Previews: three times a year Artforum looks ahead to the coming season. The following survey previews fifty shows opening around the world between May and August.

Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe

WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART

June 26-September 21

Curated by Michael Hays and Dana Miller

The atomic age is fading on its grainy analog newsreels, so it's high time for the twenty-first century to place Buckminster Fuller in a romantically tinted retrospective. He's quite an appealing figure, the space-age Thoreau, puffing like a summer breeze through the cold war.

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Until his thirties, Fuller was a gabby, overbright college dropout, a sometime meatpacker and sheet-metal worker with a Yankee tinker's streak. Then bankruptcy and the death of a child provoked a mystical experience, a Whitmanesque self-reinvention in which "R. Buckminster Fuller" suddenly appeared in a Greenwich Village cafe as an autodidactic, self-appointed expert on everything.

The danger signs of classic crankhood glow all over Fuller--for instance, he creates a tetrahedral "Dymaxion" geometry no one else can grasp--yet his mental breakthrough taps an awesome core of creative energy. On meeting him, people from all walks of life swiftly conclude that they are in the presence of a powerful, visionary seer. They are right.

And this guru is benign and generous, not an exploitative cultist. Rare among bohemian intellectuals, Fuller lacks radical politics and longhair affectations. "Bucky" is a limpidly placid one-man world-saving machine. Devoid of institutional credentials, he's a miniature academy: an architect, engineer, designer, physicist, geometer, and poet, whose main occupation is explaining how to operate reality.

First, kindly artists befriend him. Then designers come to appreciate his out-of-the-box approach. Engineers discover his patents and wonder who thought up such alien innovations, and how. Architects are annoyed by his cocksure, philistine critiques yet pleased to have a new creative arsenal of geodesic strusses and tresses.

Students adore the man. On the conference circuit, he's mesmerizing. Finally, in the 1960s, when the conventional wisdom has been tossed up into midair and is falling like pick-up sticks, his books start selling in droves. Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth and Utopia or Oblivion (both 1969) are Fuller's masterpieces, books so far-out that they achieve escape velocity. R. Buckminster "Bucky" Fuller has become the ultimate space-age techno-utopian.

Unlike his peer Timothy Leary, a scientist who imagined that lysergic acid was transformative, Bucky is not a one-trick pony. He has moved from autodidact to polymath in one long, blistering surge of omnivorous intellectual exploration and has answers for everything. He is not so much a Renaissance man as an entire alien civilization. In the '60s, he has found a decade that suits his freakish gifts.

He's the American beau ideal of a '60s guru: nonviolent, nonideological, nonrevolutionary, drug-free, neatly dressed in a suit, with horn-rims, and close-cropped hair; he is optimistic yet thunderous, can-do yet contrarian, a firm believer in the scientific method, yet questioning received wisdom in ways that seem to offer broad, smooth paths into a radically transformed world.

The world in the twenty-first century is certainly not what Fuller imagined, yet his legacy lives--it stretches from his great-aunt, noted transcendentalist Margaret Fuller, straight through Fuller disciple Stewart Brand, Brand disciple Kevin Kelly (of Wired magazine fame), and about one million ranting Internet techno-enthusiasts muddling disciplinary boundaries with their weblogs and search engines.

If they knew themselves better, they would surely make a point of knowing him.--Bruce Sterling

"Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe" will feature approximately 220 models, videos, photographs, and works on paper and the only extant Dymaxion car (a fuel-efficient vehicle designed by Fuller). The catalogue includes, among other items, essays by the curators and by Harvard University architecture historian Antoine Picon.

Travels to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Summer 2009.

NEW YORK

E. L. Kirchner

MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

August 3-November 10

Curated by Deborah Wye

Following last year's presentations of "Dada" at MOMA (which featured, in part, Berlin rabble-rousers like George Grosz, John Heartfield, and Raoul Hausmann) and the Metropolitan Museum's survey of Neue Sachlichkeit Verism, "Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s," along comes the work of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner to complete something of a Berlin trilogy. Looking back from the Weimar years to the eve of World War I, this exhibition will present, for the first time together in New York, seven of the Berlin streetscapes Kirchner painted after moving to that city in 1911. MOMA's in-depth look at Kirchner's claustrophobic and sexually charged scenes (with nearly eighty supporting works on paper) will coincide with "Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: Selections from the Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies" at LACMA, opening this month and featuring a selection of books and prints from the full sweep of the artist's career.

--Graham Bader

After Nature

NEW MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART

July 17-September 21

Curated by Massimiliano Gioni

Dystopian sentiments run through "After Nature," a "visual novel" plotted around two other narratives: W. G. Sebald's 1988 prose poem that gives the show its title and Werner Herzog's And a Smoke Arose (2008), a reedit of one segment of his documentary Lessons of Darkness (1992), in which the Kuwaiti desert blazes in the 1991 oil fires like some strange planet. Bringing together roughly ninety works made since 1894 that similarly evoke entropy and ruin, the exhibition both anthologizes prophetic visions and produces its own. Here, marginal works come center: Eugene von Bruenchenhein's finger paintings of mushroom clouds hang alongside Dana Schutz's exploded compositions; Reverend Howard Finster's sermons accompany Tino Sehgal's enactments. After, in this case, means something more imitative than temporal; the works are meant to offer views onto the natural order to come.--Kyle Bentley

Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling

MUSEUM OF MODERN ART

July 20-October 20

Curated by Barry Bergdoll and Peter Christensen

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It makes every kind of sense in the world! Why can't people build homes to the sleek, innovative, high-precision standards of the world's leading industries? Homes like trains, cars, jets! Every architecture critic keenly senses the stinking dishonesty of the "skeuomorph"--limp suburban real-estate fakery aping "Tudor" and "Tuscan." Imagine the modernist joy of ditching those sentimental relics, defying the terrors of the local homeowner's association, and assembling cheap, steam-cleanable, authentic housing generated by the muscular vigor of the mass-production line! So they've all tried it. Frank Lloyd Wright. Thomas Edison. Bucky Fuller. Even the Muji firm. The world is littered, according to this exhibition's time line, with nearly two centuries' worth of failed prefab. But will the need for "sustainability" finally blast prefab out of the trailer park and into mass acceptance?--Bruce Sterling

Polaroids: Mapplethorpe

WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART

May 3-September 7

Curated by Sylvia Wolf

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In her essay for the publication accompanying the Whitney's upcoming presentation of Robert Mapplethorpe's Polaroid work, curator Sylvia Wolf illuminates the infamous artist's "lifelong passion for using the camera to penetrate appearances." If the metaphor seems too perfect, given Mapplethorpe's best-known, hypersexual subject matter and allusions, its valences nonetheless acquire unexpected subtlety in this exhibition, which focuses on an underexamined early body of work. Bringing together roughly one hundred Polaroids produced between 1970 and 1975 (many being shown for the first time), the selective survey evidences Mapplethorpe in the making. Here already are the artist's most persistent tropes: faces, flowers, and phalli. Yet these are marked with a tender eye, no less "penetrating" but nonetheless surprisingly fleeting, sometimes even shy.--Johanna Burton

Paul McCarthy

WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART

June 26-October 12

Curated by Chrissie Iles

Lest we forget Piccadilly Circus, Paul McCarthy's 2003 video performance as George W. Bush, a president who likes to get naked and paint with his face, the artist--who has also recently enjoyed both a traveling retrospective of his work, organized by the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and his own curatorial coup at the CCA Wattis in San Francisco--will now take over the Whitney's third floor, further confirming the decidedly new world order. Timed to coincide with the museum's Buckminster Fuller exhibition, the presentation highlights McCarthy's affective relationship to built space, in the form of two early films and three architectural installations: Bang-Bang Room, 1992, which riffs on McCarthy's childhood home in Utah; Mad House, created specially for this exhibition; and Spinning Room, a fun house of mirrors and ontological dissembling conceived of in 1971 but debuting here.--Rachel Kushner

Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940-1976

JEWISH MUSEUM

May 4-September 21

Curated by Norman L. Kleeblatt

Although Abstract Expressionism is hardly undertheorized, this exhibition nevertheless promises a fresh take on those fabled denizens of Tenth Street. Featuring fifty seminal works by thirty-one stalwarts, including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, and Lee Bontecou, the show contextualizes postwar cultural production between the Holocaust and the blithe likes of Levittown. By placing unprecedented emphasis on contemporaneous academic criticism and the mass media, this show--organized in collaboration with the Saint Louis Art Museum and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, and with a catalogue featuring contributions by curator Norman L. Kleeblatt, Mark Godfrey, Caroline A. Jones, and others--claims the persistent centrality of social history. Travels to the Saint Louis Art Museum, Oct. 19, 2008-Jan. 11, 2009; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, Feb. 13-May 31, 2009.

--Suzanne Hudson

Drawing on Film

DRAWING CENTER

May 29-July 24

Curated by Joao Ribas

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"Direct" filmmaking, in which the filmmaker, instead of using a camera, draws, paints, scratches, or in some other way directly manipulates the film stock to create an image, is a small but significant tradition in experimental filmmaking. Although a number of direct films are well known (Len Lye's seminal Colour Box [1935], for example), the corpus is rarely surveyed as a whole, which this exhibition usefully aims to do. Some twenty works made since 1935 by about a dozen artists, ranging from acknowledged masters of the form such as Lye and Norman McLaren to more recent practitioners Richard Reeves and Jenny Perlin, will be screened on a loop six times each day. Two film installations (by Jennifer Reeves and Jennifer West) will be installed for one week each. Travels to the Rose Art Museum, Waltham, MA, Sept. 24-Dec. 16.

--Malcolm Turvey

Heavy Light: Recent Photography and Video from Japan

INTERNATIONAL CENTER OF PHOTOGRAPHY

May 16-September 7

Curated by Noriko Fuku and Christopher Phillips

Despite the predominance of cosmopolitanism and mass-media images in 1990s Japanese art, certain artists captured the specificity of contemporary Japanese experience. This exhibition features some eighty photographs and videos by thirteen artists who came of age during the '90s and who work in a vernacular vein. Offering an alternative to the prevailing characterization of today's Japanese art as "neo-Pop," the presentation will show, for example, how the work of Daido Moriyama and Yasumasa Morimura has been transformed in younger artists' work, like Naoya Hatakeyama's and Risaku Suzuki's disorienting landscapes and Miwa Yanagi's and Tomoko Sawada's staged photographs playing with constructions of Japanese female identity. Travels to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, summer 2009; and other venues.--Midori Matsui

Ardeshir Mohassess

ASIA SOCIETY

May 23-August 3

Curated by Shirin Neshat and Nicky Nodjoumi

Since the 1960s, Iranian caricaturist Ardeshir Mohassess has lent his gaze to the absurdities of political life in his native Iran. Precious little has escaped his artful scrutiny; his pen has detailed the hypocrisy of the gluttonous Qajar dynasty of the nineteenth century, the abuses of the shah's secret police in the '60s and '70s, and the doublespeak of the architects of the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Mohassess's deceptively simple black-ink drawings provide an acidic chronicle--at once ironic, funny, and sad--of the social and cultural history of a country ill at ease. Having been prodded to leave Iran in the mid-'70s, he has since filtered his work through the lens of exile. Co-organized by New York-based Iranian artists Shirin Neshat and Nicky Nodjoumi, this presentation comprises sketchbooks from the mid-'50s and some seventy drawings, most from the '70s and '80s. A rare sort of artist finally gets his due.--Negar Azimi

Kehinde Wiley

STUDIO MUSEUM IN HARLEM

July 16-October 26

Curated by Christine Y. Kim

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All the world's a stage, and Kehinde Wiley merely a player. For his exhibition at the Studio Museum, where he was in residence from 2001 to 2002, the Brooklyn-based painter presents ten canvases from his series "The World Stage," 2006-, for which he casts himself as an anthropologist and moves to various cities in order to parse the local customs. China was first, and now West Africa (India, Brazil, and other locations to come). The works in this show place young black males against richly patterned backgrounds, the artist's signature conceit, although here the subjects are from Lagos, Nigeria, and Dakar, Senegal, and borrow poses from the cities' public sculptures. Rendered with Wiley's characteristic finesse, the men enjoy sumptuous features, wear beads and sportswear, and make eyes at their audience.--Kyle Bentley

Arctic Hysteria

P.S. 1 CONTEMPORARY ART CENTER

June 1-September 15

Curated by Alanna Heiss and Marketta Seppala

This exhibition, organized by P.S. 1 director Alanna Heiss and Finnish Fund for Art Exchange director Marketta Seppala, aims to chart the overlap between inner and outer landscapes in contemporary Finnish art through some thirty works made since 1972. Many of the show's sixteen artists work in time-based media, and film, video, and sound installations will feature prominently. Participating artists such as Salla Tykka and the Finnish Screaming Men's Choir are known on the international scene; a greater number, among them the Pink Twins, sculptor Markus Copper, and Tea Makipaa (who will exhibit a video shot using a camera affixed to a reindeer's antlers), will be relatively new to New York audiences. A program of musical performances, part of the museum's annual Warm Up series, will accompany the show.--Brian Sholis

Decoys, Complexes, and Triggers: Feminism and Land Art in the 1970s

SCULPTURECENTER

May 4-July 28

Curated by Catherine Morris

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Alongside the jetty is the tunnel--not spiraling spectacle but subterranean breach. Both forms were equally important for Land art, yet the latter seems especially to have resonated with women artists, structuring works such as Alice Aycock's Simple Network of Underground Wells and Tunnels, 1975, and Nancy Holt's Sun Tunnels, 1973-76. This exhibition surveys the projects of Aycock, Holt, and eight other artists, providing a much-needed excavation of works that gesture less toward the sublime than the surreal: Agnes Denes's Wheatfield--A Confrontation, 1982, and Mary Miss's screens and veils from the '70s invoke ecological and mathematical systems as well as narrative and allegorical ones. Catherine Morris assembles eleven sculptures (many not shown since the '70s), alongside models, drawings, and documentation of site-specific projects,

aiming to deepen rather than restrict this terrain.

--Michelle Kuo

RIDGEFIELD, CT

Elizabeth Peyton

ALDRICH CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM

June 22-November 16

Curated by Richard Klein

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For the past decade and a half, Elizabeth Peyton has painted an attractive set of artists and musicians--Tony Just, Nick Relph, Jarvis Cocker, and the like--as idealized icons complete with pale skin, rouged cheeks, and pursed crimson lips. Perhaps prompted by Peyton's habitual use of photographs as source material, this exhibition features fifty color prints taken by the artist since 1994--including an especially tender image of DJ Ben Brunnemer napping in a German train car--and marks the most comprehensive survey of her work in the medium to date. Titled "Portrait of an Artist," the show will shift our gaze from the embellished glamour of Peyton's oils to the more straightforward look of her snapshots, providing a candid peek at her famously moody muses.--Miriam Katz

BOSTON

Anish Kapoor

INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART

May 30-September 7

Curated by Nicholas Baume

Anish Kapoor's sculptures draw on broad references: nineteenth-century Indian architecture, Turner sunsets, Minimalism, viscera. It has been fifteen years since his last US museum survey, and the ICA's flexible, high-ceilinged galleries promise the right fit for his increasingly monumental work. The venue will be stripped of its interior walls, in order to accommodate thirteen of Kapoor's large works, dating from 1979 to 2007, most making their US debut. The exhibition will feature Kapoor's signature pieces in pigment, mirror, and wax, including two selections from his series "1000 Names," 1979-80 (an early, bloodred conical structure and a grouping of five forms), and Past, Present, Future, 2006, a large-scale red-wax installation. The catalogue, with essays by Nicholas Baume, Indian art specialist Partha Mitter, and Art Institute of Chicago sculpture chair Mary Jane Jacob, should offer appropriately diverse takes on Kapoor's canon to date.--Reena Jana

CAMBRIDGE, MA

Chantal Akerman

MIT LIST VISUAL ARTS CENTER

May 2-July 6

Curated by Terrie Sultan

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While her fiction films have become steadily more conventional since the 1980s, Chantal Akerman has continued to employ the minimalist style she developed in her outstanding work of the '60s and '70s in a series of formally rigorous documentaries, beginning with From the East (1993). The film is also the basis of a video installation, From the East: Bordering on Fiction, 1995, which demonstrates that Akerman's unique spatiotemporal sensibility translates well to the gallery. This exhibition, which debuted at Houston's Blaffer Gallery in January, presents a welcome opportunity to see this brilliant installation along with Akerman's three subsequent documentaries and Women of Antwerp in November, 2007. The catalogue contains an essay on each exhibited work. Travels to the Miami Art Museum, Oct. 10, 2008-Jan. 25, 2009; Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, May 8-Aug. 2, 2009.

--Malcolm Turvey

NORTH ADAMS, MA

Badlands: New Horizons in Landscape

MASS MOCA

May 25, 2008-April 12, 2009

Curated by Denise Markonish

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Taking its title--and some of its conceptual ambience--from both the bleak terrain of the high plains and Terrence Malick's magisterial film of doomed lovers on the run there, "Badlands" casts an anxious eye on a natural landscape where beauty and brutality walk hand in hand. The exhibition promises a range of approaches to our contemporary environs, from the aesthetic to the historical to the remediative, in work by sixteen artists and groups--including Boyle Family, Alexis Rockman, Melissa Brown, and Marine Hugonnier--as well as five commissions by the likes of the Center for Land Use Interpretation and Nina Katchadourian. The catalogue includes essays by exhibition curator Denise Markonish, critic and curator Gregory Volk, novelist Ginger Strand, and Rainforest Alliance director Tensie Whelan.--Jeffrey Kastner

ATLANTA

After 1968: Contemporary Artists and the Civil Rights Legacy

HIGH MUSEUM OF ART

June 7-October 5

Curated by Jeffrey Grove

That every artist whose work is featured in "After 1968" was born in or after the titular year--a crucial one in the struggle it proposes to examine--suggests a project tempered by critical distance; no knee-jerk polemics or hazy nostalgia here. Opening concurrently with the High's more straightforwardly historical survey "Road to Freedom: Photographs of the Civil Rights Movement, 1956-1968"--and in some cases plundering it for images and inspiration--the exhibition will reflect on an earlier generation's racial and cultural radicalism via more than one hundred new and recent works in various media by Deborah Grant, Leslie Hewitt, Adam Pendleton, Jefferson Pinder, Nadine Robinson, Hank Willis Thomas, and Otabenga Jones & Associates. Travels to the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC, Nov. 8, 2008-Mar. 9, 2009; and other venues.--Michael Wilson

INDIANAPOLIS

On Procession

INDIANAPOLIS MUSEUM OF ART

May 2-August 10

Curated by Rebecca Uchill

Everyone loves a parade, but not everyone thinks of parades as art. The Indianapolis Museum aims to change that with "On Procession," billed as "the first exhibition of contemporary art exploring parades and street pageantry" and featuring recent work by Francis Alys, Jeremy Deller, Paul McCarthy, Amy O'Neill, Allison Smith, art collective Friends with You, and six others. Several of the events documented in the show's twenty-some works, including Alys's and Deller's, were staged in art-world contexts. In contrast, O'Neill's Parade Float Fragments, 2008, replicates artifacts from civic festivities. The exhibition not only features parades gone by but also had a prologue in the form of its own ambulatory festival in April in downtown Indianapolis, overseen by Los Angeles-based artist Fritz Haeg.--Philip Auslander

CHICAGO

Jeff Koons

MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART

May 31-September 21

Curated by Francesco Bonami

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The clinically poetic work that introduced Jeff Koons to the art world in 1980 initially might have seemed the product of some isolated small-appliance cargo cultist. But the artist actually hailed from Pennsylvania and had his formative moment in the American Midwest in the mid-1970s, when, as a student of bold iconoclasts like Ed Paschke and Jim Nutt at the Art Institute of Chicago, he began to synthesize his highly idiosyncratic form of pop-cultural bricolage. In the decade and a half since his last museum survey, Koons has become an art-world brand in a way few others have (who else would have his or her studio listed as an event venue on Ticketmaster?), and this exhibition, featuring some fifty sculptures and paintings made since 1979 and accompanied by a catalogue with essays by guest curator Francesco Bonami and the museum's Lynne Warren, is a chance to see the products on which he built his market dominance.--Jeffrey Kastner

HOUSTON

NeoHooDoo: Art for a Forgotten Faith

MENIL COLLECTION

June 27-September 21

Curated by Franklin Sirmans

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Neo-HooDoo is a term coined by poet Ishmael Reed to refer to the continued vitality of American spiritual traditions descended from Haitian vodun. Co-organized with P.S. 1, this exhibition explores the use of ritual and spirituality in some fifty works made since 1971 by thirty-three artists, in sculpture, photography, assemblage, video, performance, and other media. The multigenerational list of North, Central, and South American artists features Janine Antoni, Jean-Michel Basquiat, James Lee Byars, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and David Hammons alongside some less-expected names, like John Cage. While some works take on the familiar ritualistic forms of totems or altars, others unveil the sacred hidden in the everyday, the artists having created them from such mundane materials as lightbulbs, golf bags, and a beer cooler. Travels to P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York, Fall 2008.--Philip Auslander

DENVER

Adam Helms

MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART

August 12, 2008-January 18, 2009

Curated by Cydney Payton

New York-based artist Adam Helms approaches the romantic subjects of revolution and the American West with an ethnographer's eye. His drawings, gouaches, and photographic appropriations have "documented" both nineteenth-century landscapes and soldiers on the fringe: American Civil War guerrillas, Chechen rebels, Al Qaeda, and Helms's own fictional New Frontier Army. In Untitled (48 Portraits), 2006, the artist's ink renderings of balaclavas and hoods are displayed as a Becheresque typological grid, while his sculptures serve as "artifacts" of a militarized dystopia. For his first major solo museum exhibition--an installation of new works on paper and a large-scale assemblage--Helms's radical archetypes will underscore the proposition that history repeats itself. His political source material has not been lost on Cydney Payton, who mounts this show when the Democratic National Convention comes to town.

--Nicole Lanctot

SANTA FE, NM

SITE Santa Fe Biennial

June 22-October 26

Curated by Lance M. Fung

If insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result, Fung hopes to make the seventh SITE Santa Fe Biennial sane. Principals from eighteen international organizations have been named to a curatorial team, including William Wells of Townhouse Gallery in Cairo, Tsukasa Mori and Yuu Takehisa from the Art Tower Mito in Japan, Guillermo Santamarina of El Museo Experimental El Eco in Mexico City, Joseph Sanchez from Santa Fe's own Institute of American Indian Arts Museum, and participants from Beijing, Warsaw, Vienna, and Seoul. These partners each selected several emerging artists or artists' collaboratives, from which Fung chose one to send to New Mexico this past January for a monthlong residency. For the exhibition, the invitees--many of whom had never before traveled to the United States--will create ephemeral, site-inspired works.

--Frances Richard

SCOTTSDALE, AZ

Pae White

SCOTTSDALE MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART

May 17-September 7

Curated by Cassandra Coblentz and Marilu Knode

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Taking its subtitle from John Neufeld's 1969 novel about a teenager's descent into madness and the gap between sympathetic youths and misunderstanding adults, "Pae White: Lisa, Bright and Dark," the artist's first US survey, is organized around the duality of "bright" and "dark." This might sound like the curatorial equivalent of mood music for merchandising the Los Angeles artist's assorted projects (mobiles, tapestries, barbecues, birdcages), around forty-five of which, made since 1993, will be on view. But given White's generation-defining tendencies to imbue pop visuals with emotional and psychological implication, to blur high and low in art, craft, and design, and to play in between hand-making, outputting, and outsourcing, what could be more appropriate? Travels to the Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke, WV, Sept. 5-Nov. 2, 2009; and other venues.--Christopher Miles

SAN DIEGO

Eleanor Antin

SAN DIEGO MUSEUM OF ART

July 19-November 2

Curated by Betti-Sue Hertz

Over a roughly thirty-year period, beginning in the early 1970s, Eleanor Antin portrayed herself in various photo-based works as a king, a nurse, and a ballerina. Recently, she moved behind the camera, staging large-scale photographic tableaux based on Greek and Roman history and mythology. This exhibition comprises twenty-three works from Antin's series "The Last Days of Pompeii," 2001, "Roman Allegories," 2004, and "Helen's Odyssey," 2007, along with videos documenting their creation and photographs and works on paper charting the artist's earlier projects and personae. Making no attempt to hide their Southern California settings, the images of toga-draped models wallowing in luxury are clearly allegories of modern-day excess. But Antin has not lost her sense of humor, and this presentation will allow us to see such conspicuous consumption in the very landscape that served as the works' impetus.--Rachel Churner

NEWPORT BEACH, CA

Peter Saul

ORANGE COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART

June 22-September 21

Curated by Dan Cameron

Peter Saul has been enjoying (or mired in) a protracted state of critical rediscovery for nearly twenty years--a process that may finally reach its conclusion with the artist's first American survey, organized by guest curator Dan Cameron. We've long heard how Saul's acrid allegories of rubbery humanoids stood apart from Pop's prevailing pieties and paved the way for artists from Mike Kelley to Dana Schutz, but this show of roughly fifty paintings and drawings made since the late 1950s will put his own oeuvre squarely in the spotlight. At a time when global politics seem as cruel and surreal as those depicted in Saul's paintings, he'll likely survive the glare. Travels to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Philadelphia, Oct. 18, 2008-Jan. 4, 2009; Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans, Feb. 14-May 24, 2009.

--Scott Rothkopf

LOS ANGELES

John Lautner

HAMMER MUSEUM

July 13-October 12

Curated by Frank Escher and Nicholas Olsberg

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Architect John Lautner's hillside houses and roadside restaurants stand as glamorous landmarks in the contradictory dreamscape of postwar Los Angeles. Contrived to deliver expansive views from difficult sites, they are eccentric, high-tech, nature-infatuated refuges from the freeway. This ambitious retrospective features more than one hundred works made between 1940 and 1994 (the year of Lautner's death), including drawings, short films, and a slide show. The most convincing heir of Frank Lloyd Wright's organicism, Lautner constantly struggled to distinguish his late-Romantic visions from the glittering, self-absorbed city that supported him. By presenting Lautner's lesser-known efforts as well as his LA icons, like Googie's Coffee Shop and the Chemosphere, this show offers a chance to assess the depth of his stylish idiosyncrasies. Travels to the Lighthouse, Glasgow, Mar. 19-July 12, 2009; and other venues.--Sean Keller

Marlene Dumas

MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART

June 22-September 22

Curated by Connie Butler

By the artist's own design, Marlene Dumas's paintings and drawings flirt with ambiguous meaning and slippery narrative. Such open-endedness has been reflected in the critical reception of her work, which has been understood alternately as confessional, expressive, process-based, and demonstrative of theories of feminism, race, and global dislocation. Midcareer surveys often pull even the most recalcitrant art into focus, and this exhibition of sixty paintings and twenty-five drawings of the South African-born, Amsterdam-based artist should either consolidate existing interpretations or open onto new ones. Organized thematically and by series, and in association with MOMA, the show offers a singular chance to see a collection of refreshingly multifarious work. Travels to the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Dec. 14, 2008-Feb. 16, 2009.

--Jordan Kantor

TORONTO

Not Quite How I Remember It

POWER PLANT

June 7-September 1

Curated by Helena Reckitt

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This thematic group exhibition--featuring recent work by thirteen international artists, including Diane Borsato, Gerard Byrne, Mary Kelly, and Michael Stevenson--examines the malleable nature of historical memory. These artists re-create, appropriate, and refashion a diverse set of archives and artifacts to interrogate the concept that, as William Faulkner noted, "the past is never dead. It's not even past." Reenactment has been a hot topic in recent years, but this show's dynamic mix of time- and object-based works (video, performance, photography, sculpture), as well as its catalogue with smart essays by curator Helena Reckitt and art historian Johanna Burton, indicate that it will not be just another rerun.--Julia Bryan-Wilson

LONDON

Cy Twombly

TATE MODERN

June 19-September 14

Curated by Nicholas Serota

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Cy Twombly, Sol LeWitt, Andy Warhol, Donald Judd, Yves Klein, and Arman all entered the world in 1928--an annus mirabilis for art history. Of these artists, only Twombly celebrated his eightieth birthday this year. With around a hundred works, the Tate's retrospective should make plain that the triangle of Twombly, Johns, and Rauschenberg has always been equilateral; recognition of such status was long withheld in America, until the exceptional exhibition organized by the late Kirk Varnedoe for New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1994. It took another ten years (and a second Frenchman, after Roland Barthes, whose exquisite essays on Twombly appeared in 1979) for a scholarly work on the artist to approach its subject adequately, in Richard Leeman's 2004 monograph. Travels to the Guggenheim Bilbao, Spain, Oct. 28, 2008-Feb. 1, 2009; Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, Rome, Mar. 4-May 17, 2009.

--Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

Psycho Buildings: Artists and Architecture

THE HAYWARD

May 28-August 25

Curated by Ralph Rugoff

Through its navigation of a wide range of physical, psychological, aesthetic, and sociopolitical territories, this show makes clear that exhibitions of art as architecture (or architecture as art?) have not exhausted their subject but expanded it. At times crossing disciplinary boundaries, at other times reinventing them, "Psycho Buildings" insists that architecture be understood as an elastic construct. The exhibition, which takes its title from a 1988 book of photographs by Martin Kippenberger, consists of major installations from Atelier Bow-Wow, Michael Beutler, Los Carpinteros, Gelitin, Mike Nelson, Ernesto Neto, Tobias Putrih, Tomas Saraceno, Do-Ho Suh, and Rachel Whiteread. Special effects of light, color, and even smell are deployed in some of the structures, further transforming viewers into participants.--Nana Last

The House of Viktor & Rolf

BARBICAN ART GALLERY

June 18-September 14

Curated by Jane Alison

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Shoppers at H & M stores and perfume counters are now acquainted with the mass-marketed version of Viktor & Rolf, but for years the idiosyncratic Dutch duo Viktor Horsting and Rolf Snoeren were known primarily as the apogee of high fashion's avant-garde. Having met in art school in the late 1980s, the look-alike designers presented their first womenswear collection in 1993. Since then, their performance-heavy antics have included piling ten dresses on one model and fogging up a runway so that their bell-adorned clothing could be better heard than seen. The Barbican Art Gallery will present some sixty assemblages, videos, and prized clothing items from the pair's collections past and present, in addition to a spectacular major installation. Curated by Jane Alison and designed by architect Siebe Tettero, the show promises to uphold the label's love affair with irreverence and wit.

--Christopher Bollen

FOLKESTONE, UK

Folkestone Triennial

VARIOUS VENUES

June 14-September 14

Curated by Andrea Schlieker

The seaside towns of southern England, in seemingly terminal decline since the 1960s, have been reinventing themselves lately as cultural nexuses of creativity and surf. Boasting a cultural quarter, a literary festival, and now a triennial--and a particularly promising one, to boot--the village of Folkestone is exemplary. Its first effort, "Tales of Time and Space," will present a roll call of twenty-three artists that balances internationalism (i.e., Christian Boltanski, Mark Dion, Pae White) with localism (established artists living in or hailing from the area, including Adam Chodzko, Tacita Dean, and Tracey Emin) in sculpture, film, video, photography, installation, and performance. Those who complain about certain expositions' cavalier relationships to their sites should be happy--this show promises to wholly infiltrate and reflect on the town, mounting new work everywhere from historic buildings to marine promenades--and assumedly the tourist board will be, too.--Martin Herbert

ST. IVES, UK

Adam Chodzko

TATE ST. IVES

May 24-September 21

Curated by Martin Clark

How might we actively engage in honoring the reality of others? Bringing both real and imagined subjects into fragile, ephemeral community, English artist Adam Chodzko's projects--which include hunting for God look-alikes, reuniting children "murdered" on film by Pasolini, and entrusting a London gallery's archive to the care of Kurdish asylum seekers--keep that question ever in mind, engendering a fluid, subtle poetics that soars above the current "relational art" mainstream. Correcting an inexplicable institutional blind spot with respect to the artist in the UK, this solo survey by Tate St. Ives's new artistic director, Martin Clark, will include roughly forty videos, sculptures, photographs, performances, and installations from the past seventeen years, plus a new work made with winter clothing loaned by St. Ives locals. The show's catalogue will include essays by Martin Clark, Martin Herbert, Lisa Le Feuvre, and Andrew Wilson.--Rachel Withers

PARIS

Traces of the Sacred

CENTRE POMPIDOU

May 7-August 11

Curated by Angela Lampe and Jean de Loisy

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This enormous, multidisciplinary exhibition explores the destiny of the sacred and the transcendental in an age of "religious crisis," as the curators would have it. Under headings such as "Cosmic Revelations," "Doors of Perception," "Nostalgia for Infinity," and "Sacred Dances," the Centre Pompidou's, well, far-reaching enterprise will feature works by some two hundred artists, from Kandinsky to Cage, from Goya to Chan (Paul, that is), most of them jibing with cultural critic Mark C. Taylor's notion of "theoesthetics." The catalogue, edited by Mark Alizart (and available only in French), may struggle under the somewhat burdening curatorial scope, but it also promises to become a veritable reference work on everything you ever wanted to know about art and spirituality, from Adamism to Zen. Travels to the Haus der Kunst, Munich, Sept. 19, 2008-Jan. 11, 2009.--Tom Holert

Bridget Riley

MUSEE D'ART MODERNE DE LA VILLE DE PARIS

June 12-September 14

Curated by Anne Montfort

It was not unusual for 1960s French critics to claim Bridget Riley as their own. At times maintaining that they (namely, Viktor Vasarely) spearheaded Op art, the French have extended an honorary laurel to the English artist--and are gearing up for a new opportunity to frame her practice. Featuring fifty-eight paintings and more than one hundred drawings that span Riley's prolific career, this retrospective will debut several recent pieces and two murals created specifically for the exhibition. Though curator Anne Montfort may emphasize Riley's Gallic connection (the press release reiterates the influence of Post-Impressionism), the breadth and currency of the objects to be presented--from the astringent black-and-white canvases of the early to mid-'60s to the undulating and chromatically complex abstractions of the past decade--will no doubt convince viewers of the artist's universal appeal.

--Sarah K. Rich

BARCELONA

Nancy Spero

MUSEU D'ART CONTEMPORANI DE BARCELONA

July 4-September 24

Curated by Manuel J. Borja-Villel

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For more than fifty years, Nancy Spero has been, in her own words, "sticking [her] tongue out at the world" as a "woman silenced, victimized ... hysterical." MACBA's retrospective will present these gestures of defiance in some two hundred collages, gouaches, lithographs, and paintings--from Spero's earliest works on paper as an Art Institute of Chicago student in the mid-1950s to her installation Maypole: Take No Prisoners, 2007. Eschewing strict chronology, Manuel J. Borja-Villel's thematic organization should illuminate Spero's decades-long conflation of painting and writing, with an emphasis on her graphic output as a continuous "life project." A catalogue featuring an interview with Spero and essays by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Helene Cixous, and Mignon Nixon accompanies the show. Travels to the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Oct. 14, 2008-Jan. 5, 2009.--Rachel Churner

ROME

Gregor Schneider

MUSEO D'ARTE CONTEMPORANEA ROMA

May 29-August 31

Curated by Danilo Eccher

Since the mid-1980s, German artist Gregor Schneider has both dismantled and faithfully re-created the rooms of his house in Rheydt, Germany, placing them in public contexts to throw into question the concept of personal space. For this solo show, he will amplify his eerie game by adding a disorienting perceptual device. Part of a project in progress, the installation Double, 2008-, will take over four main rooms of this beer factory-turned-museum, which sports two identical wings. Here Schneider will reconstruct his family's bathroom and his grandparents' bedroom on either end of the venue to achieve a mirroring--and, no doubt, uncanny--effect. The accompanying catalogue, featuring documentation of Schneider's output so far, will be the most comprehensive publication on his work to date.

--Cathryn Drake

SIENA, ITALY

Gordon Matta-Clark

SANTA MARIA DELLA SCALA

June 6-October 5

Curated by Lorenzo Fusi and Marco Pierini

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If exhibitions on Gordon Matta-Clark seem a bit thick on the ground these days, at least the inaugural outing at the Palazzo delle Papesse-Centro Arte Contemporanvea's new home promises a different approach. One of the most comprehensive Matta-Clark surveys ever to be staged in Europe--showcasing roughly seventy sculptures, photographs, drawings, video, and films from 1969 to 1978 as well as re-creations of some of the artist's best-known interventions--the exhibition at the Santa Maria della Scala, a renovated, thirteenth-century hospital, aims to rescue the artist from the tendency to "musealize" his practice, according to the curators, and to highlight the performative qualities of his cross-disciplinary oeuvre. A bilingual catalogue, featuring interviews and essays by Matta-Clark, will contribute to this sense of the Anarchitect's radical and dynamic intellect.--Pamela M. Lee

BOLZANO, ITALY

Peripheral Vision and Collective Body

MUSEION--MUSEUM OF MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ART

May 23-September 21

Curated by Corinne Diserens

The inaugural exhibition at the Museion's new building (designed by Berlin-based architects KSV Kruger Schuberth Vandreike) centers on the relationship between architecture and performance. With approximately four hundred artworks and documentation in various media, the show promises to intertwine architecture, art, the body, dance, and history, echoing the fluidity of the museum's own interior spaces. A focus on our "collective body" is deployed as a critical strategy to investigate how contemporary work has been informed by postwar American avant-gardes, as well as to examine the latter's own debt to early-twentieth-century German, Polish, and Russian experimentation. The show is accompanied by a catalogue of new and reprinted texts by the likes of Vito Acconci, Mike Davis, Buckminster Fuller, Dieter Roth, and many others.

--Nana Last

TURIN, ITALY

YOUPrison

FONDAZIONE SANDRETTO RE REBAUDENGO

June 12-September 8

Curated by Francesco Bonami

The recent revelation that more than one in every hundred American adults now lives behind bars underscores that prison-cell design is a vital, if under-investigated, architectural problem. This show--part of a series of exhibitions taking place this year in Turin, which has been designated the 2008 World Design Capital--brings together a diverse group of architects presenting full-size mock-ups of their proposals for the irreducible unit of modern incarceration. Participants include Diller Scofidio + Renfro (architects of the new Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston), here working with Hayley Eber; Atelier Bow-Wow from Tokyo; London-based Eyal+Ines Weizman; and eight other young firms from around the world.

--Kevin Pratt

ZURICH

Seth Price

KUNSTHALLE ZURICH

June 2-August 17

Curated by Beatrix Ruf

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Crumpled sheets of clear polyester film screenprinted with stills from mujahideen videos pulled off the Internet; precision-cut pieces of wood and metal delineating the negative space around images of people kissing or lighting cigarettes; vacuum-formed polystyrene that registers the shape but jettisons the mass of objects like bomber jackets and ropes: Even at their most insistently material, Seth Price's works gesture toward some state of antimatter, invoking voids, transparency, and the weightless flux of the digital. This exhibition will feature at least as much new work as old and will likely blur the distinction between the two, as befits a practice so invested in dispersal, circulation, and recursion.--Elizabeth Schambelan

BASEL

Fernand Leger

FONDATION BEYELER

June 1-September 7

Curated by Philippe Buttner

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Though active until his death, in 1955, Fernand Leger has long been almost exclusively associated with the tubular forms he deployed in response to Cubism and the machine iconography of the interwar era. Needless to say, his work is ripe for rethinking. Gathering approximately ninety paintings from 1912 to 1954, this show surveys the French artist's full career while placing an unprecedented emphasis on the transformative years he spent in the United States during World War II. In light of his new American milieu, Leger repurposed his style, his work becoming brighter and more figurative, arguably influencing a number of Pop artists--including Roy Lichtenstein, James Rosenquist, and Andy Warhol--whose work will also be on view. This accent on legacy befits an artist who once claimed that everything is "method" and that "the only interesting thing is how it is used."

--Suzanne Hudson

Andrea Zittel, Monika Sosnowska 1:1

SCHAULAGER

April 26-September 21

Curated by Theodora Vischer

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Andrea Zittel's multiplatform practice elaborates a high-design, postmillenarian vision of rugged individualism--which is to say, one that remains very much on the grid, engaging with, rather than retreating from, the encroachments of consumer culture. The grid with which the Warsaw-based Monika Sosnowska concerns herself, on the other hand, is the geometry of modern architecture: Her sculptures and installations skew verticals and horizontals and expose the latent irrationalities of even the most soberly institutional setting. In this exhibition, roughly one hundred of Zittel's quasi-utilitarian objects, plus gouaches, drawings, and paintings on wood, occupy the Schaulager's first floor, while on the lower level, Sosnowska presents nine sculptures--a juxtaposition that should illuminate how two artists, in different ways, revise the stories we tell ourselves through the environments we create.

--Elizabeth Schambelan

ST. GALLEN, SWITZERIAND

Ryan Gander

KUNSTHALLE ST. GALLEN

June 7-August 10

Curated by Giovanni Carmine

Who says Conceptual art is dead? On the heels of Ryan Gander's one-man show jointly held at London's Ikon Gallery and the South London Gallery earlier this year, a second major exhibition opens this June. Frequently examining doubt and boredom in studio life, Gander's quiet practice also mines history and memory, and his reworkings of found items--from crossword puzzles and city maps to children's books and PlayStation games--often contradict the spirit of the original: Milestone, 2006, for example, is a Roman-looking marker built from concrete that had fallen from Le Corbusier's midcentury modernist icon Unite d'Habitation. For the artist's first Swiss solo outing, the kunsthalle will present some fifteen sculptures, videos, and installations from the past two years. Perhaps now Gander's considerable reputation in Britain will spread among international audiences. Travels to the Kunstverein Bonn, Aug. 30-Nov. 2.--Gilda Williams

FRANKFURT

Total Enlightenment--Moscow Conceptual Art, 1960-1990

SCHIRN KUNSTHALLE

June 21-September 14

Curated by Boris Groys

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Following the Schirn's 2003 exhibition "Dream Factory Communism," in which philosopher, artist, and curator Boris Groys explored the manifold aspects and impacts of Soviet art under Stalin's regime, "Total Enlightenment" moves forward in time with a comprehensive survey of Conceptual art in late- and post-Soviet Russia. Featuring 130 paintings, installations, videos, drawings, and photographs by thirty artists, including Erik Bulatov, Ilya Kabakov, Komar & Melamid, Alexander Kosolapov, and Boris Mikhailov, this show aims to define Moscow Conceptualism as distinct from its Western counterparts and to examine how its artists, according to Groys, "privately, ironically, and profanely" appropriated and exploited the official discourse. Travels to Fundacion Juan March, Madrid, Oct. 10, 2008-Jan. 11, 2009.--Adina Popescu

The Great Transformation: Art and Tactical Magic

FRANKFURTER KUNSTVEREIN

June 7-September 7

Curated by Chus Martinez

As the already quaint self-image of our times as "enlightened" continues to be revealed as mere wishful thinking, the art world's increasing interest in the rites of supernatural belief comes as no surprise. "The Great Transformation"--a group show featuring the work of specialists in pop culture's complicities with the irrational, such as Allen Ruppersberg and Mike Kelley, along with contributions from the Center for Tactical Magic, Goshka Macuga, Olivia Plender, and others--attempts to take magic seriously without subscribing to its transcendental claims, using it instead as a means of investigating power relations and alternative concepts of subjectivity. Accompanied by a catalogue that further explores issues of magic, secular society, and belief, the exhibition promises a distinct experience of second-degree enchantment. Travels to the Museo de Arte Contemporanea de Vigo, Spain, Sept. 26, 2008-Jan. 18, 2009.--Brigitte Weingart

DUSSELDORF

Meuser

KUNSTHALLE DUSSELDORF

May 10-July 20

Curated by Ulrike Groos and Meuser

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Ever since his first major solo show, at Buro Kippenberger in Berlin in 1979, Meuser has been known for his sculptures, wall objects, and installations made by combining found elements such as steel girders, gratings, and metal plates. With predominantly monochrome finishes, these works reveal the aesthetic potential and emblematic nature of industrially produced forms abstracted from their functions. The tensions among material, form, object, and space, which are emphasized by Meuser's often humorously free-associative titles, provide for ways of seeing that conjoin visuality and memory. Installed in collaboration with the artist to take into account the Kunsthalle's Brutalist architecture, this exhibition of some fifty pieces from the late 1970s to the present promises a comprehensive overview of Meuser's oeuvre.

--Astrid Wege

Translated from German by Oliver E. Dryfuss.

HANNOVER, GERMANY

Leigh Bowery

KUNSTVEREIN HANNOVER

August 29-October 30

Curated by Martin Engler

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Artist is an inadequate term for Leigh Bowery (1961-1994). Australian-born and London-notorious, he epitomized trans-everything: He was a terrifyingly inspired performer, a "fashion-forward" designer/model, a renegade nightclub impresario, and a noted Lucian Freud model, among other things. That Bowery typically enacted these roles within a "queer" context was not accidental, but it has perhaps been overemphasized. Bowery's riotous exploitation of his own real and ostensible sexual shenanigans leaves homosexuality--maybe any sexuality--rather up in the air, whether as lifestyle, aesthetic strategy, political stance, or anything else. This exhibition includes photographs by Fergus Greer, Johnny Rozsa, and others; one (perhaps more) of Freud's paintings; two films starring Bowery; and several original costumes. The catalogue should be a minefield--pardon, a treasure trove--of archival material.--David Rimanelli

AMSTERDAM

Marc Camille Chaimowicz

DE APPEL

July 4-August 28

Curated by Alexis Vaillant

Marc Camille Chaimowicz's work comes in many guises, from paintings and sculptures to wallpaper designs, furniture, and much else besides, but this exhibition is anything but a one-person show. As its title, "... In the Cherished Company of Others ... (1648-2036)," suggests, Chaimowicz is exhibiting in company with artists whose work he admires, including Tom Burr, James Lee Byars, Michael Krebber, Gerrit Rietveld, Elsa Schiaparelli, and an anonymous seventeenth-century jeweler. His Cocteau Room (Jean Cocteau, 2003-2006), a complex homage involving a dozen other artists and designers, also forms part of the exhibition. Organized with the help of a curator described as a moderator of the dialogues that underlie the show, the endeavor promises a conversation of rich and unforeseeable potential. Travels to the PMMK, Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Ostend, Belgium, Sept. 26-Dec. 15.--Michael Archer

ROTTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS

Saadane Afif

WITTE DE WITH CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY ART

June 13-August 24

Curated by Zoe Gray and Nicolaus Schafhausen

The works of French-born, Berlin- and Paris-based Saadane Afif frequently include an audio or musical dimension. His best-known work, Power Chords, 2005, is based on a principle similar to synesthesia: The sound sculpture consists of a computer-programmed chorus of electric guitars, each playing a series of chords derived from the chromatic sequence of one of Andre Cadere's barres de bois rond. Melding the figures of viewer and listener in an ambiguous way, Afif always makes reference to some absent origin and thereby induces the sort of nostalgia--light and tenacious at once--that lends power to the best pop songs. Faithful to the idea of the "cover version," the artist will revisit and rework more than ten of his previous productions, occupying an entire floor of Witte de With.--Jean-Pierre Criqui

Translated from French by Jeanine Herman.

REYKJAVIK, ICELAND

Reykjavik Arts Festival

VARIOUS VENUES

May 15-June 5

Curated by Thorunn Sigurdardottir

Overseen by artistic director Thorunn Sigurdardottir, the Reykjavik Arts Festival's second installment--a constellation of more than thirty exhibitions and events scattered throughout Iceland's capital and across the island--features a survey of contemporary Icelandic art at the Reykjavik Art Museum-Kjarvalsstadir; exhibitions by Monica Bonvicini, Elin Hansdottir, Finnbogi Petursson, Steina Vasulka, and Franz West at the National Gallery of Iceland; a solo show by Swedish artist Karl Holmqvist at the Living Art Museum; and "Facing China," a group exhibition of Chinese artists at the Akureyri Art Museum in the island's northern region. For its opening weekend, artist Olafur Eliasson and the art world's ultimate hunter-gatherer, Hans Ulrich Obrist, will kick-start festivities with an extension of the "experiment marathon" the duo organized last year in London, featuring lively projects by a mix of artists, writers, and scientists.

--Brian Sholis

SAO PAULO

Marcel Duchamp

MUSEU DE ARTE MODERNA

July 15-September 21

Curated by Elena Filipovic

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If the readymade readily entered the museum, other Duchampian practices have been gelid to institutional embrace. Duchamp's exhibition designs, curatorial projects, typographic experiments, and precision-optics demonstrations are more often read about in books than encountered in galleries. The first major solo exhibition of Duchamp's work in Latin America, titled "A Work That Is Not a Work 'of Art,'" focuses on such endeavors and their unruly attitude toward desire and containment--with more than 140 works from 1913 until the artist's death in 1968, including a replica of the "Large Glass," 1915-23; studies for the peepholed Etant donnes, 1946-66; and several editions of the Boite-en-valise Duchamp worked on over three decades. Along with a catalogue, an international symposium and a concert series will bolster the show's multimedia aspirations. Travels to Fundacion Proa, Buenos Aires, Nov. 13, 2008-Jan. 31, 2009.--Michelle Kuo

RIO DE JANEIRO

Lygia Clark

CENTRO CULTURAL BANCO DO BRASIL

August 5-September 21

Curated by Felipe Scovino

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One of Brazil's most renowned artists, Lygia Clark (1920-1988) is recognized internationally as a pioneer of participatory aesthetics. During her Neo-concrete period, she engaged with what critic Ferreira Gullar in a 1959 essay called the "non-object," and this ontological questioning of art subsequently led to her famous "Sensorial Objects" series, 1966-68, made of everyday materials to be manipulated by the viewer. Conceived in opposition to museological conventions of vision and display, such works inevitably pose a challenge to curators. This survey of four decades of Clark's output features more than thirty replicas for visitors to interact with, alongside some 150 original pieces. The accompanying catalogue promises to be a must-have, as it includes an abundance of never before published letters and journal entries from the artist's zealously guarded archive.--Monica Amor

SYDNEY

Biennale of Sydney

VARIOUS VENUES

June 18-September 7

Curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev

Titled "Revolutions--Forms that Turn," the sixteenth Biennale of Sydney promises a return to the heady politics of the previous edition--but in a more playful way. Indeed, returns, remixes, and replays constitute the playlist of artistic director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. Canonical works by Joseph Beuys, Piero Manzoni, and Jean Tinguely will stand guard beside specially commissioned projects from Pierre Huyghe, William Kentridge, Paul Pfeiffer, and others, each meditating on the "impulse to revolt in both life and art." Featuring some 400 works by more than 180 artists--including Janet Cardiff Tracey Moffatt, and Mike Parr--and accompanied by a catalogue of correspondence between Christov-Bakargiev and her curatorial comrades from across the planet, this year's biennial offers a new online venue for additional artists' projects. The show will seek to rupture whatever binary distinctions still exist among the local and the global, the historic and the contemporary.--Anthony Gardner