16–17 MAY. EUROPEAN WRITERS’ FESTIVAL / LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM
The European novel as a compass for the present
In the New York Review of Books of 19 July 1984, Milan Kundera, in his essay “The Novel and Europe,” wrote that the European novel was born with modernity — with Don Quixote — as a form of knowledge of human existence, capable of exploring the ambiguities and complexities that science and philosophy had neglected. He warned that the novel was under threat from ideologies, totalitarianism, and mass culture, all of which tend to simplify reality and stifle its “wisdom of uncertainty.” Here is a spoiler from the concluding paragraph of this precise and luminous essay: “If the idea of progress arouses my suspicion, to what values do I feel bound? God? Country? The people? The individual? My answer is as sincere as it is ridiculous: I feel bound to nothing but the European novel, that unacknowledged heritage that has come down to us from Cervantes.” At the British Library, the European Writers’ Festival is an opportunity to take the pulse of the contemporary European novel, which since Kundera’s day has cross-pollinated with other forms of narrative fiction and blended with other literary genres. Authors from Spain to Ukraine, from the Faroe Islands to Turkey, will come together to discuss love, war, humour, myth, memoir, and the capacity of literature and translation to serve as compasses for navigating the present and Europe itself.
21–24 MAY. TBILISI ART FAIR / TBILISI, GEORGIA
A Showcase for the Art of Wider Europe
At the opening of the Tbilisi Art Fair in May 2024, a polyphonic choir performed a traditional Georgian song that gradually transformed into Ode to Joy, the EU’s anthem. It was a message in keeping with the stance of Salomé Zourabichvili, then president, who had voiced her opposition to the foreign agents law just passed by parliament — legislation that stifles any externally funded association and is driving a brutal crackdown on press freedom and protesters. Two years on, the accession process to the Union has stalled, but Georgians continue to take to the streets with determination, and Tbilisi is filling with galleries and suffused with a pervasive sense of urgency for life.
Against this backdrop, the new edition of the Tbilisi Art Fair returns — the contemporary art fair that aims to serve as an international platform for the countries of wider Europe (and hopefully future EU members) such as Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Ukraine, as well as the countries of Central Asia. A fair that exists above all to launch emerging artists onto the global stage. The Hive section — a name inspired by the affordable early-twentieth-century Parisian studios that were home to artists such as Chagall, Léger, Modigliani and Delaunay — will showcase forty emerging international artists not represented by a gallery, selected through an open call. A list of the emerging artists and the prices of works for sale is available.
21–24 MAY. TBILISI ART FAIR / TBILISI, GEORGIA — A Showcase for the Art of Wider Europe*
At the opening of the Tbilisi Art Fair in May 2024, a polyphonic choir performed a traditional Georgian song that gradually transformed into Ode to Joy, the EU’s anthem. It was a message in keeping with the stance of Salomé Zourabichvili, then president, who had voiced her opposition to the foreign agents law just passed by parliament — legislation that stifles any externally funded association and is driving a brutal crackdown on press freedom and protesters. Two years on, the accession process to the Union has stalled, but Georgians continue to take to the streets with determination, and Tbilisi is filling with galleries and suffused with a pervasive sense of urgency for life.
Against this backdrop, the new edition of the Tbilisi Art Fair returns — the contemporary art fair that aims to serve as an international platform for the countries of wider Europe (and hopefully future EU members) such as Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and Ukraine, as well as the countries of Central Asia. A fair that exists above all to launch emerging artists onto the global stage. The Hive section — a name inspired by the affordable early-twentieth-century Parisian studios that were home to artists such as Chagall, Léger, Modigliani and Delaunay — will showcase forty emerging international artists not represented by a gallery, selected through an open call. A list of the emerging artists and the prices of works for sale is available.
15 APRIL–20 JULY. MICHELANGELO RODIN: LIVING BODIES / PARIS, FRANCE
Humanity in the sculptures of Michelangelo and Rodin
At a time when the body is increasingly conceived as a high-performance machine — and the machine, and therefore AI, as a possible extension or replacement of the human — art reminds us that the human condition is irreproducible and irreplaceable. On the vitality of the body, the Louvre brings Michelangelo and Auguste Rodin into dialogue: two masters of Western sculpture separated by three centuries but united by a shared sensibility, a vibrant, plastic tension. In the work of both, the body becomes almost a membrane holding together something energetic, pulsating, possessed of inexhaustible life: the soul. Curated by Chloé Ariot and Marc Bormand, the exhibition’s central thread — which unfolds across five sections in which marble, bronze, and terracotta are accompanied by a rich body of painted work — is to trace and investigate the intention common to both artists: giving outward form to inner energy. As Rodin said: “In art, a thing is beautiful when it possesses character. Character — this is the intense truth of any natural spectacle, beautiful or ugly as it may be. For it is the inner essence expressed through outward appearance. It is the soul, the feeling, the idea that shines outward through the pose or action of a human body.”
29 MAY–12 OCTOBER. JASPER JOHNS: NIGHT DRIVER / BILBAO, SPAIN
The familiar can open into a strange world
The United States seems increasingly unpredictable and difficult to understand and recognise, so much so that a phrase by Jasper Johns takes on a different, almost prophetic resonance: “Everything that is familiar can open up and become a strange world.” Even before Warhol, the American artist had worked with the iconicity and simplicity of images lodged in the collective imagination, such as the American flag, which became Flag — and which, at his very first solo show at Leo Castelli’s gallery in New York, had already attracted offers from MoMA. (Castelli had discovered him by chance: he had gone to visit Rauschenberg in his Manhattan studio and accidentally walked into Johns’s, on the floor below.) Now that Johns is 96 and the last surviving member of that generation, the Guggenheim Bilbao is inaugurating a retrospective devoted to him on an American — that is to say, enormous — scale: “Jasper Johns: Night Driver”, bringing together around a hundred works from public and private collections to retrace one of the most singular artistic careers of the twentieth century. Starting from the most celebrated paintings of the 1950s — the series of flags, numbers, and maps — the exhibition, curated by Enrique Juncosa, follows a chronological path spanning seventy years of work by an artist who helped propel abstract expressionism into pop art and conceptual art.
7–10 MAY. THESSALONIKI INTERNATIONAL BOOK FAIR / THESSALONIKI, GREECE
Books at the fair, between Europe, the Balkans, and the Middle East
The Thessaloniki Book Fair shares with other Greek cultural hubs — the Athens Music Week is also taking place these same days — the ability to foster exchange between Europe, the Balkans, the Mediterranean, and the Middle East. In addition to hosting authors from around the world, with particular attention to poetry — among them Cuban poet Víctor Rodríguez Núñez, Basque poet Tere Irastortza Garmendia, Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish, and Georgian poet Dato Magradze, who was nominated for the Nobel Prize in 2011 — the programme includes meetings for publishing professionals. Bulgaria is the guest of honour, and its book market will be the subject of much discussion. There will also be sessions dedicated to answering the question: how do you help literature written in languages spoken by few people, or in very small countries, reach an international audience?
13–17 MAY. NUITS SONORES / LYON, FRANCE
Sonic explorations and a walk along the Rhône
A friend who grew up in Michigan used to describe how, even as teenagers, they would gather in Detroit’s parking garages to dance to techno at impromptu parties. She is in her thirties, a poet married to an academic, from a rural and religious background — not exactly the profile you associate with the techno world. Which is precisely why the story is surprising: it was (or used to be) a genre widespread enough as youth entertainment — a Midwest version of our afternoon discos — to cut across very different social environments. Techno was indeed born in Detroit in the 1980s, and its godfather is considered to be Juan Atkins. Atkins will be among the guests at the Nuits Sonores in Lyon, one of the most eagerly anticipated events on the French electronic music scene, which brings together major international artists and the most interesting local talent. Acts range from DJ Amelie Lens, one of the most followed in the world, to a host of highly original projects such as Aïta mon Amour, a duo from North Africa inspired by the folk music of the chikates, popular Moroccan singers and dancers. The main venue is Les Grandes Locos, a converted former industrial space near the Rhône — perfect for a riverside stroll after a night of music.
9 MAY–1 NOVEMBER. EMERGING ARTISTS: THE BALTICS & FINLAND / TALLINN, ESTONIA
Europe through the eyes of Baltic artists
Philippe Halsman was one of the most celebrated portrait photographers of the twentieth century. Born in Riga in 1906, he photographed Dalí, Marilyn Monroe, Oppenheimer, and Louis Armstrong, and was known for asking his subjects to jump: focused on that unexpected action, they would drop their pose and give way to something more spontaneous. This intuition conveys a form of perceptual rather than expressive sensibility — one that resonates with the Baltic spirit, and that surfaces today in the freshness of the gazes brought together in Emerging Artists: The Baltics & Finland, the Fotografiska Tallinn exhibition that for the first time devotes its spaces to an emerging generation of photographers from the region. Curator Kulla Laas selected — through an open call — artists from Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Finland, many of them showing for the first time. The Baltic may seem remote — as Ukraine did, until a few years ago. And yet it concerns us closely, from security to energy to trade routes. Exploring the vision and research of new generations of artists is also a way of trying to read today’s Europe. And who knows — whether in Estonian Anna-Liisa Kree’s exploration of everyday intimacy or in Latvian Filip Smits’s colourful, surreal, and irreverent gaze — we might discover someone who will one day surprise us as much as Halsman did.
8–30 MAY. KUNSTENFESTIVALDESARTS / BRUSSELS, BELGIUM
Dancing and performing to make sense of reality
Brussels is among the European cities most dedicated to artistic experimentation. Once again this year, the Kunstenfestivaldesarts spreads the performing arts across some twenty venues throughout the capital, from theatres and museums to public spaces, cultural centres, and lesser-known corners of the city. Under the direction of Daniel Blanga Gubbay and Dries Douibi, this edition invokes 1938, the year Sartre published Nausea — a book in which the protagonist’s world gradually loses its solidity and familiarity, plunging him into a reality that is disturbing, repellent, and devoid of meaning. From here the programme takes its cue, turning to the intangibility and confusion of the present to activate a shared search for meaning, entrusted to dance, theatre, and performance as tools for reading reality and avoiding the repetition of past mistakes. Among the performances is one by Ali Asghar Dashti and Nasim Ahmadpour, in which the Iranian protagonist’s participation is made all the more resonant by his absence, as he is currently imprisoned. Another is “Prisoners of Love: Until the Sun of Freedom”, a project by Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, who spent years investigating the songs and poems composed by Palestinians detained in Israeli prisons from 1948 to the present day, reflecting on poetry as a form of resistance under constraint.
26–31 MAY. DOCUMENTA MADRID / MADRID, SPAIN
Living cinema recording urgency in real time
According to the organisers of the Documenta Madrid festival, a more essayistic approach has displaced a more direct one in documentary filmmaking. Yet the turbulence of the present moment has detonated an energy and an urgency to tell stories without mediation, and many directors have returned to the streets. Documenta picks up on this shift in register, and this year’s theme is “Taking the Pulse”. The programme is built around the idea of cinema as a living instrument for recording contemporaneity in real time. Opening the festival is an unfinished work by Pasolini (perhaps it is illegal not to include PPP in any programme?). It is an unreleased documentary celebrating the first rubbish collectors’ strike, on 24 April 1970 (“The Order of the Street Sweepers has entered history; one must be glad, as if angels had come down to earth to sit on the benches of the avenues and on the low walls of the neighbourhood”). The film was shot but never edited, then rediscovered on the shelves of the Movimento Operaio Democratico in 2005, and has since become an audiovisual project by Cosimo Terlizzi and Luca Maria Baldini: “Rivisitazione dello sciopero”. Alongside the competition sections, the programme features in-depth explorations of Slovenian experimental cinema and its role in giving voice to opposition to Tito’s regime, of British director Charlie Shackleton, and of Chilean filmmaker Marilú Mallet, exiled in Canada, whose work moves from an intensely personal and autobiographical perspective to engage with politics and history.
23 MAY. GÖTEBORGSVARVET HALF MARATHON / GOTHENBURG, SWEDEN
The world’s largest half marathon
We all have that friend who is training for a marathon, posting photos of their Sunday long run outfit, and updating their profile with their latest pace in min/km. Well, that friend could run — next year, since this edition is sold out — the Gothenburg Half Marathon, the largest in the world. Since 1980, more than sixty thousand people have taken part, and it is a genuine urban celebration: over the 21 kilometres through the city, along rivers and through green spaces, musical stations keep the participants energised. To round off the weekend in true millennial fashion, joining in the social ritual of fika — the coffee break with cinnamon buns — is highly recommended, followed by craft beers by the sea, where the sun never sets.
