Herzog & de Meuron to transform Albania’s Palace of Congresses
 
Herzog & de Meuron wins the international competition to transform Tirana’s Palace of Congresses, proposing a careful revitalization of the Albanian capital’s landmark cultural venue alongside a new mixed-use tower and public landscape.
 
The winning scheme adopts a restrained approach that preserves the identity of the Palace of Congresses while strengthening its relationship with the city. Originally conceived as an innovative building of its era, the complex remains a significant architectural and historical witness to Albania’s recent past. Herzog & de Meuron’s proposal focuses on enhancing its public role through strategic...

natura futura designs from the river outward
 
Along the Babahoyo River in Ecuador, houses once floated with the rhythm of trade, fishing, boat repair, and family life, forming a waterborne architecture shaped by weather and work. From this context, Natura Futura has built a practice that begins with what is already present: heat, timber, local craft, informal occupation, and the social ties that hold a place together.
 
Founded in the riverside city of Babahoyo, the studio works across housing, cultural, productive, and community projects, often in collaboration with Juan Carlos Bamba and local teams. Its architecture grows from direct conditions rather than abstract concepts.
 
As the studio tells...

Taekhan Yun sees humanity and imperfection as a design method
 
Designer Taekhan Yun focuses on how ideas form through drawing, collaboration, and making, as ways of staying with what is fragile and unresolved. His work process allows form to emerge slowly through relation rather than control. Across projects such as Chair for Kids and Birdhouse by Kids, as well as personal works like What My Father Left and We No Longer Read Each Other, this approach becomes a kind of listening practice; one that treats emotion, memory, and imperfection not as secondary material, but as the starting point for making.
 
In this sense, his work resonates with a quieter way of design thinking, where vulnerability is not an...

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There Is A Truth: questo il titolo dell’ottava esposizione di Tracey Emin presso la Galleria Lorcan O’Neill di Roma (30 aprile -18 luglio 2026). Entrare nel piccolo spazio espositivo di Vicolo dei Catinari dà effettivamente l’impressione di essere accolti a contemplare una verità nascosta, il cui significato aleggia tra le tredici opere presenti, per la precisione dodici dipinti e opere su carta e una scultura monumentale in bronzo, realizzati dall’artista britannica durante gli ultimi due anni negli studi di Londra e Margate. La verità rivelata da Emin ha a che fare con il potere curativo dell’arte nelle nostre vite. Come lei stessa ha affermato, There Is A Truth è «una metafora perfetta della...

TRETTITRE’s Retro audio devices with magnetic installations
 
Hi-Fi brand TRETTITRE brings back the retro audio devices with a series of wall-mounted wireless vinyl, CD, and cassette players for triple listening sessions. A rack holds all of them together in a single vertical installation, designed to unify them all like an artwork on the wall instead of making them separate devices. The modular system comes with four parts, starting with the TTT-W, which is a magnetic modular wall rack. It is flushed against the wall, and four circular magnetic pads are placed separately yet connected, resulting in a vertical design piece.
 
The three players that mount to the rack are the TTT-LP3 turntable, the TTT-DP3...

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Approximately 44% of fine and studio arts Master’s degree programs in the United States could lose the ability to matriculate students who rely on federal loans to pay for their tuition, according to new guidelines proposed by the Trump administration. The Department of Education’s (ED) proposal, first published in April, would prohibit Master’s programs in the arts from enrolling students who use federal loans if the program’s recent alumni earned less than the median salary of a Bachelor’s degree holder between the ages of 25 and 34. Currently, the Department evaluates Master’s program eligibility based on the earnings of its alumni compared with those of high school diploma holders aged...

From the nearly abstracted patterns featuring dozens of Black faces in the meticulous work of Sharon Kerry-Harlan to portraits inspired by real events like Donna Chambers’ celebration of President Barack Obama’s inauguration, Masters of the Stitch: Threaded Stories at Claire Oliver Gallery spotlights remarkable narratives in fabric. The exhibition draws from the collection of Carolyn Mazloomi, founder of the Women of Color Quilters Network, whose strategy over the better part of the last four decades has been to highlight the craft as an artistic expression beyond what the gallery describes as “folk curiosity.” Works simultaneously function “as fine art, historical archive, and cultural testimony,...

Francesco Faccin gives voice to the invisible support
 
At Francesco Faccin’s Piedistalli, the pedestal steps out from the background and claims its own presence. Presented at Galleria Giustini / Stagetti in Rome, the exhibition, the result of a long-term investigation, traces nearly two decades of research into the cultural, symbolic, and spatial role of the object tasked with supporting art. Rather than functioning as a neutral base, the pedestal emerges here as an active device that shapes perception, directs attention, and mediates the relationship between artwork and viewer.
 
For the Italian designer, the pedestal is never passive. Through height, materiality, proportion, and placement, it shapes the...

As President Trump threatens to turn the 250th anniversary of the United States’s founding into a MAGA rally, a brand-new arts festival in Philadelphia offers alternative plans. What Now: 2026, the inaugural edition of ArtPhilly’s planned biennial, features more than 30 original artistic commissions taking place across the city where the Declaration of Independence was signed. Hyperallergic joined the artists and organizers for the festival’s opening week, finding little nationalism and a lot of radical reclamation. Read on for three highlights of the program, which kicked off on May 27 and runs through July 2. A Procession to the River That RemembersArtist indira allegra and poet Evangeline Getty...

Sculptor Alan Saret, whose nebulous, three-dimensional wire works seemed to pulse with life, died on May 26 in Brooklyn. He was eighty-one. His death was announced by the gallery Karma, which represented him. Using brass, copper, and steel wire, Saret created so-called anti-forms, whose cloudlike organic shapes responded to Minimalism with a nature-attuned spirit that […]

The debut of French artist JR’s monumental public art project “La Caverne du Pont Neuf” has been postponed due to damage sustained by the artwork during bouts of high wind in Paris this week. The temporary installation, which drapes an inflatable printed canvas resembling a craggy, snow-covered rock face over the entirety of Pont Neuf […]

SAN FRANCISCO — “I’ve been in the studio maybe two days in the last month,” Saif Azzuz told me when I arrived at his airy, industrial studio space in San Francisco’s Hunter’s Point neighborhood.His absence can be blamed on recent success. Lately, the Bay Area-based artist has been exhibiting around the world, from his first solo museum show at the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston last year to his first solo gallery show in West Asia earlier this year. He’s showing no signs of slowing down.Installation view of Saif Azzuz: Aiy-ye-kwee’ at Anthony Meier Fine ArtsAzzuz’s second solo exhibition at Anthony Meier Fine Arts in Mill Valley, California, on view through June 26, boasts a...

On June 2, Colorado governor Jared Polis signed Senate Bill 133, a bill that creates a new type of limited liability company (LLC) called an Artist Company, or A-Corp, report the Art Newspaper and the Colorado Sun. The new business structure is designed to help artists in the state—defined in the bill as “individuals that create works of authorship or artistic expression comprising written, oral, visual, graphic, literary, musical, audiovisual, digital, or performing art in any medium”—set up their own business while ensuring they retain creative control of their work. The idea for an A-Corp was first proposed by Yancey Strickler, the co-founder of Kickstarter, at a TED talk last year. According to...

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Over 100 participants have threatened legal action against the Venice Biennale Foundation, alleging that Biennale leadership has not honored their official withdrawal from the new “Visitor Lion” awards last month. Determined by visitor votes, the new awards were hastily instituted after the Biennale's original award jury resigned en masse days before the event opened, and amid intensifying controversy over Israel and Russia's presence in the exhibition. The jury's resignation prompted dozens of exhibiting artists to withdraw from awards consideration in solidarity. In a statement published on e-flux today, June 3, a group of 67 In Minor Keys artists and 39 national pavilion participants...

A small painting of hell by a follower of Hieronymus Bosch led a string of surprise results during this week’s Old Masters sales in New York, selling for $537,600 at Sotheby’s against an estimate of $30,000 to $50,000. (All prices include buyer’s premium unless otherwise noted.) The result came as Christie’s Old Masters and 19th Century Paintings sale brought in nearly $7 million with a sell-though rate of 89 percent, while the similarly titled sale at Sotheby’s sale totaled $6.4 million with a slightly higher sell-through rate of 92 percent. Together, the auctions offered another reminder that collectors will fight for the right picture, especially when it comes with strong scholarship, a fresh...

In Memoriam is published every Wednesday afternoon and honors those we recently lost in the art world.Alan Saret (1944–2026)Postminimalist sculptor, draftsman, and installation artistHis flexible wire sculptures and pencil drawings helped define the "anti-form" strain of the postminimalist movement. He stressed art's organic and illusionistic qualities, making his works through a process he described as "ensoulment.""A wonderful artist whose work brought joy," Laura Hoptman, director of the Drawing Center, wrote in a tribute on Instagram. "His memory will live on in his sculptures and his drawings."Saret received a survey at what is now MoMA PS1 in 1990 — during which he carved an aperture into a...

Brass jaw harp MACKINAW CITY, MICHIGAN—USA Today reports that a brass jaw harp has been found in the central cellar at Colonial Michilimackinac, the site of an eighteenth-century fort and fur trading village in Mackinac State Historic Park. The instrument is the thirteenth to be found in the fort’s central cellar and the adjacent area. Jaw harps were brought to North America by European colonists as a common trade good. The central cellar is thought to have been used to store such items for trade. For more on the archaeology of colonial America, go to "Letter from Lake George: Exploring the Great Warpath."
The post Brass Instrument Unearthed at Michigan’s Colonial Michilimackinac appeared first on...

In Slow Burn, Shawn Huckins puts the cognitive dissonance that defines our current era in stark relief. The New Hampshire-based painter has long challenged American mythology and collective aggrandizing by reinterpreting canonical artworks and visual languages. His series have commented on the U.S.’s proclivity for erasing history and the ways our garments convey social status and class. In this new body of work, he directs us to the contradictory experience of witnessing destruction as both a spectacle and a distant occurrence. Slow Burn presents a suite of landscapes, each veiled by curtains. Floral drapery flanks a catastrophic explosion, a sliver of sunlight peeks through a decorative toile de jouy...

Excavated portion of street, Side, Turkey ANTALYA, TURKEY—Excavations on the southern coast of Anatolia have uncovered a street leading to the eastern gate of the ancient port city of Side, according to a Türkiye Today report. A theater, temples dedicated to Athena and Apollo, baths, a monumental fountain, and a colonnaded street have been unearthed since archaeological investigations began at the site in 1947. “Side is an important maritime city, but at the same time it is an agricultural city because of the alluvial soils brought by the Melas River,” said Feristah Alanyali of Anadolu University. The newly discovered street leads to one of the city’s two main gates. Nearby streets were also revealed,...

The opening of a public artwork by French artist JR inspired by Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s 1985 intervention The Pont Neuf Wrapped has reportedly been delayed after a storm damaged the installation overtop the River Seine in Paris. As reported by Euronews, the opening planned for this weekend has been postponed to an unspecified date after severe winds mangled part of the artwork on the oldest bridge in the French capital. A statement from Atelier JR, the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation, and the Amicale des Ponts de Paris said, “The decision has been taken to postpone the opening of the work to a date after 6 June, which will be set in light of the findings of the condition report.” A full...

BARCELONA, SPAIN—Live Science reports that scientists from the Institute of Culture of Barcelona have examined 25 skeletons discovered in eight graves at Barcelona’s Royal Monastery of Santa Maria Pedralbes, which was founded in the fourteenth century by Queen Elisenda of Montcada. She moved into a small palace next to the monastery after the death of her husband, James II. When Elisenda died in 1364, her remains were dressed in a monastic habit and placed in a narrow wooden coffin with a gold-embroidered silk textile and aromatic herbs. Analysis of the bones suggests she was about 70 years old at the time of death. The study also investigated the tombs said to have belonged to the monastery’s first two...

More than 100 artists are threatening legal action against the Venice Biennale Foundation for ignoring their demands that the foundation withdraw their names from consideration for the “Visitors’ Lion” awards at the current edition over the inclusion of national pavilions by Israel and Russia. The threat is included in a new announcement published on e-flux. A May 20 letter addressed to the foundation and its president, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, is published in the announcement. It is signed by some 67 artists whose work appears in curator Koyo Kouoh’s exhibition “In Minor Keys,” including prominent figures like Laurie Anderson, Alfredo Jaar, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, and Walid Raad. Also among...

The Museum of Modern Art, New York, has announced Makeda Best will serve as its new Joel and Anne Ehrenkranz Chief Curator of Photography beginning in September. Best arrives to the museum from the Oakland Museum of California, where she is deputy director of curatorial affairs. She succeeds Clément Chéroux, who left in 2022 to […]

A spate of new organisations are challenging traditional gallery models to support artists in different ways

When New Jersey-based artist and educator Ruth Borgenicht attended university, she studied mathematics. But as she shares in a statement: “Love of math was not enough to invent new ideas in this field—unfortunately for me, that also required genius.” As the saying goes, when a door closes, a window opens, and for Borgenicht, that opportunity came in the form of ceramics. Through precise forms and meticulous stoneware arrangements, the artist creates wall-hung and tabletop sculptures that are in some cases even kinetic, alternating between basket-like vessels and sturdy, elegantly nestled abstract forms. They often hang tapestry-like from a series of nails or unfurl into three-dimensional biomorphic...

More than one hundred artists participating in the 2026 Venice Biennale have said they will pursue legal action unless their names are removed from the ballot for the event’s Visitors’ Lions awards. Like the conventional Golden Lion awards, the prizes are awarded to the best artist in the main exhibition and best national pavilion. Unlike […]

In the Summer of 1973, photographer Stephen Shore traveled West for a six-week road trip across the US. The record of Shore’s journey was preserved in a “diary” of ephemera: diner receipts, photos, postcards, and notes cataloging what the artist had eaten or documented that day (a practice Shore picked up from his days observing Andy Warhol’s meticulous accounting of expenses in The Factory). Reflecting on the diary in […]

The Headlines BRINGING OUT THE BEST. The Museum of Modern Art in New York finally has a new chief curator of photography: Makeda Best, who has served as deputy director at the Oakland Museum of California since 2023, reports the New York Times. The plum position “has influenced, implicitly or explicitly, so much of how we understand the medium,” said Best, who starts in September. It has also been vacant for almost four years. “I’m someone who’s very much committed to big stories from the collection,” added Best, offering by way of example the legacy of historic MoMA photo curator Edward Steichen, who spearheaded deep acquisitions from the Farm Security Administration during the Great...

Parterre Box previews Kathryn Lewek's upcoming Salome with clips of her as another unhinged lady of antiquity.

Cindy Bernhard
PLATO is honored to present Broken Vessels, a solo exhibition by Chicago-based artist Cindy Bernhard, featuring a new body of paintings that explores spiritual rupture, transcendence and the relationship between the human body and the divine. The public opening is scheduled for Thursday, June 4, from 6 to 8 PM in the gallery’s ground floor space. The show will be on view through July 11. At the center of the exhibition is the metaphor of the vessel: the body as a container for spirit and belief. Drawing from archetypal associations between gold and divinity, Christian mysticism and contemporary existential anxiety, Bernhard’s monumental six-foot paintings depict fractured golden forms that...

Maria Kataeva makes a promising US debut in an otherwise uneven revival of Il Barbiere di Siviglia in San Francisco.

The opening of the French street artist's newest public work and tribute to Christo and Jeanne-Claude has now been delayed

In 2022, Michelle Sank encountered a stranger on a Cape Town Promenade and spontaneously asked to take their photograph. It became the first in a powerful body of work, capturing the city’s drag queens. Drag Daughters follows six young men who grew up in townships, often facing rejection or having to hide their identities, who now strive to make a difference in their communities. Now on display at Het Zuid-Afrikahuis in Amsterdam, the series includes empowering portraits that move beyond the conventional depictions of drag in pageants or nightclubs, instead placing them in unassuming or domestic settings. In a country still navigating the legacies of Apartheid, alongside ongoing social challenges, the...

From one Mister Snow to another, I salute him.

From Tai Shani to Ekow Eshun, seven leading art world figures reflect on Koyo Kouoh’s In Minor Keys, the main exhibition, as well as the national pavilions and other collateral and institutional exhibitions

Photography, at the threshold of its bicentenary, becomes here less a medium than a condition of perception itself. Remember Me at the Bourse de Commerce gathers image, archive, and gesture into a single unfolding field where memory is not stored but constantly reassembled. The exhibition operates through proximity rather than sequence, allowing works to collide, echo and refract one another in shifting constellations. Across centuries of practice, photography is treated not as a linear history but as a series of recurring questions about presence and disappearance. The result is an environment where looking becomes an act of reconstruction, and where the photograph is never fully settled into its own time....

The landmark institution uses experimental methodologies and cross-discipline collaborations to bring people closer to the UAE’s past—and to encourage the historians of the future

American artist Trevor Paglen (b. 1974) has investigated the politics of images for years – examining the machinations of AI, data sets and surveillance through series like Bloom, which appears on the cover of his new book, How to See Like a Machine: Images After AI, published by Verso Books. Bloom (2020) is a series of large-scale images of flowers that have been reinterpreted by computer vision algorithms from original photographs taken during the spring lockdown. He’s also been doing a similar thing with landscapes of the American West, as well in Clouds, where skyscapes are overlaid with lines indicating what algorithms – such as those in guided missiles, drones and self-driving cars – “see”...

Il manifesto programmatico della 61esima Biennale d’Arte di Venezia, stilato dalla curatrice svizzero camerunense Koyo Kouoh, scomparsa lo scorso maggio, è una vera e propria dichiarazione poetica che emoziona, incuriosisce, riempie di speranze e aspettative. Parla di pratiche artistiche che aprono portali, rinnovano e nutrono in un “invito all’incanto”, a dare importanza al riposo fisico ma soprattutto spirituale; il presupposto è che “la poetica libera” e che gli artisti, individuati come “interpreti essenziali della condizione sociale e psichica, catalizzatori di nuove relazioni e possibilità” possano insieme generare bellezza.
Otobong Nkanga, “And Still, Here We Are”, 2026,...

Marisa Aragón Ware grew up wandering through the Rocky Mountain forests of Colorado, where she reveled in nature’s diversity. There, she learned about woodland wildflowers, fungi, birds, and more with the help of her dad, who is a scientist. Over time, her fascination with organic forms made its way into an evolving art practice. Based in Boulder, Ware continues to spend time in the woods, taking inspiration from flora and fauna alike. Through a meticulous process of cutting and scoring paper, she creates delicate curves to imitate the volume of leaves or bones and defines feathers, insect wings, and petals with precise veins and edges. Paper became Ware’s medium of choice because she finds beauty and awe...

The issues raised by the dealer James Danziger’s AI-generated photo are profoundly and irrevocably human

Given the heat generated during firing, it’s rare to see paper incorporated into a ceramics practice. For Seoul-based artist Jongjin Park, though, the two go hand-in-hand. Park recently won the 2026 Loewe Craft Prize, a prestigious annual award celebrating innovative makers, for his striking sculpture “Strata of Illusion.” A rectangular shape with an open top and slouching side, the piece features countless folded layers made from paper towels dipped in watered-down ceramic slip. Inspired by the distinctive, rippled textures and minuscule lines within stacks of paper, Park “wanted to break through the traditional boundaries and stereotypes inherent in ceramics as a medium,” he tells Colossal. “To...

Faience amulets, Heliopolis, Egypt CAIRO, EGYPT—According to an Ahram Online report, an excavation of the mudbrick tomb of “Panehsy” in the necropolis of Heliopolis has uncovered human skeletal remains. Underneath the grave, Hisham El-Leithy of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities said that the researchers found a collection of cosmetic tools, a copper mirror, and two alabaster kohl containers holding traces of cosmetics. A third kohl container in the cache had been made of obsidian. Two light-blue faience vessels were also recovered. One of them held six inscribed scarabs, two of which appear to have been encased in gold. A duck-shaped amulet, and an amulet shaped like an Atef crown were found among...

Bacon Hole rock art photographed in 1913 (left) and 2024 (right) MUMBLES, WALES—According to a report in The Guardian, red horizontal bands on the walls of a cave in south Wales have now been identified as rock art dated to more than 17,000 years ago. The bands, which are equidistant from each other, were discovered near the Bristol Channel in Bacon Hole in 1912, and were considered to be examples of Paleolithic rock art, but a review in 1928 deemed the markings to be a natural phenomenon caused by a red oxide mineral seeping through the rock. George Nash of Coimbra University and the University of Liverpool and his colleagues used uranium-thorium dating to date the pigment. They also analyzed the chemical...

By Tm Gratkowski With intent and the will to do it her own way, there is a gallery in the most unlikely of places, off the 210 freeway on Lincoln Avenue in Pasadena. Imagine walking into the parking lot of an old lumber yard, stumbling down a paved area past old materials, equipment, and a small cluster of shed-like buildings. Nothing new, no signs, just your average ubiquitous Southern California lot. As you wander in you notice a little welcoming front porch and tucked away in the corner is...

Sculpture in the UK finds one of its most concentrated and historically continuous centres in Leeds and the wider Yorkshire region, where institutional frameworks, collections and landscapes collectively sustain the medium as both practice and discourse. Rather than functioning as isolated venues, spaces such as Leeds Art Gallery, the Henry Moore Institute and Yorkshire Sculpture Park form an interconnected ecology in which sculpture is studied, exhibited and rethought across generations. This is not simply a matter of heritage, but of ongoing curatorial and artistic experimentation that positions material form as a living question rather than a fixed category. The Summer of Sculpture programme at Leeds Art...

È da un semplice processo di recupero, archiviazione e metamorfosi che nasce “Come una diga”, ultima personale di Giovanni Longo, inaugurata presso l’Accademia d’Ungheria e aperta al pubblico fino 4 giugno 2026. Nel centro storico della Capitale, le strutture scheletriche di Longo, provenienti da cicli scultorei differenti ma strettamente interconnessi, sono le protagoniste di un’esposizione ragionata, che racconta l’andamento di una ricerca decennale, paradigmatico del percorso dell’artista calabrese. Un viaggio che pone al centro delle opere accolte negli spazi di Palazzo Falconieri il recupero di materiali lignei e la loro riformulazione.
Giovanni Longo, “Come una diga”, installation view...

L’intreccio non si lascia ridurre a tecnica nella ricerca di Yuhe Luo, ma si rivela come struttura del pensiero che precede il gesto e ne orienta la costruzione. Formata al Royal College of Art in Textile Design (Londra), l’artista sviluppa una pratica in cui il gesto del tessere supera la dimensione materiale per trasformarsi in una logica più profonda, capace di mettere in relazione ritmo, tempo e percezione. La tessitura, in questo senso, non appartiene a un singolo materiale ma è una modalità di organizzazione del tempo, una forma di articolazione del reale che si manifesta attraverso ripetizioni, variazioni minime, accumuli e discontinuità.
Yuhe Luo, “The Fluid City”, 2025, 3D printing, yarn,...

Grace Dodds
 
 
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I decided I’d take ‘never made it to the Met’ as an excuse to submit a post about why French soprano Denise Duval (1921-2015) is special to me.

Madison Schindele surveys the endlessly diverse offerings of Berlin's 2026-27 opera season.

Time and place define this issue. Inside, artists, architects and photographers examine how we inhabit and interpret the world around us. At the core of their work is a fascination with the now: how it is shaped by history, yet continuously reimagined through creativity. Aesthetica’s June/July edition invites you to engage with a slower, more attentive way of seeing, Here’s a preview of what you’ll discover: Delicate Vignettes | Nuno Serrão’s minimalist images offer small parts of wider narratives, united by cinematic aesthetics and a sensitivity to the wider world. Analogue Landscape | Svetlana Talanova makes works by hand in the darkroom, using photosensitive paper to show how patterns recur across...

Ci sono artisti che producono immagini e poi ci sono artisti che producono sintomi. TuRist appartiene chiaramente alla seconda categoria. Guardando En Marche to the Future – quel Lenin avvolto nella bandiera arcobaleno che marcia mano nella mano con una figura simile a Greta Thunberg trasformata in influencer post-apocalittica del lusso globale – la prima reazione è ridere. La seconda è il disagio. La terza, se si rimane abbastanza a lungo davanti all’opera, è la consapevolezza che quella risata nasconde qualcosa di molto più instabile: il sospetto che il mondo rappresentato dalla scultura non sia una fantasia satirica, ma un ritratto anticipato del presente stesso. Ed è qui che il lavoro smette di...

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