective is set to highlight, with characteristic humour, the rapid aesthetic flattening of contemporary urban life.—Lydia Eliza Trail 

 Sylvie Fleury and Esben Weile Kjær, Ultimate Charge (from 20 August) at Andersens Contemporary, Copenhagen  

Ultimate Charge sees the collaboration between Danish wunderkind artist Esben Weile Kjær and conceptual sculptor Sylvie Fleury. Having only graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen in 2022, Kjær is already a darling of the international art world (alongside fellow Danish artist, Maya Majou Lyse, who is currently representing her country at the Venice Biennale). Kjær and Fleury are paired, nominally, because of their shared interest in the mainstream media of their respective youths. For Fleury, this was the burgeoning language of absurdist advertisements coming out of MTV in the 1990s; for Weile, what his gallery, Albion Jeune, refers to with tactful vagueness as “the complete consumerist meltdown in the West”. Both artists were staples of the international art fair circuit this year—see Kjær’s humongous gilded rat sculpture, Lions (2026) presented at this year’s Basel Social Club and Fleury’s sculpted, disembodied mannequin legs at Art Basel. Ultimate Charge brings the two artists together for the first time with a presentation of new sculptures, reflecting a shared interest in consumerism, fetishism, fashion and the art world’s preoccupation with an aesthetic of excess.—Lydia Eliza Trail —[O]

Main image: France-Lise Mcgurn, Diary Sketch, (2026). Courtesy of France-Lise McGurn. Photo: Damian Griffiths.