Film Music Rousseau
17–26 APRIL. VISIONS DU RÉEL / NYON, SWITZERLAND
The Ukrainian night and a coyote’s coming out
“The Illusion of a Quiet Night” by Ukrainian director Olga Chernykh was shot in a single night in July 2025 by forty directors and hundreds of Ukrainians. It paints a collective fresco of a country at war: fear, exhaustion, joy and life. She writes on Instagram: “I wanted to make a luminous film about the night in Ukraine to show that, whatever happens, light will triumph over darkness.” The film will have its world premiere at the Swiss documentary festival Visions du Réel. The program is broad — 164 films from 75 countries — and organized around thematic strands: Family Novels, The Turbulence of Love, The Dust of Empires, Back to the Future, and Confronting Leviathan, focused on films that portray authoritarian regimes. A retrospective is dedicated to Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa, who will also present his new short film “Campo Marzio,” about the Lychakiv Cemetery in Lviv, where the people who fought the city’s invaders across the centuries lie at rest. Shifting register entirely, another strand is devoted to Moroccan artist Meriem Bennani, who went viral posting shorts featuring two anthropomorphic lizards in a hollowed-out, hysterical New York during the pandemic. She will bring her latest film, “Bouchra,” about a lesbian coyote director who must come out to her mother.
15 APRIL–23 AUGUST. MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ: BALKAN EROTIC EPIC / BERLIN, GERMANY
A return to Serbian roots, through eroticism
Marina Abramović is one of the most celebrated — and most intense — figures in contemporary art. Her latest work, which she herself describes as her most ambitious, is Balkan Erotic Epic. Marking the 75th anniversary of the Berliner Festspiele, it comes to Berlin in two stages: an exhibition at the Gropius Bau, on view from April, with video installations and sculptures, and a performance in October at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele — the world premiere took place in Manchester last autumn. Abramović returns to her Serbian roots — partly, she has said, to free herself from her mother — exploring eroticism as a primal energy. Eroticism — “the only energy we have; we can use it for creativity, for spiritual purposes, or it becomes aggression, war, rage” — is a bridge between life and death, a channel of connection with the universe and the originary source of existence. This monumental performance lasts four hours and involves seventy musicians, dancers and singers, who give form to erotic rituals drawn from Balkan folk tradition. It channels a powerful flow of feminine energy, primordial and apotropaic rites — such as running naked or massaging the breasts — to confront death, ensure fertility and restore balance with nature. The Gropius Bau exhibition brings together historical and recent works: Abramović has been exploring the Balkans for decades, traveling through a Serbia scarred by war. In “Balkan Baroque” (1997), for instance, the artist sat atop a mountain of blood and animal remains while intoning traditional Serbian elegies.
1–12 APRIL. BARTÓK SPRING INTERNATIONAL ART WEEKS / BUDAPEST, HUNGARY
The spring festival — and then to the polls, in Budapest
The Hungarian composer and pianist Béla Bartók was so fascinated by the musical traditions of his country that he would often travel through rural Hungary and neighboring lands, in the company of his friend and fellow composer Zoltán Kodály, to collect and transcribe traditional songs and melodies. These recordings — what today would be called field recordings — formed the basis of much of his work, from piano sonatas to symphonies, rhapsodies and cantatas. In the eclectic spirit of the composer, the program of the new edition of the Bartók Spring International Arts Week in Budapest celebrates Bartók’s creativity and vision across a range of musical genres and artistic languages: from “Sinbad,” the first Arabic opera (from Oman) in a co-production involving Csaba Káel and Egyptian conductor Gabr Histam and librettist Nader Salah El-Din, to the dance of “Full Moon,” one of the last works by choreographer Pina Bausch; from the jazz of saxophonist Chris Potter to the folk of Márta Sebestyén, one of the country’s most beloved singers, performing alongside harpsichordist Judit Andrejszki. Some are hoping this music will inspire Hungarians ahead of the presidential elections on April 12th, where Prime Minister Viktor Orbán — after sixteen years in power — is playing for his political future (and, given his vetoes, so are the rest of us Europeans).
10–25 APRIL. SALVAJES, SILVESTRES Y ESPONTÁNEAS / MADRID, SPAIN
The nature that grows wild in the city
The former Roman duo Franco 126 and Carl Brave sang of “flowers grown up through the cobblestones” — and beyond the Roman evocation, there is a genuine emotion stirred by the irrepressibility of nature, which keeps being born, reborn, existing while we continue to spread layer upon layer of concrete. The festival “Salvajes, silvestres y espontáneas” at La Casa Encendida in Madrid is dedicated precisely to the city’s spontaneous flora, focusing on the most overlooked and misunderstood natural life in the environments we inhabit. The event, coordinated by Alberto Peralta, one of the founders of Madrid’s community urban garden network, aims to provide tools for recognizing its value and potential — value that is often invisible to an overly urbanized gaze. The manifesto reads: “What is unknown goes unnoticed; what is unnamed ends up at the margins of language, almost impossible to express.” This year’s edition looks at innovative and unconventional neighborhood gardening practices, emphasizing knowledge and hands-on engagement. The program includes meetings with collectives, professionals and artists, workshops on soil and its microbial life, short films devoted to lichens, and walks to learn to identify wild plants and their possible ethnobotanical and culinary uses — what in hipster parlance translates as “urban foraging.”
23–26 APRIL. ART BRUSSELS / BRUSSELS, BELGIUM
A reliable destination for discovering new European artists
Art Brussels is one of Europe’s longest-running (since 1968) and most important contemporary art fairs. It is known as the premier occasion for discovering new talent: galleries give substantial space to the work of emerging international artists who can prove revelatory for collectors. Complementing the main fair — with over 150 galleries and more than 800 artists — conversations, performances and installations extend across the city through an off-program, in which museums, galleries, foundations and private collections all add their voice. One highlight: at the Bozar gallery, “Beauty Through a Contemporary Lens” opens, an exhibition exploring beauty and how art describes and challenges the norms of what is considered beautiful, from Botticelli to video games.
23–26 APRIL. ABEL SELAOCOE / LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM
Abel’s progressive tradition at the Barbican
Abel Selaocoe, South African musician, singer and composer, has invented a musical genre of his own. Its elements are: the cello (he trained at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester), traditional South African melodies, percussion and Xhosa guttural singing — the Xhosa are a Bantu-speaking people, the second largest linguistic group in South Africa, whose language is characterized by click sounds. He blends Baroque music with township rhythms — rhythms born in the informal settlements of the apartheid era — groove and ancestral chant. He himself has described his musical research as a “progressive tradition,” one in which he grafts vocal improvisations, with an orchestra or alone, onto works by Bach and others. At the Barbican Centre he will appear among the guests of the Mohopolo/Ancestral Memory Weekend, a celebration of South African music and culture: a space devoted to Bantu tradition for talking about community, passing down stories and memory, and commemorating both the Anglo-Zulu colonial war and the struggle against apartheid. And for discovering the music of South Africa, which ranges from traditional Zulu music to afro-psychedelic future pop, afrorave, contemporary jazz and amapiano — a subgenre of house music.
4–5 APRIL. OPEN HOUSE ATHENS / ATHENS, GREECE
Permission to peek inside other people’s homes
To get a sense of a city, you can climb to a vantage point and take in its geography — trace its arteries, orient yourself within the boundaries of its neighborhoods, pick out its landmarks. Or you can move through the city differently, peering into courtyards, following instinct and the profiles of buildings. How many times, stepping into an entrance hall or glimpsing a ceiling through a window, have you been seized by the urge to go and snoop around other people’s homes? Open House is the international format in which, for one weekend, many cities open to the public — free of charge — the homes of others and much more: public and private spaces normally off-limits that transform the city into a diffuse museum. An event designed to bring the public closer to architecture and design. This weekend it is the turn of Open House Athens. Visitors will be able to explore museums, studios, offices, banks, repurposed industrial spaces, hotels, deconsecrated churches turned cultural centers — and above all, of course, private apartments and homes. It is the weekend when one is permitted to be shamelessly nosy: to see which books are on other people’s shelves and what shade of white is on their walls. In addition, last weekend the “Made in Athens” showcase, part of the program, opened more than 30 creative studios belonging to designers, artists, ceramicists and upholsterers — a micro design week.
8–19 APRIL. KADDISH, LA FEMME CHAUVE EN PEIGNOIR ROUGE / SAINT-DENIS, FRANCE
Kertész’s literature as a lens on the present
“I have the impression that, in reflecting on the traumatic effect of Auschwitz, I touch on the fundamental questions of human vitality and creativity; and thinking about Auschwitz in this way, paradoxically perhaps, I think more about the future than the past,” said the Hungarian Jewish writer Imre Kertész in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 2002. A survivor of the concentration camps at Auschwitz, Zeitz and Buchenwald, he recounted his experience above all in “Fatelessness.” Kertész’s work is examined by French author and director Margaux Eskenazi in the piece “Kaddish, La femme chauve en peignoir rouge,” on stage at the Théâtre Gérard Philipe in Saint-Denis from April 8th to 19th — without translating the full title, Kaddish in Hebrew is a prayer of praise to God, also used as a funeral chant. With a theatrical language that blends literature, testimony, music and political questions, the work interrogates the role of memory and how it shapes our present. Moving through Kertész’s writing, it is deployed as a lens for examining urgent themes such as racism, antisemitism and totalitarianism — drawing on the experience and testimony of the past, but so that they may help orient us toward tomorrow, precisely as Kertész intended.
5 MARCH–20 JULY. HENRI ROUSSEAU: L’AMBITION DE LA PEINTURE / PARIS, FRANCE
A jungle painted for the end of a friendship
The effects of certain relationships reverberate long through time. Such is the case with the friendship between Paul Guillaume — art dealer and gallerist, introduced to the Parisian avant-garde circles of the early twentieth century by Apollinaire — and American collector Albert Barnes, for whom Guillaume acted as intermediary, helping him acquire eighteen paintings by Henri Rousseau, an artist who saw no success in his lifetime — too naïf, they said. Today Barnes’s collection is held at the eponymous Foundation in Philadelphia, while Guillaume’s forms the heart of the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris. From the union of the two institutions was born the monographic exhibition “Henri Rousseau: Painting as Ambition” at the Orangerie. Around fifty works are on display, some on loan from other European and American institutions, including “The Sleeping Gypsy” from MoMA in New York. The exhibition also explores Rousseau’s creative process, offering the chance to examine the material characteristics of his works and to place them in the context of the modern art market, to which Guillaume and Barnes contributed greatly. To revisit today a collaboration, even just an anecdote or an episode from a fruitful friendship between the two sides of the Atlantic, carries with it a veil of nostalgia, as though that kind of understanding already belonged, in some way, to another time. We console ourselves with Rousseau’s gentle, luxuriant jungles which, far from naïve, speak to the heart in a suspended and silent language where the exotic element is more dreamed than real.
9–12 APRIL. REWIRE / THE HAGUE, NETHERLANDS
The festival of adventurous music
Rewire, in The Hague, is an “international festival for adventurous music.” We approach it in a spirit of adventure, scrolling through a lineup of names that look like random strings of characters (XTC in the XIV, or Yb3L), and set off to explore. We begin with cellist Violeta García and discover that she fuses electronic scratches with the deep tones of her instrument. We then pluck up courage and land on Sombat Simla, a Thai musician and the greatest living player of the khene — a bamboo mouth organ from Southeast Asia. One final discovery: Kee Avil, a Canadian artist releasing a “deconstructed” album one track at a time throughout 2026. And one could carry on like this through the remaining 143 artists.
