The Top 10 Exhibitions to See Around the World This December
Save to My OculaOur editors select the shows not to miss this month, including Nancy Lupo’s latest Bench, the 6th Kochi-Muziris Biennale and Tala Madani’s re-examination of the mother-daughter relationship.
6th Kochi-Muziris Biennale (12 December 2025–31 March 2026)
Before Kochi, there was Muziris: a port now vanished, but once alive with salt air, distant languages and the slow choreography of ships threading the Arabian Sea. That ancient hub of exchange lingers as a kind of undertow to the modern, multicultural city. It is in this layered terrain that the Kochi-Muziris Biennale has taken root, South Asia’s longest-running event for contemporary art and a rare platform where artists respond to the country from within it. The sixth edition—titled For the Time Being and curated by artist Nikhil Chopra with HH Art Spaces, a Goa-based artist-led organisation—turns further toward process and relation. Participants include acclaimed Indian artist, poet, and scholar Gulam Mohammed Sheikh, Nigerian-born multidisciplinary artist Otobong Nkanga, and Liverpool-based queer feminist activist Janet Price. This edition imagines itself as a ‘living ecosystem’ held together by friendship economies and shared time. Kochi remains its protagonist, but this time the city breathes through many bodies at once. – Shanyu Zhong
Mary Kelly, We don’t want to set the world on fire (14 November 2025–24 January 2026) at Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London
2011 is the year when, according to writer Mike Davis, ‘Iskra [the revolutionary Russian newspaper founded by Lenin] becomes Facebook.’ It’s the year when models of protest and journalism developed in the 19th and 20th centuries were abandoned in favour of their digital progeny—Tahrir Square was organised largely on social media and subsequently documented by ‘citizen journalists’ on smartphones. In the large-scale wall piece Circa 2011 (2016), American Conceptual artist Mary Kelly highlights this sea change with an abstract image that obliquely recalls the events of the 1968 Arab Spring, reflecting the ‘aesthetic shift from the curated images that shape our recollection of 20th-century events… [to] vast networks of photographs taken with mobile phones...’ Like other works in the presentation, the image is composed using the artist’s signature compressed dryer lint, allowing Kelly to make incisive commentary on both geopolitical strife and the ingenuity of domestic labour. – Aimee Walleston
Tala Madani, Daughter B.W.A.S.M. (22 November 2025–17 January 2026) at Pilar Corrias, London
In 1953, American psychologist Harry Harlow conducted an experiment in which infant monkeys were separated from their mothers and offered a choice of two inanimate surrogates, the first made from wire and wood, the other from cloth and rubber. Even when the wire mother offered milk and food, the young monkeys overwhelmingly clung to the softer cloth alternative. I thought of this controversial study when looking at the latest paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Tala Madani, which are haunted by an impassive female android who gazes outwards at ‘Shit Mom’, Madani’s playful faecal figure who represents the subversion of maternal ideals. Built from bodily fluids and inherently, humanly messy, Shit Mom stands in contrast to the AI robot who has been, in the words of Madani, ‘born without a mother’—a riff on Francis Picabia’s 1916 painting Daughter Born Without a Mother, in which he reflects upon the sexualised metaphors of machinery. In an inversion of the infant monkey experiment, Madani shows Shit Mom reaching out across the void to nuzzle and cradle these mechanical daughters. It represents a darkly absurdist fracturing of the mother-daughter relationship, a reflection of an accelerating technological landscape in which AI assumes a surrogate role in the lives of many. But, Madani asks, at what cost? – Louise Benson
Christopher Joshua Benton, The Obligation of the Circle (21 November 2025–13 March 2026) at Baró Galeria, Abu Dhabi
If last year’s Abu Dhabi Biennale left you remembering an epic carpet sprawled across a market car park—embroidered with merchants’ stories of longing for Afghanistan and Pakistan—its artist, Abu Dhabi-based Christopher Joshua Benton, now makes his gallery debut with a series of interior tapestries. The works offer a quiet reflection on the genre, its community, and its war-born storytelling. The title gestures toward Benton’s meditation on socially engaged art as an attempt to build a circle. Wall-mounted carpets—depicting urban imagery or the medium’s own production—are paired with his printed reflections and quotes from peers, creating an intimate dialogue. The exhibition also presents Benton’s personal war carpet collection, tracing pivotal moments that tore Afghanistan and its weaving communities: the 1979 U.S.S.R. invasion, the 9/11 attacks that led to U.S. intervention, and the 2021 military withdrawal that enabled the Taliban’s return. Together, the works form a personal reckoning, weaving memory, history, and artistic reflection. – Zian Chen
Vajiko Chachkhiani, Agape (8 November 2025–10 January 2026) at White Space, Beijing
Tbilisi Zoo lost hundreds of animals to the June 2015 flood, a shock disaster for Georgia’s capital. Among the creatures that survived and escaped was a white tiger which mauled a man to death days later, and was eventually shot dead by police. This event influenced Vajiko Chachkhiani’s work Living Dog Among Dead Lions (Agape), the original version of which was shown at Venice in 2017. Resurfacing in Beijing eight years on is a new edition of the Tbilisi-born artist’s ‘rain house’—an abandoned wooden structure uprooted from the Georgian countryside and fitted with an irrigation system simulating relentless rain—continuing a lineage of conceptual micro-architectures (Simon Starling’s 2005 work Shedboatshed, for example). Here, surrounded by a new series of leather sculptures moulded from everyday objects, the house stands a beacon of evolution, resilience, and interior-exterior dualism. Chachkhiani has said, ‘It is the inner life of the piece to deform, change, and transform. And that is also my observation of how history works.’ – Misong Kim
Nancy Lupo, Hark (22 November 2025–24 January 2026) at Michael Benevento, Los Angeles
Every year, Berlin-based American artist Nancy Lupo makes a single bench, all of which are ‘scaled versions of existing benches or quasi architectures in civic or commercial space.’ Bench 2016 (2016), for example, is based on a bodybuilder archway at Muscle Beach, in Venice, California, while Bench 2015 (2015) is a recreation of a bench Lupo noticed in a small park near her home in Los Angeles. For Hark, Lupo has gathered what she calls ‘the most Hollywood of my benches’. While this might sound glitzy, her main inspiration for this exhibition is not Tinseltown itself, but something completely otherworldly: a visitation from an angel. ‘I was sitting on this concrete bench… And then there was this crazy, shimmery, blue light. And it was an Angel… The message (which was only an energy, no actual words) was a momentum forward and the idea of “nothing missing”.’ Nothing missing, and everything well-placed. – Aimee Walleston
Joyce Ho, Vera (22 November 2025–22 January 2026) at ShanghART, Beijing
In a neatly arranged white cube space, Vera—Joyce Ho’s ever-present heroine in her perpetual black and white uniform—wipes the glass, steams clothes, and bows in greeting. Yet the gestures never fulfil their purpose: the glass never clears, and the clothes are engulfed in unnaturally dense vapour—the consequence of the performer’s deliberately hyper-accelerated slow motion. The routine becomes dissonant, turning the ordinary into something estranged. Across the gallery, Vera’s presence extends into sculptural and performative objects: vertically hanging cleaning cloths arranged to resemble a skeletal frame, and a stack of jeans gradually tilted until it stands upright. Through performance-based video and installation, Taipei-based artist Ho questions how the space we live in is structured and perceived. She reveals the instability of looking, and considers how the disciplined body, though manipulated, also holds the capacity to reclaim its own agency. – Shanyu Zhong
Matthias Weischer, Off Target (27 November 2025–10 January 2026) at GRIMM, London
The cloistered scenes depicted in the delicate oil paintings of Leipzig-based artist Matthias Weischer (a member of the New Leipzig School) have the air of joyful decay—the kind an interior designer might refer to as ‘lived in’. Walls painted in faded topaz and amethyst conjure an interior world layered with the patina of age, and empty rooms feel as if they have just moments ago been vacated by their inhabitants, whose lives we get to know only through the clues left behind in their dwellings. In Feld (2025), a teapot rendered in shadowy outline sits on the yellow carpet, while the screen of a boxy red television is angled just out of sight. Textural scratches and boxy, graphic volumes conjure an ever-shifting sense of each room that is reflective of the ways in which memories can shape our impressions of a place, as well as how these can slowly fade away over time. Among these hazy imprints of home, it’s notable that the prints, paintings, and other framed images displayed on the walls within each composition—artworks within the artwork—are precisely in focus. Weischer’s direct nods to art history—from an Edo-period print to a Constructivist painting—suggest an interest in how such objects can act as time capsules. People come and go, the artist seems to suggest, but some things never change. – Louise Benson
Anti-Action: Artist Women’s Challenges and Responses in Postwar Japan (15 December 2025–8 February 2026) at The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo
The 1950s and 60s in Japan were a time of rapid and drastic change: political and economic reform, urban and industrial growth, and increasing foreign influence. Opening this month at the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, a new, encyclopaedic exhibition of 120 works from 14 artists sheds light on how women of the post-war avant-garde scene responded to shifts in artistic trends and their impact and reception locally. Described as an ‘effort to reinterpret Japanese modern and contemporary art history’ based on art historian Nakajima Izumi’s conceptualisation of ‘anti-action’, the show frames a trend among female artists responding antithetically to the ‘action’ era following their heyday with the introduction of the French abstract pictorial movement Art Informel, and subsequent popularisation of American abstract expressionism and action painting, purportedly leading to a ‘swingback’ in the gender order and ‘reassertion’ of traditional hierarchies, as argued by Nakajima. Among the highlights are Kusama’s chic Macaroni Coat (1963), Tabe Mitsuko’s ping-pong balls on paper (Work, 1962), and Tada Minami’s large-scale scrunched aluminium sculpture (Frequency 37303055MC, 1963). With Japan persistently ranking poorly in global indexes of gender equity today, visibility and recognition become necessary and significant. – Misong Kim
A Call of All Beings: See You Tomorrow, Same Time, Same Place (13 December 2025–12 April 2026) at Taichung Art Museum, Taichung
The inaugural group exhibition for Taiwan’s newest municipal museum unfolds inside a SANAA-designed fusion of art museum and city library: eight structures stitched together by a six-storey atrium that manages to feel breezily porous. With more than 80 artists and collectives on show, the exhibition leans confidently on new commissions from Taiwan-based artists such as Yin-Ju Chen, Wu Chi-Yu and Au Sow-Yee, who continue their investigations into nature, ancestry and coloniality without so much as breaking a sweat. The international line-up—Ana Mendieta, Chris Marker, Maria Thereza Alves, Joseph Beuys, Joan Jonas, plus a rather unexpected drawing by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry—feels eclectic, if not always cohesive, yet together they test how far this museum-library hybrid can stretch. For my part, I’m most eager for the Truku Indigenous-led Tai Body Theatre, whose performance recasts the building as the dwelling place of Truku giants—an idea that feels perfectly at home in the atrium’s cavernous space, where the park’s greenery unfurls through its transparent façade. – Zian Chen —[O]
Main image: Mary Kelly, Tucson, 1972 (2017) (detail). Compressed lint. 168.9 x 225.7 x 5.1 cm. Courtesy the artist and Pippy Houldsworth Gallery.
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