Reviews

The Centre Pompidou closes on 22 September 2025 for a five-year renovation. A note from the plaza, the last public duty of a piazza-with-escalators.

Art Basel's 56th edition: Katharina Grosse spray-painting the Messeplatz, Nicola Turner's horsehair sculpture in Unlimited, Miriam Cahn at Meyer Riegger, and Parcours crossing the river.

The 2025 Serpentine Pavilion by Marina Tabassum opens 6 June. Four wooden capsules, one kinetic, a translucent acrylic skin, and a first Serpentine by a Bangladeshi architect.

Inside Santa Maria Ausiliatrice, the Vatican handed its 2025 Architecture Biennale pavilion to a working restoration crew. The artwork was the building becoming itself, slowly, for six months.

Andrea Faraguna's Heatwave, the Kingdom of Bahrain's Golden Lion–winning pavilion at the 2025 Architecture Biennale, cooled its visitors by ten degrees with no power source beyond the building itself. A review.

Carlo Ratti's Intelligens, with the Giardini's Central Pavilion shut for renovation, pushed the 19th Architecture Biennale out across the city. The show recovered where the national pavilions took over.

Bilna'es at Sharjah Biennial 16 — Adam HajYahia's 'Speaking with the dead' turned a set of Al Qasimiyah classrooms into a listening room, anchored by a vinyl compilation drawing on the platform's Palestinian and international music catalogue.

Sharjah Biennial 16, to carry, reviewed. Five curators, 17 venues, almost 200 participants. Hoor Al Qasimi's five-curator model as a working method rather than a tagline.

Nomad St. Moritz 2025 at the former Klinik Gut, reviewed. Pergay tables in a patient dining room, a Neapolitan pop-up in the old hospital canteen, and a fair that used its building as the point.

Design Miami/ Paris 2024 at L'hôtel de Maisons, reviewed. Louis Vuitton's Campana debut, a million-euro Prouvé sale, and a room of Jean Touret that won the week.

Art Basel Paris's debut at the refurbished Grand Palais. Under a glass nave, with 195 galleries and a Premise sector that mattered, Paris finally had a fair that belonged to it.

Manifesta 15 Barcelona Metropolitana, spread across twelve municipalities, reviewed. The venues did most of the heavy lifting. A few rooms addressed Catalonia and those were the ones worth the trip.