The Top 10 Exhibitions to See Around the World This March

Our editors select the shows not to miss this month, from the Biennale of Sydney to a landmark Seoul group exhibition that celebrates queer visibility.

Natasha Tontey, Macho Mystic Meltdown; Chapter 2: Monster; She Wrote (7 February – 19 April 2026) at MoCA Taipei

As part of the Han Nefkens Foundation’s one-work solo exhibition programme across Asian institutions—its previous iteration by Eunhee Lee unapologetically piercing the darker underside of Taiwan’s semiconductor industry—Indonesian artist Natasha Tontey conjures a wild Minahasan cosmos in Monster; She Wrote (2025), spiking it with Spaghetti-Western sci-fi vibes, perfectly fit for her suppressed Minahasan story. In this black-and-white short film, a hyperbolic warrior-actress— drawn from Permesta militia tales she learned through oral histories, where women barely had a voice —strides across the frame, enacting exaggerated codes of macho performance: boots striking the ground, knees slicing the air in goose-step precision, missiles and rifles whirled with theatrical bravado. Militarised masculinity is pushed to the point of delirium, of rupture, until spectacle tips into satire. She shapeshifts without warning—mystic, monster, soldier, diva—each persona bleeding into the next in lush, unapologetic excess. — Zian Chen

Spectrosynthesis Seoul (20 March – 28 June 2026) at Art Sonje Center, Seoul

When Spectrosynthesis first opened in Taipei in 2017, it was the first exhibition of its kind in an Asian government-run museum dedicated to LGBTQ+ art. In 2019, Taiwan legalised same-sex marriage. After travelling to Bangkok and Hong Kong, Spectrosynthesis, co-organised by the Hong Kong-based Sunpride Foundation, arrives in Seoul—in a country where homosexuality remains criminalised in the South Korean military and conservatively regarded in society, even as queer visibility in art grows. Alongside internationally recognised figures such as Annie Leibovitz, Gilbert & George and Martin Wong, the exhibition foregrounds local voices across generations: Inhwan Oh was among the first to explore gay identity in Korea during the 1990s; siren eun young jung’s ongoing ‘Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project’ (2008 – present) examines female queer communities in traditional theatre; and emerging painter Grim Park reimagines the intimacy in Korean folklore and iconology through a mischievous tiger. No single exhibition can fully redress the queer community’s marginalisation or rewrite history, but it can create a necessary platform—one that makes visibility harder to reverse. — Shanyu Zhong

Biennale of Sydney (14 March – 14 June 2026) at various locations in Sydney

Under artistic director Hoor Al Qasimi, the Biennale of Sydney becomes a testing ground for her sustained engagement with Indigenous decolonial practice—this time smack in a Five Eyes state. Last year, her ‘in conversation’ event at the Art Gallery of New South Wales was cancelled, but she presses on, with several artists she has long championed through the Sharjah Art Foundation showing a pleasing consistency in the lineup. One highlight is its cross-geography dialogue at a scale and precision rarely seen: DAAR—Decolonising Architecture Art Research—lays Arabic haṣīra mats on public spaces on unceded Aboriginal Land, enabling facilitated conversations of grief, refusal, joy and co-struggle. The mass incarceration of First Nations is linked to broader global patterns, as seen in Vernon Ah Kee’s collaboration with Iranian-born Hoda Afshar and writer Behrouz Boochani. Lebanese visual artist Mounira Al Solh works with Arab diaspora communities, while Chinese artist Hui Ye spotlights Orchid Island, a Tao Indigenous territory under Taiwanese dominion where the dumping of nuclear waste led to activism and protests—topics virtually ignored by liberal-funded cultural programmes. — Zian Chen

Reba Maybury, I Come in Peace (6 March – 31 May 2026) at Secession, Vienna

British artist Reba Maybury, or ‘Mistress Rebecca’ (the name she uses in her work as a dominatrix), has a practice grounded in delegating labour, asking submissives to create work for her through instruction and control. In her Used Man series, shown at Company Gallery in New York in 2024, piles of clothing left by former male clients lay discarded—on Maybury’s command—on the floor. The installations had a touching tenderness to them and it is this line between assertion and vulnerability that makes Maybury’s work captivating. Her practice reckons with questions of capital, prompting viewers to ask whether sex work transcends fetishism—and at times, sensationalism. I Come in Peace is Maybury’s first large-scale institutional show in Austria. On the outside of the iconic Viennese Secession building (once an architectural manifesto for Art Nouveau) in the Jugendstil typeface, the artist has placed the names of Viennese men who review sex workers. Considering the myriad ways Maybury has already presented her submissives to an audience through art, I Come in Peace will doubtless demonstrate new heights for her artistic control. — Lydia Eliza Trail

Folded Group, curated by Bill Nace and Kim Gordon (19 March – 17 May 2026) at Amant, Brooklyn, New York

While many well-known artists (including Jean-Michel Basquiat and Mike Kelley) were also members of experimental bands in their off hours, Amant’s soon-to-open Folded Group, curated by Kim Gordon and Bill Nace, features ‘artistic practices that have shared moments on stage and in the studio’. The show includes works by 19 musician-artists (including Gordon and Nace) and inaugurates Amant’s newest exhibition space at the rear of its Zoli restaurant, which opens in late April. The restaurant also features Pierre Huyghe’s Satellite (2024), a triptych aquarium housing fluorescent GloFish (the first commercially available genetically modified pets). Unlike Huyghe’s ode to artifice, however, Gordon and Nace—who collaborate as guitar duo Body/Head—are highlighting the handmade with this presentation. Works by the likes of Nate Young (founder of Detroit noise band Wolf Eyes) and Lauren Pakradooni (who makes music under the moniker Tether) embrace a DIY spirit recognisable in the US’s eternally cross-pollinating experimental music scene. The exhibition is complemented by an expansive solo survey of Gordon’s own work, Count Your Chickens. — Aimee Walleston

Barkley L Hendricks, All is Portraiture (6 February – 4 April 2026) at Marian Goodman, Paris

Over the past decade, the genre of Black figurative painting has been met with perhaps too great an air of solemnity. Writing in Frieze in 2024, John-Baptiste Oduor deftly analysed this point, noting that such works are often at risk of ‘interpretation preced[ing] engagement’. The American artist Barkley L Hendricks was heralded by The New York Times as a pioneer of Black figurative painting on the occasion of his posthumous 2023 solo show of portraits at the Frick (the first ever for a Black artist). The Frick focused on Hendricks’ most dazzling depictions of Black Americans, including his famous Lawdy Mama (1969) featuring the artist’s gorgeously afro’d cousin, Kathy Williams. Leaning in another direction entirely is Marian Goodman’s All is Portraiture, which presents Hendricks as a conceptual artist whose work doesn’t sit comfortably within a single genre. Revealing his research into colour and geometry and his devotion to basketball, paintings including I Want to Take You Higher (1970) interpret the colour and movement of basketballs being thrown and bounced. The exhibition opens a welcome space for expansion into the nuances of Hendricks’ sharp-witted, and endlessly engaging, oeuvre. — Aimee Walleston

Félicien Rops, Laboratory of Lust (6 March – 31 May 2026) at Kunsthaus Zurich

Félicien Rops, the sadist illustrator for the great writers of the fin de siècle, is presented in a large-scale retrospective at Kunsthaus Zurich. In contemporary scholar of religion Per Faxneld’s mammoth Satanic Feminism: Lucifer as Liberator of Woman in 19th-century culture (2017), Rops’ works are discussed as a tool for visualising female liberation. In his more forthright images, Rops depicts women writhing in pleasure at the occult altar of a Baphomet, or tempting St Anthony, who is crucified, naked, on a cross bearing the word ‘EROS’. Considering the largely online, Gen-Z-led adoption of witchcraft and satanic feminism as subcultures (often in opposition to the rise of far-right populism) it is not surprising that Rops’ work often appears in TikTok edits synced to Kate Bush songs. This latest exhibition, Laboratory of Lust, frames Rops as a radical, demonic-erotic illustrator. His work was intended (akin to his contemporary, Charles Baudelaire) to resist the bourgeois morality of late-19th-century Paris. Will the show frame Rops, who arises today both as a deeply fashionable artist, but also as a master of symbolism and the Parisian fin de siècle, as someone pertinent beyond just ‘provocation’? — Lydia Eliza Trail

Don McCullin, 90 (14 February – 12 April 2026) at Hauser & Wirth, Somerset

Over a seven-decade career documenting war, conflict, tragedy and beauty, British photojournalist Don McCullin has only ever taken one self-portrait. Or at least, he has only ever exhibited one. He has never shown much interest in developing a public profile, or in the acclaim his work has garnered. He has dedicated much of his life to documenting the horrors of conflict, yet vehemently rejects the image of the heroic war photographer. Given this dislike of the limelight, it is perhaps unsurprising that at 90 years old, McCullin is now embracing the quieter moments. From his home in Somerset on England’s west coast, he has traded death and destruction for countryside views and ancient statues. However, as this new exhibition makes clear, the photographer has always possessed an eye for the everyday: Kurdish children at play and American soldiers at rest appear alongside painterly depictions of locations close to his picturesque home. His attention to universal experiences, his meditative gaze and the intimacy of black-and-white film all take centre stage in this show. As, for the first time in the UK, does that one and only self-portrait. — Philippa Kelly

 Yu Ji, Origin of the Tiger (6 March – 11 April 2026) at PPOW, New York

When I think of chairs in art history, I think of those created by Van Gogh, Joseph Kosuth, Joseph Beuys—vessels burdened with myth, nostalgia and the philosophical definition of what a chair is. Chinese artist Yu Ji’s chairs stand at the opposite end of that lineage (of what has long been an unquestioned male-dominated canon). They become temporary sites of pause—places to rest briefly before departure. Play Know Attention (2026) comprises four identical chairs, each fitted with two textured, ghostly, hollow concrete forms cast from human knees, which perch precariously on collapsible wooden structures. The works reflect the Shanghai-born artist’s recent movements—from a self-organised residency in Phnom Penh, Cambodia to her relocation to New York—arriving alongside her first US solo exhibition. In contrast to these fragile constructions, new works from her ongoing Flesh in Stone series (2012 – present) assert a different kind of endurance. Cast in cement and plaster, the fragmented torsos and limbs resemble archaeological remnants—twisted, yet resisting the steel bars that attempt to pin them in space. — Shanyu Zhong

Annika Thiems, On Wings (or almost) (5 March - 5 April 2026) at Bartha Contemporary

That the first solo exhibition of textile artist and designer Annika Thiems happens to fall at the tail-end of London Fashion Week seems fitting for a practitioner who has frequently blurred the line between sculpture and sartorial imagination. Thiems, who grew up among her family’s upholstery shop in Germany, is attentive to the sensual properties of the many materials she makes use of in her work, from pinstriped suiting fabric to waxed cloth. For a dance performance by Elisabeteh Mulenga at Sadler’s Wells in London last year, Thiems designed a padded corset made from furnishing fabric, quietly inverting the design history of the object to bulge outwards from its wearer rather than drawing their torso in. There is a surrealist twist to many of her costume designs and installations for the likes of Cosmic House and Tate Britain, a conceptual undercurrent that is upheld in On wings (or almost) at London’s Bartha Contemporary. Conceived in response to Méret Oppenheim’s print portfolio Parapapillonneries (1976), in which the Swiss Surrealist artist sketched out unruly, impossible butterflies in playful scenes rendered in the scrawled lines of coloured pencil, Thiems equally turns expectations on their head in absurdist upholstered sculptures that delicately frustrate common associations and uses of form and fabric. — Louise Benson —[O]

Main image: Barley L Hendricks, Untitled (Southfield, Jamaica) (c. 2000) © Barkley L. Hendricks.