7-8 NOVEMBER. LAND OF POETS – ZEMLYA POETIV / LVIV, UKRAINE
That’s how they are, our Ukrainian titans
Mariana Savka, a Ukrainian poet, writer and publisher, smiles in a selfie with a soldier in rehabilitation at Superhumans (a network of clinics specializing in war trauma). In her post she writes: “Today I wrote a dictation sitting next to Gennadiy. He has only his left hand left, and he wrote with it. It was the first time he had written with a pen since losing his right arm and his legs. He radiated positivity and kindness, and he lifted my spirits. That’s how they are, our Ukrainian titans.” Savka is the curator of the Lviv poetry festival Terra di poeti, which this year is titled precisely “Ukrainian Titans: The Creation of New Myths.” Since 2022 we have been watching the creation of a modern mythology, the everyday epic of a country fighting for its life, in which the front is only the first line of a total, existential civic commitment. Stories and words, above all poetry, are the dimension in which the experience of war, life and death is processed and transfigured, and the festival’s mission is to awaken Ukrainian identity through language. There are about seventy events, including the concert “Taras Shevchenko Super Star,” a poetry reading and live play of the video game Stalker, the return of the irreverent art group BuBaBu, and a meeting with the intelligence service’s Active Operations department.
13 NOVEMBER 2026 – 4 APRIL 2027. SOPHIE CALLE, IS IT BETTER? / BERLIN, GERMANY
Art as a truly transformative gesture
Sophie Calle said in an interview with Louisiana Channel that when she faces pain, like a famished dog she asks herself: what can I take from this situation? Rather than sit with the difficulty, she turns her life into a work of art, processing the experience outside herself by making it an artistic gesture. Once she was left without warning by a man. To react, she asked 107 women to interpret freely the letter with which he dumped her: “Take Care of Yourself” represented France at the 2007 Venice Biennale. Her works, conceptual and vital, spring from an intuition: she invited friends and strangers to sleep in her bed so she could photograph them; in a moment of crisis, she followed and photographed strangers around Paris, entrusting herself to their energy and guidance; she filmed people seeing the sea for the first time; she worked as a hotel cleaner to tell the stories of the rooms through the belongings of those who occupied them. Her works combine photographs and texts, start from autobiography and the recursiveness of experience, and explore, with a gentle sense of humor, intimacy, love and death, and the blurred boundary between reality and fiction. They also join the tradition of women’s writing that has made its own life the material of storytelling. In the coming days her solo show “Is it better?” opens at the Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart in Berlin, where, for the institution’s thirtieth anniversary, she will present a new work.
28-29 NOVEMBER. KANAL-CENTRE POMPIDOU / BRUSSELS, BELGIUM
The (controversial) sperm whale of the arts in Brussels
In the former Citroën plant and “Citroën garage,” after a troubled and extremely costly saga, Kanal-Centre Pompidou opens, a mastodontic museum of art and architecture in Brussels. Many judge it a megalomaniac and unsustainable project that will drain public resources rather than produce culture, given the construction costs and the upkeep of this sperm whale of glass, metal and concrete, which will be among the largest museums in Europe, and given its symbolic and economic subordination to the French of the Pompidou. Kanal, by contrast, describes itself as a city of the arts within the city, an ever-open process. Alongside the exhibition spaces will open a library, auditorium, cinema, bar, restaurant, rooftop, a bakery, workshops and cool play areas for children, all free. The program for the opening weekend is ambitious too: ten exhibitions, concerts, DJ sets, screenings, family activities, “rituals.” And polychrome: the show “A truly immense journey,” a selection from the Kanal-Centre Pompidou collection, mostly Pompidou, coexists with “An infinite woman,” which starts from a famous colonial expedition to Africa sponsored by Citroën and, through archive material and works by artists such as Carrie Mae Weems, celebrates the imaginative resistance of Black women.
5 NOVEMBER 2026 – 7 MARCH 2027. FEMINIST FUTURES FOREVER / VIENNA, AUSTRIA
A new exhibition of one’s own
In 1985, in Vienna, at the Museum of the 20th Century, today the Belvedere 21, a feminist group show opened with more than seventy women artists, “Art with a Mind of Its Own,” which was received, as often happens with feminist movements, either as ghettoization or as a milestone. Forty years later, Feminist Futures Forever, at the Belvedere 21, starts again from that exhibition and reopens to feminist practice in art, from the avant-garde to contemporary artists, bringing into dialogue voices of different generations, intersectional and international. Many artists who took part in the 1985 show are present, including Laurie Anderson, interviewed in Christiana Perschon’s project “An Oral Herstory.” More than a hundred artists are involved, from Marina Abramović to Sophie Calle. Also taking part are Anna Jermolaewa, a Russian-born naturalized Austrian, together with the Ukrainian choreographer Oksana Serheieva, who emigrated to Austria in 2022. At the 2024 Venice Biennale the two brought “Rehearsal for Swan Lake”: in the USSR, Swan Lake was looped on television whenever something happened in politics, replacing the regular broadcast, and became a code among Russians for a change of power. In the work, dancers rehearse for a regime change in Russia, so that symbol turns from an instrument of censorship into a protest.
12 NOVEMBER 2026 – 11 APRIL 2027. VANESSA BELL & DUNCAN GRANT: INSIDE BLOOMSBURY / LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM
Vanessa and Duncan’s love for art and life
In 1916 Vanessa Bell, a painter, designer ahead of her time and sister of Virginia Woolf, took a house in the country, at Charleston, together with her lover and fellow artist Duncan Grant and his lover, David Garnett. She was married to Clive Bell and was the lover of Roger Fry; he was the lover of Keynes. Together they were among the founders of the Bloomsbury group, where ideas and loves circulated with freedom and intensity. Tate Britain devotes an exhibition to the partnership between Bell and Grant, to their experimentation in art and in life. More than 300 works tell of their dialogue and the building of a shared visual language in the house-studio, recreated at the Tate. There art overflowed from canvases onto walls, window frames, curtains, lamps, decorative works on furniture, ceramics and textiles, penetrating every aspect of daily life. This was the vision of the design company they ran, the Omega Workshops.
18 NOVEMBER 2026 – 8 MARCH 2027. LA MENESUNDA SEGÚN MARTA MINUJÍN / MADRID, SPAIN
Argentine confusion, reassembled in Europe
Besides being a story of art, this is an institutional undertaking and a story of museum export. In 1965 Marta Minujín and Rubén Santantonín created a wild work at the Visual Arts Center of the Instituto Torcuato Di Tella in Buenos Aires, “La Menesunda,” which in the River Plate dialect means a miscellany, a muddle. It is a path of eleven rooms and passageways that the viewer walks through, encountering a couple in bed, a masseuse, a giant telephone, a room smelling of fried food and one full of fans. The sensibility of the Buenos Aires avant-garde had at that time intercepted the public’s need to be immersed in, and in some way take part in, the work of art. In 2015 the Museum of Modern Art of Buenos Aires embarked on a Herzogian operation: reconstructing La Menesunda by studying archive photos and videos, with the help of Minujín herself. The result was “La Menesunda según Marta Minujín,” which tours the museums of Europe until 2028. The operation thus turns a mythical work of art into a product of Argentine cultural export, assembled and modulated each time according to the museum, using both materials recovered since 2015 and materials made from scratch in Copenhagen, the first stop. In November it arrives at the Reina Sofía in Madrid.
2-30 NOVEMBER. PHOTO DAYS / PARIS, FRANCE
The revolution and the many places of photography
A few weeks ago a young Parisian, who teaches French language and culture to Italians on Instagram, posted the schedule for 24 and 25 October in Paris, where protests have been going on for weeks and République, now fenced off, can only be walked around. After breakfast (coffee and a cigarette, clope in slang) and Pilates, the Révolution is on the schedule, continuing in the afternoon after a long lunch and ending with police gas and a bottle of wine accompanied by a screening of the media condemning the attacks on shop windows. Along the route of the manifs, perhaps by shortening lunch a little and smoking one clope fewer, you may come across and visit one of the eighty-six places or moments devoted to photography, linked up by the constellation of Photo Days. In the year of the bicentennial of the invention of photography and in the month of the Paris Photo fair, Photo Days brings together in a federation (their word) all the photography events in a route through Paris and the metropolitan area, with exhibitions and visits to studios, galleries, foundations, institutions and museums. It also lets the artists in the “carte blanche” program set their art in dialogue with unusual places, such as the designer agnès b.’s series on Moscow fashion and lifestyle in 1987, a story originally made for Vogue.
4-8 NOVEMBER. ICELAND AIRWAVES / REYKJAVÍK, ICELAND
Weirdos of the world, unite in Iceland
“Sæglópur” (lost at sea) is one of the most famous songs by the Icelandic band Sigur Rós. The lyrics, a few words and vocalizations, float in a sea of enveloping sound that swells, precisely, like the sea, and are partly in Icelandic, partly in Vonlenska, or “Hopelandic,” the language of hope, an invented language created by the singer Jónsi. It is an almost banal example of how alive, free and welcoming to every form of weirdness the music of a small country like Iceland, home to 400,000 people, is (isn’t Björk the queen of weirdness?). And indeed Iceland Airwaves, the music festival held every year in Reykjavík’s freezing autumn, is much loved by oddballs from all over the world. In an interview, the Icelandic singer Rakel Mjöll actually spoke about how all these music lovers gather in the city whatever the weather, the northern lights, the wind lashing the island, or the snow. Airwaves hosts local and international artists, emerging and established, without preference, as long as they have something interesting to say and a bit of daring. It started the day before yesterday and runs until the end of the week: if you feel weird, though by now we are not quite sure what is weird and daring today and what is a pose, Airwaves welcomes you with open arms.
10-15 NOVEMBER. BARCELONA CALLING L’ORIENT MITJÀ / BARCELONA, SPAIN
Stories of women from the other side of the Mediterranean
Barcelona Calling l’Orient Mitjà is the third season of the Teatre Nacional de Catalunya series devoted to the art of that part of the world, geographic and cultural, on the other side of the Mediterranean, to get to know artists from the Middle East and North Africa. This year the program deepens its focus on women’s gaze and experience. The independent Iranian theater company Shieveh, which, judging from its website, has not staged shows in Tehran since 2022, will bring the play “The Child,” directed by the company’s director Afsaneh Mahian: three women land on a European beach after a journey with smugglers, hoping to obtain refugee status. One is an Iraqi Yazidi, another is Afghan and the third is Lebanese, and they have a newborn with them. When questioned by the authorities, they refuse to say whose child it is, in the hope that, if all three are expelled, the baby might have a chance to stay in Europe (Shieveh always creates shows that combine a documentary vocation with lyrical staging). The Lebanese artist Chrystèle Khodr will bring “Record,” a story inspired by Eva Stahl, a Swedish nurse who survived the massacre at the Tel al-Zaatar Palestinian refugee camp during the Lebanese civil war. The Syrian-Palestinian artist Bissane al Charif and the French-Syrian singer and actress Hala Omran will open a women’s circle-performance to talk, with humor, about menopause and women’s bodies in contexts of war and violence.
20-22 NOVEMBER. INVITO AL VIAGGIO / VENICE, ITALY
The great persistence of myth, today
At Palazzo Vendramin Grimani, overlooking the Grand Canal in the San Polo district, the Fondazione dell’Albero d’Oro organizes the travel literature festival “Invito al viaggio,” this year titled “From Gods to Myths” and devoted to the legacy of myths and the way they continue to speak to us in the present. Why do we keep telling them? Several European intellectuals will reflect on how myths reverberate in the contemporary novel, on Mediterranean geography and identity, and on the role of women in Greek mythology. On this last theme, Silvia Romani’s Furiose. L’ira delle donne nel mito antico has also just come out.
